First flag of the United States, the ‘Betsy Ross’, in use 1777-95. Detail of the stars representing 13 colonies in unison. Flag of Europe, the emblem of the Council of Europe and the European Union.
Unitary Executive Theory
The state of emergency clause signed into law 2020 by Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Trump was officially rescinded last month: May 11, 2023. It permitted a three-year suspension of Constitutional rights, allegedly to mitigate a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), declared January 30, 2020 by the United Nations (UN) outfit, World Health Organization (WHO). The state of emergency allowed for emergency use application of investigational new drugs, lockdowns, and suspensions of freedoms, including the sacrosanct right to religious assembly.
Lest Americans breathe a sigh of relief with the prospect of a return to normalcy, WHO is presently considering amendments to International Health Regulations (IHR) and a Pandemic Treaty that would confer the UN agency power to indefinitely supersede the Constitution. One amendment proposed by India’s delegates to WHO would strike obligation to consider human rights in determining medical protocols. WHO governance is stewarded by the conceit, “One Health” which seeks to supplant sovereign national and individual concerns with global equity of all life species (human, animal, insect, plant, etc.) in the interest of biodiversity and ecology. One Health emerged in the wake of 9/11, specifically with the emergence of severe acute respiratory disease (SARS) in 2003.
The 2020-23 American state-of-emergency was enabled by the Patriot Act (the full title of which is “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001”), signed into law by President George W. Bush. The statute conferred extra power to the Executive—the military branch of government—to combat national emergencies as might arise from biological warfare, such as the anthrax terrorism that targeted media figures and minority leaders of Congress concurrent with 9/11 (FBI code-named, “Amerithrax”).
[A previous Parking Lot post conveys that yours truly happened to have been a random recipient of mail laced with white powder in circulation in the Tri-State region in the weeks following 9/11.]
Several years after 9/11, the FBI traced the anthrax scare to the US Army biological warfare lab (USBWL) at Fort Detrick (Frederick, Maryland). The Army base had garnered the moniker, “Fort Doom” in light of its World War II anthrax experiments. A facility there acquired an equally dystopian nickname, “Anthrax Tower”. As the FBI’s report was announced, a seasoned scientist at the lab allegedly committed suicide, raising suspicion regarding his potential role in the terrorism.
In addition to its anthrax exploits, the biological warfare program at Fort Detrick is infamous for its employment of Operation Paperclip scientists and human use research for biodefense (including Operation Whitecoat in which conscientious objectors were subjected to medical experiments). The program’s advanced weapons research included use of insects (such as ticks) as disease vectors, allegedly deployed during the Korean War.
Fort Detrick is the site of US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), a Division of Clinical Research under the purview of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency formerly stewarded by Dr. Anthony Fauci who served as Chief Medical Advisor to Presidents Trump and Biden. As a bio-safety level-four integrated research facility lab, IRF-Frederick, BSL-4 specializes in infectious diseases, especially “those causing high-consequence disease (e.g., Ebola virus and SARS-CoV-2) and those included on the NIADID Priority Pathogens list”.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shut down USAMRIID August 2019, and cited “national security reasons”1 for not having informed the public about this cease-and-desist action until the lab resumed activity April 2020. The Chinese government alleges that USAMRIID developed the pathogen and has called upon WHO for an investigation.
Seal of the President of the United States, as effective July 4, 1960 with coat of arms modified by Dwight D. Eisenhower to represent all 50 states. The blazon otherwise maintains the style adopted 1945 by Harry S. Truman. Public domain. Reproduced by Parking Lot with permission provided by Executive Order 11649.
Nelson Aldrich was the Gilded Age Senator who ushered in the Federal Reserve Act. The law that established the central banking system in the US was signed into law by President Wilson Dec. 23, 1913. It provided a template for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established in the wake of World War II at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference (Bretton Woods Conference, 1944). Senator Aldrich also sponsored the Sixteenth Amendment allowing for collection of federal income tax. Aldrich was grandfather of his namesake, Nelson Rockefeller, Vice President under Gerald Ford and Governor of New York.
