the no name league

Tracing a conservative slogan's chronological arc from an inconspicuous tagline to a regurgitated maxim of secessionists, segregationists, proto-fascists, neo-fascists, and duplicitous Right-wing political critters.

(this is an updated version of the article posted May 10, 2023. There was a technical issue, so this first part is split into two sections. Then we carry on with the remaining 3 parts. This can be read over on Medium as well.)
The American system of government is packed with old conundrums and intricacies. Those who passed their high school AmGov classes may remember learning that its founding documents are not exactly the most straight forward. The world’s oldest constitution exudes a sense of “flying by the seat of one’s pants while trying to sound fancy.” Good or bad, most modern nations have since attempted to make their charters more updatable and more verbose to smartly avoid legal confusions and misinterpretations.
From the outside, it is almost mesmerizing how every other Supreme Court decision tends to be some epic game-changer boiling down to pithy interpretations of 250-year-old vaguery and vibes. As well, an incessant American addiction to embracing ahistoric viewpoints helps little and their adoption by disingenuous political characters with poor understanding of etymology seems to make the political waters even muddier.
Frankly, the particularly untidy issue of how to classify the United States of America’s structure of government has already been beaten to death by a plethora of well-written academic literature and dissertations from fellow history-nerds. If quibbling over political theories were a pack of horses, they would have been a vat of glue well before any of our grandparents were born. To the vast majority of Americans, the nomenclature means much less than how it works or how they are represented in a land that purports to be created by “We The People” to establish justice and keep themselves generally healthy, safe, and secure.
Despite the country’s original architects being overly concerned with snazzy wording as they cobbled together a nation as technologically advanced as a contemporary Amish community, there has been a long line of smug pedants who go out of their way to whip out the ol’ “We are a Republic, Not a Democracy” trope at the end of rants over modern issues into the online ether. Almost as if it were some magical mic-drop (a very rare thing in Amish country) we have no choice but to nod and begin praisingly clapping at. Unfortunately most of these self-classifying scholars have not been using it for sincere discussions over antique terms, instead opting to whip it out as justification of divisive political policies that would be detrimental to anybody who was not an already well-off male of European descent.
Much has already been written about the authoritarianism surrounding the invocation of this 7-word canard and the insinuations when invoked by very conservative personalities. Some have nerdily discussed the phrase’s ambiguous usage by a few of America’s founders or how it harks back to America First Committee supporter's writings to later be picked up by their Bircher inheritors. But typically, the discourse tends to gloss over the volumes of antisemitism, moral panickery, classism, xenophobia, and unabashed racism accompanying its usage & the users of the expression.
So a deep spelunking into archives of governmental records, academic publications, newspapers, literature, speeches, and websites galore was undertaken. It may not look it, but we have attempted to tell the quickest story of how this “We’re a Republic Not a Democracy” cliche has been brandished since spawned by the words of “Plubius” in 1787. As we whip through the timeline and profiles, the reader will notice that there is an overwhelming amount of context. Piles of links are provided to help spell out details which would take a chapter or more in a book to break down.
To make this a bit easier for all of us to digest, we have broken this up into 4 parts. The first two follow the historic trail of the idiom’s usage. We then finish with residual but obligatory context, also in two parts, which should give most any sane American a bit of the shudders anytime they hear this cretinous expression going forth.
(in order to save the author & reader some sanity, we will often use “RNAD” when referring to this article’s catchphrase going forth as well)

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Plubius

Like an Appeal to some 235-year-old Authority, “We Are A Republic And Not A Democracy” is ultimately referencing Madison’s Federalist #10 essay regarding how to sustain public interests without infringing on the rights of individuals. As “Plubius,” Madison discusses combining elements of democracy and republicanism to create a decentralized system of government to deal with a populace spread out over a capacious confederacy. Endless discussions have been had over what a handful of America’s framers really meant by such terminology and similar remarks since the pseudonymous disquisition appeared on newsprint in the closing months of 1787.
Particularly over the last century, conservatives have proudly pointed to Madison’s prose like it was some kind of final-say. As if history stopped over two centuries ago and words’ meanings never evolve or writers are simply humans who can also have different interpretations and blind-spots. Historians and pedantic nerds (like yours truly) tend to point out that “democracy” and “republic” had been used almost interchangeably long before the U.S. signed off on its constitution. Madison and others involved with constructing a novel monarch-less government had already used both terms to refer to their nation. We will come back to this on the backside, but those who penned the essays as “Plubius,” otherwise known as the Federalist Papers, acknowledged that they were using “democracy” specifically to refer to a “pure democracy” (direct democracy as we tend to call it now). Much of it in order to evade having to consider the unfathomable logistics an unfettered system of government for a bulky and inequitable society spread across a landmass, especially in the era of slavery and horse & buggies, required without shooting themselves in their own well-heeled feet.
Making use of some fancy internet sleuthin’ skills (i.e., running wads of terms through a myriad of search filters) we eventually came across an 1818 book with looks to be one of the earliest passages declaring that “the United States is not a democracy” because “illustrious sages” of the Constitutional Convention had thoughtfully built in “the wisdom and energy of aristocracy” to temper the “turbulence” & “fluctuation and weakness of unbalanced democracy.” Nevertheless, as per John Bristed’s America and Her Resources, the novice nation was a “representative republic […] obliged to exist too much by exciting and following the passions and prejudices of the multitude.” The chief crux of the book was cautioning that allowing immigrants and Free Blacks to be involved in any component of the local, state, or federal political process would lead to the country’s suicide.

The 500 page tome also stressed the evils of slavery. More so for fear of slave-owners’ safety, if their slaves would ever have the gumption to revolt against their “masters.” Being opposed to slavery on the grounds of not wanting to be around Black people was not all that uncommon in abolitionist circles. Bristed did his part by proposing that the “wretched African race” be sent back to help civilize the “immense continent of Africa, containing a hundred and fifty millions of Mahomedans and Pagans, steeped in ignorance, superstition, brutality, vice, and crime.”
Bristed’s book set the uncanny tone for the rhetoric and the persuasion of people who would subsequently employ anti-democratic and RNAD verbiage to bolster unnerving political positions within specious arguments that basically amounted to the “othering” of their fellow countrymen. Revulsion to any demographic change is now a very familiar fash-y dinger and although this was less than a generation into a new America, he was by far not the first to cry about his less-than-white neighbors. (here's looking at you Benjamin Franklin) But to promote his proposed fixes for fabricated issues, such as using the gallows for minor crimes to curb a burgeoning population of non-English immigrants and Black people, Bristed had to really sell it. Like an early-19th century version of a recent tweet from some blue-checked white-replacement-obsessed account that the current CEO of Xchan regularly interacts with, the Episcopalian clergyman (and immigrant) had his rage-farming shtick down:

“The free blacks which swarm in our northern and middle states are generally idle, vitious [vicious], and profligate, with very little sense of moral obligation to deter them from lying, thieving, and still more atrocious crimes. For some winters past, a gang of free blacks used to amuse themselves in the city of New- York, by setting fire to whole rows of houses, for the purpose of pilfering amidst the confusion and horror of the flames.”

The sparse amount uncovered from online print and governmental records suggests that the polemical RNAD was overall atypical for the next half century. Yet discussions concerning what was and was not “democratic” about the fledgling nation and the fundamentals which made up its relatively progressive and dynamic society became en vogue. Authors and journalists visiting from Europe, like Touqueville, built careers based around this discourse. Democratic movements beyond the eastern shores of the Atlantic bloomed in fits & starts, depending on how oppressive or progressive the local authorities decided to be.

Nullification & Slavery

It would be irresponsible not to shine a brief spotlight on South Carolina's John C. Calhoun (DR/D-SC) and the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s. Although quite the neckbeard-rocking nationalist in his early political career, Calhoun was an exceptionally racist (even for his time) defender of slavery who resigned from being Andrew Jackson’s vice-president to represent South Carolina’s attempt to void federal tariffs. Calhoun professed that all states are sovereign entities and the Constitution was only a compact of separate sovereign states who have the right to annul federal laws which they may deem unconstitutional. In reality, the Constitution’s Article III and Supremacy Clause, as well as several Federalist papers, including Madison’s № 39 and № 44, make it clear that states cannot just abrogate federal law and would instead need to take it up with the Supreme Court.
The banal “States’ Rights” is simply repackaged Calhoun’s “concurrent majority,” the principle underpinning his doctrine of nullification. To prevent tyranny of the “majority” (free-states not reliant on the 3/5ths clause for electoral college or Congressional representation), the “minority” (slave-states) can void federal laws like those concerning tariffs, anti-slavery, anti-segregation, voting rights, or health care access.
We should note that while Calhoun had used RNAD to describe his home-state of South Carolina a few years prior, he directly referred to the “Federal Republic” as also being a “Constitutional Democracy” designed by “the immortal framers of our Constitution” in 1841. And although peculiarly remembered as a “defender of minorities,” he was quite clear that the only minority he cared protecting was a slave-holding South, demonstrating that the opposition to federal tariffs were a precursor for a fight to maintain slavery’s legality. Small wonder that the RNAD argument harnessed to “fend off a tyranny of the majority” would become part of the conservative “States’ Rights” jargon a century later. As historian Richard Hofstadter put it…

“Not in the slightest was Calhoun concerned with minority rights as they are chiefly of interest to the modern liberal mind — the rights of dissenters to express unorthodox opinions, of the individual conscience against the State, least of all of ethnic minorities. At bottom he was not interested in any minority that was not a propertied minority. The concurrent majority itself was a device without relevance to the protection of dissent, designed to protect a vested interest of considerable power ... it was minority privileges rather than minority rights that he really proposed to protect.”

Another anti-democracy panjandrum of the era, Orestes Brownson, was the originator of the xenophobic-laden term “Americanization” and a pioneer in the national pastime of obsessing over the downfall of the country, believing that democracy would “lower the standard of morality, to enfeeble intellect, to abase character, and retard civilization.”

”...our Government is not a Democracy, but a Constitutional Republic ... That just in proportion as we resolve it practically into a Democracy, do we destroy its character as a government.”

Brownson argued that the biggest national threat lied in affording any autonomy to the unpropertied working class of the cities, which would somehow lead to an aristocracy of elected wealthy business owners. Interesting given that the Constitution’s Framers essentially constructed something that, although progressive for its time, would technically be considered an oligarchy built on many affluent familial ties. And seeing as how less than a century later wealthy industrialists would make an inverted argument against democracy, in a Mencken-esque way, he was not wholly incorrect. Of course it would be expected that a government built as a republic (a political parallel to a company ran by a board of directors) would not also turn into “a government run like a business” (a now familiar leitmotif of many conservative political campaigns). Brownson, though, was very clear that his version of the republic would be a theocracy led by the Church of Rome in order to rescue the country from ruin.
Despite the nullification crisis and other disagreements nudging America towards a civil war, the expression that had emanated from Federalist №10 still rarely popped up in public discourse until pro-slavery congressmen began to thrown it around in 1858 to complain about Kansas becoming a free state, a la Rep. George Taylor (D-NY), or to make Calhoun-y Madison-invoking speeches, from the likes of Senator Clement Claiborne Clay (D-AL), about a republic being the only “stable and conservative” form of government which could keep slavery in the South from being ended by some tyrannical equality-minded democracy.
Eerie utterances to see 160 years on, but we should keep in mind that a few years later Clay became a conspicuous member of the Confederate’s Congress, co-created a network of secret spies for the South, suspected of organizing Lincoln’s assassination, and whose face was printed on their money.

“No sentiment is more insulting or more hostile to our domestic tranquility, to our social order, and to our social existence, than is contained in the declaration that our negroes are entitled to liberty and equality with the white man.”   —Senator Clement Clay

1880s Political Campaigns and an Eccentric Anti-Suffragist

The US Civil War was distracting enough that, for at least a couple of decades, few cared to ponder the specificity of the country’s descriptor. Instead, political creatures of all stripes applied both terms mostly interchangeably. But in 1882, to give a taster of what was to come a half-century later, the Republican Party drafted a textbook of campaign talking points as a response to the 1876 election, in which the Democratic candidate received 184 uncontested electoral votes to the Republican’s 165.
Four states returned 20 votes-worth of disputed electors, which Hayes ® needed in order to win the presidency. The resulting Electoral Commission and the 1877 Compromise essentially ended Reconstruction, leaving Blacks with negligible political support and protections in the South under Jim Crow laws. (The debacle also led to the 1877 Electoral Count Act and why Pence could not reject electors in January of 2021.)
Going forward, as per the Republican manual, campaigns were to emphasize that if enough voters in low-population states are represented by a majority of electors overall, even when vastly outnumbered by the votes in heavily populated states, then the election should be considered legit. Non-Americans looking in could justifiably dub this “tyranny of the minority,” as the campaign textbook pointed out that the six electoral votes of Delaware and Nevada’s 43,824 human votes equaled the same as California’s 154,459. But “American Exceptionalism” also means reveling in lopsided systems as long as one waves the flag the hardest and mendaciously paints “democracy” as the opposite of any constitutional checks and balances, despite contemporary democracies elsewhere having exactly all that enshrined in their own constitutions.
Another aspect of exceptional Americanism is conveniently forgetting recent pasts. The abolitionist establishers of the Republican Party had came up with a very democratic principle for their third plank in their party’s original 1855 platform…

“The people are the rightful source of all political power; and all officers should, as far as practicable, be chosen by a direct vote of the people.”

So the Gilded Age kicked off with the rather exclusive usance of “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy” by a very privileged monied class of eccentric white people.
In her 1885 book, How We are Governed, lifelong anti-suffragist Anna Laurens Dawes leaned right into the conflation of “democracy” with “pure democracy” to accompany this RNAD verbalism. Even as she perfectly described “democracy” as the choosing of representatives in a large nation like the U.S., she also declaimed “democracy” to be unworkable for large nations such as hers.
Dawes spent much of her life railing against allowing women to vote, maintaining that “feminine nature is unsuited to government” and became famous for two controversial publications. Her philosemetic 1886 The Modern Jew: His Present and his Future book does a decent job predicting the creation of Israel. But as most philosemetism tends to go, it was held a heavy air of antisemetism with its othering-focus on Jewish people, who in her view, were not being expected or able to be an meaningful elements of society.
The rich elitess' 1917 The Indian as Citizen was written to support her father's Dawes Act of three decades prior, which forced Native Americans to assimilate into American society to remove any last vestiges their own self-government.
Who would suspect that an affluent socialite, whose father had written legislation to strip away Native Americans’ governance over their own communities and lands, would be against allowing half the country to cast ballots in their country’s polls and be so oppositional to democracy’s most basic tenets? Honestly at this point, we would.

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(because of some sort of surprise technical issues that we have zero control over, when we came back to edit links and clean up some crappy grammar, we had to delete the first post and then break the first part into two sections in order to update it. So if you are with us, on to part 2 of part 1 of 4) #Democracy #weAreARepublicNotADemocracy #Republic #AmericanHistory #altRight #Libertarian #HeritageFoundation

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(because of some sort of technical issues, this particular post is a continuation of part 1 of 4. you are a welcome to read this over on Medium as well) ...

Super Duper Rich Fellas

Thinkers and politicians of the 19th century had incorporated “Jeffersonian democracy” as a common descriptor for how the country was running, but most Americans, as well the rest of the world, skipped semantics and embraced “this great Republic -the foremost democracy” going into the future.
Yet quibbles remained in expected over-influential corners. RNAD's second act began (and remains) as a magical shield of patter to fend off trade-unionism, socialism, and any other -ism attracting the indignation from the “captains of industry.” Racial political matters, like anti-immigration and preserving slavery, had been 1800s problems to crusade for with RNAD as pretext. The comparative 1900s, though, were the beginning of the idiom’s use in antisemitic imbued arguments against the labor movement. (We touch on a few popular books of the 1910's having an unpredicted hand in bringing the phrase back into vogue for the well-healed class on the backside)
“The Fathers created a republic and not a democracy” was the very first line in former Secretary of the Treasury turned big-city banker Leslie M. Shaw’s (R-IA) 1919 Vanishing Landmarks; the trend toward bolsehvism, a tirade from a wealthy conservative suffering a meltdown over any non-white men, women, poor, Native American, or immigrants having any say in the political process. This was just the beginnings of perpetual Red Scares, constructed with armies of straw-men slapped together to depict “democracy” as a concept socialists had conjured up to sell their takeover of the US and depose its enchanted business/church-like government.

Oilman, financier, and Citgo-founder Henry Latham Doherty soon followed by couching RNAD in a self-agrandizing Haratio Alger-eque 1920 article in the New York Tribune:

“Our forefathers,after studying every form of government, including all the different forms of democracy, established a republic, not a democracy. Those of us who resist many of the proposed changes in our form of government are not standpatters, but simply want changes which are in harmony and not in conflict with the government set up by our forefathers. We do not want to revolute, but are willing to evolute.”

Doherty’s column was more or less a bingo-card of every out-of-touch über-rich “let them eat cake” recycled talking-point we all have heard too many times already… If the poor could simply learn to be more thrifty, crime & prostitution will be halved and they will all assuredly get to be rich like him. Low wages & longer hours in dangerous physically-draining jobs is actually a favorable thing fro everybody and will help us abstain from inventing loathsome labor-saving devices or risk a reduction in US exports. Otherwise, housewives will endure undue burdens when men are at home annoyingly spending too much time with their families. Unions will entice medical doctors to quit to be high-paid tradesmen and a less than 60-hour work week will turn us all into a “race of mollycoddles.”
Super fun familiar stuff.

On the other side of the continent, the LA Times published an editorial grousing over how voters were clearly too ignorant to understand even the most mundane of ballot measures, insisting RNAD was the reason why representatives (in gerrymandered districts) were the only ones who should decide if the citizens of California deserve to be blessed with any new statutes.
And a congressman whose anti-Japanese racism inspired the coming Japanese internment during WWII, Sen. Shortridge (R-CA), found it strangely imperative to slip in a little context-free RNAD while discussing his support for an increase of postal employee's salaries in 1925.

Red Scares & Model Ts

As revolts and revolutions flared up in other lands, a related moral panic was building steam in the US. The richer stratum, with over-sized influence on governance and what made it into the circulars, refused to believe that any red-blooded American, especially the multitudes of overworked & underpaid, could ever have the gall to entertain any ideas remotely associated with socialism, like fair-pay, equality, or live-ability. Unlucky targets in the shape of recent southern and eastern European immigrants, cast as importers of revolutionary political and economic schemes to stain society with crimson colored communism, became some of the first scapegoats of the 20th century.
The Second Ku Klux Klan had recently re-declared themselves the defenders of white protestant America against a foreign Marxist degeneracy and got themselves busy digging their hooks into both major political parties.
Henry Ford purchased the wide-circulated Dearborn Independent and put the presses to work sharing what was “discovered” in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a glaringly built-for-disinformation manuscript that had “surfaced” in Russia a few decades.
It is difficult to keep the history of RNAD’s misinterpretations and misuse brief enough for a short article without getting too deep into the messy weeds of bigotry, but more masochistic readers are welcome to hurl themselves into the nauseous background of the “The Protocols” to learn about Ford's “The International Jew”, the men who “found” it for him (and were involved in organizing the America First movements and the pro-Nazi American Bund), and how many discreditable antisemitic tropes have since stemmed from this counterfeit codex. But there is a bright blinking caveat that such rabbit holes from here on out do tend to lead to increasingly more horribly racist and genocidal material. oof.
Ford-approved antisemitic rants were collected in The International Jew. For anyone paying a modicum of notice, its contents are regularly reflected in the diatribes crawling out of the angriest pallid corners of society and into mainstream right-wing discourse and X-twitter’s “For You” feed. Although he never directly adduces RNAD, Ford obsessively lays all blame for democracy, as well as both banking and Marxism, jazz, booze, anything “liberal,” and all other kinds of earthly woes on the Jews…

“The Protocols distinctly declare that it is by means of the set of ideals which cluster around 'democracy,' that their first victory over public opinion was obtained. The idea is the weapon. “Democracy is merely a tool of a word which Jewish agitators use to raise themselves to the ordinary level in places where they are oppressed below it; but having reached the common level they immediately make efforts for special privileges, as being entitled to them.”

With the help of rampant xenophobia and much influence from white supremacists like the Klan and erudite-esque eugenicists, the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted. Little coincidence that a Red Scare, an Immigrant Scare, and a noticeable uptick in antisemitism was happening simultaneously. A stock market crash, the subsequent Great Depression, and what it took to correct course in a relatively progressive era, while fascism was on the rise elsewhere, made for an icky concoction that built the RNAD brand that has persisted for decades since.

FDR and the “Jew Deal”

The proverbial mask often slipped off quickly for those who frequently went out of their way to proclaim, “we're a republic, not a democracy.” It was quickly becoming an aging chestnut, which required minimal repurposing for the well-off to make arguments for opposing New Deal programs enacted to aid in alleviating the nation’s economic predicament and move the country into the future.
Industrialists mustered their half-century old anti-labor lobby groups, like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), to counter Roosevelt’s progressive economic policies and push a curriculum into American public school to instill a fear of immigrants, labor-organizing, and the insidious specter of “democracy” that they alleged would create a class war to destroy the nation that was “intended to be a republic but not a democracy.” By 1928, they had already successfully inserted similar RNAD phrasing into the Army Training Manual of Citizenship. However, as Commander-in-Chief, Roosevelt and his administration ended the distribution of the guidebook four years later. The manual’s content eerily reflected a surge of chauvinistic rhetoric with sections on the art of self-governance being specifically “the product of distinct [Anglo-Saxon] racial stocks” New immigrants were classified as a drain on the fabric of American society founded on “reverence and respect for family and race” threatened by an imported “mobocracy” bent on transforming upright citizens into lazy atheistic communistic anarchists. Most sane active duty and veterans would surely call it “cringe” if it were printed today.
Europe was still recovering from the Great War concurrently enduring an ensuing escalation of extremist politics and strife. Reactionary industrialists backed the rise of fascist regimes in regions eyeing the lands beyond their borders while ecstatically othering portions of their own populations. Tensions rose as the U.S., under FDR, had to choose between helping remaining democracies stop a disturbing spread of belligerence or to remain isolationists curled up in a fleeting sense of safety provided by oceanic distances.

Back in the 48 states, led by deep pockets already actively opposing the president’s recent domestic policies, the America First Committee (AFC) was organized as an amalgamated pressure group for those opposing intervention, attracting other wealthy industrialists as well as radicals, socialists, communists, anti-communists, pacifists, and contrarian FDR-haters. Because of its founders and political position on foreign policies, it also attracted antisemites and fascism-enthusiasts in similar veins of their most renown spokesmen, Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.
Some AFC leaders and notable members were also benefactors of antisemitic pro-Franco activists and their organizations. Others held sympathies towards or directly worked with European fascist regimes, such as International Olympic Committee president and Hitler-friendly German-American Bund rally-speaker Avery Brundage, aviator & convicted Nazi-agent Laura Ingalls with her famed rants decrying “lousy democracy”, infamous anti-labor Anglo-Israelite radio commentator & columnist Boake Carter, and the founder of the red-panicked Christian Anti-Defamation League & author of several pro-Nazi propaganda books fixated on tying communism to the Jews Elizabeth Dilling, whose “main devices of promoting fascism was to split hairs on definitions.”

“Our U.S.A. form of government is a Republic, not a democracy, the difference being between government by checked and balanced Constitutional law and representatives, or government by direct 'mobocracy.'”

