Papa's Got a Brand New File

by Marc Moran

July 10, 2002

An interesting thing just happened to me.

One of my employees asked if she could speak with me about a private matter. I asked her to take a seat and to tell me what was on her mind. She said that over the weekend her father had asked her about her job; how she liked it and how her boss was treating her. She told him that she loved the job and that I was a great boss. He asked my name, she gave it to him and that was that until he called her a couple of nights later.

"I spoke with my FBI friend," he told her. "He told me that your boss has been a member of the National Alliance since 1999. Does he have propaganda around the office?"

She told me that she didn't know what he meant when he told her that and she asked him.

"He's an activist. They have a file on him. He wrote a letter to the editor and they have a photograph of him at a rally."

Well there wasn't much more that she told me. She said something about the letter I wrote being about "Blacks and Jews" and nothing more.

I asked her, "Doesn't it bother you that the FBI has a file on me?" After all, I am the kind of man that I used to admire when I was growing up.

Beautiful wife, respect in the community, successful business, friendly, helpful, that kind of thing.

She looked at me sadly.

"You really are a great boss," she said.

I nodded and told her that it was okay. I wasn't mad at her, but I was deeply hurt. Deeply.

She walked out of her office and I immediately sat down and began to write this essay.

First, let me clarify a couple of points.

I have never been to a rally, although I just got an invitation to one this morning.

I am a member of the National Alliance, but I joined only about a year ago. I'm sorry that it took me that long to come around to some of the problems facing this country, but at least I have come around. I am not really sure what goes on at the National Alliance headquarters in West Virginia, as I have never been there, nor have I ever spoken to anyone who is a member with the exception of Andrei Kievsky, and then it was mostly about organic gardening and family. I know that the National Alliance sells a lot of books that are hard to find from other sources, in fact I have purchased quite a few. Perhaps the FBI has a copy of my purchases. I understand that they check into what people check out of libraries, so anyone who would have the temerity to actually read books not assigned in class might actually be a threat to the United States of America, I don't know. After all, I'm not an agent of the Federal Government. They obviously have a different criterion for what is and isn't a threat to this country and its people, judging by the bang-up job they've done since Sept 11th.

Or August 8th, if you want to get technical.

If the FBI is interested in my affiliation with the National Alliance, the American Legion, the Sons of the Revolution, the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, the National Rifle Association, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Hopewell Museum, the Republican Party or any of the other organizations I happen to be a member of, I would expect that they would stop by and have a glass of iced tea and ask me about them face to face. I would assume that that is how the FBI works because they are supposed to be professionals at what they do. I have always believed that they weren't the type of sloppy, shoddy organization that gives out personal information on U.S. citizens, particularly law abiding patriots like myself, to every Tom, Dick and Harry that calls them at the office and asks. I assume that they would be honest, forthright and dedicated to preserving the laws of this nation, allowing people to freely associate with others as the Constitution allows.

That is how I thought law enforcement agents worked, but they obviously do not. Instead they behave like a thoroughly corrupt organization, working not for the U.S. citizen, but for a hostile occupation force bent on the intimidation and surveillance of free thinkers who have wandered off the P.C. plantation. They secretly keep files on citizens, thinking that only they know about it. They violate the rights of Americans in order to please their handlers, negating the very Constitution they have taken an oath to uphold. I know they have because I keep a copy of the Constitution on my desk at work and I am looking at it right this moment.

It says:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

There it is in black and white. My right to say what I want, to write and publish what I want, to worship God as I see fit, to freely associate with people that share my interests and beliefs and to ask the government, when it has caused me grief, to redress that grief.

Have I missed something?

I have been writing for Vanguard News Network for about four months. I use my own name because I am not ashamed to put my name on what I write. I am not afraid of what others think about me, or my opinions. I have come about them honestly after years of research and deep thought. I would debate anyone at any time about any topic, provided I have an opportunity to speak, something the media would never allow. It's not a secret because I have nothing to hide.

