Massie and the Ghost of Luther Martin 

The American Founder Luther Martin rests in an unmarked grave beneath New York, his name erased from the pantheon of patriots. He’s a ghost because the victors—those who herded us from a republic of free communities to a corrupt national empire—wrote the history books and crowned their own heroes. In 1787, this Maryland Anti-Federalist stood against the constitutional tide, an often inebriated yet brilliant underdog (as Bill Kauffman’s Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet paints him), defying Madison’s Virginia Plan, which gave us our Constitution. This was hatched in haste as a soft coup against the federalist system championed by Anti-Federalists like Thomas Jefferson, conveniently away in France at the time.

On June 19, Martin split Maryland’s vote, a solitary plea for equal state representation lost in a 7–3 rout. Martin saw the myth taking shape—a centralized state that would bury liberty and local rule under a veneer of unity. The empire’s scribes scrubbed him from the story, his forgotten grave a relic of a republic they couldn’t abide.

Martin fought for a limited republic—communities bound by principle, not debt or distant scoundrels. He warned of an executive bloating into a king, impeachment a sham, states’ voices strangled by federal ambition. Jefferson, writing from France as the convention unfolded, shared his dread of centralized power unbound by an informed, principled citizenry. Neither could have fathomed what we’ve wrought: not a lone monarch, but a sprawling bureaucracy owning both parties, as technologist Elon Musk has mused, a uniparty gorging on debt and dominion. Nationalism, we’re told, is the antidote to globalism—a step away from faceless technocrats. Fair enough. But in itself, it’s a hollow creed, incompatible with a republic not tethered to scoundrels who capture the people through a centralized system, thriving where citizens trade vigilance for chants.

Last week, the ghost stirred. Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky farmer with a dissenter’s spine, rejected the House GOP’s push to extend Biden-era spending. On March 11, 2025, he voted “no” on a continuing resolution that mocks the reform he’s preached. X is trending with voices weighing in about Massie’s stand—mostly in support of him. But the louder tale is of a populace too bewitched by nationalism’s pageantry to see its strings. Massie’s stand mirrors Martin’s: a republic of truth doesn’t kneel to debt or expedience. Yet nationalism, for all its bluster against globalism, offers no foundation. It’s useful insofar as it resists global governance, but as a guiding principle of its own, it’s a siren song, luring us to make tribalistic excuses for a system that scoundrels—bureaucrats, warlords, party hacks—wield to bind us, not free us.

Federalism today is in tatters. The 17th Amendment of 1913 turned Senators from state sentinels into corporatist pawns, making a mockery of the Constitution that Martin warned was too weak to bind slick-tongued snakes. The executive, now a bureaucratic hydra, spans continents, dropping bombs and decrees while flags wave over the wreckage. This kind of faux-patriotism isn’t love of a republic; it’s worship of a national god, a sacrificial machine demanding the skin of soldiers, taxpayers, and prophets to fuel its myth. Nationalism might slow globalism’s grasp, but it’s no savior—it’s just another cage, gilded by debt and captured by the unprincipled, flourishing where citizens forget to question.

The victors hid Martin’s memory from you because his vision threatened their altar. You now live as cattle amongst their spoils. His defeat that June day was a symbolic funeral for the republic, the first stone in a sidewalk of amnesia induced by decades of centrally planned schooling. Jefferson’s worst fears pale beside this beast we’ve fed—a snaking system that thrives on an uninformed flock, not a vigilant people. Nationalism’s allure is its promise of belonging, a bulwark against the global void, but it delivers a script where dissenters like Martin—or Massie—become outcasts, their warnings lost to the crowd’s hum. It hides its victims: the war-ravaged, the indebted, the erased. Martin’s unmarked grave illustrates a nation that has swapped its soul for a lie.

A limited republic needs no such lies. It’s a living bond, rooted in the dirt of free communities, not the marble of a debt-ridden throne. Our lives should not be governed by renters of power whose time in office provides an inadequate time horizon to do the right thing in the face of national pressure.

A republic demands citizens awake, not enthralled—criminals falter where principle reigns. Martin and Jefferson knew this, and we paved them over—one with forgetfulness, the other with platitudes. Massie’s defiance, however faint, cracks the myth open, begging us to look down—at the ghosts, the cost, and the republic we might yet reclaim if we can tell the truth. Nationalism may push back globalism, but it’s no home for liberty.