It also does not help the historical optics when a founder’s son (also an AFC member) went on to publish books for the John Birch Society and apartheid-apologists. Especially rough is the fact that his grandson, William Regney II, was the money-man for several white supremacist periodicals and established the alt-Right’s (now defunct) lobby group, the National Policy Institute.
Nor is it great that establishing member Robert Rutherford McCormick, owner of the conservative Chicago Tribune, allowed his close friend Harry Jung to keep offices in the paper’s Tribune Tower. Jung published antisemitic and racist pamphlets throughout the 1930s, like Communism and the Negro and the Nazi-funded paper The American Gentile, and organized the antisemitic/anti-New Deal lobbying group American Vigilant Intelligence Federation.
Similarly, AFC co-founder and Sears chairman General Robert E. Wood funded the creation of the “Manion Forum,” a conservative radio program hosted by Clarence Manion, the soon-to-be lead promoter of T. Coleman Andrew’s campaign for president in 1956 as a candidate for the white supremacist States’ Rights Party and Christian Nationalist Party (aka Constitution Party, aka America First Party).
Those with a cursory knowledge of history know antisemitism and the Red Scares were barely-refined scapegoat fuel for conservatives and hard-Right groups during the lead up to America’s entry into the Second World War. Many with power and wealth, who had long soured on the New Deal, took issue with FDR’s attempts to expand the courts and believed that sending aid to Britain was a folly, choosing to instead look inward while the rest of the world was rapidly becoming smaller.
Smaller minor-league-esque AFC affiliated groups, like the “Native Sons and Native Daughters of the Golden West,” borrowed Shaw's racist invocations of RNAD to claim that only “socialists, near-socialists, anarchists and bolsheviki” were enthusiastic about “democracy.” As supportive of nearby indigenous rights as a batch of Californian racists could be in the early-1900s, the Native Sons/Daughters of the Golden West opposed immigration and naturalization of Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican residents and laborers; going so far to file lawsuits to disenfranchise Japanese-Americans during World War II. Having been soused in some white ethnostate thinking for a few decades already, they were a bit ahead of others who would later emerge from the America First rabble.
Echoing Ford’s antisemitic tracts, radio personalities used the new medium to spread pro-fascist propaganda over the airwaves. Infamously antisemitic but ever-popular Father Coughlin had been sermonizing to families over the previous decade through living-room radio sets, blaming the Great Depression on both the communists and the bankers involved in a Jewish plan code-named “democracy.” Meanwhile his Christian Front and the German-American Bund, led by previous Ford employee, Fritz Kuhn, made RNAD one of their maxims.

“We are a republic, not a democracy” was evolving into its truer form of a microcephalic umbrella argument for anti-FDR, anti-communism, anti-civil rights, and antisemitism. The New Deal, the President’s popularity, and the general revulsion of overtly fascist tenors contributed to keeping these kinds of sentiments and the phrase from becoming mainstream sentiments. Thus, RNAD remained almost exclusively propagated in Right-wing circles in cahoots and/or adjacent to the AFC. Although his black book was filled with AFC leaders, Minnesota pastor Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith created a separate America First Party to rally more extreme America Firsters who concurred with its diktats of “America was a constitutional republic; not a democracy”, “CHRIST FIRST IN AMERICA! AMERICA FIRST IN WAR AND PEACE!, and Smith's calls to fight “Jew Deal Communism”, fueled by his belief that “the only good Jew is a dead Jew.”

During the war, Smith headlined rallies alongside Father Coughlin and joined William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, an American spin on Hitler’s Brown Shirts intended to be the fascist street-fighting wing of the Christian Party of America, sharing analogous rhetoric stemming from Ford's “Protocols.” (FUN FACT: Pelley was also a British-Israelism acolyte and mentioned in Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here alongside a few American-Firsters introduced above)
In the 1930s, Pelley sometimes referred to America as a “democracy,” but only in terms of it being a theocratic “TRUE DEMOCRACY OF JESUS THE CHRIST.” By 1936, he would claim…

The system of government in the United States is that of a REPUBLIC —not a Democracy, as the Communist Jews try to propagandize. “The Silver Shirts will attempt to restore the American Form of government, but it won’t be a democracy—it will be Republicanism. That this nation is a Democracy, or has ever been a Democracy, is mere blatherskite smokescreen. The Silver Shirts will attempt to restore a Constitutional Republic...”

And later in his book There IS a Jewish World Plot... JEWS SAY SO!:

”...the United States is not a Democracy, but a Republic. The members of this Committee, however, were not sufficiently erudite in their civics to be aware of that fact, or of the difference between the two governmental forms.”

Fascism is Really Bad at Taking Hints

Not long after democratic-inclined nations had routed the principal fascist threats in Europe and Asia, Truman defeated Dewey in a close 1948 election. Yet both parties’ solid beating of conservative white-grievance political campaigns run by a blustering Southern Democratic/Dixiecrats/States’ Rights Party and their kindred far-right groups inferred a discernible uptick in far-right organizing. As we will keep noticing, RNAD was frequently the framing for execrably extremist hyperbolism to aid in the normalization of bigoted political platforms for the coming century.
Akin to a callback to the 1882 Republican campaign text book, centrist Republicans predictably re-employed the phrase to critique a two decade run of Democratic administrations. Complaints about the New Deal, the Supreme Court, public schools, perceived commingling of the branches of government, and consistent Democratic wins were targets to levy RNAD at; something that may be expected during a time of nonstop political frustration. For instance, Representative Frances Bolton (R-OH) gave the game away in front of a Republican women’s group in 1949, complaining that the New Deal and the Democratic Party were supposedly being conflated with the nation’s “democratic principles of government.” But also exclaimed “We are a republic, not a democracy” in her speech that could be described as puerile generalizations. (Given how the brass-ring for the GOP establishment & think tanks nowadays is to lock in an infallibly autocratic President under the “Unitary Executive” theory, looking back at these words is simply adorable.)
But the loudest and most common usage continued to be bellowed from those with connections reaching back to the previous decades’ America First movements.

Common Sense was an “anti-communist” newspaper circulated by Conde McGinley, co-founder of the aforementioned Christian Anti-Defamation League and the Christian Educational Association, which became an influential pro-Nazi and antisemetism broadsheet in the mid-1900s. Common Sense regularly featured editorials by pro-fascists with a standard theme:

“America is a Republic— not a democracy. The word 'democracy' was never used in the. Constitution. Citizens of the United States want no “World Federation” to replace the American form of government.”

McGinley's publication was bankrolled by “Judge Armstrong,” an organizer for the KKK & a southern millionaire who famously attempted to make deals to fund colleges if they'd reject Jewish & Black students and teach white supremacy. As vainglorious white supremacists do, George Washington Armstrong also wrote more than a dozen racist and extremely antisemitic books, regularly reprising RNAD alongside heaps of “Protocols” hooey. So he certainly deserves a paragraph as well. George has long passed, but the Armstrong Foundation he started consistently funds almost every influential conservative & Libertarian™ activist/think-tank currently influencing state and federal Republican policy platforms. (more on that over on the backside)...

“All the wise men who won independence and founded it agreed that it should be a representative republic, not a democracy.”

Antisemitic conspiracy-theory-laden editorials from Firster Elizabeth Dilling, naziism-fan George Van Horn Moseley, and controversial radio personality Upton Close also regularly appeared in Common Sense. Close was another bombastic white-grievance grifter in the vein of Carter and Coughlin, who used his voice and ink to share his antisemitic views, including writing the forward for Robert H. Williams's The Anti-Defamation League and Its Use in the World Communist Offensive treatise about a “Jewish conspiracy,” contending that “democracy” ultimately meant communism. (FUN FACT: Williams was also a holocaust denier and believed Eisenhower was owned by the Jews.)
McGinley's newspaper helped drum up McCarthy's Red Scare vers. 2.0, with articles defining communism as “Judaism” and attacking Jewish people and other minorities for purportedly helping them create a “One World Government” (soon after to be known as ZOG). It also regularly reprinted articles from the ethno-nationalistic American Renaissance and a pile of antisemitic propaganda reputedly introducing the American Nazi Party's founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, to the “Jewish Conspiracy” baloney.
Furthermore, Common Sense propagandized for a multitude of other like-minded fascist and hate groups, publishing and advertising work by various white supremacists like Robert E. Edmondson. RNAD naturally fit well & quite often into the ramblings of the Jew-baiting pamphlets Edmonson had distributed since the 1930s. “Communism as a Jewish plot” was stock but shallow subtext to what became slurs of “globalist” and “woke commies” now encapsulated in the spittle spurted from modern talking-heads’ tirades at “young Republican” conferences organized by piqued boys like Nick Fuentes’ America First PAC or Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA. If we can already come up with one take-way, it is that “democracy” has been handily lumped into some of the most bigoted dog-whistles much more than “republic” has ever been explained or defined by any of these factions of fanatics.
By the mid-1940s, Edmonson had organized the Pan-Aryan Conference as a bulwark to stop “the Jewish-Communist takeover of America” based on the soon-to-be Bircher belief that FDR was a Communist-Jew, entitled “He Is Not One of Us!”.
Edmonson's “research” was also the forerunner to William L. Pierce's Who Rules America?
(Pierce also wrote Hunter and The Turner Diaries. The latter talks of a “Day of the Rope”, an American-styled kristallnacht that is commonly referred to in the hard-right/White Power milieu, which inspired McVeigh to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, as well as other “white replacement” conspiracy theory obsessed mass shooters over at least the last decade)
Staying on brand, Edmonson's 1953 book, I testify against the Jews is inundated with “We are a Republic Not a Democracy.” (FUN FACT: Edmonson also believed flouride in public water was a communist plot)

The RNAD tagline continued to be put to use by exceedingly aberrant characters in post-war America.
Über-conservative self-help guru George W. Crane persistently used the story of Pontius Pilate convicting Jesus to death as an example of what the “mobocracy” would be like if the US was not kept a “republic.”
Howard Rand, editor of Destiny Magazine and head of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America would drop the catchphrase in the midst of fulminations over respected journalists critical of McCarthy’s Un-American Committee with the audacity to discuss democracy on their radio shows. Rand is considered to be the catalyst for the white supremacist Christian Identity movement’s evolution from British-Israelism. Claims that the Jews were behind the Communist Revolution and that Zionism & Communism were inexorably linked filled the pages of Destiny. (we briefly discuss Christian Identity in part 2)

Communism is Civil Rights

Shifts in the nation’s demographics became more noticeable as the U.S. grew bigger in its britches, making the world seem smaller and its populace realize that their culture did not need to remain exclusively pink-skinned and protestant. Some of the most vociferous members of the powerful, profuse, and easily sunburnt segments of the population adopted RNAD as an opportune rallying cry for rejecting the integration of society being ushered in by the phantom of communism. Such themes remain well associated with “Republic, Not a Democracy,” thanks to a handful of political actors with a massively outsized affect on American politics.
For his 1956 senatorial campaign, the former Georgia governor, who had battled the Brown v. Board of Education decision by attempting to abolish the entire state's public schools system, a second cousin of Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (R-SC), cover-upper-er of lynchings, and friend of the Klan, Herman Talmadge (D-GA), published an infamous pamphlet entitled You and Segregation. Like something Calhoun would have penned more than a century earlier, he propounded that integration, or anything else mandated from a federal level, was downright unconstitutional. But now, it came down to the fib that “democracy” was absolutely synonymous with “race-mixing” and “communism”:

“Could it be possible that these Americans, who talk and write so much about 'our democracy' do not know that this nation is a republic and not a democracy?
“Could it be that they desire a gradual overthrow of our republic and the establishment of a “democracy’ —as is advocated by the Communists and fellow-travelers. ... “It is evident that many of this group believe only in one mixed, amalgamated race; the anti-God Marxist religion; and one all-powerful central government not segregated by state lines or Constitutional barriers. This is obviously the 'true democracy' they talk, write about and proclaim so brashly.”

Especially in regions the Black Belt of the South, court decisions and executive orders were threatening a white supremacist status quo. Talmadge and his segregationist successors were announcing that, as far as they were concerned, the only legitimate representatives & decision makers for the rest of the citizenry were well-off white men. The Warren Court affirming a more democratic “one-vote one-person” was correctly feared to end the separation of the races in schools, universities, bedrooms, and plumbing. Instead of dealing with inequality, scapegoating an infiltration by “the Reds” to undermine society became the prevailing tune stuck on repeat like a busted phonograph ever since.
(Quick interjection: it is not untrue that communists were involved in the civil rights movement. In an attempt to organize workers in the south, they had a hand in pushing for racial equality that most white labor organizations refused to address. The first years of the Cold War quickly put a damper on things, but the Great Depression was a time of different realities. Similar to what happened in the European/Asian/Global south, allying with communist organizing was more so a response to being left with no other way to counter the discrimination and oppressive structures established under Jim Crow and feudalistic sharecropping. Multi-racial groups, like the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union, allied themselves with socialist movements, yet would frequently butt heads with the CPUSA. A typical observation from union leaders was that African-Americans tended to embrace unity and were more adept at resisting repression through collective action. On the other hand, Whites tended to be individualistic, less experienced, and could be more easily convinced by farm managers to turn against the struggle. Out of necessity, union organizing has routinely been a fellow traveller of civil rights activism.)

By the end of the 1950s, “We are a republic, not a democracy” was an established shibboleth for the sketchiest edges of the far-right, showing up in pamphlets distributed by the White Citizens Councils, a suburbanized cousin of the KKK, emphasizing that the Framers made a republic not a democracy in order to safeguard a white individual’s right to discriminate and states’ rights to segregate. The Supreme Court being influenced by “radical psychologists and sociologists” from the NAACP & communists to unconstitutionally impose civil rights and end the lawful segregation of the races were again the stereotypical concerns. Fuzzy logic was that no provisions of the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights had made “separate but equal” illegal. Speeches recurrently warned that all past nations who had mixed Black and white races endured decline in their culture and civilization; a well-worn parable from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race handed down to neo-nazis for decades to come, not dissimilar to the run of the mill rants from a racist-drunk-uncle at Thanksgiving.
The Christian Nationalist Crusade/Party, a slightly less fash-y named iteration of Pelley’s Silver Shirts, repeatedly put the RNAD apothegm to bigoted use in the holocaust-denying paper Cross and the Flag they began publishing in the ’50s. Its founder, previously mentioned Indiana klansman/Silver Shirt and America First Party presidential founder/candidate Gerald L. K. “We're going to drive that cripple out of the White House” Smith, had campaigned for Talmadge in the ’30s and later ran as a Republican in Michigan in the ’40s. The Christian Nationalist platform called for deportation of all Jews & African-Americans and aided in George Wallace’s campaigns for office in the 1950’s and 1960's….

“SMITH talked for several hours, principally on a religious theme, among other things likened the Twin Cities to Sodom & Gomorrah in relation to the opposition he has had from the C.I.0. and Communistic elements.
“SMITH declared America was a constitutional republic; not — a democracy. ”...although Smith's public statements are very closely guarded, he knows that Smith privately is anti-Jewish. He is firmly convinced that the only good Jew is a dead Jew.”

---

Now that we have this semantic-meets-historic misadventure off and running, how about we check out how the John Birch Society adopted “Republic, Not a Democracy” as a motto, stapled a tinfoil hat on it, and got to work selling segregation and unfettered capitalism until they popped themselves out literal neo-Nazis, the Religious Right, and a Republican think tank/lobby machine built to overturn the rights Americans have fought long and hard for? It will be like watching grumpy grey nincompoops deliberately getting their red, very white, and blue Mogwai wet and then feeding them after midnight. A real hoot if you are caught up on your ’80s film references…
A Brief but Bigoted History of “We're a Republic, Not a Democracy” (2 of 4) – if you thought those fascists were bad...

...

…check out these Birchers and their very pasty esoteric ethnostatist friends

(if you showed up late, you can still back up to Part 1)

The Least Grape Welch

There is little point in beating around the blandest of berry bushes, the John Birch Society was created by affluent conservative men to promote Gilded Age-esque policies based around a fanciful free-market with well-heeled Caucasian Christian men planted in the highest positions of society. There is a chronic American fairy tale that a patrician class lording over its lessors is the only way to defend against phantasmal “collectivism” invading the land and reshaping it into some hellscape of equality. The Bircher’s become its 20th century storytellers.
Failed candy entrepreneur, Robert “everybody is an illuminati-backed communist” Welch, was a prolific writer whose rhetoric first attracted Midwestern Republicans already deeply steeped in the McCarthyism of the decade before. Although he could not sell a lollipop to a schoolboy, Welch was a skilled schmoozer. Allying with the “right” tycoons and giving speeches extolling the virtues of American “free enterprise” at their get-togethers attracted the support of several corporate interests who soon joined him in cobbling together his new reactionary project.
Over the years, Welch had wrapped himself up in well-worn conspiracy theories about Eisenhower, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the entire federal government all being communists thanks to “the Jews” attempting to expand civil rights and any other programs he believed had gone too far beyond some 1800-something salad-days. “Republic Not a Democracy” became the indubitable mantra for the Birchers to incorporate into their loudest campaigns to paint the civil rights movement and its leaders as communist-stooges involved in a plot to divide America by race (echoed in recent whines of “racism was dead until Obama was let in the White House”), impeach Supreme Court Judge Earl Warren, and anything “progressive” or less than complete laissez-faire capitalism as simply an evil un-American force imported by foreign elements.
The era of right-wing “We're a Republic, Not a Democracy” overt propaganda was solidly underway with the furiousness of white upper-middle class revanchism aimed at a foreign bogeymen hellbent on ending the orthodox Americana of Jim Crow and segregation.

Multitudes of better write ups regarding the influence the Birchers have had on the American conservative movements are a dime a dozen. But for a quick macro-perspective of the RWNJobbery, as much as Welch hoped to make a multi-million member movement to slow history’s forward progression, their support of the Wallace & Goldwater campaign and ally-ship & member-sharing with organized racist & segregationist groups kept them publicly ostracized to the fringes of the Republican Party. Their tactics of turning even the most mundane disputes into a manufactured culture war battle, on the other hand, has been adopted to drum up votes for mainstream Republicans in lieu of rustling up genuine policy proposals. So much so that much of what Welch had envisioned and fostered has come to fruition in recent years.
Much of their political positions and rhetoric had already been assembled in corners of society under the flickering glow of burning crosses and merely repackaged from hard-Right excrement seen in publications such as McGinley’s Common Sense and Gerald L. K. Smith's Cross and Flag. A plethora of antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, and conspiracism was produced by or explicitly associated with the Birchers. More than a little of it eventually became staple fair for the alt-right and QAnon movements of today. RNAD was incorporated in their calls for the suppression of those daring to demand their votes matter as much as white men’s. As well, the John Birch Society (JBS) was already notorious for being fascist-adjacent during its inaugural years. Revilo Oliver's 1959 book ALL America Must Know the Terror That is Upon Us is a short screed exposing an imagined nefarious overseas-born, underway since the 1870s, to import communism under the guise of “social reform” and “democracy” in order to destroy the Republic. As a co-founder of the JBS and profuse pseudo-academic & writer, Oliver helped set the tone for the group of curmudgeonous middle-aged white men and their fellow-travelers. In addition to founding the group’s American Opinion, he also co-founded National Review, the leading journal of “mature & respectable conservative ideas”, which shared many writers and financial backers like their far-Right buddy Mr. Manion and a whole clown-car loaded with others of even Right-er persuasions.
Oliver's most memorable contributions were to the white supremacist movement after embarrassing Welch by publicly squawking the quiet parts out loud that the world’s troubles would end if “all Jews were vaporized at dawn tomorrow” along with the “Illuminati” and “Bolsheviks,” he resigned from the JBS to mentor and collaborate with fellow JBS members William Luther Pierce, Kevin Strom, and Willis Allison Carto to form the proudly neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance and National Alliance. He soon became an influential promoter of the Christian Identity movement, where the Bircher’s “we’re a republic, not a democracy” was also a customary idiom. Under the pen-names “Ralph Perrier” & “Paul Knutson,” he regularly wrote for Liberty Bell, a sister magazine to the White Power Report. Both were published by George P. Dietz, also a brief JBS member and the American neo-Nazi movement’s internet pioneer, whose “Liberty Bell Network” in turn inspired other online white supremacist forums like Louis Beam’s “Aryan Nations Liberty Net,” Tom Metzger’s “White Aryan Resistance Computer Terminal,” and Dan Black’s “Stormfront” (which is still very much up & running to this day). So naturally the RNAD canard appeared in the Liberty Bell from time to time as well.

In 1965, Willis Carto’s Noontide Press published a short book entitled “This is A Republic, Not a Democracy! (Let's Keep It That Way)” by “Edward Langford”, a pen-name of racialist anthropologist and neo-Nazi Roger Pearson, to put on lily-white reading lists. Pearson, another one of the original Birchers, was supported by the Pioneer Fund (a white supremacist grant organization pushing eugenics & racist pseudoscience) and edited their Mankind Quarterly magazine, went on to edit & write for the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, machinated with literal Nazis as leading chairman of the World Anti-Communist League, and had boasted about helping hide Josef Mengele after the war. Pearson dedicated his book to the JBS's most famed co-founder, Robert Welch, for “popularizing the slogan”.
The book was fundamentally a replication of decades old “white replacement” literature by eugenicists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who had inspired some of the most racist U.S. and German laws in the first half of the 20th century. Pearson theorized that democracy only works in homogeneous purely White nations because other races were simply too feeble and inherently unequal to not reduce it to uncut chaos. So America's “Nordic White founding fathers” opted for a republic. But supposedly “the real Communism is race-mixing, race-leveling” and “the destruction of our Western civilization in its entirety”. Pearson praised Welch for bringing all this to the public's attention and lays bare why the Bircher's were so pro-segregationist, anti-democratic, and such fervent boosters of the white genocide conspiracy theory...

“The real danger from the spread of the democratic idea is the dispersion of power to those of inferior ability, those of subordinate race, who have been allowed within our gates.”

Links to recordings of Dan Smoot Report’s 1966 “A Republic, Not A Democracy” television broadcast pop up here & there on social media, , posted by oddballs who think a mouthpiece for segregationists and extremely racist political campaigns dressed up in a suit would somehow make believable “constitutionalist” arguments for scaling back voting & civil rights. Smoot was a legalese-speaking Bircher trying to convince Sunday afternoon TV-watchers in conservative-friendly regions that, starting with the Fourteenth, any Constitutional amendments concerning civil or voting rights were illegal, had never actually been passed, and every subsequent amendment was transforming the sacred republic into a democratic welfare-state that the Founders knew would lead to the destruction of “liberty.” The print version of Smoot’s “Reports” were predominantly homilies about desegregation being part of a long-game communist plot to turn the South into a “negro Soviet Republic” under the guise of “democracy.” Again, totally run-of-the-mill platitudinous stuff that totally never gets old (/s).
As half-ass as they were, the John Birch Society’s attempts to keep the extremism under wraps were repeatedly hampered by its membership and public support of segregationists like George Wallace. Fred Koch, one of the Bircher’s original eleven, built an oil empire off of constructing refineries for the Soviet Union and Nazi-Germany’s Luftwaffe. By 1938, Fred believed “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan,” and after helping found/fund the JBS, he wrote, “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America” and “will use the colored people by getting a vicious race war started.” The Birchers maintained lightly concealed associations with hate groups, like the KKK and the White Citizens Councils (which morphed into the like-minded Council of Conservative Citizens in the 1980s), who would share & sell JBS publications at meetings. Damning caveats came in the form of colorful comments from well-known extremists, such as American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell:

“The Birch Society is sort of a kindergarten for the Nazi Party. In the last year we have taken over a majority of Birchers in three cities.”

Incidentally, Rockwell also borrowed the RNAD expression to rage in the pages of his own Mein Kampf rendering, This Time The World, that “our nation is supposed to be a Republic, not a Democracy, as pushed by the liberals and pinkos and Jews” in order to install Marxism as part of a strategy to replace White people. This was by far not the first or the last time he used that spiel.

