Ancestry of Liberty Caucus members: Voices from (for) the USA’s “ethnic core”

The Republican Party has had a genuine and formal dissident political bloc for the past 11 years, led by the indefatigable Ron Paul, called “Liberty Caucus”. It has been, officially and ostensibly, a strict-libertarian caucus. Considered individually, though, its membership displays clear pro-Western and even racialist sympathies.

“We need to stop illegal immigration totally, and reduce legal immigration, and end the diversity visas policy. I fear [for] the next century…if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.”

Virgil Goode

The above are the words of former Congressman and Liberty Caucus member Virgil Goode, who is now running for president as the nominee of the Constitution Party (which is seen by some as an thinly-veiled White-“voelkisch” party).

Another former member of Liberty Caucus is Congressman Tom Tancredo, known for his open stance against non-Western immigration, and his tireless efforts on behalf of ending open immigration policies. A current member, Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, recently gave a magnanimous on-air interview to James Edwards, the only openly-Racialist radio-host on the AM radio waves that I know of in the USA. (James Edwards and his team officially describe themselves as “paleoconservative”, but also frequently use the term “pro-White” in reference to themselves). Congressman Jones did not grovel-for-forgiveness about the appearance when opponents attacked him for it, as many others would have done.

Ancestral origins of Liberty Caucus members

As it turns out, Liberty Caucus might as well be called the “Ethnic-Core-American Caucus”: Not only is every member “White”, but there is hardly a trace of anything ancestrally-outside-NW-Europe. Most of the members are of Colonial-stock; all but one are of Protestant background, the other being Mormon; hardly a trace can be seen of Ellis Island. (A single member, Bill Posey, has partial-Jewish ancestry, but of a special kind [see his entry below]).

This in an age, remember, in which none of the nominees for President or Vice President are White-Protestants, an age in which the Supreme Court has exactly zero White-Protestants, in which Congress is about only about half White-Protestant [535 seats in Congress, 304 are Protestants, but 40 or so of those are Black, so it is 264/535 = ~50%].

Current members of Liberty Caucus (together forming five percent of the current Republican House membership, and about 15% of the influential “Tea-Party-Wing” of the Republicans) are:

Roscoe Bartlett, James (“Jimmy”) Duncan, Jeff Flake, Trent Franks, Scott Garrett, Walter B. Jones, Jack Kingston, Jeff Miller, Ron Paul, Bill Posey, Denny Rehberg.

Below is a quick personal profile of each current member, with focus on what is known of each man’s ancestry. The main source is Ancestry.com. Some of this is, necessarily, educated-supposition, which I have noted where applicable.

Bartlett

Roscoe Bartlett [Ahnentafel]
Born in 1926 in Kentucky; Seventh-Day Adventist; has represented a rural-heavy Western-Maryland district since 1993. Grandparents’ surnames (born 1830s-1850s): Bartlett, Gatewood, Minnick, [Unknown, born in England]. Ancestrally, then, he is very likely 75% Colonial-American, 25% English (one grandmother immigrated in 1880). Ten children.

Duncan

Jimmy Duncan. Born in 1947 in Tennessee; Presbyterian; has represented the region around Knoxville in East-Tennessee since 1988. According to his wiki, some of his ancestors were in East-Tennessee in 1861, and as he himself was also born in Tennessee, he is probably of heavily or totally “Tennessee ancestry”, and thus likely to be of all, or nearly-all, Colonial-Stock. He is a co-chairman of the “Congressional Friends of Scotland Caucus”, an obvious clue to distant ancestry.

Flake

Jeff Flake [Ahnentafel]
Born in 1962 in Arizona; Mormon; and based on a review of the surnames available in his ancestral tree (Flake, Hendrickson, Hock, Packer), he is probably of typical Mormon-ancestry: part-Colonial-American, part-later-British, perhaps a bit Scandinavian (based on the Hendrickson surname). He is certainly descended, at least patrilineally, from Mormon Pioneer stock). In 2012, Flake is a candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona. Five children.
.
.

Franks

Trent Franks [Ahnentafel]
Born in 1957 in Colorado; Southern-Baptist; has represented an Arizona district since 2003; on his father’s side, he is of Colonial ancestry all over the map — some from New England, some from the Carolinas, some on the frontier in the early 1800s (Tennessee). His mother’s origin is a mystery: The only information I can find is that her name was ‘Juanita’, no maiden name is given. She is listed as being “from” Briggsdale, Colorado (whether or not that means “born in” is anyone’s guess), and published a novel called “An Echo of a Dream”. (That she published a novel and was likely born in Colorado suggests exotic ancestry is unlikely. Although ‘Juanita’ sounds exotic today, SSS reports that it was one of the 100-most-common given names for baby-girls born in the early-20th-century, peaking at #48 in 1924. In the 21st century, it is no longer in the top-1000.) Trent Franks worked for the Pat Buchanan campaigns of the 1990s.