In an uncannily similar fashion, the National Defense Authorization Act was signed into legislation by President Biden, Dec. 23, 2022. The Bill allotted $816.7 billion to the Department of Defense (DOD) and declared “ironclad” US commitment to NATO. Bill 7900 required DOD to provide “research and development of innovative bioindustrial manufacturing processes”, a confusing clause not the least for which it seems to task the military with production of biological products.
A potential Trojan Horse folded into the mammoth spending package appears on page 950: Senate Bill 2297, International Pandemic Preparedness and COVID-19 Response Act. Citing imperatives for Global Health to counter pandemics and Global Media to combat propaganda, the bill authorizes the National Security Council to comply with strategies determined by WHO.
The 2024 Presidential campaign might present an opportunity to debate Unitary Executive Theory. The framers of the Constitution sought to empower the American People as sovereign over leaders, establishing a triune representative system by which the Executive branch were to have been severely restricted to protect against tyranny.
As journalist, Jeffrey Tucker explains, the problem of the extra–potent Executive runs deep into the institutional structure: there are myriad three-letter departments couched within the military branch—HHS, NIH, and CDC being just a few—in which career civil servants skirt public accountability. They are not elected, but appointed and serve without Executive oversight. This condition is the unintended effect of a Congressional check dating from the Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt’s expanding reach was curtailed. But the regulation didn’t preclude growth of the bureaucracy beneath him, it just gave it autonomy.
The frustration that President Trump encountered with this administrative state-within-the-state was at times apparent. Executive Order 13957 attempted to amend the “competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy–determining, policy–making, or policy–advocating character”.
In the interest of individual and national sovereignty, withdrawal from the UN and its affiliate agencies should be considered. I am opposed to the rejoining of UNESCO with the pledge of $600 million payment of back dues as was announced this week.
I was initially taken aback by President Trump’s criticism of the UN and withdrawal from UNESCO and WHO. I naively failed to appreciate the national threat imposed by allegiance to global governance. After three years of witnessing the collapse of the freedoms guaranteed by US law—including censorship brokered by the so-called, Trusted News Initiative funded by the Executive—I finally understand the imperative to limit government and conserve the Constitution.
E pluribus unum
As the SARS-2 pandemic revealed, public health agents consult with private businesses and fail to recuse themselves or cite conflicting interests when determining regulations and policies. NIH scientists shared the patent for the modeRNA vaccine that the government required of the military, refusing all requests for religious exemption. The current Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ties to Alphabet and its subsidiaries, Verily Life Sciences and Google Health. A former FDA Commissioner turned Pfizer Board member was the lead reporter on the Pfizer (BioNTech) vaccine for a major news outfit. The corporate capture of key figures at government agencies compromises integrity and public trust.
The syndication of public government–private business is by definition, fascism (from the Roman fasces, pl. fasci; ‘leagues’, ‘syndicates’, or ‘unions’). The 20th century political conceit was born of the Italian Kingdom’s reconfiguration of government to broker public–private partnerships and supranational alliances – forming an axis of military and economic power via international pacts and unions.
Fasci are represented in heraldry by a bundle of sticks. They appear in the seal of the United States and related insignia of the President as a bundle of arrows held in the talons of the Roman military standard, the aquila.
The Presidential Seal represents the union or federation of 50 states and bears the motto, “from many: One” (E Pluribus Unum). The shield features 13 stripes denoting the original colonies. The American eagle is emblematic of national sovereignty with rays of light emanating as a halo towards the heavens, illustrated by 13 clouds and stars. Like the stars on the colonial flag called, the Betsy Ross, (1777-95) the stars of the seal are symbolic of the founding colonies. The insignia of the Seal depicts the holding of peace and war in balance, as represented by the olive branch and the bundle of arrows respectively. Originally, the Presidential seal depicted the eagle looking leftward towards the arms (to the viewer’s right), considered in heraldry as representative of the sinister or ominous course. After the firebombing of Tokyo (code name, Operation Meetinghouse) that killed 100,000 people and decimated 267,000 buildings in a single night, and after dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Harry S. Truman had the design amended so that the eagle faced the dexterous, the expression of righteousness and peace.