Unfortunately, the Bircher-flavored taint on conservative politics persisted and their populist scaremongering tactics helped usher a B-list actor from California into the White House, an anti-democratic movement named after the Boston Tea Party gain power, and a reality-TV actor who is currently being guided back into office again by JBS-associated think tanks. And apparently the John Birch Society is again being welcomed into the Republican & conservative milieu again after more than half a century in the shadows.
While the JBS can probably be most credited with keeping the RNAD slogan alive, it still remained associated with the edgier grimy corners of the American hard-Right. Rare public appearances were made when Klan-friendly Bircher segregationists would invoke it while loudly whining about minorities & non-conservatives not knowing their place.
In a May 1968 long-winded diatribe recorded in the Congressional Record, decrying protests at Columbia University over the construction of a segregated gym being on public land (after years of West Harlem residents enduring the removal of their homes by the school) and students discovering links between the university and a weapons research think tank involved in the Vietnam War, Representative John Rarick (D-LA) did his part as one of the few Democratic Birchers by sticking to the script:

“Columbia, like our nation, is a republic, not a democracy, but the Marxists know that if they can get their idea of democracy into practice and acceptance by the people, they have reached more than the beginning of the end so far as our republic is concerned.”

He then followed with a demand for more police officers to be employed in order to stop an upcoming “Poor People Campaign” march in DC, planned by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the recently assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rarick was such a beloved conservative that he made the cut for laudation in conservapedia for being ahead of the curve of the modern Republican Party. Quite charming that the site's creators conveniently gloss over his racism and segregationist misadventures with George Wallace's American Independent Party (who also endorsed Trump for president). Or Rarick actively supporting David Duke’s failed 1990 run for US Senator as a Republican.

Corporate needs you to find the differences between Militias and Neonazis

Speaking of the edgier corners of American history, we should probably pick up the pace to run through the remaining decades of the 20th century, when “republic, not a democracy” was almost exclusively used by forces so dark that no dressing them up, even in bleached sheets & spire-topped masks, could render them respectable for any sane society. Granted, that Overton window has been pulling pretty hard to the right for some years, so some of these characters have recently seen their shticks become increasingly mainstreamed with a gobs of assistance from the internet.

“For the purpose of definition, extremists are those whose activity and program constitute a threat to the democratic process. Some common characteristics are attempts to suppress differences of opinion, impugn the motives of those with whom they disagree, undermine confidence in the government, intimidate, incite to violence, and disturb the peace in furtherance of their objectives. Rightist extremists are also obsessed with domestic Communism and attach great significance to their insistence that America is a republic and not a democracy.”         —Milton Ellerin, Rightist Extremism, 2008

It does hit the point home when a former Republican Florida state representative, White Citizens Council organizer, Bircher, Ron Paul supporter, founder of the National White Party and the Church of Creator, white power heavy-hitter Ben Klassen includes invectives like this in his incredibly racist newsletters:

“In opposition to our individual sovereignty under a republican form of government, there exists a powerful force – the Jewish race – to control every function of our lives through a strong central government, under the banner of “democracy”. A government that has the power to give you everything you need also has the power to take everything you have. Recognizing this, our White ancestors intended that we live under a republican form of government, not the current welfare state: the mob rule of democracy.”

(Acolytes of the Church of the Creator believe that the Jews created Christianity in order to make White people weaker and the first priority should be to “smash the Jewish Behemoth”. They hold even less affectionate opinions of other races and are particularly obsessed with white replacement conspiracy theories)
Another white supremacist “religion,” derived from British-Israelism *(whose members apparently enjoy mentioning RNAD whenever they can)* and reformulated by Klan-supporter, Christian Nationalist Crusader member, and former Pentecostal minister Wesley A. Swift with helpful promotion from the many projects of American Firster Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, was the Christian Identity movement. During the mid-1900s, Swift recorded and shared as many of his sermons as he could to get the wack-job word out about the U.N. instating a “World Government” under the guise of “democracy”. Alternately, the U.S., he demanded, was supposedly intended to be a theocratic nation ran by white Christian men to counter an unholy global menace...

“Now they tell you today that one of the worst circumstances you can find in democracy today and I don't have any use for democracy anyhow for democracy is mob rule. I appreciate a Republic and the concept that people are choosing those who are representing them, but this is not a Democracy, this is a Republic form of government. Therefore they tell you that we have all kinds of people, all races of people, and we emerge into one great race and God smiles on it. But God does not smile on this idea, because God is a racist. Oh, you say I do not like this. But I want you to know that God is a God who has established a fact, that this white race is his people, and he has raised them to the same power as nature, the same force as nature, to the highest status on the face of the earth.”

Before his 1970 passing in Mexico as a medical tourist, Swift had successfully built a chain of churches (often taking over already established ones) in at least 7 states. And by the 1990s, there were at least 245 ministers preaching to their Identitarian congregations in over 40 states, the most numerous residing in Missouri. The white supremacist religion was promoted by neo-Nazi movers & shakers like David Duke, Revilo Oliver, Tom Metzger, and Swift’s protege, Richard Butler, who became pastor for the church’s subsequent headquarters, the Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake, Idaho. Because their theory of constitutional government was based on the notion that the U.S. was strictly a Christian republic governed by “Christian common law” with the highest authority being the county sheriff, the Identitarian doctrine folded nicely into the ideologies of many militia and Posse Comitatus extremist groups as well.
Swift's unremitting message that the “US Christian Republic” was manifestly not a democracy lived on in the sermons of subsequent ministers. The most vigorous were Michael Hallimore coated his white supremacist Kingdom Identity Ministries flock in Arkansas with. On radio broadcasts, Hallimore would fall back on old Coughlinite and America Firster tropes about democracy being a “globalist” Jewish plot to replace the white race & culture using communism. Alarms were sounded that “the programs of anti-Christ (Jews & Blacks) work continually ... to destroy your race, your culture and your philosophy” in order to make it even spicier for a crowd famously averse to strongly seasoned food…

“Now hear this: ...until we destroy democracy, until we repudiate democracy we will never see the greatness of the Kingdom of God. Oh! you say...that can't be, this is a great democracy. But the Kingdom of God is not a democracy, it is a Sovereignty. It is the one absolute power that shall rule and reign in His Kingdom. His words are law, His government is Law, and even tho we may embrace the concept of a Republic until He whose right it is to Reign does come, we shall then join with Him in a vast Republic for all the earth under the administration of the MOST HIGH GOD, but I am going to tell you that the concept of you as a Great Nation with your race supreme were yours until the twentieth century. They accomplished this by bringing us into great tribulation, and we are still in this great tribulation. For these policies sold into your midst this 'democracy' we are now finding interpreted for us, to be a world democracy in religion and all states of human life and living, and his my friends is a Jew concept. It comes out of the mind of organized Jewry. To do this they must attack your race and your culture, for culture emerges out of a race.”

Kevin Strom, mentee of Bircher and NR-founding neo-Nazi guru Revilo Oliver, similarly argued in a 1977 issue of his National Alliance publication Attack! that “democracy is tantamount to national and racial suicide.” Thusly repeating the claim that democracy leads to the mixing of races and the loss of self-discipline required to maintain national self-sufficiency. Essentially, democracy was irreconcilable with a white-ethnostate striving to be wholly independent from the rest of the world. (FUN FACT: Strom was convicted of possession of child pornography in 2007)
America’s most notorious and influential hate group deserves a brief moment in our spotlight. Having devolved into its most pathetic and perennial incarnation by the mid-1960s, the Third Klan was reduced to a pointy-topped shadow of its former self, broken up into occasionally competing smaller klans scattered throughout the whitest regions of the U.S. With so many other white supremacist groups throughout the land and their well-earned reputation of deplorability, there were numerous other less enormously embarrassing options to team up with if one really needed to stoke up their lily-white outrage. Yet, Ku Klux Klan groups still existed and still pumped out propaganda. In true pale-complected conservative fashion, they stuck with the uninspiring classics:

“PURE DEMOCRACY EQUALS DICTATORSHIP  ... America is not a Democracy where the mob rules. America is a Constitutional Republic where the LAW rules; and where property, God fearing, Bible reading men, administer the governmental offices, after being duly elected to office by the Democratic PROCESS.”

(yup, you read that right. “We are a republic, not a democracy, but we do democracy like a democracy does.”)

Middle-aged readers likely remember the white supremacist ambiance churning in & out of the Posse Comitatus and “Patriot” militia movements who came out of the woodwork after the fatal bungling of the arrest of an Aryan Nations associate by US Marshals in the northernmost tip of Idaho. The debacle in turn motivated white supremacists to bomb a Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring 680. *(Kathleen Belew's book Bring the War Home is an amazing resource on the militia-meets-RaHoWa NeoNazi connections in the last decades of the 1900s.)* The Turner Diaries, an exceptionally popular book sold at militia-frequented gun shows and far-right assemblies, written by former Bircher and pupil of Revilo Oliver, William Luther Pierce, aided in the persisting of perpetual-white-victimhood and fantasies of a “holy race war”. The story of a guerilla counter-offensive, implemented by white Christian preppers against an army of black soldiers and white liberals controlled by a Jewish world government ending in a purely white-populated earth by 2099, spoke to more than a handful of the militia movement’s “Patriots.”
To aid in radicalizing the rural working class, RNAD was adopted as a mating call for these movements, who often shared memberships with the Klan and Christian Identity movements and their myths of a Semitic globalist conspiracy to destroy their land as they reshaped it into an unChristian democracy.

“We’re a republic, not a democracy” was such a prevalent certitude that an Oregon City-based militia designated themselves the “Republic v. Democracy Redress.” The group initially labelled itself a “think tank” for the Christian Patriot movement in the late 1980s, but its founder, Robert Wangrud, artlessly let the racially obsessed cat out of the bag in interviews with Smoot-ish elegance:

There is only one race that founded this country and that is the white race. The Constitution recognizes this and clearly states that only white people can be citizens of the country. The 14th Amendment of course changed all that, but we feel it became law illegally and as such is not binding... We need to begin taking care of our own. People should also take a Christian oath of allegiance before taking any office. That would eliminate the religious cults like Hindus and Jews from taking power...

Members of Republic v. Democracy Redress would make the 400 mile trek to meetings at the Aryan Nations' Hayden Lake compound, sometimes showing up in their newsletters to discuss their theory that prior to the 14th Amendment creating a new subordinate citizenship status based on the Social Security scheme, the States had been completely sovereign (a la Calhoun), and white males were intended to be the recipients of complete freedom, and the distributors of restrictive laws for women and non-whites. and White males were intended to be the recipients of complete freedoms and the distributors of restrictive laws to women and non-whites.
While membership of militias & white supremacist groups have waxed & waned since, the internet has been keeping their white-ethnostate wet dreams very much alive. As expected, RNAD shows up regularly in discussion on far-Right forums and rage-baiting whitelash websites. The neo-Nazi Internet forum created in 1990 by “Republican special interest group” leader Dan Black, Stormfront, offers such declarations in the whitest powerest ways one would expect...

Likewise, twenty-first century specters of century-old fascism in the form of pasty boy clubs, like the Patriot Front and their Active Club buddies, subtly propagandize with Silver-Shirt hued phrasing, designating democracy a failure that needs replacing in order to save “our eroding Republic.” Interviews with potential recruits commonly include questions like “When did you realize democracy has its flaws?”
For the most part RNAD has always been relegated to phrasing flung around by ultra-conservatives, the far-Right, and their openly fascist brethren. But the America’s Overton Window has had an especially unsettling slide over the last decade or so. To at least not lose careers over saying the quiet parts out loud, the kinds of conventional policy-makers, figureheads, and their supporters, who used to stay well away from talking points traditionally confined to the extreme perimeters of politics, are now gleefully reinvorgorating the edgier hits that only used to be comfortably blurped out at old Bircher meetings.

In These Modern times...

“We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy” has been a consistent conservative canard since Roosevelt and Truman held the White House. Of course, all political stripes like to complain; but this kind of ireful talk seems to well up in print, TV & radio, podcasts, and social media in times of uninterrupted conservative election losses. And appears less when a winning streak is underway. Coupled with an accelerating rise of heavily funded and influential reactionary groups spun up from a nexus of Libertarian™ and segregationist support from their industrialist and America Firster predecessors, there has been a lot of screeching to go with the revanchist scheming.
The Heritage Foundation, a prominent influential ultraconservative think-tank known for long-gaming dominionist and illiberal political projects seemingly ripped directly from Robert Welch's vision board, publishes “reports” loaded with ramblings regarding “Republic, Not a Democracy” as if it had not already been called out as fascist-adjacent malarkey in the decades before. Borrowing heavily from the tenets of pro-segregationist unabashedly anti-democracy Libertarian™-meets-theocratic-republic Christian Reconstructionism, its co-founders refined their movement to mold opposition to equality & integration into a “Moral Majority” for political potency. Mashing together white-raging Christian fundamentalism with free-market fanaticism, Heritage picked up America First’s story arc to work with some of the same Nazi-fanboys and pro-apartheid freaks associated with preceding fascist movements.
It goes without saying, the New Right's most prolific wedge-issuing organization has never had much qualms with invoking RNAD to make arguments for a conservative state’s right to underrepresent marginalized people in government or to segregate its population. So, of course, they continue to produce RNAD-themed email campaigns and “reports” while quietly creating undemocratic templates for voter suppression laws in GOP-run states.
Their near-indistinguishable associates at the Federalist Society have also gone whole hog pushing “We are a republic, not a democracy” as reason for why Americans should not complain about having their votes not count, either under the electoral college or for their fault of living in a gerrymandered-away district. This bombastic activist organization of “heirs of James Madison's legacy” assembles lists of hyper-conservative judges for Republican presidents to fill vacancies with, whether the candidates are qualified or not. Considering the RNAD-citing protestations made by anti-FDR politicians and segregationists over a presidential overreaching affect on the judicial branch, it is striking to see a groups like this publish books unironically titled Republic Not A Democracy in recent times.
The State Policy Network, a web of Right-wing groups sympathizing with the rudiments of Calhoun's 200-year old arguments, links together the power and funding of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, along with the model bill writing ALEC and a long list of well-funded Dominionist-meets-Libertarian™ organizations fond of using the “we're just a republic” line of reasoning, SPN aids in giving corporate interests a bigger roll in crafting legislation and rolling back much of America’s labor and civil rights successes over at least the last century or more. (see:this article's backside) Politicians with close ties to these groups, e.g., Mike Lee (R-UT), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Mike Johnson (R-LA), have been heard recently using the RNAD epigram to deflect criticism of a deeply flawed electoral system or to complain about the citizenry voting down invasive & authoritarian laws that hard-Right minority governments have attempted to impose on them.
We are going to add two additional but final drips of unfiltered kookiness into the wacky bucket of cranks. Let us start with the bizarre political cult of the Laroucherites. The chore of comprehensively describing their ideology and history would produce a colossal article in & of itself, but one can get a sense of the vibe in the son of the founder’s 2010 bonkers treatise, “We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy.” This ponzi-flavored fringe political sect has been a prolific publisher of antisemitic and related tin-foil-hatted literature since the early 1970s and could be considered an inspiration for the current “If there is a conspiracy-theory… yo, they’ll adopt it” QAnon movement. From Adolf Hitler being a Manchurian Candidate for a satanic British monarchy to land bridges across oceans to violent anti-union protests to writing reports on Leftist organizations for the FBI and reports on anti-apartheid activists for the South African government to “9/11 was an inside job” to allying with some of the worst neo-Nazi groups listed above to morphing into an über-MAGA fan-club and trolling progressive politicians, there is a heck of a lot of faux-populist nuttiness to process. But in recent years, the rhetoric has been fairly indistinguishable from organizations like the JBS and their State Policy Network successors. Larouchite organizations donating to some of the same lobbyist & activist groups indicates that there may be some kind of toll required in order to use RNAD. Because they certainly do in their weird pro-Trump/anti-British tirades about fantastical “woke” fascist mega-corporations advancing a “tyrannical democracy” in articles like “Wise Up Mr. Biden: America is a Republic, Not a Democracy.” The last zany dribble we will leave you with has a similar sounding name and whose Mises Institute has had a running beef with the Kochs since Murray and Charles had themselves a falling out in the early 1980s. (at least it still gets that dead oil/klansman Armstrong money) Like Rothbard, Hoppe, Mises, Ron Paul, and others in the “paleolibertarian” milieu, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s site has been credited by influential alt-Righters as having been their doorway into white nationalism. We could get into this lifelong JBS member's neo-Confederate “race realist” and secessionist views or his years working for Hillsdale College or somehow being an “anarchist” but anti-immigrant and for tightly closed borders or upping the bigotry of Ron Paul's campaign messaging or regularly publishing all sorts of alt-Right characters, but we feel you probably get the drift by now. So alongside his site's racist content laundered as Libertarian™, Lew has kept the Old Right’s Firster themes going by accompanying the New Right’s freemarket-traditionalist-nationalism with plenty of posts promoting RNAD…
It is almost amazing that “we are not a democracy” has become so ingrained in the extreme traditionalist-meets-white supremacist-meets-Libertarian™ corners of the Right, that they cannot get over the semantics long enough to come up with a new argument that people do not immediately recognize as bunkum. Unfortunately, those corners are big enough to have been mainstreamed into some of the institutional Right's most consequential organizations and messaging.
FFor those who have made it this far along in our nearly interminable article, hopefully it has been a memorable ride, to say the very least.
At this point, most of us can acknowledge that “we are a republic, not a democracy” is simply the chorus of a song continually playing on the Right side of America’s political spectrum. Rarely, if ever, is heard in the expanses of Center or Left-leaning politics. Maybe because it is a really awkward phrasal idiom to pair with complaints over the unwonted concept of “direct democracy,” even as “direct democracy” is not even what the rest of the world is talking about whenever “democracy” is alluded to.
When these people are get hairs up over terminology nobody else has been using outside of pedantic footnotes or 235-year-old correspondence between chesty fellas, it makes one really wonder what then do they actually mean by this “republic” that they, at best, define with vaguery and with the pining for an era without running water, internet, paved roads, or suffrage for pretty much anyone except well-off white wearers of wigs.
_____

Since Publius’ pontificated over his generation’s new confederation being a republic, but not a democracy, rarely has the sentiment been used for honest clarification or to argue for legitimate policy that would affirm the first three words of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, such perfidious platitudes have been adopted and adapted by mostly chalky geneology-obsessed Anglo-Saxon-y prigs to unsubtly justify the opposing of “others” being allowed to have a hand in governing, let alone presence, in a nation that they believe was only theirs to conquer and control.
The 1800s saw RNAD deployed alongside polemics supporting slavery, creating anti-immigration moral panics, and to justify maintaining a white supremacist status quo over actual indigenous people and those who were forcefully imported or immigrated there to make a new life outside of a shambolic Europe. In the first part of the twentieth century plutocratic-minded men invoked the cliché to dismiss long-simmering working class discontent. With the aid of the xenophobic zeitgeist and some esteemed eugenicists (who we will discuss in Part 3 & 4), antisemitism and invigorated bigoted & fascist movements, promoted by some of those same elites, RNAD was handily hitched to fear-mongering and attacks on labor organizing and integration. White supremacist organizations of the last 75 years naturally inherited these sentiments, the members of such groups, and the vague axiom to use in their tantrums over an imagined Jewish cabal ending segregation, imposing communism, and replacing Christian Caucasians through a lattice of increasingly vaguer folk devils they correlated with civil rights, asylum-seekers, Critical Race Theory, “gay agendas,” suffrage, “woke,” and “democracy.”
In our wired-up era, where anyone with internet access could potentially have a voice, talking-heads on satellite radio & cable television, and the online warriors they inspire, have done such a bang up job of normalizing the dog-whistles, it is now a struggle to avoid the piles of overproduced bigotry being flung around every time we open up our handy electronic devices. And as we have learned, much of it is just barely laundered repackaged tropes from the past.
It would be nice to think that all this is just naive historical misinterpretations on their or our parts and we are just looking through a contemporary progressive-shaped lens at a small sample of ignorant or diabolical people claiming that the the U.S. is “a republic, not a democracy.” But if you are still with us and not yet seething over this timeline of its usage, let us all flip over to the backside to continue inundating our brains with context and anecdotes to help us appreciate how the rest of America has, for generations before we were even a twinkle in someones eye, recognized the erroneous “We Are A Republic, Not a Democracy” as just another disingenuous far-Right catchphrase bound with a hardly hidden unscrupulous undercurrent.
that backside: A Brief but Bigoted History of “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy” (3 of 4): holy moly, there is an even darker back side of this semantic silliness

...

History Could Use Some Context...

(looking for the beginning of this screed? try this)
Sincere apologies for making that first half so darned condensed. We were certainly not kidding about how much we had to get through. An online article is much too short of an avenue to cover the wacky ride “We Are A Republic, Not A Democracy” has taken through U.S. History. If there is a publisher looking for a book about political menaces hidden in innocuous-sounding bromides, please drop us a line, because it would take a hefty volume to properly dissect and reconnect all the nodes of reactionary zealotry sitting in the data and drafts on our hard drives. If we were to elevator-pitch it, we would describe it as a tale of an American aphorism told in the fashion of that “The Red Violin” film. But there is probably something more creative there than likening a cursed fancy fiddle to an old political slogan utilized by a series of historical characters to showcase their own plot arcs. Anyways…
In an attempt to make up for such an abbreviated chronicle of inanity, we have written this “backside” to add footnotes and some perspective on who kept the idiom in circulation, why they used it, and how Americans have, from the get go, smartly recognized it as clearly confused cover for glaringly blimpish anti-democratic machinations.
During fleeting parcels of spare time, we have been gradually piecing together a separate article intended to be a resource of “fun facts” about the Klan and other extremist far-Right hate groups’ influence & ties to mainstream conservatism. Specifically the white Christian nationalist kind and the political parties propelled by its perpetual bonfire of grievances. Going through the research, we noticed that the dictum “the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy” frequently popped up in literature & propaganda produced by segregationists, the KKK, the John Birch Society (JBS), and a myriad of white supremacist groups. Like a reflection of these groups’ broadly similar beliefs, the expression paired with conflations of civil rights and/or communism with democracy as a component of some sinister Jewish stratagem sneakily crafted to conquer the white Christian man, his culture, and the republic for which it supposedly stands.
We came across the story of Klansman Samuel Green calling in a favor from segregationist Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge to ban players like Jackie Robinson from playing at the Dodger’s 1949 Exhibition Games in Macon & Atlanta. While researching Talmadge we momentarily thought that we had found the publication that had kicked “We are a Republic, not a Democracy” *(which we will continue to abbreviate RNAD)* into quasi-popularity, his 1955 book You and Segregation.
We dug around to see if there were any other conversations about the phrase’s background and came across a Medium post recounting the same story of segregationist employment. It referred to Talmadge’s book as being the beginning of RNAD’s journey as well.
Further internet spelunking brought us to a 2019 New York Times concerning a lame social media spat between Alexander Ocasia Cortez and Dan Crenshaw over the Electoral College. In it, historian Nicole Hemmer recounted RNAD’s humble beginnings as a frame for anti-Roosevelt sentiments, as notable America Firster radio squawking-head Boake Carter wrote “The United States was never a democracy, isn’t a democracy, and I hope it will never be a democracy.” The article then mentioned the John Birch Society injecting it into regular right-wing parlance, where it has blissfully been embedded ever since.
Not a wholly incorrect explanation, but we were still left wondering how this historical and ideological bridge from Madison to the anti-FDR movement had been shaped. It seemed implausible that it was a sudden and pervasive epiphany for affluent conservative circles of the 1930s. Additionally, who were all the people and groups who had invoked it between then & now? Was it really almost exclusively used by the hard-Right that we kept running into? Or was this merely some cognitive bias on our part?
To answer our last question, we spent hours (nay, months) galore google-dorking around the internet combing through every public archive and website of government records that we could get our keyboard-callused hands on. We even looked into recent online documentation. In the first decades of the World Wide Web, the mention of RNAD was pretty rare, sometimes showing up in sketchy online forums and white nationalist “nationalist” websites.
Results of queries via Open Measures (previously Social Media Analysis Toolkit) suggest that mentions of RNAD were mostly confined to hard-Right networks, with big jumps whenever conservatives would have themselves an uproar over election losses (like the 6th day of 2021) or culture war manufactroversies had gone into outrage overdrive.

