USA –-(Ammoland.com)- “The Occupy movement has set its sights on the U.S. Constitution, calling the nation’s founding document ‘drastically’ outdated while seeking a rewrite that includes provisions for a new national currency, a requirement that troops refuse certain military orders and the abolishment of the Federal Reserve,” Aaron Klein of WND.com reports.
That hardly seems like the neo-Marxist agenda the movement has shown to date. Aside from the “drastically outdated” part, it actually sounds pretty good.
“Occupy’s goal of a new U.S. Constitution,” Klein warns us, comparing this new endeavor “to a [Cass] Sunstein-initiated effort…funded by billionaire George Soros – to push for a new, ‘progressive’ U.S. Constitution by the year 2020.”
“Last week, Occupy launched a new website, OccupyTheConstitution.com, which lists proposed changes to the Constitution while calling the document outdated,” he reports.
Here’s where we run into problems: That URL redirects to GiveMeLiberty.org. A WHOIS lookup shows that site registered to We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education, Inc.
These folks aren’t “the Occupy movement”—they’re people interested in restoring, not replacing the original intent Constitution, and remind us of its irrevocable relationship to the Declaration of Independence. I see they even link to Freedom to Fascism by a man I had the privilege of sharing dinner and corresponding with before his untimely death, the late Aaron Russo.
Restraints like requiring a declaration of war to commit troops and holding those troops to an Oath-Keeping standard are hardly reflective of “progressive” ideology. Nor are petitioning for sound fiscal policy, rejecting debt incurred through unconstitutional legislative actions, or the other petitions for redress of grievances they present for our consideration. If I have one beef, it’s that they don’t specifically include a petition for the right to keep and bear arms, although they do address it—along with our right to form militias—in the sidebar video.
While I have no doubt those behind the real “Occupy movement” would love to replace the Constitution, the people WND is setting its sights on aren’t communists, they’re Constitutionalists, “conservatives” and “libertarians,” they’re not the “Occupy movement”—they’ve simply, and cleverly, co-opted the name, and it looks like that was enough to cause kneejerk assumptions and conflation.
I have no idea what Klein – a “senior staff reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief” was thinking when he put this piece together without checking basic facts that took me under a minute to ascertain. It’s hard to believe anything this poorly vetted made it to publication, in spite of his providing a “research” credit at the end. As things stand, this is irresponsible to the point of bordering on libel, and a profound apology is in order, particularly with some of the hostile sentiment that’s been stirred up among commenting readers. It will be interesting to see if Joseph Farah pulls the piece and issues a full and sincere retraction.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He is a field editor for GUNS Magazine, and a blogger at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance.