Garrett

Scott Garrett. Born in 1959 in Bergen County, New Jersey; Member of the Lafayette Federated Church (Protestant); represented a New Jersey district since 2003; his surname is of English origin, but I cannot locate anything else on his specific ancestors. Based on his membership in a Protestant church, his English-surname, and his appearance, NW-European ancestry being predominant is certain, and Colonial-ancestry is likely. Wife Mary Ellen, and two daughters, Jennifer and Brittany.

Jones

Walter B. Jones
Born in 1943 in North Carolina; Born Baptist, now a Catholic; has represented an eastern North Carolina district since 1993; “the son of former US representative Walter Sr. (1913–1992), and Dot Long Jones (1914–1984)”. Jones is a lifelong resident of Farmville, a suburb of Greenville, North Carolina. Specific information on ancestry is unknown, but given that he has two parents born in pre-World-War-One North Carolina, he is likely of Colonial-ancestry. Appeared on dissident-Right-Wing radio show, The Political Cesspool, in 2012.

Kingston

Jack Kingston
Born in 1955 in Bryan, Texas; Episcopalian; Congressman from Georgia since 1993; the son of Martha Ann (née Heddens) and Albert James Kingston, Jr. His further ancestry is not available online, but many signs point to his being all or nearly-all NW-European, and probably heavily (if not all) Colonial-Stock.

Miller

Jeff Miller
Born in 1959 in St. Petersburg, Florida; Methodist; has represented the 1st District, encompassing Florida’s panhandle, since 2001, when he took over from populist Joe Scarborough. I hesitate to speculate on his ancestry without any real clues, other than his Baptist affiliation, which (of course) suggests Colonial ancestry. I will say that the man’s face, somehow, bespeaks the dusty fief of a small-town Deep-South sheriff. Sure enough, his official biography notes that he once served as a deputy sheriff.

Paul

Ron Paul [Ahnentafel]
Born in 1935 in Pennsylvania; Raised Lutheran, now Baptist; has represented a Texas Congressional district in the late-1970s through mid-1980s, then again from 1997 to the present. His ancestry is 87.5% German, 12.5% Irish. See The Ancestry of Ron Paul, the “German Candidate” for a complete analysis of his ancestry and other background information.

Posey

Bill Posey [Ahnentafel]
Born in 1947 in Washington, DC; Methodist; has represented a Florida district since 2009. His ancestry is at least 1/4 Russian-Jewish (two Jewish great-grandparents entered the USA, probably in the mid 1880s, from Russia), and very likely 1/2 Jewish, depending on whether his grandfather, surnamed “Tohl”, was Jewish or not — Google suggests that it is. The other half of his ancestry seems to be solidly Colonial-American: All ancestors on his father’s side were born in the Virginia-DC-Maryland region, with Anglo names, circa 1860. Bill Posey’s background is remarkably similar to Barry Goldwater’s: Both are of half Jewish ancestry and half Colonial-American ancestry; in both cases, their Jewish ancestors arrived early (before Jews became a major population element of northern-urban USA) [Goldwater’s arrived in the 1850s]; in both cases, their Jewish ancestors married-into Protestant families and converted; in both cases, their politics were/are strongly “pro-American”. Bill Clinton on Barry Goldwater: “He was truly an American original. I never knew anybody like him.” Another noted figure on the “extreme right” fitting this mold is the prolific Lawrence Auster.

Rehberg

Denny Rehberg [Ahnentafel]
Born in 1955 in Billings, Montana; Episcopalian; “a fifth-generation rancher” in Montana, which suggests pioneer stock — According to this, his great-grandfather was born in Montana in 1873, making him probably one of the first Whites born in that future-state. (There were only about 20,000 Whites in Montana in 1873, the Census suggests. His ancestry is only known firmly for his father’s father’s branch: Which is half-German and half-Irish/Scottish. The surnames known for the other branches are: Herman and Cooley. Nothing in his background suggests anything other than NW-European ancestry. Rehberg is running for U.S. Senate in Montana in 2012.
.
.
.
Analysis

Liberty Caucus: A Hard-“Core” of the Tea Party

Liberty Caucus, as a political-bloc, was a forerunner of the Tea Party, the movement that gave the Republicans the energy to win a substantial victory in the 2010 Congressional elections. We can actually say that Liberty Caucus forms a hard-core of the Tea Party movement.