A great deal of time was spent scouring the Library of Congress for old broadsheets and journals going back centuries to see what these political discussions in the America’s neonatal years sounded like. But the essential key has been the Internet Archive, a wellspring of Congressional reports, FOIA requests, and all sorts of papers & books discussing misconceptions created by confusing semantics. The Internet Archive is an invaluable tool containing all sorts of scans of official documentation, as well as some exceedingly dark direct-from-the-source far-Right material containing information that can help pull the robes off of several white supremacist groups’ inner workings and connections.
To the point, we assiduously attempted to find examples of non-hardliners using RNAD, but it was a rarity to come across anyone using the buzzwords who was not already steeped in the fringiness. Of course there were invocations while complaining about FDR, conflating “democracy” with the Democratic Party, and railing against public schools. Some goofier examples were the few moderate and progressive Republican politicians incorporating RNAD in whingey criticisms of Roosevelt or Truman having too much unilateral power over the executive branch and other divisions of the federal government. A bit of an odd argument to see from the predecessors of the current promulgators of the unitary executive theory, a notion modern conservative nobility has been pushing for in order to give their president-of-choice autocratic-y control over the executive branch and other corners of the nation’s governance. Something that, like a Leopard’s Eating Faces Party themed misadventure, could majorly mess with those sacred states’ rights that they supposedly hold so dear.
But when you are on a farm that only grows the kind of cherries that conservatives find exceptionally tasty, then you are going to end up with an especially hidebound flavored harvest. So that is the fruits of our labor, an annotated timeline of the popularity of “we are a republic, not a democracy” with some of the worst people America has conjured up.

“democracy” according to long-dead blokes...

“They had just ideas of the value of personal liberty, but none at all of the structure of government best calculated to preserve it. They knew no medium between a democracy (the only pure republic, but impracticable beyond the limits of a town) and an abandonment of themselves to an aristocracy or a tyranny independent of the people.”
      —Thomas Jefferson

All kinds of more eloquent thinkers have broken down these Republic and Democracy terms much more succinct than we could hope to, but we are going to go head and give it a go…
A straight-forward definition of “democracy” is a system of government by the citizenry “exercised either directly or through elected representatives”.
Similarly, the plainest contemporary definition of “republic” is a system of government ruled by the representatives of the citizen body. The modern turn of phrase refers to a system of government which ultimately derives its power from the people rather than from some hereditary monarch based on divine right.
Rudimentarily speaking, when the terms were brewed up by each of their respective ancient societal counterparts, both more or less held the same meaning. In 6th century BCE, the Athenians named their system of voting and representation “dēmokratia” (literally “people power”). The Romans later designated their Latin rendition “res publica.”
For an obvious albeit rather simple example: The Greek word for “democracy” is “Δημοκρατία,” written in the Latin alphabet as “Dimokratía.” One could double-check this with any translator site or app. If they translated the word “republic” into Greek, the result would also be “Δημοκρατία.”
Further to the point, the official English name of the nation of Greece is the “Hellenic Republic”. You can type that title into any translator and the result is “Ellinikí Dimokratía.” Or “Ελληνική Δημοκρατία” in Greek.
The Roman's res publica” loosely translates to “public affair,” or more specifically “state.” (Plato's “Republic” or “Πολιτεία” translates to “State” as well) Res publica was essentially a Roman term for the Greek “Dimokratía” with similar intended characterics of freedom from arbitrary control by a monarch over political or societal affairs, along with some slightly updated concepts. Yet the Roman Republic was also not without its slavery, class conflict, massive lack of suffrage, and the risk of ominously familiar sounding literal Ceasers imposed on itself in order to “Save the Republic.”
Governing-wise, the Romans stood on the shoulders of their Greek antecedents, building on what had been created before. And sure enough, shrewdly using a different label did not necessarily cease the amount of despots and poor outcomes for Rome. Thanks to a senate deciding that it was in their best interest of the Roman citizenry to grant autocratic power to the winner of recent civil wars, Rome endured being instead ruled by emperors for the final 1,500 years of its existence. Maybe that is something to keep in mind when anyone attempts to lionize ancient republics in their awkward Appeals to Tradition.
While the Roman Republic’s governance was constituted by a wealthy senate and lower-ranked assemblies, a written “constitution” does not a “republic” make. Representation does not require free elections by the general citizenry. History demonstrates that the voice of the populace can have zero say and still be clearly considered a “republic.” In essence, an autocratic or despotic state could certainly be a republic as long as they were not considered a hereditary monarchy.
Zipping forward through history (Bill & Ted style) we would crash into the Enlightenment to witness the ancient philosophy & literature, architecture, and societal organizing of the Greeks being again en vogue with prominent European thinkers. The American colonists, ever the contrarians, followed a similar suit but would lean into a more Roman esthetic.
But, as historians Robert Dahl have pointed out and as our translator app says, there were veritably no real distinctions between the two terms until Madison were published in 1787 written as one of the Plubiuses (Publii? Publiusi?). Even his fellow novice-Americans had used the words interchangeably throughout the 18th-century. Many modern historians conclude that Madison simply “made it to discredit critics who contended that the proposed constitution was not sufficiently 'democratic.'”
Madison later disclosed that the “democracy” he had referred to was specifically a conceptual “pure democracy,” with no leaders and where everything is voted on by everyone. In order to sell it to those holding out on signing off on the Constitution (e.g., slave-states). The word “republic” had been utilized more for aesthetic reasons. Sort of akin to how “Spring Water” is a label slapped on a bottle of water in a store, but its content came out of a tap somewhere other than your sink.
Add to that, other than in maybe some quaint towns and enclaves, a “pure democracy” has never existed on any scale larger then maybe a neighborhood’s worth of people. Even Athenian democracy had various constitutions, assemblies, and halls of government which would resemble an ancient version of early-America where slaves, out-of-towners/immigrants, and women were cut off from participating in. Considering that the “birthplace of democracy” never even had a pure democracy, it is a bit disingenuous to infer “democracy” is synonymous with “pure democracy” when no society, not even the Greeks, has ever attempted a pure direct democracy.
Outside of thought experiments in the form of newspaper editorials, literally not a single person anywhere was talking about a desire for a “pure democracy” then or thereafter. Surely one could scour the social media landscape nowadays to come across some idealistic college freshman’s post to prove us wrong, but even the most direct democracies devised by humans, such as trade unions or Switzerland, have never expected to run like a pure unadulterated 100% democratic free-for-all. And as we will soon see, as we scroll downward, it is not like Americans were oblivious to what bullshit was being shoveled at them. Hamilton, for instance, had little trouble pointing out that the overuse of “pure democracy” to paint democracy as unstable was just a manufactured talking point of his fellow governing officiates.
A year earlier, Shay’s Rebellion had caused a bit of a panic in confederation’s shacks of government. Similar to Chris Rufo hunting down words in books he does not like to bolster his maufactroversies, “mob rule” and “democracy” as pejoratives used in a comparable manner by Madison. Following the publication of the Federalist Papers, some Framers like James Adams, would share similar attitudes. But, like Rofo’s re-framing of CRT, there had been a redefinition of the term “democracy.” A decade earlier, Adams had already written glowingly about how great it was that “every State upon the Continent has instituted a democracy, and that the people are universally fond of their new government..” Unfortunately, these semantics have clumsily muddied the waters, giving floppy ammo for some privileged people to fight against representation and suffrage for others ever since.
Despite contemporary goofballs using tenuous “Appeals to Founding Fathers” to argue against reforming the out-of-date electoral system by whipping out the RNAD-card, Madison had already contended in Federalist No. 39 that a representative republic is still 100% a republic even if its office holders were directly elected. He even made multiple appeals at the Constitutional Convention for a direct “at large” popular vote of the President as the “fittest” way to elect a President; something other developed democracy on the globe currently do with rarely such dramatic hiccups. Even so, from this present-day vantage point, it is rather nuts to cling so tightly to the words of oligarchical politicos of the past who casually supported slavery & property-owning requirements in regions like the South so much so that they decided against popular voting because it would be too disadvantageous for wealthy repressive slaveholders. At least Madison, a slave-owner, was perceptive enough to be aware of the hypocritically racist mess they had made.
(In all seriousness, a popular vote does not make a “direct democracy.” Nor does it make a government any less of a “republic.” For one, a president or any other branch of government would be superfluous in a direct democracy. And it would not give more populated states any more voting power [as some people myopically understand it] than smaller ones. If you or your friends think so, please take the time to consider that a “popular vote” would simply mean that literally zero state has more voting power than any other. Rather, every single vote would count equally to elect a person for the one office that supposedly represents every single person in an entire nation and not just a few swing states who received excessive campaign visits. Essentially, every Republican vote in California [and there is huuuuge amount of them] would be as consequential as ever Democratic vote in California or in New York, as well as those in Alabama and South Dakota. Ironically, the Electoral College has created the conditions for one of the main reasons some of the Framers made for creating the Electoral College — to not have the presidential election come down to who can get the most partisans out to vote in small handful of states.)

To give a sense of the vibes when the Federalist No. 10 article hit the newsstands, at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention in November 1787, James Wilson (a Madison ally, “the principal architect of the executive branch,” and one of the Constitution Convention’s most influential members), gave a lengthy spiel remarking that “three forms of government seem to have been correctly known, the monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical.” Ending with an “epic mic drop” proclamation that the Constitution they were about to ratify was “purely democratical.” and “In THIS CONSTITUTION, all authority is derived from the PEOPLE.”
S.O.P. stuff. For every “Madison/Franklin/Adams said Republic” quote, there were at least a dozen or more dialogues regarding the democratic nature of their new American experiment during this era, often from those same oratorical fancy fellows.

Others unquietly called attention to the inherent flaws they had just baked into their system. Heck, Alexander Hamilton's Federalist No. 22 advised against schemes like the electoral college that would “contradict that fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail,” as well highlighting the threats a tyranny of the minority and the duplicitous profiteering that their republican design would be predisposed to...

“One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.” ... “The fabric of American Empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure original fountain of all legitimate authority.”

Relevant to our RNAD tale, there is an oft quoted reply that Ben Franklin gave to being asked by a socialite, point blank, “What have we got —a republic or a monarchy?” His answer, “A republic, if you can keep it,” of course did not mention “democracy,” possibly because democracy & republic were commonly used interchangably and the word “democracy” was not an element of her binary question. Anecdotally, some in the colony-turned-nation were expecting George Washington to be made king. Or at least president-for-life. (John Adams advocated for addressing the President as “His Majesty”) The quick quip got itself a distinct patina after Dr. James McHenry publicized the anecdote 16 years later, rewording it and adding some extra lines to spin up political worry as part of the good doctor’s anti-Democratic/Jefferson propaganda. It probably would have remained in the forgotten files of history, but the tale was published in a reprint of McHenry’s journal a century later, a few years before RNAD began to really pick up steam. Decades later, the “A Republic if you Can Keep It” was revamped in print to make nugatory complaints about the Roosevelt administration. AFC member Robert “the New Deal is a Red Plot” McCormick's Chicago Tribune appropriated the story to contend that the Constitution was designed with the intention of preventing the spread of Communism.
Madison, a slaveholder, softened little in his support for the slavery-reinforcing 3/5ths compromise, but quickly came around to agreeing with the description of his new nation as a “democracy.” Furthermore, he recognized the incompatibility of slavery with democracy; which led him to realize that, like previous republican societies, much of the country, especially “the Southern States of America, are, on the same principle, aristocracies.”.

Evidently, the abstraction of “American democracy” is prone to being bogged down in semantics. Even worse, those tendentious interpretations of what a small crew of Founding Fathers had intended for the U.S. has been a mess from the outset. Americans could have done as most every other country does and update their legalese as it aged. Instead, nominal eggheads keep trying to reinterpret what America’s gentry pieced together 250 years ago through whatever ideological filter they learned about U.S. history through so that they can hang their “Originalist” placard on it. Rather eye-roll-y stuff for anyone who spent their last few months slogging through Constitution Convention transcripts and attendees’ correspondences talking about how they fully expected future Americans to rewrite a decent chunk of their by-the-seat-of-the-pantaloons edicts and clunky compromises.
Even Thomas Paine, known as “The Father of the American Revolution” with his rabble-rousing pamphlets, argued that it was preposterous to assume that any generation should rule themselves with statutes of past kings or parliaments. As in, there is no reason to stick with bygone eras’ laws when the people who wrote them were literally dust. Paine was no Enlightenment Era slouch. He recognized the stark reality that things evolve; society would not always be like it was in 1791, when he spent several paragraphs propounding on precisely this in Rights of Man...

“Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”

And despite what neoteric talking-heads claim about the magic of republics with laws written on parchment, history has clearly indicated that whether a nation claims to be a republic, constitutional republic, representative democracy, or a direct democracy, having a constitution is not a magic shield to keep all the bad things at bay. There is literally no guarantee of keeping a constitutional government in any political system. As the Roman Republic exhibited and Thomas Jefferson pointed out, representatives and/or courts, elected by its citizenry or its high society, could still select tyrants or transfer power to one or more authoritarians, thus killing the whole project…

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.”     —Thomas Jefferson

“democracy” in the 1800s was simply “democracy”

We have already shown that the debate over whether the nation was a republic or a democracy remained a rare one during the country’s pubescent period. Exceptionally famous in its time, Touqeville's De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America) was a two volume analysis of why republican representative democracy had succeeded in the United States while failing in other lands. Touqueville shared what he had witnessed on his travels around the fledgling country and so his 1835 book became extremely popular and influential in the European educated classes. He expounded on the land he traversed, discussing its rather democratic nature and its “democratic republic” form of government. Madison, who by then had declared himself a Republican-Democrat, was a fan of the book as well.

And so “democracy” organically grew into a frequent theme in newsprint throughout the first half of the 19th century...

”...the democracy of the republic will certainly march to certain triumph in the coming contest.” ”...the Republic is what our democratic creed recognizes.”

...often used within the same sentence as “republic” to describe the United States. Even in xenophobic warning about granting too much voting power to Americans, especially newer arrivals.
As the impending civil war crept closer, the founders of the Republican Party repeatedly describe the republic as a “democracy” that they endeavored to preserve. The label consequently appeared far & wide in anti-slavery broadsheets. Seriously, it was such a quintessential theme with the new pro-abolitionist party that they explicity wrote it into their original political platform:

“The people are the rightful source of all political power; and all officers should, as far as practicable, be chosen by a direct vote of the people.”

Despite Calhoun's anti-federalist agitation a few decades prior, arguments still appeared nonexistent when Lincoln described the U.S. as “a constitutional republic or democracy- a government of the people by the same people” in a July 4th, 1861 speech to Congress or when sharing his opinions in his writings...

“As I would not be a slave, so would I not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”
  —Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Things carried on much the same after the war. Republican-aligned newspapers continued to publish editorials agreeing with what has been previously pointed out...

“Republicanism and Democracy in their broadest sense are identical. In other words, a true Republic is also a true Democracy. A government which has for its basis a written constitution and whose people have severally and collectively the nomination and election of their rulers, or rather agents is both a Republic and a Democracy.”

Sometimes blatantly...

“The republic has democracy in its origins.”

And sometimes a bit Madisonian...

“A republic is a self-restrained democracy. Our success is phenomenal because of self-restrained. this is the glory of America.”

Although not all that scientific, we even took a gander at the timeline of “republic” and “democracy” appearing in literature using a simple Google Books tool. Leading up to the Revolutionary War, “republic” was a popular output of English-speaking print-houses. It remained so, but slowly lost its luster until “democracy” overtook it as the modern era took hold. Since the early 1900s, “democracy” became the common term of usage, while “republic” fell out of favor. In the end, we should assume that most authors are probably simply using their era’s common lingo for and not get ourselves too up in arms over pedanticism and semantics. Do what you will with this titular data…

Unplanned Backfiring of Historical Pontifications

The beginning of the next century likewise persisted...

”...the word Democrat ought to have a pleasant, ring in the ears of every true lover of liberty, because it is synonymous of freedom, liberty and independence. Democracy means a country governed by the people. A Republic means the same thing, if properly carried out. France has a Republic, but not a Democracy. The United States has a Republic on a much broader scale, therefore we have a Democratic Republic.”

More than 100 years after its founding, describing the nation in both manners continued with many remarking that, for all intents & purposes, they were conceptually the same and the “republic,” as laid out in the “original constitution as drafted by the patriots of the first convention,” was humbly a “representative democracy.”
The inclusion of women’s voting rights and other electoral reforms, such as referendums and direct election of Senators, bolstered the expanding democratic norms in the U.S. Likewise, other nations around the globe were embracing increasingly open and fairer societal vibes. Dying spasms of traditional monarchistic imperialism manifested in an autocratic Germany and Austria-Hungary marching Europe into a Great War with little regard for any choices of their citizenry. Consequently, Congress was asked to help defend the popular descriptor in Wilson’s request to support and join the other Entente Powers. Although showing up a bit late in the game, the U.S. teamed up with democratic allies France and Great Britain in a high-cost victory over obsolescent aristocratic establishment-ism.
But for RNAD, a spoke had recently been unintentionally yanked off the wheel of what seemed a mostly settled matter, thanks to progressive historian Charles A. Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. The central argument was that the U.S. Constitution was in fact a component of a counter-revolution to financially benefit wealthy landowners and creditors of the Revolutionary War. According to the historical records, the same drafters of the nation’s founding documents had confiscated land during the war for themselves. He recounts how the war had unleashed radical democratic currents in the common people, but the Constitution was structured to tamp them back down. According to Beard, the authors of The Federalist Papers, representing their own interest group, convinced the monied landed class holding legislative power to stay the course, called “Republic,” for fear of a “mob” that democracy was feared to devolve into. But as it turned out, farmers, debtors, and the plantation owners politically pushed back by establishing “Jeffersonian democracy” in 1800.
For the ensuing decades, academics and historians adopted his exposition. The legal community, on the other hand, did not tend to agree. And primarily for patriotic reasons, by the Cold War, much of it was essentially thrown out. But sharing his interpretations and analysis had unintended consequences, as one particularly privileged group re-appropriated Beard's class conflict theory for their own anti-working class messaging. Wealthy elites of the 1920s essentially went “Ah, we actually agree that the US was originally set up as a republic to be administered by those such as us.” As noted in Part 1, arguments were made that the masses should leave all the rule-making up to the politicians they had been funding. The growing momentum of organized labor movements, striving for better representation and fairer outcomes, were viewed as a hindrance to the return to the Gilded Age that they pined for. So they inherently took the simple step of propagating the notion that democracy was congruent with the socialism that the elites categorically despised.
Beard had a hand in kicking off some unintended consequences for sure, but two other books hit shelves soon after to unabashedly inject maximum racism laced with RNAD straight into conservative politics. These pseudo-intellectual treatise would inspire some of the most detestable groups of people to come down the pipe of the twentieth century. They also configured the familiar fear-mongering racial rhetoric mainlined into global Right-wing politics that we are presently witnessing. Eugenicist Madison Grant's 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race combined America's simmering racism and anti-immigration sentiments to foster fears of a “race suicide” for his conceptualized loftier-ranked “Nordic race.” This was the substantive inception for the “white replacement” conspiracy theory that has dominated hard-right politics over the last century.
Grant's book begins by declaring that “the greatest danger which threatens the American republic” is “the gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political, and social foundations were laid down, and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character.” He goes on to ponder imagined racial skull shapes, argues that slavery is actually a good thing for “lesser races” to learn how to work since whites were evidently designed too brainy yet too feeble to work in the fields, and warns that democracy inhibits societal progress because it is simply too equal to maintain without being led exclusively by an elite lily-white class.
Pseudo-scientific statistics from Madison Grant and his book were used to compose the incredibly racist Immigration Act of 1924 and justify Jim Crow laws for decades to come. The book was so widely embraced by chauvanistic thought-leaders that Teddy Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler both incorporated its content into their own political policies. (Hitler even wrote Grant a letter to tell him “This book is my Bible.”)
He was even more explicit in his article, “Discussion of Article on Democracy and Heredity”, about the “equality” of democracy being, in his opinion, an enticement for immigration in order to pollute the American whiteness. The melting pot was alledgedly already a failure by 1918 and only being made worse by “democracy.”
Grant's racialist “Nordicist” doctrine directly bred most of the panicked white-resentment based idealogies that have followed since. He wrote the introduction for his disciple Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, one long caterwaul about percieved threats of non-white colonies and non-white “mongrels” living in white countries which would lead to a collapse of civilization because democracy had opened “the flood-gates of anarchy” to weaken the white race. And as in paranoid reprints of Ford's Protocols of Zion and propaganda from white supremacist groups throughout the 1900s, the America First movements & their spin-offs, and current accounts that the owner of X-Twitter revels in boosting, according to Stoddard, the diminishing of white power was declared a Jewish and Bolshevist plot.
On further-Right edges, white supremacists and their normalizing apologists have quoted & praised Grant and Stoddard for highlighting democracy and universal suffrage as the root of their imagined “white genocide.” Some of it being handily mainstreamed by those who made careers out of spreading and building on the eugenecists' work, like Roger Pearson who effortlessly hobknobbed with Republican presidents as a member of the JBS and the Heritage Foundation. Other times it furtively shows up in promotions from think-tanks, 24-hour news pundits, or social media posts as “voter replacement” or “Cultural Marxism.” A little too on the nose, Madison Grant had provided seed money for the Pioneer Fund, the eugenicist endowment with an unsettling amount of crossover with the Libertarian™/traditionalist New Right and its alt-Right progeny.

Through ill-defined terminology, a version of the argument had been laid out that the fortunate Anglo-Saxon/Nordic status quo was embodied in a “republic,” while everything that could possibly threaten it was personified in “democracy.” But before the America First movements scooped up and ran with RNAD, prominent industrialists and anti-labor groups, such as the Liberty League and the DuPont-funded National Association of Manufacturers led by Henning W. Prentis, demonized President Roosevelt’s New Deal as the opening salvo of a Semitic-led socialistic class war against the Republic that never materialized. Red Scares had already created suppressing effects, but these kinds of campaigns to replace the use of “democracy” with “republic” in public discourse and the education of American children were ramped up.

On an America First related note, we could not find that Boake Carter quote referenced in the New York Times as an early appearance of RNAD. But Carter certainly propagandized for them on his radio show and “Jew-baiting, Fascist-minded” nazi-apologist Congressman Jacob Thorkelson (R-MT) was big enough a fan that he enjoyed sharing and reading aloud Boake Carter columns in Congress...
(FUN FACT: Thorkelson also opposed accepting Jewish refugees as World War II began, claiming that Jewish migrants were part of an “invisible government” which was tied to the “communistic Jew” and Jewish “International Bankers.”)