I discovered the website about nine months ago and I immediately fell in love with the humor expressed on the site and the way that news was arranged to connect events and people in a meaningful way, something that is deliberately left out of the major media sources. I found the articles and letters to be arcane, insightful, combative and profane, but I never once found them to be evasive, intentionally false or misleading, something the other so-called "news" sources frequently do. I decided to write some pieces because I thought my perspective was a valid one. I am a Christian with a strong faith, a loyal husband and loving father. I have a stable home life, living in a town that my own family helped to found over three hundred years ago. I had spent over ten years as a stand-up comic, touring the United States from one end to the other. I have served in combat with America's Guard of Honor, the 82nd Airborne Division and have been decorated for my action under fire. I have been a law-abiding, taxpaying, productive member of society who has done as much or more than most people I have met in my life. I have great relationships with my parents, my in-laws, my neighbors, and my business associates. I got a phone call at work yesterday from the Japanese guy who sat next to me on a flight last month, thanking me for the book I gave him and the advice on marriage and fatherhood and our relationship with God.

That's the kind of life I lead and that's the viewpoint I have to offer. I was not the typical media version of a "racist" or a "bigot" and I thought that my low-key, everyman essays would resonate with others like myself who had been so thoroughly brainwashed by Hollywood/Madison Avenue/Public Schools that the very idea of even reading VNN would be tantamount to committing treason.

I thought that I might be able to contribute in some small way to what I see as a legitimate movement to save this nation from chaos and destruction in a place where people can speak openly about the Truth.

I felt it was my duty.

I have never been an activist of any kind.

I marched in a parade once that was supposed to be against the opening of a nuclear plant, but that was only because I seriously wanted some action from a young lady who actually cared about nuclear plants. It wasn't much of a protest and that was over twenty years ago and I didn't get the girl either. I enjoy the art of debate and I love the thought of engaging in discussions that lead people to deeper levels of understanding. My father has done this his entire life and I guess that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. When people in my neighborhood find themselves interested in Indian artifacts, inevitably someone will lead them my way and I will talk to them whether they are six or sixty. I may not know everything about the earliest inhabitants of this valley, but I will share everything that I do know with whomever shows an interest and many of these people have gone on to learn things I have missed and they always come back to share that information with me. That, in a word, is community. People sharing ideas, people expressing concerns, people taking the time to show that they care. That is how I operate because that was how I was taught people ought to behave. The closest I have ever come to being an activist was when I began to write letters to the editor. I began writing them about six or seven years ago about whatever topic caught my interest. I wrote brief, concise and at times, humorous letters that made my point. Newspapers like the Times of Trenton and the Hopewell Valley News began to regularly print them and I would often hear comments from people at church or in the neighborhood that I had made a good point, had expressed myself well, had gotten them to think about something in a different way.

Then something strange happened. I noticed that for every letter I would write expressing what I would describe today as a "conservative" viewpoint, three or four letters would be published in response. Not supportive letters like the comments I heard first hand, but mean vindictive attacks on me personally. They were sometimes so off base and ridiculous that I would laugh at them, wondering why these people could not respond in a level-headed way, with counterpoints that could make their own position unassailable.

Soon I began to realize that the letters to the editor section of the newspaper was really not all that different from the main pages. It was carefully constructed to tear down the "conservative" position and to show people that the way they had been thinking was no longer tolerable to the mainstream of American thought. It is designed to muzzle any divergent beliefs by humiliating writers who did not toe the line, using other writers to do the dirty work.

I have answered too many hecklers in my day to be responsive to such tactics.

I still received phone calls, one from a former history teacher, commending me for my well-reasoned position and my articulate summation of events, both nationally and on a local level. I still heard comments from people in church or at local historic association meetings, people who knew me by name simply by the letters I had written, but for some reason, the newspaper stopped printing my letters.

Towards the end of 2000 an employee of mine sent me an email with a link to a website called www.racetraitor.com. He thought it was funny and knowing that I was a "conservative" churchgoing kind of guy, he thought it would ruffle my feathers.

He had no idea.

At that time my understanding of the problems in this country was focused on issues like the homosexual lobby, feminism and liberals. I knew that the public education system had been dumbed down, but I didn't realize that it was intentional. I hated the way that crime reports focused on any crime Whites committed, but seemed to avoid making the connection when Blacks were involved. I had not, at that time, read the statistics from the government's own website and had no idea of just how bad Black on White crime was. I knew that the only time I had ever been the victim of a violent crime, in 1978 at the age of 18, it was at the hands of a Black man who blamed me for his crime. I don't remember the text of our conversation, but I certainly remember the gist of it. He had just gotten out of prison because of "White mother-fuckers like you." He then proceeded to pistol whip me before stealing my plastic wallet with thirty bucks in it. My leg was in a cast at the time of the mugging, so I was an easy mark.