Michelle Bachmann

The Tea Party has its own caucus, led by nationalist-oriented Michelle Bachmann, a woman with deep roots in the Upper-Midwest of the USA, who is of 100% Norwegian ancestry (and, actually, all branches of her family seem to have arrived in the USA from Norway in the 1860s and 1870s, when the Upper-Midwest was still a near-frontier society). She is an active Lutheran in what is probably the most conservative large-Lutheran-church in the world today, the USA’s WELS. (Incidentally, she shares Lutheran heritage with Ron Paul himself; see Ron Paul’s Ancestry. One hears little about Lutherans in the USA, they being neither loud nor self-aggrandizing by nature, but something close to 1-in-10 American-Whites are of at-least-nominal Lutheran background).

Origin of Liberty Caucus

In the November 2010 elections, the Republican Party won 56% of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, taking over control from the Democrats. Something approaching one-third of the Republicans in the new Congress were seen to be aligned with the Tea Party.

The Tea Party, of course, was a White-American political movement ostensibly favoring limited government, but actually (“implicitly”) energized by the kind of White frustration and angst represented by Sam Francis — It seemed like the “Middle American Radicals” Dr. Francis predicted had arrived in force.

The Tea Party can best be seen “explicitly” as a mushrooming of the Ron-Paul-Wing of the Republican party. The energy, political-apparatus, and animating-politics of the Tea Party seems to have originated in Ron Paul’s 2007-2008 presidential campaign, and thus with Ron Paul himself. It was the Ron Paul campaign that declared December 17th, 2007, “a new Tea Party” — millions of dollars flowed into the Paul campaign on that day. The Big-Media was stunned.

The Tea Party was not necessarily Ron Paul’s creation, but that the Tea Party could exist at all required something like the Ron-Paul-Wing of the Republican Party to have existed in the first place. Mass movements do not come out of nothing. “The army was kept in the field” in various forms over the years, with Ron Paul (and thus Liberty Caucus) an important element in that torch-bearing.

Both Ron Paul’s Liberty Caucus, and the wider Tea Party, are said to draw inspiration from two historical 20th-century Republican traditions: (1) The so-called “Robert Taft Wing” of the mid-20th-century Republican Party, which involved strong opposition to expansion of U.S. federal government power and the emerging U.S. welfare state, but not really focused on social conservatism or foreign affairs [the “isolationists” were led by Taft]; (2) The Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964 (the legacy of which a great many Republicans today claim as their own), which was libertarian but also socially-conservative and hawkishly anti-Communist. Goldwater lost the battle, the conventional wisdom goes, but won the war: Republicans, from Reagan on, generally espouse his values.

The Legacy of Liberty Lobby

Liberty Lobby must also been seen as an inspiration for Liberty Caucus (and the latter’s larger manifestation in the form of the Tea Party). They are similarly-named, but ostensibly-very-different. Liberty Lobby was a racialist-populist organization founded in the 1950s, the influence of which lasted through the 1990s. It did a lot of things, and published a newspaper called the “Spotlight” in the 1970s and 1980s, the circulation of which reached 330,000 in the early 1980s.

The early Tea Party was something genuinely grassroots: The kind of anger that bubbled to the surface could not have been inspired solely by libertarian ideals of limited government.

Liberty Lobby was founded by the prolific American racialist organizer and publisher Willis Carto, and carried the torch of the post-1945 dissident White-“Voelkisch”-Right in the USA for many years. (Willis Carto is still alive today, and in his 80s is still publishing: “American Free Press” and the “Barnes Review” are his two current publications).

Although I don’t think we can say Liberty Lobby directly inspired Liberty Caucus, at least the two “drew water from the same springs”: Both appeal naturally to the USA’s ethnic-core. The author of a recent biography on Carto, Professor George Michael, has mused that some of the 2007-2008 Ron Paul movement’s energy and momentum will have come from the remnants of Liberty Lobby. The union of the dissident Right (former “Spotlight” readers and Liberty Lobby supporters) with various other bases of support produced the Ron Paul phenomenon. Professor Michael also notes that Carto has ceaselessly promoted Paul for years.

Conclusion
I believe that the ancestral analysis above shows that Liberty Caucus itself, and the broader Tea-Party by extension, is obviously at least an “Ethnic-Core-American” movement. Looking at the ancestral pool of the current Liberty Caucus members collectively, the total of non-NW-European ancestry that I can find is ~4.5% (via Congressman Posey’s partial-Jewish ancestry) [0.5/11 members]. All indications are that the other 95.5% ancestral-stock is NW-European.

Given that Liberty Caucus is much more NW-European-Protestant (and Colonial-American) than average for Congress or even for the Republicans today, one must either believe that this is due to one of two things: (1) Coincidence, (2) that this political-bloc is a proxy for Core-American ethnic-politics.

______________

(Update: Sept. 2022: The images having gone down at their original sources, I  have replaced them all.)