Noticeable Neo-Nazi & Bircher Overlaps

Financiers, industrialists, and various moguls unsubtly spread anti-labor propaganda with a respectable coating of anti-civil rights and antisemitism contingent on what margins of accepted discourse they could get away with; sprinkling in RNAD to marginally make their messaging more palatable for average-America.
There were enough bona fide connections between outspokenly conservative magnates, their corporate boards, and unsavory far-Right associations over the last 100 years that it is difficult to not notice the same names of men popping up again & again in members-lists, newsprint, and fulfilled FOIA requests. Clever businessmen were able to generally stay out of the spotlight. Fortunately for researchers, historians, and journalists, their funding, friends, and attendance at particular meetings nevertheless would frequently give them away. There is so much more to showcase than we are able to present in these articles. If we ever undertook writing a proper book, this would be the most in depth and entertaining part of the task. But for now, we will just keep presenting our cursory findings forming a humongous pile of shady fash-friendly characters being shady and fashy together.
Merwin Kimball Hart (R-NY) was a lawyer, politician, and insurance executive who founded the “National Economic Council” (NEC), a lobbyist group seeking to limit governmental influence in the aftermath of the 1929 economic collapse. As is custom, Hart also believed that the New Deal was un-American and that Communism had survived the first Red Scare to entrench itself throughout the country. Him and his ideas flawlessly fit into the tycoon-supported America First Committee's program. Although publicly claiming not to be a fascist, Hart visited Francisco Franco and lauded the dictator for his violent suppression of trade unions & socialists in Spain. On his return, Hart wrote America, Look at Spain, which persistently linked Communism with “democracy,”, admonishing any use of the nefarious word by American politicians.
NEC meetings regularly involved members of the German American Bund and analogous fascist groups of the 1930s and 1940s. Hart would enthusiastically share his “The Alien Influence in Our Midst” speeches, declaring “it is time to brush aside this word ‘democracy.’” In the 1950s, he would use the NEC's bimonthly Economic Council Letter to attack liberal causes and portent that the U.N. was utilizing “the illegal immigration of perhaps a million European and Asiatic undesirables” for the “socialization of American industry” and to “bring all American life under absolute domination.” (a persistent thread in modern far-Right and militia groups) The Letters were a heap of some of the first and deepest holocaust denial with claims that the death of 6 million Jews was impossible, blaming of World War I and the Russian Revolution on the Jews, and yammerings about how America's support for the State of Israel will take the U.S. republic down.
Following the Second World War, Hart and like-minded business owners slapped together the American Action Committee, the first explicitly Right-wing political activist group, to “defend” the U.S. against perceived domestic “enemies” through polished-for-middle-America reactionary politics. American Action were developing the explicit lines from the America First movements through the Birchers and on to the Right-wing think tanks of today; fusing burgeoning militant Libertarianism with pernicious anti-immigrant/communism/labor by helping congressional electoral campaigns of conservative candidates and promoting the repeal of federal spending and regulations. Hart unsurprisingly became the lead chairman of the New York chapter of the John Birch Society.
Robert E. Wood, head of Sears Roebuck and co-founder of the America First Committee, was pivotal in building Hart's new organization, using close relationships with conservative congressmen and industrialists to the organization's advantage — a beneficial relationship of familiar faces who had been intimately involved in the America First clique. American Action was almost indistinguishable from the rising Foundation for Economic Education and NEC, as its membership and money also came in from higher-ups at Sears, Union Carbide, Sante Fe Railroad, Sun Oil, EF Huton, the Pews, General Motors, the Volker Fund, and especially the DuPonts.
Coughlinites and related collaborators, whose influence would continue onward into the incoming far-Right American politics, joined the unprogressive group alongside support and alliances from notorious conservative celebutantes such as “Judge” George Armstrong, George Deatherage, Allen Zoll, Conde McGinley, Joseph P. Kamp, and Robert H. Williams. Wealthy industrialist and member of the NEC's executive committee, Russell Maguire, would transform the American Mercury into a white supremacist digest; Charles Coburn, the prolific actor and anticommunist activist and later an honorary member of the white supremacist White Citizens Council; and Verne P. Kaub, an avowed “nationalist conservative” and associate of Hart & Buckley who would later collaborate with Willis Carto's far-Right Liberty Lobby, all spent considerable effort building American Action, which bolstered their own white power projects. Much of the financial connections extended through these individuals, groups, and beyond to have a considerable affect on developing the contemporary conservative movement's direction over the last half century.
Case in point: Klan organizer, prolific producer of antisemitic literature, Texas oil tycoon, and another RNAD-regular mentioned in Part 1, “Judge Armstrong,” was one of Hart’s most significant financial supporters. He was sitting on so much money earmarked for bigotry that he attempted to endow southern colleges with boatloads of cash if they would remove non-white & Jewish students and adopt a strictly white supremacist curriculum. Utilizing his oil-tycoon wealth, the Judge Armstrong Foundation was created to endow southern colleges with boatloads of cash if they would remove non-white & Jewish students and adopt a strictly white supremacist curriculum. Utilizing his oil-tycoon wealth, the Judge Armstrong Foundation was created to specifically fund related white-embittered segregationist and “Libertarian™” projects. His foundation has been a consistent contributor to a considerable collection of contemporary Right-wing think-tanks/activists carrying on the conservative tradition of constant culture war. A very abbreviated list of recognizable beneficiaries includes the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Freedomworks, Christopher Rufo's Claremont & Manhattan Institutes, Media Research Center, Cato Institute, Foundation of Economic Education, Mises Institute, Prager University, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, Pacific Legal Foundation, and a wide array of other consortiums conformably wrapped up in the Atlas Network and/or the State Policy Network (both which the Armstrong estate also directly funds).

Tracking back the other way through one of the Armstrong estate's renowned benefactors, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank founded by the dominionist Federalist Society/ALEC-creator Paul “Moral Majority” Weyrich and Joseph “a little bit right of Attila the Hun” Coors (two enthusiastic dues-paying Birchers), we get to see some recognizable faces and themes. We have already noted Heritage’s regular plugging of RNAD to go along with segregationists and Nazi-fanboys that the conservative-king-making conglomerate welcomed as board members and project contributors. Apparently, they also never tired of employing the same ol’ trustees of past Firster factions and their far-Right-er offshoots who joined the think tank from boardrooms at Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Pfizer, Sears, Mobile, and a pack of chums from the American Enterprise Institute.
Straight out of the gate, Heritage associated with those dressing up immoderate reactionary grievance machinations in tailored suits & gaslit neckties. Roger “never found a nazi he didn’t like” Pearson, William F. “neo-nazi career starter” Buckley, Peter “alt-Right piggybank” Thiel, Sam “neither slavery' nor racism' as an institution is a sin” Francis, Eileen “handicapped kids should rely on God instead of being a drain on taxes” Gardner, Ernie “apartheid is worth it so the Reds don't threaten my funding” Lefever, Tony “our anti-gay campaigns are bolstered by klan voting lists” Perkins, and anti-civil rights Congressman Ben “tenants should be publicly hung if they fall behind in rent” Blackburn (R-GA) are just a few characters to get us started.
Outside of its propaganda campaigns for the tobacco industry and against anything hinting at public health regulations, un-ironically proposing a national health care scheme in the 1990s that became the framework for the Affordable Care Act they stoutly loathed two decades later, and other forays to pull the GOP rightward and away from popular mainstream platform policies, there are all sorts of tedious listicles to be made of Heritage's inanity, associations, and authoritarian fetishism. But we really should carry on addressing more contemporary matters. As in, literal on-American-doorsteps stuff that reflects the vein of autocracy that these spouters of RNAD are arranging…
A Brief but Bigoted History of “We're a Republic, Not a Democracy” (4 of 4): selling autocracy through pseudo-intellectualism & mic drops

...

Is Project 2025 the “Republic” they keep talking about?

(for easier readin' on rant.li, we published this article in reverse order. and (if you’re lookin’ for Part 1, we got ya))
Considering the Heritage Foundation’s Libertarian™ and fundamentalist ultra-caucasian legacy and membership, little surprise that their new edition of Mandate for Leadership looks as sticky as a Robert Welch wet dream with all the draconian austerity and the purging of “secret Communist” woke government employees to be replaced by weaponized redpilled loyalists.
Project 2025 is like an amalgamation of the intentions built up behind the unitary executive theory (the kind their reactionary forebearers decried during FDR & Truman administrations) with a hybrid Calhoun-ish “States’ Rights,” as long as the traditionalist Evangelical led Republican-imbued federal government prepares the policies for their conservative state legislatures to pass. An amped up surveillance state with police forces to ensure women & children not leave their home-states willy nilly, deploying of military for domestic policing, directing the DOJ to pursue political adversaries, privatizing as many agencies that their financial sponsors are willing to take over, redefining & censoring language that may offend caucasoidal christendom, banning of anything deemed “pornographic” or “degenerate,” dismantling the Constitution’s separation of powers, ending of policies aimed at protecting the environment or human health, suppression of unions & unionizing efforts, and decreasing voting & civil rights all sounds like something that absurdly vainglorious people, believing that some divine force gave them and their race dominion over the entire world, would come up with. All of that while selling it by repudiating the U.S. electoral system and pointing at Joseph McCarthy (D/R-WI) and Eastern European autocrats as inspirations, is just too damn on the nose for anyone who has studied a lick of political theory or modern history. Quite the 920-page blueprint for a real-life Handmaid’s Tale to be imposed on those seen as underlings, as if average Americans would gleefully consent to as the real exemplification of what a “republic” would look like without democracy (or maybe they would if “I’d even shoot myself and my kids in our clown shoes to own the libs” is regrettably a middle American sentiment now).
It is a bit rich that there are over 20 mentions in Project 2025 of the need for “democracy” while decrying a “rich and powerful elite.” We can assume most of it is simply blatant gaslighting, because it would be especially sad if Heritage and their cohorts were this un-selfaware when they write this kind of flim-flam into their word processors. These are literally the same men (let’s be real, it’s almost exclusively white men) who have been pushing free-market-ish theocratic policies for years, bankrolled by overzealous tycoons and who have been talking down to working Americans about enduring their decreasing wages, security, health outcomes, suffrage, and opportunities. These are the same who profited their way into the 9-figure Manhattan penthouses and 7-figure St. Tropez yachts of a celebrated capitalist-class while handing 5-figure checks over to the rich rage-farmers piecing this Project 2025 together…

“It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.”

Simply bizarro-world stuff considering that a large queue of ultra-wealthy elites, who would have been likened to “robber barons” before they started astroturfing political movements through purchased-politician-provided dark money loopholes over a century ago, have lined up to gleefully assist Project 2025’s coming to fruition.
Four Christ’s Sake, there’s even a line in a section bellyaching about public-union representation for federal employees somehow being “incompatible with democracy,” because “even threats of bargaining and delay [are] considered acts against the people.” It is no surprise that anti-union groups would make such bonkers statements, but it takes some bold levels of centrifugal spin to proclaim that “labor organizing for better pay & living is bad for our beloved democracy” when you were the same who never stop blabbering about “We are a republic, not a democracy” for so many decades.

on related notes...

The lasting influence on American conservatism by abundantly funded organizations who trace their lineage back to America First cliques (the NEC, JBS, CCC, etc.), continued well past pointed exasperations with FDR’s policies and on into segregation and extant culture war battles to drum up a voting bloc that had existed in both parties until the final decades of the 20th century. Prominent entities with similar outlooks, membership, and financial resources, such as the pervasive State Policy Network (SPN), with its ALEC and the American Conservative Union partners, alongside other acutely bigoted beneficiaries of the dark money DonorTrust excitedly augmented the herding of conservatives specifically into the Republican Party. Thus yielding what Kevin “southern strategy” Phillips had deemed “the New Right” and carrying on full steam ahead with Christian reconstructionist Howard Philips' “organized discontent”.
“Republic, Not a Democracy sticks around as conservative-backlash apologia, e.g., the NEC's continued opposition to public education (a “Libertarian™” argument repeatedly retooled to de-fund & undermine integration and to funnel resources into religious & private schools), the SPN's Independence Institute arguing against ballot measures, the New Right grumbling over anyone outside of a beatified ruling elite of sallow males having say in laws that govern themselves and devolving into some “despotic democracy.” Sometimes the incantation is still infused with incredibly overt tones of antisemitism that seem to be recently getting less sometimes.
Speaking of, RNAD has also been a recurring theme of countless National Review articles. “Countless” because a quick online search of the “preeminent journal of conservative opinion” results in dozens of recent online articles concerning the republic-ness verses democrat-ness of the U.S. Given the nature of NR's heap of content-makers, safe bet that if we peaked into archived editions, we would find that it has been a recurring theme since the magazine began fawning over segregationists and aparthied-apologists in 1955. (of course we took that bet and... oh jeez was there a heckuva lot of hand-wringing over how replacing the apartheid rule under the new Republic of South Africa with the “degradation of the democratic dogma, if applied, would bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization,” equating it with the dread of the impending end of Jim Crow laws via ‘One Man, One Vote’ SCOTUS rulings.)
William Frank Buckley Junior's National Review is a newsprint specimen demonstrating the connectivity of furtively dominant coalitions having evolved from the America First milieu struggling to learn how to dress itself up as “respectable” conservatism. Buckley grew up with a proudly racist oil developer for a father of a rather antisemitic from across the Atlantic. A fantastical fable was spun up in the 1960s about Buckley single-handedly casting the Birchers and other repugnant fringe-dwellers out of mainstream conservative politics to let them dwell in the abyss of extremism and white-grievance inspired crankery. Robert Welch, who he had befriended, worked alongside, and lauded as “an amazing man ... as conservative as they come” a few years prior, was pretty much the only notable casualty of this “spring cleaning.”
Yet other figures who had cut their teeth with the America First movements to later establish and build the John Birch Society, like Revilo “Franco-fren” Oliver, Clarence “originalism is a wonderful way to rationalize segregation” Manion, and Russell “deep pockets for neo-Nazis” Maguire were intimately involved in getting Buckley’s virtuous project off the ground. They would apply their Bircher-expertise to develop the publication while JBS luminaries like Roger Miliken and the Kochs provided funding. Mirroring the failed PR strategy of their favorite segregationist-enabler, Barry Goldwater, Buckley downplayed his extreme-Right compadres to present himself as the conservative exorciser of far-fringed demagoguery, selling himself as a prototype of what George Bush II’s “compassionate conservative.” Simultaneously, many of the pallid demons in his employ kept pumping out content for white supremacist rags like MaGuire’s American Mercury (which Buckley had also previously written for) and hatched some of America's most white supremacist operations. To assist in getting NR off the ground, Buckley hired and even defended the future American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell (who also wrote for American Mercury), going on to consistently publish & promote a swarm of ill-famed whitelash causes.
National Review could never have found a more consummate publisher than William Rusher, a prominent spokesman for the late-20th century’s conservative movement. As fountainhead of the New Right, he was the magazine’s direct link to influential conservative and Republican circles. Rusher was a lifelong conservative, hitting all the archetypal fusionist notes: ecstatically organizing support for the milky-hued Rhodesian ethnostate, campaigning for Goldwater and Reagan, proposing a conservative “new majority party” to bring together Democrats and Republicans still mad about segregation and societal progress to support of a Reagan-Wallace ticket in the 1970s, recurrent Pinochet fanboy, imagined barrages of “liberal bias” in every corner of present-day America’s society, anti-communism/anti-“modern liberalism” activist railing against every cultural aspect that fell outside of white Christianity, and was intimately involved in more than a few SPN-associated Republican/fusionist think tanks.
Being published in Buckley’s magazine gave boosts into the reactionary cool kids’ club for a herd of hard-Right provocateurs like Dinesh “professional Jonanist” D’souza, Dennis “faux-college dean of urine & feces” Prager, Ann “not a big fan of the 1st Am” Coultier, and Pat “inspirer of Proud Boys” Buchanan. But a parade of even more agonizing soi-disant far-right academics, whose dribble became the fertilizer for current crops of extreme-Rightists regurgitating threadbare racist conspiracy theories and “civil rights is communism is democracy” monologues, were also gifted lifts into the Bircher-shaped spotlight via the “preeminent journal of conservative opinion.”
A quick jaunt through the recognizable contributors list finds holocaust denier Joseph Sobran, pseudo-academic racist Taki Theodoracopulos (whose magazine Gavin McInness kicked off his “Proud Boys” under alt-Right puppet Richard Spencer's editorship), racialist/eugenicists Charles “Bell Curve” Murray (American Enterprise Institute & modern eugenicist guru) and Victor Hanson (Hillsdale) and Richard “Mankind Quarterly” Lynn (publishing partner of Roger Pearson), various ferociously fascist-fanboys and über-antisemites like Ezra Pound and of course Revilo Oliver, VDARE's Peter Brimelow (whose über-racist articles shaped Trump's immigration policies via Stephen Miller) and Sam Francis (American Renaissance, Council of Conservative Citizens) and John Derbyshire (Taki's), alt-Right panjandrums Jared Taylor (AmRen and Council of Conservative Citizens) and Paul Gottfried (Mises Institute, coined “alt-Right” with Spencer while at Taki's), influential anti-immigration “expert” and VDARE promoter Mark Krikorian, fascism and dictators-fanboy Rod Dreher, League of the South founder and apartheid/Rhodesia-fan Thomas Fleming, as well the older guard who came up with “fusionism” as an academic term for what is commonly referred to as “the Libertarian™-to-Fascist pipeline”, such as Murray Rothbard (alt-Right guru who founded the Cato Institute with the Kochs and championed David Duke) and Frank “fusionism” Meyer (inspirer of groups like the Heritage Foundation).
Many of these personalities have also spent time working intimately with the Heritage Foundation. Speaking of, over the last decade or so, readers may have came across TownHall.com “articles” and wondered what this uptight American complain-a-thon was and why so many of Buckley’s goofballs show up in it. That would be “synergy.” TownHall is a “media” machine that started as a BBS online forum created in a National Review and Heritage Foundation joint venture. It quickly became the “largest conservative site on the Web,” now residing in the rapacious hands of the Salem Media Group as another appendage of the extra-conservative media empire’s expansive reach. *(Speaking of Salem produced programming partners, TPUSA's Charlie Kirk also has his own “We are a republic, not a democracy” routine. Another spectacular example of either intentionally disingenuously misdefining terms for rhetorical effect OR someone who dropped out of community college before taking a single civics course yet speaking with the confidence of a mediocre white man.)*
Point being, NR is an in-print example of applying highbrow makeup on an ideology so “traditional” that it cannot shake old financial and ideological ties to its reactionary past. Its founder rarely, if ever, shied away from justifying and supporting some of the most wrong sides of recent history and the journal he birthed continues to carry on the tradition. The rhetoric is still mask-off with barely rehashed “average citizens shouldn’t be involved in choosing their fates.” Old segregationist & Bircher reruns. Not too long ago, a Welch-echoing article written by Lisa Shiffren from TownHall.com and the Independent Women’s Forum (another SPN club) pulled the old “interracial marriage & civil rights are just the start of a Negro Soviet Union” when riffing about the 43rd U.S. President’s past:

“How had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. ... “Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from pursuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. ... “It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution.”

Americans weren't dumb. They called it out...

We are not saying that someone going out of their way to argue “We are a Republic, Not a Democracy” is a dead giveaway for segregationists or antisemitic conspiracy theorists. But it has been downright rare to hear this pseudo-axiom from anywhere but white-griping Right-wing circles.
Nevertheless, after all this exhuming of RNAD’s voyage through history, we are still left wondering if we are just perceiving these correlations from our modern vantage point?
Maybe we are simply projecting present-day biases onto the past?
So far & for the most part, the answer seems to be a pretty solid “nope.” Apparently, it is not just us. Americans in the past were not naive automatons who simply swallowed disingenuous and malignant reactionary tropes. Most saw the moldy chestnut for what it was. Seeing how some of the worst people were the ones who kept it rolling certainly cast a dark shadow on those 7-words. People noticed that its usage rose alongside increasing fascism. Fortunately those chanting RNAD were called out for what it was. Maybe we could all take some notes from our nation’s past and get back to not being so concerned about how offended authoritarian-minded jerks may get when we break it to them that the porous double-speak and fading gaslights is not actually hiding their dipshittery very well. During World War II, the FBI noted how keen wannabe-Nazi propagandists were to repeatedly insert “We are a republic, not a democracy into their messaging. Many mentions of pro-fascist operatives and activists decreeing the tagline were recorded throughout the 1940s.
Undercover reporter Arthur Derounian's 1943 book Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America details his conversations and interactions with prominent members of the America First movements and their unabating “splitting of hairs” over definitions in order to undermine democracy and promote fascism with the ol' RNAD. In 1946, Derounian followed up with The Plotters, pointing out the same usage of RNAD by nationalists reducing democracy down to a Jewish plot to turn the nation into some Communist hellhole.
Following World War II, Congressmen stressed how messed up it was that RNAD was still being utilized to disguise pro-fascist proclivities…

Antidemocracy is another of the great common denominators of the Fascist-minded, “Democracy is decadent,” Fascists everywhere declare. In the United States, the favorite theme among the pro-Fascists is that our country is a “Republic,” not a “democracy.” Democracy, the “anti’s” say, is “mobocracy,” the rule of the mob. A “Republic” is the rule of the elite, while democracy, according to their definition, is a synonym for communism

As well, discussions were had in Congress concerning propagandists like Upton Close & Merwin Hart’s use of RNAD to only faintly shroud their fascist ideals. Prolific researcher and political scientist Claudius Johnson addressed the room-dwelling elephant in his 1947 book Government in the United States:

“Those who insist that the United States is just and only a republic never tell us exactly what they have in mind.”

Johnson explains that the “modern democracy” they claimed to oppose were the initiatives and referendums, antitrust & anti-lobbying laws, popular elections for offices, and any regulations, pensions, welfare, or societal progressive laws created by freely elected officials. His astute observations had been already proven in the words & actions of anti-New Deal America Firsters before the book’s publication. The Birchers and their ilk, who came trailing after, then went gone out of their way to prove Johnson wholly correct.
In the 1950s, the persistent use of RNAD by segregationists to attack public education (this should sound quite familiar) was easily identified:

“Certain very reactionary extremist groups in this country are waging an all-out propaganda war. . . against what they term welfare statism, collectivism, socialism and Marxism... “In their desire to preserve their version of the American way of life they include educators in their list of “left-wing” organizations. Their list includes groups and individuals who are fighting for democratic principles—fair treatment to minorities, better understanding between religious and racial groups, advancement of civil rights and civil liberties. The word 'democracy' seems to be offensive to them. They declare that this country is a republic, not a democracy.”

Especially with the Birchers and their membership of apartheid-apologists & neo-fascists revamping RNAD into a theme-song, those who noticed did not hesitate to quickly make fun of the chicanery…

With battles for civil rights and integration tumbling into the 1960s, purveyors of backlash willingly brought the spotlight upon themselves and their calls for curtailing the American experiment. In the saner media, op-eds drew attention to the far-Right’s continued use of their myopic anti-democratic precept. Small town newspapers covered the JBS’s baffoonish attempts to expand their Libertarian™-segregationist rabble by passing themselves off as local “Study Groups.”
Articles hit the same points Jefferson nailed 150 years earlier when he noted that, except a handful of eccentric diehards persistently cobbling together poorly constructed straw-men, literally nobody was even talking about direct democracy…

Every time, it came from some extreme right-wing individual or organization, which used the slogan to cover its reactionary purposes. “ Always these purposes were to turn back the clock and wipe out social and economic gains the common people, by democratic methods, have made through their government and their labor unions. That's why right-wingers spread propaganda saying the forefathers who wrote the Constitution never intended to set up a democracy. ... “'The government of a republic is known as an aristocracy or oligarchy if power is held by a small group ... or a dictatorship if power resides in a single person. When, however, control rest with a majority of the people who have the opportunity to express their will freely in their choice of public officials, the government is a democracy.' “What the Birchers and their kind seem to have in mind when they shout 'republic, not democracy,' is to take power from the people and put it in the hands of an elite. We don't believe the American people will fall for that kind of a scheme.”