Jean–Antoine Houdon, Memorial to George Washington. Bronze. Unveiled July 4, 1857. North Carolina State Capitol, Raleigh. File by Daderot. Public Domain.
A monument of George Washington at the Capitol building in North Carolina portrays the President with the sinister arm leaning on a bundle of fasces, partially covered with a cloak. The first of three generals to hold Executive Office, Washington was conferred with the Roman victory title, Pater Patriae, or Father of the Country.
Studied in fascism, former City of London financier Rodney Atkinson describes its main components as “corporatism (that is the State granting of power to corporate bodies like businesses, unions, interest groups, churches, etc.), collectivism, State authoritarianism, supranationalism, centralism, political intolerance of alternatives, and anti-free trade”. The British Atkinson holds special contempt for popery and conflates Roman secular powers (as signified by the Vatican) with the religion of Catholicism, a fault of his otherwise sound account.2 He identifies fascism’s principal enemies as communism and liberal democracy and claims that by its nature, fascism is apolitical in its desire to assume power across the political spectrum. This cross-party appeal is precisely why fascism poses grave danger to democracy, it is illustrated by unlikely alliance of the Italian Right and German Left in WW II.3
Atkinson has delved into the history of the European Union to expose its origins as extending aspirations of WW II axis powers, a matter that he characterizes as a coup against sovereignty of nations—indeed against democracy itself. According to Atkinson, the free nations regionalism that established the Council of Europe in 1989 (UN consultative status, 1995) essentially realized the Nazi scheme of a Federal Europe of the Regions (FEUV, FEUN). The concern to forge a European Federation arose in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). It was 1849 when the great French novelist turned statesman, Victor Hugo invoked forming “a United States of Europe”. The call was echoed by Winston Churchill in 1946.
League of Nations
Among intellectuals to anticipate and appreciate the threat of the Pax Americana’s asymmetrical War on Terror launched with 9/11 were Antonio Negri (1933–) and Giorgio Agamben (1942–), octogenarians born in the Kingdom of Italy. Their most well-known publications were issued at the close of the millennium, “Empire” (2000, the first in a series that Negri co-authored with Michael Hardt), and “Homo Sacer” (1998, an examination of lawfare, sovereignty, and human rights). Agamben’s “State of Exception” (2005) draws upon the admonitions of Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt who testified at Nuremberg. Schmitt explained that it was the state of exception clause (Ausnahmezustand) within the Weimar Constitution that permitted the National Socialists to dismantle Germany’s first democratic government, established 1919 after Armistice and the German Revolution. The clause was written into the Constitution by Hans Josef Globke, architect of the Reich Citizenship Law (Nuremberg Laws, 1935) that stripped German Jews of their rights, enabling ghettoization and forced labor. It is shocking to think that such deeds did not preclude Globke from holding further office. He became Director of the Federal Chancellery of West Germany (1953-63).
The fall of the Weimar Republic (1933)—Germany’s first representative democracy—is top of mind today with respect to financial collapse from hyperinflation and correlated deflation (devaluation of currency). The government was destabilized by an economic crisis that would soon envelop the world in Great Depression. The fiscal crisis struck Germany after punitive measures were set into place by The Treaty of Versailles. Ill-conceived legislation passed by parliament further destabilized the government, particularly the Enabling Act (1933), which ultimately allowed tyranny to prevail. The Act was supported by Theodor Heuss, who became a designer of concentration camps and supplier of slave labor to Nazi weapons projects before emerging postwar as the first Federal President of Germany in 1949.4
Schmitt was a critic of the League of Nations, (1920-46), a supranational alliance of European nations (forerunner to the United Nations) established at the Paris Peace Conference. President Wilson betrayed campaign promises to keep America out of the European conflict, only to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his efforts to consolidate European powers in formation of the League. The European League was matched and bolstered by allied Anglican think-tanks intended to govern foreign policy: Council for Foreign Relations (CFR, est. New York, 1921) and Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House, est. London, 1920).