I knew a girl from school who was raped by a Black guy, but she never reported it because she was afraid to. So there was only my personal experience and my intuition to help me understand the problem of race and crime.

Until I received that email I had never visited a "racist" website in my life. I had only heard about the National Alliance in the same way that most White Americans hear about it, on the news, in context with the Timothy McVeigh bombing and always with the exact same language, as if it had been scripted, "...who used the book The Turner Diaries as a blueprint for his bombing of the Murrah Federal Building..."

That website led me to another and that one led me to one called Yggdrasil. That one woke me up, and from there I wound up here.

Until this point, my only real unhappiness with the government was that taxes seemed to make accomplishing anything remotely like my parents had an impossible dream.

That was until Waco.

I was performing at a comedy club in Dayton, Ohio, that week and staying at a local hotel. I had written a joke about the standoff in the early days that went like this,

"I understand that Federal authorities are wondering when David Koresh will be coming out of the compound at Waco. If I'm not mistaken he claims he's Christ.

Wouldn't that be Easter morning?"

It got a good laugh at the time and a couple of days later I sold the joke to a Black comedian named George Wallace and he told it on the Tonight Show, getting a much bigger laugh than I had.

Show business.

The morning that the guys from the FBI and BATF smashed into the house at Mt. Carmel, I watched in horror from my hotel room bed.

"They're burning them alive." I remember thinking. "There are children in there."

No one came out of there on Easter morning.

My uncle, who happens to be an agent with BATF, got into a big argument with me about what happened there. I took the position that they never should have crushed the front of the house with a tank, should never have started the whole thing with their commando-style attack in the first place. He made every argument I have ever heard since about Waco - the meth lab, child molestation, sawed-off shotguns, you name it.

I held my ground. There were kids in there. They burned those children to death. It was handled badly. There weren't any fire trucks.

He sent me a couple of BATF after-action reports, the testimony of the agents who had played a role in the siege and subsequent immolation of those poor souls.

They only reinforced my position.

I remember one agent saying that he had candy bars in his ammo pouches, because, "sometimes the kids get scared."

Yeah, I'll bet.

One agent was repeatedly claiming to be "thrown into a ditch by gunfire" but somehow miraculously kept "leaping to my feet." I could read the fiction in the account. One does not leap to his feet from a prone position, I can tell you from experience.

Another agent, a female, described hiding behind a propane tank to avoid gunfire. Does that make sense to anyone?

Would you hide behind a propane tank?

My uncle and I have a deep respect for each other, but we haven't talked a great deal since my grandmother passed away this past winter.

My wife and I cared for my grandmother to the end and she died peacefully in her bed, surrounded by her loved ones in our home, in the same room where her mother died in 1965. My uncle missed her passing to work a gun case in Richmond.

He should have been there, but his duty to his country kept him away. Knowing what I do now, I wonder if he has seen my FBI file. Maybe he knows that I write letters to the editor and think about things. Maybe he is worried about being related to someone like myself, and the impact it may have on his job.

The horror.

So I wonder, does the FBI have the right to keep a file on me? Have I really done something so dangerous and subversive as to write essays about Father's Day and the Fourth of July, thinking that I could get away with it?

Am I entitled to the redress of grievances guaranteed in the First Amendment, since I am obviously not entitled to the free speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press portion?

Does anyone reading this understand just how thoroughly corrupt the system is when people such as myself have an FBI file labeling them activists who write letters to the editor, while people like Mohammed Atta receive visa waivers six months after they bring down the WTC?

I wonder too, about the National Alliance. After all, I have sent them money, bought books from them and attended a meeting to listen to David Irving speak -- another incident I was subversive enough to write about -- all because of the message of the National Alliance.

Did they give my information to the FBI? Is there an informant at the West Virginia headquarters, or do the authorities merely steam open the mail before delivering it to Dr. Pierce and copy down the personal information of the sender?

How would I ever know?

This morning when I came into work I was a boss, a husband, a father and a deacon at my church. I was the local arrowhead guru, amateur gardener, jack-legged carpenter and good friend and neighbor. I was a reader, student of history, loyal son, beloved uncle and half-assed essayist. When I sat down at my desk this morning I was racially aware, but I certainly wasn't an activist.

But I am now.

MARC MORAN

Back to VNN Main Page