Constitutional Democracies

Yet another recent addition to the roster of anti-democratic presses from expected corners is the new fangled “Convention of States” scheme to ecstatically rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Sadly, we are not talking a few more tweaks for some distinct conservative advantages. This is the unabashed collaboration of white Christian-conservative activists and politicians with well-resourced Rightist organizations cultivated alongside the SNP-affiliated Tea Party movement for the first time in history calling for a constitutional convention under Article V in order to overhaul the Constitution. The plan is an extremer spin on Calhoun's doctrine of nullification promoted by many of the groups this write up has grown to love. Like impetuous clockwork, the Heritage Foundation mechanistically label this plan a “grassroots effort,” despite it being another cash-rich project endowed by Mercer and Koch balance sheet entries over at the American Legislative Exchange Council. As if the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA’s “Project 2025” were not a gross enough proposal completely remaking America into a theocratic autocracy, this Convention of State’s plan would directly write out American democracy to replace it with a version of “Republic In Name Only” that would not bode well for any one but maybe a privileged few Rightist swamp-toddlers in Washington DC.
Which could be why even the John Birch Society (who is still very much around) is like, “whoa, that's too over-the-top for even our brand of screwballery”. Granted, Birchers dig these nouveau-conventioneers’ “government should be so small it could drown in a bathtub” shtick, but they would rather utilize Article VI to shrink government instead of blatantly imploding the Constitution to refashion it in such an overtly monocratic manner. Although it has caused quite the fun rift in conservative “constitutionalist” circles, all the (literal) big money is on bringing court cases and getting the remaining states (19 have passed legislation and 9 have bills in legislation) to sign on and reach the required 34-state goal to enact a new constitutional convention with an extremely white and conservative theme.
Because they have mostly been relegated to more shawdowery corners, this has probably been the JBS’s most news coverage in decades. But the influence of groups like them and their progeny keeps coming. One could argue that it has become more ubiquitous, because the groups they inspired are seeing the fruits of their slow methodical decades-long labor finally coming to fruition…
Which again, bodes horrible for almost every last one of us.

But if we really want to talk about constitutionalism (this is as good a place as any to drop this blurb), without democratically choosing representatives or voting on ballots, the supposed sacrosanct “We the People” would just be three diminutive words written in large font on a sheet of paper under Philadelphian glass to make our little patriotic hearts forget about the whopping amount of Americans that have been historically disenfranchised in the past.
However, the words of the U.S. Constitution guarantees comparatively fewer rights than much of the rest of the world’s constitutions and has less than half (26 of 60) of the provisions that the world’s average bill of rights contains. Which may explain why designers of other constitutions since 1787 have used America’s as an example to be less emulated, but rather more as lesson in what not to write in order to avoid the flaws and mistakes in their own constitutionalism. (especially given that the U.S.'s was written in a time of horse, buggies, and extreme racism & inequality) Chickens from eggs laid 235 years ago appear to be coming home to roost in a coop of electoral results denial, institutionalization of minocracy, and the derailing of virtuous checks and balances.
But none of that means America has not been learning, trying, and using its amendment process to expand suffrage and democracy to its people. The 9th and 10th Amendments both discuss the rights and powers of those humans which the first 7 words of the Preamble directly refers to. Furthermore, the 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments address voting rights, allowing us to democratically elect our representatives. And as mentioned earlier, several of the Constitution’s co-creators, as well as a most progressive and conservative presidents, have been on record describing the U.S. of A as a “democracy” and/or “representative democracy.” It seems to make much more sense to go with authentic historical voices, as opposed to the “We Are A Just a Republic” rabble with a fashy pedigree.
Maybe this is why a Constitution-demolishing “Convention of States” looks more like the result of underfunded school systems or maybe rampant homeschooling by historical-revisionists adults who grew up to be mad that they were unable to inherit a country as racially homogeneous and evangelically supremacist as the one their mediocre ancestors enjoyed.

To be fair, the U.S. is not doing the democracy thing well

We should acknowledge that “we are not a democracy” is not an entirely incorrect observation. The U.S. cannot seem to solidly codify voting rights for its citizens. Gerrymandering is still a pervasive problem. A non-partisan electoral agency to maintain fair, safe, and legit elections is not even being considered for the American system. Nor is there much gumption to replace an antiquated independent-party-crushing First Past the Post and a slavery-era amendment-generated Electoral College with something considerably more democratic, like Ranked Choice/Instant Runoff or Proportional Representation. Lower & middle classes, women, minority & people of color, LGBTQ, handicapped, struggling farmers & independent gig-workers, and other substantial swathes of Americans remain underrepresented in outmoded corridors of power of local, state, and federal governments.
Conversely, the parliamentary halls, executive offices, and judicial benches continue to be crammed with an excess of electable but inept frantic-bible/flag-wavers that money can get past that post first. But that is beyond this article’s scope, so we will leave that for others to address who are much better at it than we ever could be.
As we have now seen, “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy” is a well-worn disingenuous axiom that will likely not see retirement any time soon. Right-y free-market elitists and segregationist chuds opposing equal representation have fallen back on it without cluing us in on what they actually mean by this “republic.” Current Louisiana congressman & SPN mascot Mike Johnson’s “we don’t live in a democracy” but a “biblical” republic comes to mind. Heck, conservatives have been complaining about people voting on existential issues since before Kansas chose not to become a slave state. So besides the optics of “a republic if we can keep it” having been tainted by a parade of pale prejudiced dweebs, what even do they mean by “republic?”
Sometimes the response is an equivocal “a constitutional republic,” which clears up almost nothing. A constitution is not what makes a republic. But at this point, almost every republic is constitutional (and most of those are considered democracies). Switzerland, often touted as the closest case of quasi-direct democracy, is also a constitutional republic. Anecdotally, if we do not get too wrapped up in the figurehead part, nations like the U.K. and Canada are informally labelled a “crowned republic” or “monarchical republic” because, as John Adams pointed out, they operate essentially like any other republic. Furthermore, since they very much are formalized under constitutions, they would also be considered a “constitutional republic.”
As well, China, Russia, Cuba, and the former USSR are all “constitutional republics.” But there are some crucial democratic components missing, which sets them apart from other republics like the United States. Considering the genre of Americans discussed so far, adamant about the U.S. not being a democracy, we are starting to think that these kinds of one-party oligarchies may be the muses for the style of polity that the anti-democratic/pro-republic reactionaries are striving for.
On the other hand, annoyingly pedantic RNAD-obsessed Right-wingers seem to quite enjoy prattling on about what they think “democracy” is and all the problems they can come up with to pin on it. Apparently it can only be defined as synonymous with unadulterated pedal-to-the-floor pure uncut “direct democracy.” Quite the straw-man to construct when pretty much no one is or was proposing any such notion. Continuing to equate it to socialism and communism is even more bonkers on so many levels when rarely are these economic systems even on anyone’s radar when discussing the ideals of the nearly universally revered “democracy.” Seems we should do some investigating into how much the underfunded American education system has cut its Civics and History courses.
Maybe in a less brain-wormed world, Americans could come to use the objectively accurate and more concise “We aren’t a Direct Democracy, We are a Democratic Republic” to aid in the prevention of superfluous ambiguity.
Speaking of clarity, Charles Beard, the history professor who returned crackpot attentions to RNAD with his 1913 book, subsequently discussed similar concepts and definitions thirty years later in his aptly named The Republic: Conversations on Fundamentals. In fictitious conversations with others he discusses the history of the word “democracy” being bastardized by English aristocrats to signify any “government by the rabble” and its later use in the American colonies by Whigs and rich landowners to smear laborers, agrarians, and slaves who they feared would stop working and seize their properties. Eventually, average Americans adopted the name “democrat” for themselves and their Democratic-Republican Party until eventually settling on “Democratic Party,” which the Republican Party subsequently emerged from.
Beard explains that although there is no mention of the term “democracy” in the Constitution, there is also no law or mention of the U.S. being a “republic” either. Yes, according to a single line in Article IV, each state is guaranteed protection and a “republican form of government,” but nowhere is the federal government branded a “republic.”
Plenty of republicanism is written into the federal constitution. There are also large hauls of democracy packed in there as well. Since the 1790s, it has been amended to include increasingly more democratic principles which give us many of the freedoms and rights that we take for granted today.
Beard’s book is a decent read on this subject, as well a peek into how 1940s Americans thought about these terms. He wrote a decent summary of how democracy is characterized nowadays...
1. People, not a legalized monarch or class, are the source of all political power. “The voters directly choose the principal agents of government and, through their agents, indirectly, all other persons who have political power over life and property.” 2. “Through agents chosen by the voters, all laws are made.” 3. The chief agents of government must retire at fixed intervals or submit themselves to another vote if they seek continuance in power. 4. “All voters are equal; without regard to intellectual, moral, or economic qualifications, has one vote and no more; and in elections, as a rule, the candidate who receives the highest number of votes, whether a majority or a plurality, is placed in office.”
Proceeding further with some of the concepts we have came across while researching for this article, democracy, “rule by the people,” has become a bit of a catch-all. Modern features of typical democracy frequently includes competitive elections, freedom of expression, and protection of individual civil liberties & human rights.
Moreover, most republics are inherently democratic. As anyone who has taken an AmGov class knows, democracy is an essential element of most modern republican systems. Proper democracies require discussion and compromise to flourish — something that can also be applied to damn near any organization, even a household or the inner workings of companies — as well as a defined system of government relying on representation. When world leaders speak of “democracy,” these are the kinds of ideals that they refer to.
When U.S. military and politicians talk about “spreading democracy,” for better or worse, this is what the PR campaigns are selling.
We never hear of “spreading republicanism.” Partly because it sounds rather goofy when said out loud. And again, most sane humans who have ever lived long enough to ponder governance have viewed the two terms as rather synonymous. We say “exercising our democratic rights.” But no one says “exercising my republican rights.” On the flip-side, calling the U.S. “the Republic” sounds appropriate, but calling America “the Democracy” sounds weird. If the Pledge of Allegiance contained “and to the Democracy for which it stands,” it would be clunky as heck. (“but it’s in the flag pledge” is a favorite argument for RNAD. Also a bit ironic given the author of the oath was a socialist, an adherent of an economic system maligned as derived from cursed “democrats.”) It fundamentally comes down to how language is used. The modern definitions are so damn close that arguing in the First World about “republic” being confusingly antithetical to “democracy” is facepalmingly inane at best.

Even more hilarious is the amount of think tanks, Religious-Right activist groups, Libertarian™ syndicates, and various online nut jobs with long histories of RNAD-inspired promotional literature and unhinged social media posts, also having plenty to say about the awesomeness of American democracy, what an essential gift it was that the Founders bestowed democracy upon us, how protecting & engaging with democracy is integral to our modern society, how democracy (even the direct kind) is an indispensable element of modern republics, and with all their innate downfalls, republics may actually be a bit overrated. The cherry on top is seeing this kind of discourse in print or on websites only a few pages/posts away from another contributor ranting about how the U.S. is in no way whatsoever a democratic democracy.

On a similar note, how is it that Libertarians are some of the loudest about the country being a republic when their whole thing is “no one else is above me except whatever money and market forces may come?” Or is it all just a put on and they have given up denying that their aforementioned pipeline to fash-land exists? We have yet to come across any believable rationalization, but it is rather fun that it only took National Review’s Bill Rusher, principal originator of modern conservatism and architect of the interconnectivity between laissez-faire capitalist and traditionalists, one sentence to succinctly explain democracy as a “free-marketplace of ideas” in terms one would think they could understand. It is better than anything we could come up with: .
Despite the “let the market decide” mantras, free-marketeers do really seem to prefer and rely on governments to prop up their markets and businesses and even their political ideologies. Is “Faux-Laissez-Faire” a word? Because “libertarian,” given that the anti-authoritarian political philosophy the word denoted until Rothbard celebrated ripping it off in the ’70s, really does not seem to fit those guys. And representative democracy is not necessarily immune, but republicanism has historically had an oligarchical bent.

Besides all that silliness, no reasonable definition of democracy would exclude the United States of America. Elsewhere across the globe, where 95% of the (non-American) humans live, at least 159 nations use “Republic” in their official names. If one is really fixated on an American Exceptionalism fetish, then dying on an “We Are Only a Republic” hill is an embarrassingly silly way to do one’s performative red-white-bluery.

“Republic” is a Word, Not a Hill to Die On

s lengthy as it is, this 4-part article has been nothing more than a speedy recounting of “We Are a Republic, Not a Democracy” through the annals of American history. We leave it to the oodles of others with actual academic clout to explain the perplexities of political theories, distinct differences in speech or thought between now and bygone days, semanticist concepts & confusions, and what actually entails a nation being “Not A Democracy” in our modern era. (a heap of links have been provided below for the reader's perusal)
But please allow us to end with a few brief impressions born from months of researching the history behind RNAD…
For the pedants still hung up on interpretations of the colonial era’s interpretations and usage of ancient civilizations’ interpretations of what words may mean, maybe take a few moments to consider the type of self-defining fascists and segregationists who made “We are But a Republic” their mantra. While you are it, maybe update your vocabulary to 2024 terminology. That or get used to the eye-rolls and being waved off as yet another in a long line of unserious dorks. Super cool life choices.
For the rest of us, although the “immigrants/minorites/woke/globalist-socialist-corporate-bankers are coming for our fragile white kids to turn them into a mobocracy of transgender communists” sounds like played-out baloney to the general population, reactionary rage-farming can still raise a bountiful crop of votes and financial support from those who have internalized a zero-sum game of anything approaching equality for others feels like oppression to those already possessing privilege. There are multiple levels of unfortunate irony built into such a self-knee-capping strategy for politicians.
For one, moral panicking does nothing to help a society move forward into the future. Nor does it make things better for anyone, especially the Americans who have gobbled up manufactroversies constructed by well-off online/cable/radio rage-vendors. These people persistently search for an enemy, usually a foe conjured up who was not on their radar just a few moons earlier, who has zero affect on Americans’ day-to-day life whatsoever. Making “democracy” the nemesis, for fear of the “wrong people” being granted a choice in how their lives are governed, is equally as wackadoodles. Adding to this, broadsides against “others” having choices somehow making conservative white men “victims” illuminates the projection of the kinds of choices these “martyrs” would themselves make in order to “own the libs/left/immigrants.” Such revealing rhetoric is well into the realm of Accusation in the Mirror and even more disingenuous than proclaiming that “democracy” cryptically means “a pure democracy that is actually just communism.”
Secondly, what the heck is up with portraying principles like democracy and equality as products of some mysterious elitist cabal taking over the land for Communism/Beelzebub/Sharia/Depopulation/Rainbow Flags? Very bizarre because it is insane to believe that citizens having the same opportunities to live and have a say in how they are to be governed is somehow a more tyrannical predicament than a nation ruled by a handful homogeneous politicians handpicked by a small band of like-minded men who already hold outsized amount of wealth and power. Which is literally the definition of “elitist” (belief that some things should be controlled or owned only by the richest or best educated people). Politically speaking, “plutocracy” or “oligarchy” would be relevant terms and be perfectly compatible with a “republic.” And like wealthy secessionists and segregationists of the past, those cranking the “republic, but not a democracy” crusade up the loudest have chiefly been well-to-do oil, auto, and publishing magnates who have been very candid about how they, “the captains of industry,” should be the given all the strings to manipulate government with, rather than just a bulk of the strings already purchased long ago.
There is some irony in making use of democratic processes to obtain enough power to curtail democracy. At least for the time being, they still technically need consistent electoral wins in order to keep creating their variants of legislation, place allied magistrates on court benches, and fill normally nonpolitical governmental positions with political appointments. Is this the “republic” they want? As we have pointed out that for centuries, those with privilege and power have been upfront about their fear of democracy. They are probably not wrong that there would be less billionaires if we were more democratic. But we would also be more likely to have a more equitable society as we see in other nations that tend to be better at doing democracy. In spite of a “mobocracy” that never arrives in these democratic lands, the sturm und drang in a society of diminishing citizens’ rights, liberties, and safety under a strict republic sure sounds like a dismally despotic fate for everyone but the few elitists sitting atop the heap. Little surprise that we found most of this “We are a Republic, Not a Democracy” in promotional material of fascists and segregationists declaring that a republic was the only veritable bulwark against a “tyranny of the majority,” circulated at the exact same time Jim Crow was busy curtailing the citizenship rights of minorities.

They may view and demonize democracy as a threat to their standing and privilege, but they still need democracy’s assistance to reach their minocratic objectives. Because for now, this is how the sacrosanct U.S. Constitution and the nation’s political norms currently work…. …until they no longer do and this “Republic” becomes Jefferson’s 173 elitist despots of lily-white Christian Reconstructionism. Or perhaps something markedly worse.

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for the visual learners...

We spent entirely too much time putting together a visualization to display the interconnectedness of the “We are just a Republic” promulgating creatures and their buddies discussed here.

We realize that some readers may get hairs up over a few associations. Most of these characters are legendary for their ceaseless Red-baiting, Jew-baiting, and Woke-baiting. Many built their “organized discontent” brands and well-funded partisan organs focused on the othering of their fellow Americans. So as far as we are concerned, they lopped off any of those “nuh-uh” legs they could have possibly stood on quite some time ago. Besides, if there was enough corroboration for a link, we made it. And although crazy long, this 4-part article is much too short to cover every detail.
Honestly, making this chart was more a labor of love, so we will surely be building on our beanplating in future articles elaborating on these kinds of shady connections.
(if you are having trouble seeing the interactive network-graph, try THIS)

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• “The Real Reason Why Republicans Keep Saying “We’re a Republic, Not a Democracy”
• wE’rE a rEPuBLiC nOt A dEMoCRacY – A political usage guide for a feckless commentariat
• ‘America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument
• Once Again to Madison and Republics
• The “A Republic, not a Democracy” Library
• America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare
• James Madison: Republican or Democrat? – Robert A. Dahl
• The Electoral College’s Racist Origins
• Why do we still let the Electoral College pick our president?
• ‘We’re a republic not a democracy’: Here’s what’s so undemocratic about this GOP talking point
  

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Okay, one last thing, we promise...
Humongous thanks to Ernie Lazar over at the Internet Archive. We don't know who Ernie is, but damn was his FOIA Collection an amazing archive of connections and answers. We dug through all sorts of online resources, but at least 75% of the relatively authentic source material was already on the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. If you are able, please toss them a donation to keep freely accessible records up and running the way the world wide web was intended to be. That would also give a big middle finger to many of the dingleberries we have been talking about.
Oh, and this whole thing was originally published over on Medium as well.

#Democracy #weAreARepublicNotADemocracy #Republic #AmericanHistory #altRight #Libertarian #HeritageFoundation

...

Except only slightly and for a token few, the former US president never reduced insulin prices, and the current president has never increased them.

Nowadays it seems that around every 2-6 months a noticeable proportion of online discourse becomes briefly concerned with the price of insulin in the USA for at least one or two passes of the social media moon. The commotion over pharmaceuticals is often spurred on by the current US president's administration making an announcement/promotion concerning healthcare or when members of its Congress attempt to pass something to reduce the price of insulin for those of us who rely on it for daily survival.
Inevitably, a looming slab of the former president's fan-ship will troll related online conversations to share their belief that their champion had already reduced insulin prices while in office and his successor simply turned that all around on his first day in office. There are a few mostly incorrect versions and they often get crammed into one jumbled narrative.
The common tale is that while in office, President Donald Trump lowered insulin prices for everyone, but after Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 election, his administration reversed the reduction on his first day in office, making insulin prices super expensive all over again. Some renditions tell of how the ex-president lowered all insulin prices to $35 across the board. A few narratives utilize specious anecdotes of how their friend's cousin's co-worker's sister's kid's insulin was affordable under Trump until 2021, but now they are unfortunately back to paying through the roof for it. Others acknowledge the reality that it was just an unrelated Medicare rule that did not kick in until Trump was on his way out, but believe that Joe Biden is just taking all the credit for the former president's extraordinary deal-making to pull it off. And still others just smoosh it all together:
To be as crystal clear as a vial of humalog, we are not here to defend the current US president. We do not even have a go-kart in that political race. We do however have a type 1 diabetic here at the no name league. And if, despite current legal debacles, the next general electoral race comes down to a reenactment of the previous geriatric mud-fight, the issue of who did what for insulin prices will likely come up many more times before now and then in debates as well as the incoming avalanche of propaganda.
Diabetes is not a temporary disease. For type 2 diabetics who require it, insulin is a necessity that keeps blood sugars regulated when a pancreas can no longer keep up with the body's demand. It is not a walk-in-the-park, but with a great deal of focus and persistence there exists a possibility to reduce the reliance on insulin. Type 1 diabetics, however, are stuck with remaining dependent on insulin for the rest of their lives. Insulin has been a literal life-saver since its discovery, but there is no foreseeable way around access not being super-duper existential for Americans, considering each year more and more are diagnosed with diabetes.
At minimum, those of us who care about the over 7 million insulin-dependent Americans with diabetes should be acquainted with the actual record of insulin pricing policies and not just rely on spin propagated by candidates and their fandom. We should be especially concerned with the significant number for whom insulin is an extreme financial burden of almost half their income.
Like the current “trans-panic” turning into disingenuous momentary culture war induced concerns for women's sports and human trafficking victims (who are most often queer, minorities, and immigrants), the attention would be nice but diabetics are being used as insincere political fodder and it is, in fact, doing little to help. So today we are focusing specifically on the former president's record and how what little was done was never taken away by the president who replaced him.

An EO to hurt more than help

An executive order was signed by US President Donald Trump in July of 2020 that would not actually go into effect until Jan 22, 2021.
Its stated intent was to lower insulin and EpiPen prices for the low-income clients of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). It also could be described as some marvelous window dressing...
The proposed Executive Order on Access to Affordable Life-Saving Medications would have barely budged the already modestly priced insulin for the patients at these community clinics. Yet, what it actually would do was add excessive red tape & burden to these federally supported health systems. And because no additional funding was appropriated in the executive order to support the extra resources & employees required, it would in turn create a reduction in services for the poverty-stricken.
Specifically, the executive order (EO) we are discussing only affected Federally-purchased prescription drugs via the 340B program for community clinics, which is incredibly vital for poor diabetics & others to survive while they are scraping by.
The 340B program was created by the US Congress in November 1992. For historical context, that would be right around the time that unforgettable bro-down went, uh... down.
What the 340B and the EO have in common is neither affect insulin prices charged elsewhere, Because that is simply not how they work.
The nitty-gritty is that it would have reduced insulin prices by pretty much nothing for pretty much anyone. Certainly not down to $35.
So before the EO took effect, it was rightfully delayed, then legally rescinded and taken off the table by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) by November of 2021.
As in, the executive order that some point to as Trump's triumphant lowering of insulin prices, was never ever in effect. Not after it was signed in mid-2020. Not when it was scheduled to go in effect at the end of January 2021. And has never been since.
But how could an executive order be nullified?

“By their very nature executive orders lack stability, especially in the face of evolving presidential priorities. The president is free to revoke, modify, or supersede his own orders or those issued by a predecessor.”

Rescinding executive orders are not unheard of. Especially ones that will go into effect after a president leaves office. But agencies affected must first sort out if abrogation is legally justified. (The former president attempted this with DACA, but failed because “laws”.)
So the “Access” EO was patently trashed...
There are some finer details addressed later, but to state the obvious here: this executive order was designed to sound good and helpful, yet once in full-swing would have only damaged critical health services for the poor.
How intentional this was could be debated, but it is not the first underhanded attempts at dismantling health systems. As American's with their goldfish-y brains tend to do, most have already forgotten about the veterans who were suffering after Trump's privatization of the VA led to an “unmitigated disaster”.