Schmitt doubted the viability of dissolving national allegiances to instantiate cosmopolitanism, as was the objective of the League. Derived from the Greek, kosmopolitēs, or ‘citizen of the world’, the political theory of cosmopolitanism is a globalist conceit held in opposition to nationalism. It is the notion of a union of municipalities, akin to the city-state regional alliance of the Roman and Holy Roman Empires. Schmitt argued that man makes friends or allies only in opposition to foes or enemies. There can be no peace through unification because man is bound up in a tribalist “us vs. them” mindset. As summarized by German classicist and philosopher Leo Strauss, Schmitt’s theory of the partisan posits5:
Because man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men.
—Leo Strauss on Carl Schmitt
World War I was sold to Americans as a liberation of Belgium which had been captured by ‘Huns’. It was later hailed as The Great War; “the war to end all wars”. In addition to taking down the Prussian Empire, the conflict dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Ottoman Empire). Unscathed was the status of Great Britain whose Empire had reached such expanse that the sun never set on it. Eastern Europe was home to the most sophisticated military of the age (in Czechoslovakia); and the largest city on the continent: Istanbul, at the Middle East gateway. The Treaty of Versailles set into play a new world order in favor of the victors, stewarded by the UK–US and Russia, soon to become the USSR.
During the fascist takeover of France during World War II, American journalist, Varian Fry established the Emergency Rescue Committee to channel intellectuals out of the port of Marseille. The ERC was led by artist Miriam Davenport and heiress Mary Jayne Gold. Fry composed a book, “The Peace that Failed” that discussed the World War I break-up of Czechoslovakia and the Treaty reforms of the interwar period. Its subtitle suggests an argument worthy of current consideration, “How Europe Sowed the Seeds of War”.
As the League of Nations took root during the interwar period, regionalization of Europe and the Americas was promoted: Pan-Europeanism and the Pan–American Union. When the League was conceived, Congress precluded American conscription out of concern for the potential of a supranational syndicate to override national sovereignty. Yet, a western correlate was established as the Pan–American Union, an international trade alliance among the Americas.
It was at the Pan Am Union that the International Labor Organization (ILO) first convened in 1919. The ILO evolved into a United Nations Agency and is now based at UN headquarters in Geneva. After World War II, the Pan–Am Union evolved into the Organization of American States (OAS, est. 1948), the syndicate that orchestrated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994-20) under President George H. W. Bush and signed into legislation by President Clinton. NAFTA was a contentious deal that President Trump renegotiated to increased domestic benefit in March 2020, while the world was under SARS-2 lockdown (United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, USMCA).
The Pan–European Union, was stewarded by Austro-Hungarian aristocracy: Count Coudenhove–Kalergi and Otto von Habsburg, former Crown Prince of Austro–Hungary, its first and second presidents. Writing in “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” a 2023 publication by Canadian Patriot historian Cynthia Chung examines the books of Coudenhove–Kalergi including “Paneuropa” (1923); the autobiography, “Crusade for Pan-Europe” (1943 ); and “An Idea Conquers the World” (1954). She traces Coudenhove’s vision for the unification of Europe to his pride for an ancestral lineage dating back to the first Crusade of 1099, an event that he credits with having manifested “European consciousness”. Chung illustrates that the regalia for the European Union/European Council derived from the Pan-European Union movement.
After World War II, the League transformed into the United Nations and the European Economic Community (EEC) was established amid the Marshall Plan for reconstruction, seeding groundwork for the European Union (1993) and European Council. The signatories of the Treaty of Rome that established the EEC (1957) cited four freedoms: travel, trade, services and capital.
The theory was to confer prosperity across countries as a peace keeping measure. The imbalance of economic power within the EU puts the Federation of Germany in charge, as was demonstrated by the Bundestag’s clampdown on Greece during the financial crisis (2009).
