text: In reply to message69571: Our rights as well as our lives and our culture are seriously threatened today, and the institutiona we are taught to trust to defend them, are not! All true. All good men realize that action is needed to meet the threat.Un fortunatley there are many proceses that are being offered as solutions to these problems, that are actually merely useless distrations, and draw off the hopes and energy of good folks who could be making a real contribution to saving our Republic.One such, in my opinion, is the idea of becoming an “American State National” The whole idea seems irrelevant to me on its face. The unalienable rights we committed our government to secure, in the Declaration of Indepndence and our Constitution, enumerated and non-enumerated, were not ascribed to one class of persons and not to another. But I clicked the link in Kam's post, went to the California-based web-site, and found offered as one of their sources, the PDF of the following boook: Fruit from a poisonous tree by Melvin Stamper, JD.“JD stands for “juris Doctor, which is Latin for Teacher of the Law. Means Melvin is a law-school gaaduate. A lawyer. One of the coterie that makes its living and derives its power from making the law scary and inaccessible. I think Melvin is a good-guy, and trying to help, but I suggest that his perspective is defined by the habits of his profession: make it difficult, obscure, tangled, and intimidating.The cover of the book has several claims on it:“American blacks were set free as slaves but never as free men.” American blacks per se were never “set free” The legal emancipation of slaves in America was achieved by the 13th Amendment to our Cosntitution which reads in pertinent part, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”I see no reference to blacks here, nor do I see permission for any other form of involuntary servitude....excpet as properly applied punishment. Nor, arguably, is “emancipation “ necessary from a state of servitude into which no man has lawful right to put another. The 13th Amendment did not, and could not make anyone “free”. God did that. All the 13th Amd. did was to prohibit men from violating the pre-existing God-given rights of other men.“All you own belongs to the federal reserve” This is nonsense Neither Melvin or anyone else can show us a human law which supersedes the Divine law of propertry, nor any part of the Constitution which allows or authorizes any part of any American governemnt to perform a wholesale seizure or transfer of property. If the unlawful federal reserve bank shows any part of my or your assets on its balance sheets, it is committing fraud, and posssible grand larceny.“You were made a slave by the way your name is spelled” Melvin cannot find in our Constitution, nor in any law made pursuant to it anywhere in the country, any legal significance to the way in which your name is spelt.“the Patriot Act emasculates the Bill of Rights” It is true that the so-called Patriot Act presumes to authorize numerous invaions on our rights, however the Bill of Rights is part of our Constitution, and it has been clear since the case of Marbury v Madison in 1803 that “a law repugnant to the Constitution is void”. No part of it that infringes our rights is law. You may obey it, government employees may enforce it, but you would be a fool and they, criminals.