So to those who still think insulin prices dropped precipitously under Trump and were driven back up after Biden entered office…

1. They simply did not.
2. You either live on a different timeline or have memory issues.
3. Screw you for making us seem like we are defending Joe Biden.
The social media posts of anecdotes about relatives & coworkers who supposedly had some atypical deal until Donald Trump left office start to sound rather dubious when one considers reality. If one really believes their insulin was cheaper under the previous president, then they should be able to easily provide receipts showing what they paid during his time in office. Or at least they would posses evidence of this imagined “cap” or price reduction under Trump, as well some proof of soaring insulin prices returning under Biden.
For the rest of us, we can check an online pharmacy to give us an idea of what pricing was like under Trump in August 2020 by using the ol' Wayback Machine:

and under Biden in May of 2021:

and November 2022:

or one can even check it out for themselves: www.healthwarehouse.com/humalog-insulin-100u-ml-10ml-vial.html
According to healthwarehouse.com's site, the price of insulin has remained expensive as ever for at least the last 3 years. Although it looks like they have finally increased their prices some in recent months, it remained the same at $335/vial from the end of Trump's term through almost all of Biden's thus far.
But if you somehow have those receipts hidden somewhere, please try not to be like this lady whose video made its way through online MAGA-land a few years ago with a goofy attempt at copying a poor mother whose clip of sheer frustration had gone viral on Tik Tok in 2020 for having substantial cost issues with her son's diabetic supplies.

Sorry lady, but there was never a 5x rise in insulin prices. And there is no way that is this middle-class-lookin' Karen filming herself in her nice car having to regularly visit any FQHC for her kid's insulin. Granted, she may have been merely having an issue with her family's insurance company and naively misdirected her rage. Yet edging on QAnon-esque rants about a corrupt evil cabal and calling for “people with the Holy Spirit in them” to “rise up” does not help this lady come off as anything other than a subpar actor disingenuously fabricating BS to gain internet brownie-points. It would be aggravating if it was not such an obvious farce.
To sum things up so far:
There was no executive order lowering insulin prices.
There was no discernible change to insulin prices for diabetics in the United States before or after the last president left office.
There was only an attempt at undermining health care resources for the poor and some silly antics abounded because of it.

Giving credit where credit is due...

Under the ex-president, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) added an optional $35 a month cap on insulin prices for those enrolled in Medicare Part D plans. The Part D Senior Savings Model was officially announced in May of 2020 and went into effect at the beginning of 2021.
But there are a few buts…

Medicare is generally for Americans 65+ years old (and some disabled people).
So if you are whining about losing a $35 cap on your kid’s insulin, that would mean that your child has been a senior citizen for a while now. Yes, this is a too common argument from people who do not seem to realize that would indicate that they are super old and probably should be enjoying their twilight years not fighting silly political scuffles online for their geriatric offspring.
Besides, the CMS's $35 cap did not kick in until January 1, 2021. That would be almost 2 months after Donald Trump lost his reelection campaign run and three weeks before Joe Biden replaced him in the White House.
As well, it only affected Medicare Part D plans, which has had relatively low prescription prices for a while. Part D is only available in premium Medicare (private/market) plans. Under the new CMS pricing model, the insulin price cap was a voluntary option that roughly a third of Part D plans adopted. At least 23% of Medicare enrollees in 2021 did not have the possibility to receive the $35 insulin cap because they were not enrolled in a Part D plan. In 2022, less than half (45%) of non-Low-Income-Subsidy Medicare recipients were on Part D plans that participated in the CMS's pricing model. (Nowadays, around 20% are without a Part D plan) That means that if the rule stood as it was in the waning days of Trump's presidency, at least 14 million diabetic seniors would not even have the option to receive the price cap.
Granted, maybe 3% of Medicare recipients use insulin.
So in theory, the best possible outcome was that the $35 optional rule applied to approximately 1.44 million, mostly type 2, diabetic seniors (20% of American insulin-using diabetics) if they were able to enroll in a Part D plan that offered the price cap. That is amiable, but not nearly as epic as the orange spray-tanned fanfare has tried to make it out be.
Another caveat to increasing enrollment in Part D plans is that prescription savings can be wiped out by the premiums charged by the insurance companies selling them. As well, while not his fault, Part D deductibles rose rather markedly under the former president:

But the thing about the $35 is that it never went away

The Medicare Part D $35 insulin price cap has unceasingly been there since the first day of 2021 and has never not been a thing since.
If it had been removed, recalled, or rescinded, then we would be able to deftly dig up at least one press release from the White House, the CMS, or the HHS announcing it. There would also be some media coverage, especially in right-wing media blogs and their myriad of cable news channels. Similarly, we would be able to find a trail of fury across common social media platforms from Facebook and Twitter to the enclaves of Trump's fan-base on Truth Social, Gettr, Parler, Rumble, Gab, and Twitter (especially nowadays) over Biden snapping his fingers to overturn one of their champ's biggest wins.
As one of us is a diabetic, one would think we would have noticed that as well. Being current-events junkies, we definitely would have been aware of that transpiring. But we did not. And it is quite safe to assume that neither can anyone else.
Since the $35 insulin cap has existed since January 1, 2021 it has always been easily verifiable with a quick visit to Medicare’s own site. The $35 cap is mentioned right there in the middle of the page. Sorry to poop the red-hat party, but it is very unambiguous that Biden did not make it go away. Go ahead and click on the link to find out:

Incidentally, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed by Congress and signed into law last year (2022) by the current president. It contained provisions further extending the insulin cap for Part D to solidifying it as a requirement for Medicare policy providers, along with prescription price reducing schemes, low-income subsidies, and vaccine coverage kicking in at the beginning of 2023. Additionally, the $35 for a month's supply was also extended to Medicare Part B and essentially all Medicare plans starting July 1, 2023.
Hopping ourselves back into the Wayback Machine, we can follow Part D's $35 insulin progress through the captures of medicare.gov/coverage/insulin to find that it has always been there since the beginning of 2021.
While Trump was in office the page mentions the coming price cap: A few days after Biden came in: Later in 2021: A year later: And for good measure, here is 2023 after the IRA came into effect: Honestly speaking, it is unclear how much he had to do with it, but kudos to the former president for occupying the office to initialize an insulin cap for diabetic American seniors. But again, despite incoherent rantings about it having been taken away and causing insulin prices to rise back up, the Part D $35 insulin cap clearly never went anywhere since it was enacted.

So no matter how you slice it...

Insulin prices did not drop wildly under the former president. Nor did they shoot back up after Biden came in. Heck, other than the last three weeks of his presidency and only for a portion of senior citizens who many were already getting discounted pharmaceuticals, insulin prices were never lowered under Trump. It would necessitate more than a few dimensional portals and maybe a time machine to make that measure of magic happen. Unfortunately, none of us have anywhere near that kind of technology yet, not even the US government.
The fanboy narratives really need to be given up. It is rather awkward, even embarrassing, that some will fabricate stories about cheaper insulin to glorify a shyster who hired Alex Azar (a fellow wealthy butthead who oversaw the tripling of the price of their insulin as Eli Lilly CEO) to head the HHS.
For us that are affected by #diabetes, the more we think about it, the more disgusting all this becomes. It is incredibly frustrating to have people's health used for political pageantry. Maybe like something in the vein of the Hippocratic Oath, there should be a requirement for politicians to pledge that unless they are working to actually help the situation, they will not use our physical well-being for their political bullshit. The slight-of-hand crud that ends up hurting us absolutely does not help.
Not to say that people with other ailments are not hyper-aware of their situations, but type 1 diabetics genuinely know their shit because this is not a fucking hobby. This is not a disease caused by “unhealthy living” or “poor eating habits”. There is no choice given in the matter and once one is diagnosed with the condition, they must simply endure it for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, those of us with busted pancreases are very astute about any subject matter related to our survival and we share and communicate with each other… a lot.
So we would like to make a top-level of a request that you please quit it with the fairy tales and the gaslighting. It is not helping.

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That was the gist of it. But if you are really into finicky bits...

There are some finer details, as well as some sigh-inducing arguments that get made by the online red-blooded red-voting red-hatted crowd that should probably be summarily addressed. Follow along as we work our way back to the top with our prototypical pedanticism.

Yes, Medicare is available to more than just seniors

As noted previously, Medicare is a federal health insurance program that those 65 or older qualify for. If you are hitting that age soon, this is your reminder that it is not automatic and you must enroll yourself.

There are also a handful of exceptions to the age eligibility requirement:

• Disability – If one receives Social Security Disability Insurance, they may be eligible for Medicare within 24 months. ALS sufferers are fast-tracked into Medicare.
• ESRD – If one has end stage renal disease, they are eligible after a kidney transplant or 3 months after dialysis treatment begins.
• Family relationship – In some instances, one may be eligible under the age of 65 based on their relationship with a Medicare recipient with disabilities.
• 62 years old – Benefits can be received slightly earlier than 65 if one meets the marriage and work requirements.

So now we all know that Medicare is mostly for seniors 65+, but it can also apply to some outliers. It is difficult to sort out exactly how many of those rely on insulin and would be eligible for the Part D $35 price cap after January 1, 2021, but as noted above, it is no where near the total number of insulin-dependent Americans.

Stretching FQHC services

Some fanboys point out that Trump's EO would have expanded the family FQHC coverage from the sliding 200% of the federal poverty level ($34,840) to 350% ($60,970). That certainly sounds great and of course would be wonderful if publicly funded health clinics were able to cover more Americans, but the EO would still not have increased funds for FQHCs to take on that extra load of clients and, as we have already revealed, in turn would limit the resources even further for everyone that needs to use FQHCs including those requiring insulin.
From the Rescission of “Implementation of Executive Order on Access to Affordable Life-Saving Medications” (2020 Rule): Additionally, because the proposed eligibility requirements differed from established federal guidelines, privacy issues would have arisen as a fleet of non-medical staff would be needed to deal with an influx of clients and to dive into their medical records to figure out which ones among them were eligible. (patient privacy issues would be an immediate inherent issue. maybe HIPAA suddenly no longer matters to MAGA anymore)
Furthermore, recipients would not be able to show up at just any community health center to pick up insulin either. According to the rules, they would have to be regular clients at a specific FQHC to qualify. (so much for that ol' anti-ACA “They won't let us keep our doctors!” talk)
Nevertheless, over & over the experts point out that the Executive Order on Access to Affordable Life-saving Medications would have only helped a rather small amount of diabetics by only a few cents at best. Namely because most of those dealing with poverty that would fall under the proposed FQHC rules were receiving cheap or free insulin already.
And we cannot stress this enough: without an increase of funding, clinics have no choice but to cut all sorts of service in order to keep up
...especially when they are in the middle of a global pandemic.

Importing more than just Canadian boner-pills

To pedantically cover all sorts of bases here:
In July of 2020, the former president signed an order allowing states, wholesalers, and pharmacies to import certain drugs from Canada and other foreign countries. It would have also allowed manufacturers to import lower-cost versions of the drugs they sell elsewhere as well. The importation/re-importation of insulin was also to be allowed.
This was originally labelled a “gimmick” by Azar, his HHS Secretary, but as any sycophant serving in that administration who wished to stay would, he changed his tune. He was not wrong though, as The Congressional Budget Office had already concluded that importation would hardly trim drug costs by an inconsequential 1% over the course of a decade.
There were also concerns whether medications would be safe for American consumption and if Canada even had enough of a supply to have much of an effect on US prices. And even worse for Canada, studies showed that a sudden increase in orders from the US would decimate their stock of drugs. If just one in five US prescriptions were filled by Canada, the country's drug supplies would be depleted in only 165 days.
Canada already was dealing with pharmaceutical supply issues during a pandemic. They were not about to let their situation get even more dire just so that their southern neigbhour could make a poorly conceived attempt at lowering prices.
Also, Canada does not have the resources to be the drug regulators for the US. Four in five online pharmacies claiming to be “Canadian” are actually from other countries and mostly sell drugs of questionable origin, safety, and efficacy. As Trump's Human Services Secretary Alex Azar stated:

“I must caution that when one goes online and buys drugs that are supposedly from a Canadian drug store, you are taking your lives into your own hands.”

So the Canadian government blocked bulk exports while Canadian drug distributors took the matter to court, effectively rendering the order mostly toothless.

Favored Nations

The Most Favored Nation Nation Price EO was signed in September of 2020 and the CMS subsequently announced in November of 2020 that the interim final rule was to take effect on January 1, 2021 alongside the Part D $35 rule and continue until 2027.
“Favored Nations” does not apply to insulin pricing, so we will stick to quick facts: • It only would have specifically effected drug prices under Medicare Part B. • It allowed the government to negotiate drug prices. (something the free-marketeers in his Republican base have taken issue with) • CMS targeted 50 inject-able medications that made up the greatest amount of Part B spending. Insulin is not on that list. So anyone bringing the “Favored Nations pricing” is either naive or unscrupulous. • There was only 5-weeks lead time, effectively cutting out recommendations from professionals and medical organizations that would be effected by the EO. • The rule would have decreased access to medications and increased prices for a large number of seniors reliant on them for life-threatening conditions like cancer. • The rule was blocked by a series of federal court cases before it could go into effect at the beginning of 2021. • The rule was officially terminated by the CMS in January of 2022.
Again, we are just pointing this out to be thorough, but the IRA has comparable stipulations for the government to haggle over drug prices for Medicare Part B and D. Yet it judiciously skips the legal and detrimental hullabaloo because Congress and the current president did not just try to Hail Mary it at the end of their term.

Really confused arguments by really confused Americans

At this point it should be clear that people are mixing up different executive orders and various rules enacted before and after the ex-president left office. Most never went into effect and the one that did, still remained on the books and has recently been expanded to all Medicare recipients.
But we would like to say one last thing before getting into a few more examples of confusion and make some clarifications...

Universal Health Care would go a tremendously long way to fix this. No nation's health care system is perfect. Take the nation that looks like it is wearing the US for shorts and who the previous administration was hoping to fix drug pricing problem for them. Canada still lacks the political will to make insulin fully covered in every province, but at least everyone can get the insulin they need for free or less than $35 a month. Rationing insulin is unheard of in Canada. The richest country in the world (with the highest income inequalities of developed countries) could easily do something similar. It does not always have to be exceptional just to spite itself. Considering how the rest of the world does their health care, the US is exceptional
...but sadly, not all that often in a good way.

That said, we would like to show you a few of the sources/articles recurrently used as supposed evidence for “but #Trump lowered #insulin prices and #Biden reversed it” claims. These links also double as “further reading” resources if you need more to convince yourself or others that those assertions are entirely incorrect.
• Biden Administration Rescinds Trump Administration Insulin Pricing Rule – This is probably the most overused article seen on social media to “prove” that Biden broke what Trump fixed and made insulin prices shoot back up. There is a prolific problem with Americans reading headline without reading the actual words in the articles. The sharing of this report is made even more egregious because 9 times out of 10 the posts consist of a screenshot of the headline with the included image of a spilt jar of coins without providing a link or any assessment of its contents.

Although if one would take a moment to read it before posting it, they would find that the article is specifically about the FQHC rule that had never gone into effect. To be fair, although it does not mention the Part D rule, it is much more succinct than all this babbling done here and you would have saved time reading it instead. So we are just going to use a screenshot of a paragraph in the middle summarizing what has transpired with the EO...

It should also be pointed out that Joe Biden did not “rescind the order on day one” either. Again from the article:

The Biden Administration delayed the rule twice before it became effective on July 20, 2021, and the first opportunity for HHS to impose the requirements of the rule would have been through grants awarded in fiscal year 2022. So, while the rule has been in effect since July, it had yet to be implemented.

• Biden freeze hits two Trump drug price rules – This CNN article comes up quite a bit as well. Rather ironic given MAGA-land's disdain for the “Clinton News Network”. This essentially runs through what was rescinded and why. There is no mention of the $35 insulin pricing because it was never ended. And yet again, there is an explanation of why the FQHC order was on track to be rescinded, though:

• Joe Biden Rescinded a Trump Era Executive Order Capping Insulin Prices at 35 Dollars – We came across this blog post a few months ago hidden in the thicket of replies under a politician's tweet. It is not a well-known tract, but it illustrate the rationale that the ex-president's disciples seem to commonly hold.

As per usual, the blog's author conflates the EO with the optional $35 Part D rule, incorrectly implying that the Medicare rule was frozen:

...the Biden Administration froze all not-yet-implemented executive orders so they could undergo review.

Essentially that is a true statement, but the Medicare rule was already implemented on January 1 and was not an executive order.

The post continues on confusedly:

A large difference in the two plans is that the Trump Executive Order includes a provision for those without health insurance, and does not require the beneficiary to be enrolled in Medicare. Biden’s does not include any language for those without health insurance, and requires the beneficiary to be enrolled in Medicare.

Again, that is not an entirely wrong averment, but this is like comparing Apples to Cucumbers. The former president's EO applied to FQHC clients who would not generally be on Medicare in the first place. Similarly, the EO did not apply to those on Medicare. As explained almost endlessly in our article, the “large difference” was that the EO was a wholly different plan from the CMS's Part D rule (which also does not include any language for those without health insurance, yet requires the beneficiary to be enrolled in specific Medicare plans). Besides, that rule has recently been expanded as mandatory for all Medicare plans by the current president and has never removed.
One could maybe fault Biden for not giving the former president more credit for kicking off the Part D rule that he expanded, but as pointed out above, it is fairly difficult to confirm how much Trump deserves credit for it in the first place.
After previously explaining why the EO was rescinded, the blog continues by admitting that “Trump did not actually lower prices”, but then blames this on the Biden administration putting “a pause on the executive orders”.
As explained by expert after expert and this article that you are reading, the post's final statement, “If the Biden Administration hadn’t done that, then it of course would have gone into effect and reduced the prices”, is utterly false.
Besides, if both the Access FQHC EO and the $35 Part D cap were in effect, they would still not effect the overall prices that the vast majority of insulin-dependent diabetics pay.

Hopefully by now you have finally caught the drift

If you have gotten this far and are so inclined to keep reading even more in depth analysis by genuine experts, then have at the articles and studies below as well as the myriad of links provided throughout the article.
From those of us that have to deal with this illness on not just a daily, but on a minute to minute basis, please help us by at the very least informing yourselves.

• Access to Affordable Insulin and Epinephrine Autoinjectors Through Federally Qualified Health Centers – JAMA Network • Trump’s $35 Insulin Plan: A Nickel Solution to a Billion-Dollar Problem • Estimated Changes in Insulin Prices and Discounts After Entry of New Insulin Products, 2012-2019 – JAMA Network • Insulin is an extreme financial burden for over 14% of Americans who use it • Eli Lilly to cut insulin prices, cap costs at $35 for many people with diabetes – it is a start • Yes, Biden stopped a Trump order to lower insulin costs, but it would not have helped most diabetics – short YouTube vid breaking down the Access EO if you are one of those “video watchers”
P.S. From those of us nerds who are tired enough of politicians & health systems dragging their feet that we are utilizing our DIY skills in order to help out our fellow hyperglycemia-prone laity, this must be emphatically expressed: #WeAreNotWaiting
(this was also published on Medium)

...

Another case of disingenuous political actors utilizing an ongoing moral panic to attack experts and politicians actually working to fight human trafficking.

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This week, right-wing rage-farmers on social media and their news networks were making big hay out of the California State Assembly Committee on Public Safety rejecting SB 14, a Senate bill to raise human trafficking to a “serious felony” and add it to the Three Strikes Law.

Despite originally passing unanimously in the Senate with a bipartisan vote, the narrative is that “the Left” voted it down because, of course, “they are protecting child traffickers & pedophiles”.
We can't speak for the Assembly members or their original votes, yet it seems that they may actually have considered the advice of experts in the field who pointed out that the bill wouldn't likely help, but would instead hinder efforts to reduce child trafficking.
• Analysis of SB 14 for the Public Safety Assembly
Essentially the passage of SB 14 sends more funds to California's prison systems instead of poverty reduction, education, and programs that would actually help kids & their families become less of a target and reduce the economic draw of human trafficking.
A byproduct of current moral panic strains circulating, the bill is written to make voters feel better about focusing on punishment without actually fighting trafficking or the societal problems that allow it to flourish. Yet because of pervasive naivety about the realities of human trafficking, the bill will likely have an unintended pernicious effect seen in other states' laws of punishing the very victims of trafficking themselves.
From Assembly-member Jones-Sawyer:

“Unfortunately, the Three Strikes Model, which SB 14 is designed after, focuses only on punitive actions and does nothing for victims. Spending billions of dollars on punishment means those dollars are unavailable to help victims and prevent the crime from happening in the first place. Criminals already take up a disproportionate amount of funding—spending more to punish more is a poor use of state resources.
SB 14 was granted reconsideration so that I, as chair of the Public Safety Committee, could work together with the author and committee staff to find a way to move forward that respects and protects victims and effectively deters crime.”

Today (Jul 13, 2023) the bill was passed in an emergency vote in the California Assembly.
SB 14 now heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee after the summer break.
No sane person is trying to defend human traffickers of any kind.
As organizations that are actually involved with fighting trafficking and helping the victims point out, we have underutilized laws already on the books that can still send perpetrators to prison for life, but there are major problems with performative laws that specifically focus on using more tax-payers' money to punish without actually helping and often hurt many of the victims of trafficking.
While context may be lost on those who prefer outrage over logic & reading comprehension, for now we'll just keep shouting this into the void as they yell at those actually trying to reduce human & child trafficking and label the rest of us “pedos” & “groomers”.

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(a version of this article is also published on medium)
#california #prison #trafficking #farRight #moralPanic #threeStrikes

...

Documenting another online flaming bag-of-poop singeing real life.

(a slightly slicker & updated version has been posted on Medium)

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Last weekend a scuffle broke out between two far-right groups protesting a Portland suburb's first ever Pride Night.
It appeared that a well known “shirt” group, the Proud Boys, got into it with a lesser known local hate group wearing gaiters calling themselves the “Rose City Nationalist Club”.
In the melee, two of the RCNC gaggle had their masks removed. As it is nowadays, others nearby had their cell-phone camera apps up & running. Within a few post-fracas breaths, more than a few versions of footage of the slap-fight were quickly uploaded to social media.
As a testament to how the Tesla CEO's recent purchase is quickly becoming the new chan site, one video briefly showed two maskless neo-fascist pugilists' faces, was uploaded and swiftly spread around by accounts by twitter accounts big, small, and mostly with little \$8 blue-checks in them.

It seems the video had been first shared by the now-suspended @OMGLikeReally account. It took little time for more heavily-followed rather-right-leaning twitter accounts to alley-oop the short flick into their like-minded fans' feeds. As it goes on the Busted Bird app with viral tweets from these kinds of accounts, the site's owner commented:

And so by the troll law of online-nature, the video was boosted like a phallic rocket ship powered by millions of views and the replies swelled with conjecture of “paid crisis actors”, “antifa”, or worse.
As we saw on January 6th and in Allen, Texas and in Buffalo, NY and so many other times when far-right individuals (who share and even act on the shared rhetoric of a slightly less far-right) get caught doing something horrible or embarrassing, they are quickly thrown under the proverbial bus. Exciting podcasters and “citizen journalists” to sprint to their mics and social media to share their excessive outrage. Labeling the miscreants a “false-flag”, “ANTIFA”, “BLM”, or “Trans” and squeezing synthetic indignation out of how preposterous it is to think that conservatives like themselves would ever do something like that. And pedal-to-the-metal it until that rage-fueled bus is running on “Empty”.
From small-time MAGA grifters like FemalesForTrump and AMERiKANgriLLL and RickTheTank to bigger names like Glenn “I haven't found an authoritarian I didn't like” Greenwald and Tim “I'll never wash this beanie” Pool, they bused it out to the masses.
But instead of reckoning with the fact that these are the kind of groups that show up to protest a LGBTQ event, something neo-nazi-attracting moral-panic-pumping accounts like LibsOfTikTac, GaysAgainstGroomers (who organized the protest), and a myriad of culture warrior accounts would advocate for, organize, and actively cheer on, the accounts shared their anger about having seen a “fed” (or in some cases an “antifa”) false flag and the pixelated faces of two unmasked men undeniably proved it.
Under a tweet from Benny Johnson (1.6M followers) sharing the video and “viewed” 32 million times, a blue-checker account kicked it off with a “Here's two who were unmasked. Do your thing, sleuths.”