Speaking on occasion of European Parliament’s 70th anniversary last year, representative Ryszard Legutko, of Poland echoed Atkinson’s sentiments, asserting, “The EU is a democracy without a demos”. He noted that despite proclamations to the contrary, the Parliament is characterized by a dearth of diversity matched by a lawless lack of accountability to voters of the sovereign nation members.
A schoolhouse in the 1880s performing the Pledge of Allegiance along with the Bellamy Salute at the end. Some children don’t seem to be abiding by the program. Public domain.
Allegiance
A previous Parking Lot essay discussed the misguided advocacy for Big Brother Government envisioned by American socialist, Richard Bellamy in, “Looking Backward, 2000-1887,” (1888), the utopian novel that served as inspiration for Orwell’s dystopian, “1984”. Bellamy’s cousin Francis wrote the “Pledge of Allegiance” in 1892 to be featured at the Chicago’s World’s Fair. A celebration of the ‘400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus’, the Fair was called the World Columbian Exposition. It is most remembered for its elaborate showcase of electricity sponsored by Westinghouse.
Despite Bellamy having attended a Baptist college endowed by the Rockefeller’s—the University of Rochester—the Pledge was secular in service of the State. Bellamy orchestrated a specific gesture—the Bellamy salute—that was made during recital of the pledge. It was replaced by the holding of the heart during WW II in light of its resemblance to the Nazi salute.
The phrase, “under God”, was added to the Pledge by Congress in 1954 in response to a petition from President Eisenhower who cited a perceived cultural threat of secularization and communism.
Formerly WW II Supreme Allied Commander of Europe and Supreme Commander of NATO, President Eisenhower was the third and last general to have been President. Eisenhower led the Council on Foreign Relations and established a think-tank at Columbia University, the American Assembly. He also established a research institute at Columbia to study war and peace.
According to his biographer, Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower thought that NATO would become a European alliance – that the US and Canada would bow-out of membership in a decade.6 Yet, as he left the Oval Office in 1961, he was of another frame of mind. His farewell address admonished the dangers of a “military industrial complex” and the Cold War responsibilities of Pax Americana, including procurement of a “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”. He warned—not of a particular county or regime—but of a “hostile ideology – global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method”.
On this Flag Day, let Americans take heed of Eisenhower’s red flag.
As always, thanks for reading.
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Peace and love,
Poppy
Resources for learning and advocacy follow below:
Reggie Littlejohn is principal among advocates of the Sovereignty Coalition, a volunteer organization seeking to inform Americans about this potential seizure of individual rights and freedoms and to preserve national independence from world governance. Sovereignty has issued a petition, #ExitTheWho and facilitates contacting representatives to express concern for American sovereignty.
UK Column news website hosts several articles on the WHO. An interview with David Bell, “Why Policy Makers Should Reject WHO’s Pandemic Proposals” might be most instructive. Another UK Column interview features American physician, Dr. Meryl Nass discussing the UN’s One Health “Power Grab”. Subscribers may recall Dr. Nass as having provided expert testimony to Congress linking Gulf War Syndrome to the Anthrax Vaccine.7
The UK Column co-hosted a recent panel discussion, “WHO Do You Think You Are?” with Children’s Health Defense, a US nonprofit advocating for regulation of medicine and environmental protection founded by 2024 Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Additional information can be found on James Roguski’s substack, a Californian who put his life-on-hold to protest American conscription in WHO full-time. Fittingly, in videos Roguski’s home decor suggests an extensive collection of globes.
Grady, Denise (2019-08-05). "Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-06-21.
Atkinson, “And Into the Fire”, 2013, p.12
(Ibid., p.11).
Ibid., p.18., via Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder” 1981
Meier, Heinrich, “Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: the hidden dialogue,” Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995, 125
Ambrose, Stephen (1983). Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect (1893–1952). Vol. I. New York: Simon & Schuster
House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Archival testimony from Meryl Nass on Gulf War Syndrome
https://archives-veterans.house.gov/witness-testimony/dr-meryl-nass-md