The twitter fanboys were giddy because they believed that they had finally found two real-live “feds” in the wild.
Or in rare cases, excited that there was finally proof that the Proud Boys weren't connected directly with neo-nazis (spoiler: they are) because it sort of looked like they were sort of kicking some nazis' butts.
So they got to sleuthing. Sort of.

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The masked Proud/PF/RCNC Boy

Some infinitely more familiar with the local fash-scene easily identified one of the masked men as RCNC's founder/leader Casey Knuteson, a former Proud Boy of the same group who had left for the Whiter-Powerier pastures of Patriot Front. (Patriot Front is believed to be “feds” by these same context-adverse twitterers).
Several had been exposing “Canute the Great's” travels and his most recent spin-off group, the “Rose City Nationalist Club” for while.
While online “sleuths” thought they had a case, unsurprising to most everyone else, Knuteson was plainly one of them and the brouhaha was simply internal beef over who was more fash-y and less cuck-y. As the local PBs explained on their “memes by angry white guys” telegram channel: The Patriot Front leaks published by Unicorn Riot published show Casey had been a kind of go-between the local PBs and PF.
And as it has so often been with the Traditional Values “We're Fighting To Keep Kids Safe” crowd, Knuteson was also apparently found guilty of physically abusing his own child and 9 years later still doesn't have custody. (again, we must note that in those 9 years, he's been a member of Proud Boys and two White Nationalist groups; a common thread that maybe we should get into in future writings.)
There is heaps more context we could get into, but that's enough for this shit-show and surely others can do a better job breaking it down than us. We are not journalists. Nor do we live in #Portland. We just do OSINT-related stuff to expose & debunk bad things that people being bad do to people that don't deserve it. That's why we are here: to help Benjamin out.

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The second masked boy in a fuzzy screenshot

Although local activists recognize him from other RCNC actions, as of today (30th of June, 2023) the skinnier second unmasked man from the video has yet to be identified by anyone the author has heard from.
Or at least he hasn't been identified in the reality that we reside in.
Some top-notch keyboard “sleuth” had stumbled on a twitter profile that maybe possibly perhaps looked like it could fit the supposed “fed” stereotype in the story that the riled up crowd had spun.
Their man had been found and no further investigating or confirmation was necessary. They announced the search done and the reply-guys retweeted it up and down the app with two taps on their tiny screens.
All sorts of similarly much-followed $8/month-clout accounts, like russia-buddy inside-trader Tyler Durden Daniel_Ivandjiiski @zerohedge (1.6M) to smaller ones like Alex Sheppard (72K) and even smaller fake doctor rage-farmers who have to rely on AI to make their pfp and their friends look decent, “Dr. Frensor” (13.5K), jumped in to spread it faster than a Tesla-battery fire.

They had settled on the offender being a young Jewish man named Benjamin Brody, who had just graduated days earlier from UC Riverside and was trying to enjoy the beginning of his summer with friends and family.
From the outside, it is utterly confusing as to why one would assume Benjamin would be a wily FBI agent so far from home.
Apparently if someone viewing the grainy images on their phone or an outdated monitor squinted juuusssttt right, he slightly looked like the skinny kid in the pixelated video screenshot. And an older Instagram post from his fraternity mentioned his desire to work for the government and was on his way to a “polysci” degree. And as everyone knows, if you want to work for any governmental agency, you must first do untrained undercover work for the federal bureau of investigations. Totally.
Last Sunday (6/25) Benjamin Brody woke up to harassment from terminally online weirdos who think that the FBI, antifa, trans-people, immigrants, Jews, reptilians, and/or some combination of all or none of the above are behind everything that makes their crazy-ilk look as crazy as they do.
Egged on by accounts with millions of followers & an edge-lord billionaire who is open about his fondness for tin-foil hat-shaped logic.
The trolls from twitter tried their darnedest to reenact the odious doxxing and skewering we've been accustomed to seeing oozing out of 4chan, 8kun, and kiwifarms. Noteworthy stochastic menaces came from even less fun corners of the social platform, from #Musk-fluffer Matt Wallace (1.1M followers) to Ian “confused about Orwell” Malcolm 1984 (4K) to QAnon-conspiracist ReturnOfKappy (87K). And naturally, the multitudes of lower-ranked angry-mob comments and replies were outlandishly gross as well.
With haste, they smeared the news around the social medias and began harassing him & his family through his social media accounts. The author is unaware what Benjamin dealt with in person, but it was evident what was happening online.
Much of it packed a noticeable antisemitic edge to it. Some notable mentions are tweets and replies from JD Sharp (36.8K) and @Chaos_Memer giving a wink & a nod to the worn out “the Jews are behind everything” tropes that have been given renewed juice from the recent rise of the alt-Right and QAnon movements.

The “we found the fed” panic spilled into other expected edgy realms. On GETTR, #ProudBoy founder Gavin “choke a tranny” McInnes shared screenshots with the familiarly regurgitated childish commentary...

And the image boards of 4chan, where this stuff normally starts out, shouldn't be left out...

The author has not spoken with Mr. Brody, but it's pretty safe to assume that the young man is occupied living his post-graduation life. His rather compact online footprint makes it glaringly obvious that he is an average middle class kid who posts selfies and group photos with buddies and is too busy to do much interaction with much else online.
To the chronically-online, that in and of itself may be “suspect”. But for those of us who aren't stuck in their phones, grinding our teeth anxiously awaiting our next dopamine hit from online interactions, this is actually quite common, if not the norm.
While those wackos aren't likely to be convinced by anything that sounds like logic, the rest of us should consider Benjamin's case and how these insane conspiracy theories being throw at him fall apart...

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Olympic leaps in logic failing to even qualify

In a sane world, Benjamin Brody is entirely none of our business. His mostly anonymous life has suddenly been subjected to scrutiny by the modern equivalent of a lynch mob propagated by millionaires, billionaires, and well-off grifters who get clout and make loot from the amount of rage that they can build up in their enthralled fandom. This is a young man who has been thrust into a clown-shaped storm of ire overnight while literally having absolutely nothing to do with an event 1,000 miles from where he resides. The iota of specious “evidence” they've scraped together takes incredibly insane stretches to connect at best. Yet amazingly there is an ugly mass of internet gremlins who are obsessed with them being true. Let's quickly run through them and examine how they hold up.
According to wackos like Matt Wallace's reply-guys, Benjamin is a “federal agent.” Demonstrating an extreme taffy-like logic, they point to his social media accounts that he and his fraternity limited or shut down soon after the deluge of harassment. Especially where it mentions that he was planning to get a Political Science degree and hoped to “work for the government.”

It is a leap in logic that a PoliSci degree means that one is destined to immediately work in law enforcement or federal investigations or, in this case, even do undercover work 48 hours after graduating from a school on the other side of the country from where the FBI trains new recruits.
The conspicuous problem with this is that Benjamin earned himself a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology. There are around 23.7 million Americans working for federal, state, and local governments. And “the federal government is arguably the largest employer of anthropologists outside of academia.” Governments use anthropologists to plan, research, and manage projects.
No offense Ben, but it's mostly pencil-pusher stuff. Anthropology is just not “undercover in extremist hate groups to make them look bad” exciting stuff. And as stated above there are millions upon millions of “government jobs” from social service to meteorologist to political aide to dog-catcher. So it's one super weak Charlie Kelly-esque stringed out connection to make.
Benjamin received his degree on the evening of Wednesday at a graduation ceremony at UC Riverside. Degrees take stress and time to get through. Fitting in training with the FBI would take a huge chunk of time away from said education. Part-time jobs while in school is enough. FBI training would take a clone.
Despite what very smooth-brained nutters may think, one cannot simply be an on-the-ground FBI agent 2 days after graduating either. It takes at least 20 weeks of intensive training in Quantico, VA before moving on to other specific areas of expertise. 21 Jump Street was a fictitious TV show. This is not how real life works.
Even more outlandish, the unmasked goof has been a regular at RCNC hootenannies for a while.
So that would mean a heck of a lot of trips from Southern California to a boring corner of Oregon just to build up an undercover presence to make some white power group (that few had heard of until less than a week ago) look bad.
And he would have had to have driven or hopped on a plane within 48 hours after graduating just to get in the middle of a scuffle between two far-right groups so if someone filmed it, he could mess with their optics in a small PNW suburban town. Huh?!?
If the feds knew someone would be shooting for internet content, then in brain-worm world there is a damn good chance that whoever filmed the OMGLikeReally video is also a “fed”!!! No wonder that Pokemon-pfp-ed account got suspended!
The more we ponder it the more insane the Olympic-level stretching gets. But that is standard conspiracy theory thinkin' for ya.
Speaking of magnificent feats in logic & obsession:
Internet-famous Amiri “have I told you how I used to be in prison” King used one of the blue-check features he paid good money for to babble (as bad as this article does) on about Mr. Brody, regurgitating the same brain-worms Gavin did on GETTR:

“So its making the rounds on social media that one of the de-masked Patriot Front members is allegedly a Ben Brody, who is a member of a Jewish fraternity.
“If someone accused me of being somewhere I wasn’t, I would immediately take to social media (or hold a presser) to provide evidence that I was NOT.
“With ease.
“It’s 2023. There are fucking cameras everywhere.”

But, without seeing any of these internet philosophers' certifications, Mr. Brody had already done just that with a video on his Instagram account explaining that he didn't know or care to know about what had been going on in wacky online spaces because it sounded absolutely preposterous at best. He just requested that he and his family be left alone.

Soon after he followed up with screenshots of “receipts” from the day around Riverside, CA. Someone else even posted footage from one of those “fucking cameras everywhere” of him picking up food at a restaurant in Riverside.

Yet none of that mattered to the chan-infected #twitter accounts. Conspiracy theories are hard to shake and people would much rather double-down than admit they are easily convinced by even the most spurious claims.

And Benjamin being Jewish added to the obsession.
The (((echoed))) responses left in comments of his Instagram posts, the focus on his Jewish background relating to “false flags” by well-followed accounts and their reply guys hits that point home.

Regardless, the clincher is that Benjamin looks only vaguely like the dweeb who lost his mask in the Portland suburb. He was living life 1,000 miles away when the Oregon City slap-fight went down. If he really could have teleported up there, he must've gained a few pounds on the way back along with some extra facial hair. His nose, eyes, and eyebrows seemed to have changed shape as well.
Also, he would've healed up that head wound he received in the filmed tussle inhumanly fast.
If he is a fed, then Holy Moly do they have everyone beat with how well they can now bend time & space and transform human bodies overnight.
(several twitter accounts claimed that Benjamin's shorter hair was part of the coverup. Sure, but if we were trying to hide, we'd probably give ourselves at least a hair dye, a different style, or shave all of it off. Not just a light trim that changes little of our overall appearance. But that's just us being not idiots)
A related but sort of sad issue is that, in reality, almost all of us look like a lot of other people. No kidding. Each one of us are likely to have a doppelganger somewhere out there. Considering the grainy quality of the video screenshot going around, there's bound to be plenty more young men out there that sort of look like that doofus.
For instance, here's an Instagram post from a Fenerbahçe football club fan account with an almost identical dude...

(it's from several years ago, so probably not him)
Or there's the ex-singer from Canadian band “Hedley”...

(except he's currently in prison for sexual assault)
Speaking of singers and grifters, how about MAGA up-and-comer Joey Mannarino?
He nailed the look of “Unmasked Boy #2” while singing “Desire” for a Philly community cable show that never took off. According to the caption, “This young man has big things in his future.” Fitting because he's on our shortlist of grifters to showcase in the near future...

We should also consider “Green Libertarian” Ron Paul fanboy, Steve Bannon War Room guest, and opinion writer for the Moonie's Washington Times Kyle Olbert who also had a wonderfully tin-foil-covered reply to @Chaos_Memer's “crisis actor” tweet with:

“Mark Zuckerberg and Wolf Blitzer are alumni of the PatriotFront-linked AEPI. Andrew Borans, CEO of the Alpha Epsilon Pi Foundation, served as an advisor to Turning Point USA, which helped organize the January 6th Rally in front of the White House. Counterintelligence asset?”

“PatriotFront-linked AEPI”??? And the only one that liked his tweet was Olbert himself. There is too much ignorance to unpack there, but even worse, this genius also looks like the second unmasked jerk in Patriot Front “RCNC-linked AEPI” crew...

Apologies to Ben for pointing out how many not-good people he might look a little bit like, but this just means there are likely a whole bunch of you out there that look like Benjamin Brody in lo-def photos taken of you as well.

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Trendy tin-foil hats

Benjamin Brody is not just the victim of mistaken identity, but also of an unhinged world built by opportunistic grifters using social media to build their perpetual manufactroversy machines.
The US is built on conspiratorial thinking. That'll never go away, but they've made a huge comeback in recent years. The flat-earthers and moon-landing skeptics of the past are now looking around going “WTF?!? This is crazy!”
The thing is that conspiracy theories tend to break down when we consider conspiracies involve people, time, and scope.
If the “conspiracy” takes a lot of time, then it will inevitably be found out. Conspiracies can be a slow burn, but they can only remain under wraps if there aren’t many people involved.
Because if it involves a lot of people, it is insane to think that it would never get out.
And if it involves a large scope, many locations, or too many elements, then there’s even less of chance the real story would be kept under wraps.
And if we consider removing any thing from the equation, would the whole thing crumble.
Take the Patriot Front for instance: If the PF were a “fed” operation, it would be the worst ROI being an extremely limited “psyop” that involves wayyy too many white boys out there without a single anybody leaking that they happen to be a huge “fed-op.” Leaked records show a group of goofballs spawned from another group of known white supremacists who were at the Unite the Right rally coordinating for years and years around the US. If this were all just a big “psyop” to make white nationalists look bad, then why? White Nationalists already do the job of making themselves look bad all by themselves. They don't need the government's help to make it worse, let alone a kid who just graduated college a few days earlier.
Seriously, check out the above link filled with 400+ GB of media and files. They include conversations PF members had with Proud Boy leaders discussing plans and coordinate actions, including Knuteson's chats with the some of Portland's high-ranked PBs. Or you can download it from DDOSecrets, a site conveniently banned from SpaceX owner's “free speech” platform.
But this is about Benjamin and how the “conspiracy” around him falls apart. The notion that him and many others remained hush-hush for at least a year while Mr. Brody simultaneously was undercover as both a student in a Southern California University and an active member in a Northern Oregon hate group and somehow fitting in around a year of training that would take him away from his schooling, is loony.
And the scope being regularly traveling 1,000 miles to make a small handful of goofs look bad. Granted, these goofs are connected with a pile of other goofs throughout the US. Which makes this conspiracy theory downright moronic. There's a whole bunch of these PF and PB dudes. So one has to go to great lengths to believe that the federal government spent a ton of resource to have videos of themselves training all these goofs in various places across the US over the last 6 or so years to make them look like goofs and all of the aggrieved white boys stayed quiet about it.
And one of them was a Jewish kid graduating with a BS in Anthropology that they flew up and down the west coast? And he was so instrumental that he had to be quickly flown in after walking across a graduation stage two days earlier because they couldn't get anyone closer to show up to an anti-LGBTQ hangout?
We mean this with all due offense...
This is brain-worm level stuff.
This is beyond ludicrous thinking of how things work with the government, time, and space.
And speaking of look-a-likes, take another gander at the photos of these PF goofballs. There's more than a few that look close enough to “unmasked guy #2” that you can have your pick of neo-Nazi doppelgangers. And yet none of them are Benjamin Brody.
(it is sort of awesome that not only does unmasked goof #2 have to keep his head down now, but many of his fellow antisemitic right-wingers also think he's Jewish)

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9chan

All this is yet another unwarranted outrage machine amplified by social media and the rage they have farmed is pointed at another innocent random person who could not have cared less about Oregon City but now has to deal with a barrage of hostility coming at him and his family.
The hypocrisy runs deep when the same guy who pronounced that his platform doesn't allow doxxing, has no issues with doxxing an innocent man who he has been suckered into believing is involved in a plot to smear his fellow antisemitic alt-Right buddies as the bad guys.
These angry twitter-folk have been riled up by a micro-blogging network quickly morphing into the newest chan and it's trust-fund turned government-contract-funded owner seems to embracing it with glee.
But they mad that there were Nazis at an anti-LGBTQ shindig. That's normal nowadays.
They're mad at the fever-dream notion of the FBI trying to make people, who these folk at least tacitly agree with, look bad.
And by extension, it makes them look bad.
Because in this nefarious plot to make hate groups actually look like hate groups they are the real “victims.”
So while the rest of us in reality are subject to their wrath, the bogeyman is yet again their own shadows.

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Luckily this seems to have remained an online debacle. And as debacles that arise suddenly from micro-blogging platforms, they tend to dissipate rather hastily. But these things sometimes have a way of spilling over into real-life-land. So we need to realize that what happens online still has real-world consequences.
We hope that Benjamin Brody comes out of this unscathed. These troubles may have sent him in an interesting and positive life direction. And luckily he seems to have a strong support from his former classmates. If you see this Ben, let us know if you'd like anything corrected. We tried to only look into enough details to confirm how preposterous this last week's social media silliness has been. Apologies for invading your personal life in anyway. We simply wanted to document the bullshit and point out that it is indeed bullshit.
Good luck out there.

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• Two of the Worst Far-Right Groups are Now Fighting Each Other  – Vice

• Conspiracy Theorists (and Elon Musk) Falsely Accuse Student of Being 'Fed' Posing as Neo-Nazi  - Vice follow up mentioning this article. ThanX for the nod, Mack!

• Online hate and harassment continues to rise

• 'Hugely damaging': Most Americans are being harassed online when using Facebook, Twitter and Reddit

• Twitter, others slip on removing hate speech, EU review says

• Twitter may face fines in Australia over hate speech

• Patriot Front: Behind Conspiracist Claims That the Far-Right Group Are 'Feds'

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P.S. The RCNC has offered to have a “mutual combat fight” with the PBs. Probably akin to what football supporter groups sometimes do in Europe. What an interesting turn of events that most of these MAGA normies also may have trouble wrapping their heads around.

P.P.S. We moved this last part because it felt like it was gumming up a portion of the above ramblings. But we've kept it because it was fun and we don't owe anybody anything:
So the great Amiri King followed up his initial stumble into the foray with an even more idiotic tweet tweet of “questions” which answering may illustrate the high level of “every thing I don't like is a fed” conspiracy theorists we're working with here:

Accused Patriot Front member, Ben Brody, has uploaded a video of himself denying any involvement with the hate group. Here's a list of my personal red flags: Ben Brody waited until he scrubbed his personal instagram down to 4 posts AND until he was removed entirely from his fraternity page before addressing the accusations by uploading this video. Why? What are you hiding?

• the dipshits you sent were harassing Ben. The author has been harassed by QAnon & far-right bigots and shut down his accounts as well. It's a sane thing to do to stop harassment.
  

Photos of the side profile of your face?

• ya, Ben doesn't owe you anything. The video was to tell you dweebs to piss off. Also, he doesn't need your stage direction, naked selfie pfp guy.
  

Ben mistakenly (I think intentionally) referred to Patriot Front as 'Patriotic Front.' Surely someone who just graduated with a degree in criminology from UC Riverside with the goal of working for the US government would know. EXACTLY who Patriot Front is, right? I believe he did that intentionally to mislead people.

• Benjamin doesn't need to care what it's called. We call the PBs “Pud Boys” and PF the “PeeFront” on the regular. He's got better things to do and besides, he graduated with a BS of Anthropology. Anthropologists don't necessarily care about the PF. In fact, most LEOs we've talked to have no clue who they are and have only heard of the PBs. (although some of their coworkers happen to be members) We also know federal investigators that have no clue about the #altRight and their related apologists.
  
• also, it's spelled “Rose City Nationalist Club”. Not “Patriot Front”. He can't that right. Great investigative skills there drug-dealing “instagram model”.

Ben's twitter account was active at the time of the skirmish with the Proud Boys. Now all of a sudden it's suspended? Why? Why is your Twitter account suspended? Also, why didn't you address this in the video when this is one of the burning questions?

• buddy, settle down. You should ask Elmo about the suspension. I suppose it's shut down because of incoming harassment. We haven't spoken with Benjamin, but it's happened before.
  
• quick question: why aren't your tweets searchable?
  
• he posted the video after his family was harassed (see above). He didn't see your list of demanding questions. He doesn't live on #Twitter like you do. Nor does he care what a middle-aged naked man with 154,000 followers thinks. None of us do. But we totally believe that you would react in a perfect manner if we blamed something on you that wasn't true and then doxxed you. We get it, you'd of course be great at answering all the questions from all the thousands upon thousands of blue-checked wackos coming at like a swarm of stupid.
  

Last but not least. Ben's exaggerated hand gestures are a total red flag for me. I've spent too man years of my life locked up in prisons with toooo many liars for that to NOT catch my [eye]. That might be a stretch for some people, but it's telling to me.

• ya, that's stretch. And we get it, if someone has been locked up they will either not tell a soul or they won't STFU about it. Of course you're one of the latter. We've worked with enough of them to know, they seriously won't let you forget it and will tell you how to make frito's pizzas and toilet wine, as if it's some kind of delicacy. No one that matters cares about your “special set of prison skills”.
• Please, learn about the concept of self-awareness for once.
  

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an epilogue as of 31 May 2024...

A day or so after publishing this, we tossed a link for this post over to a Vice magazine journalist who had written the first decent article covering the Oregon City dust-up in hopes that he would at least pass this on to Ben.
(FUN FACT: Oregon City used to be the home of a white supremacist “Patriot” militia named “Republic v. Democracy Redress.” We wrote up a humongoid 4-part article on the racist history of the phrase “We are a Republic, Not a Democracy” which includes a mention of these lily-white weirdos. yay, Oregon City.)
A week later, the journalist, Mack Lamoureux, wrote an article focused on Ben’s situation which included a link to the Medium version of this post. That was nice.
We thought, like most online shenanigans, that may be the end of it and Ben at least had a better understanding of the silliness that was affecting his novice-anthropologist life. But a few months later, a Huffington Post article announced the filing of a lawsuit by Benjamin Brody against Elon Musk for libel.
We were taken aback when we found out that the attorney who took Ben’s case on was Mark Bankston, the fella who took on Alex Jones for the Sandy Hook parents. And phooey was the lawsuit an awesome read.
Also, rather cool to see this story covered by national and international news, from NPR to CNN to Bloomberg to Reuters to arstechnica to Forbes to Verve to the illustrious KnowYourMeme.
Even funner, is the current owner of X-twitter demonstrating for the court, his deep non-understanding of how things work and some other sketchy goofballness. His fan-club may not agree, but it really seems to be a bit of of a theme for him.
Extra neato to see tidbits we wrote up here getting used in a court case. Apparently, the screenshot that we had taken (but forgot to archive) of his reply to the ZeroHedge account is being used as consequential evidence. Fun stuff for sure.
Fingers & toes crossed for Benjamin.

...