The Answers Are All in the History Books, And The Answers Are Not Pretty

Definition leads to clarity, clarity leads to understanding, understanding leads to wisdom, wisdom leads to good decision making.

By Rich Kozlovich

There are some historians I've read a lot over the years.  Nikole Hannah-Jones and the blatant falsehoods of her 1619 Project, the leftist corruption of the FDR administration, and more.  Yet we still see society embracing the very things history proves are disastrous.  The fact is all this screaming about racism in America is a corrupt scam destroying America.  And it's provable.  

There's no reason for society and these highly educated politicians to fail to see all this.  We have the history that tells the real story, it's recorded history, and it's history that's incontestable.  Yet, they fail to act on that history. 

I think is an excellent writer and one of my favorite historians.   Recently he published this piece, The Logic in All the Madness, Biden's agendas may have fundamentally changed America for decades, saying:

Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills.............

Most Americans poll strong support for Israel. They oppose the Biden effort to triangulate by revisiting the old Obama nihilist agendas of emboldening the Iranian/Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis axis to play off against our traditional allies of Israel and the more moderate Arab regimes.....

.......by allowing leftist campuses to normalize anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist advocacy, and by destroying the once close alliance of Israel and the United States, the left feels it will be almost impossible to go back to the pre-Obama/Biden years. Their legacy, they hope, is a mendicant Israel utterly dependent on U.S. largess—a condition itself predicated on essentially destroying the idea of a secure Jewish state within its present borders.

• Salman Rushdie: A Palestinian State Would Be Hamas "Is this what the progressive movements of the Western Left want to create?”
• Israel Cannot Maintain The Status Quo In Gaza Sha'i ben-Tekoa If Israel, having achieved a military victory, returns control over Gaza to the same radicals who control it now, she is re-committing to slow suicide. ..... Indeed, like the Nazis, the Brotherhood’s religion has had a 1,400-year history of mass murdering Jews, starting with the decapitation of hundreds at the Khaibar Oasis, a slaughter carried out by Muhammad himself.  In every century thereafter, Muslims massacred Jews.............

We're facing some serious economic issues that will be difficult to overcome, but we're facing some serious demographic issues that may be more difficult to overcome.  The left’s promotion of the gay agenda and the denigration of a traditional heterosexual society, and the nuclear family, along with the environmentalist’s demands we have less children to save the planet is having, and will have, devastating long-term demographic consequences.   

Then we have Muslim immigration, and make no mistake,  Muslims don’t buy into any of that. They have children - lots of children - and in many western nations they’re openly practicing polygamy, and European nations are allowing it. At what point is there a point of no return? If these leftist multiculturalist schemes continue western civilization is soon to become an Islamic nightmare. 

• A Nation That Doesn't Control its Borders, Isn't a Nation
• Prominent Muslim Declares: 'We Are On The Road To The White House' - The Islamic Takeover of America Unveiled
•  Israel Cannot Maintain The Status Quo In Gaza Sha'i ben-Tekoa If Israel, having achieved a military victory, returns control over Gaza to the same radicals who control it now, she is re-committing to slow suicide. .......A self-respecting Israel must finally gird its loins (a Biblical expression), and demand its right to sovereign ownership of Gaza. And as the legitimate landlord, it will have the authority to evict squatters, who, in the last election and via every opinion poll since, have supported the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas, whose goal is to finish Hitler’s work. Indeed, like the Nazis, the Brotherhood’s religion has had a 1,400-year history of mass murdering Jews, starting with the decapitation of hundreds at the Khaibar Oasis, a slaughter carried out by Muhammad himself.  In every century thereafter, Muslims massacred Jews. They butchered them in Toledo, Spain, in 1066; so did the rampaging Al-Muwahiddun (Almohades) in 12th-century Andalusia and North Africa. The Muslims expelled the Jews from Yemen in 1679; murdered hundreds in Algiers in 1805; and that’s just the shortlist...............

What's going to happen to Europe in five years?  It will continue to cease to exist as we know it. Violence is going to erupt all over Europe as the native populations begin to realize these leftists controlling their lives commitment to "multiculturalism" is a suicide pact with those who hate and despise everything Europe is or was. And there will be violence on the order of chaos!  

Even if the native population just sits down to die the Muslim population will translate all the violence that's going on in Muslim dominated lands to Europe, forcing all native Europeans into dimmitude, and killing the rest, including those of a different Muslim sect, whom they consider heretics. We will see the one thing we've all felt was impossible - an out and out religious war.  

Europe is breeding itself out of existence, as is Russia.  Even if they stand up against the insanity and drive Muslims out of Europe, and that's what they will finally conclude will have to be done if they're to survive (Think Spain after the defeat of the Moors) they will not have the numbers to properly rebuild their economy and America will not have the economic wherewithal to bail them out is we did after WWII, since America will be having it's own economic reality check trying to meet the financial obligations of Social Security and Medicare, not to mention the national debt.   

Europe will be on it's own and then will turn to the United Nations to provide for their security and economy, and that's a leaky vessel if there ever was one. Europe is doomed! And so is Russia!

One question remains. Currently Europe is ruled by socialists favoring internationalism. With the recent elections we're seeing a trend to turn to socialists of a nationalist flavor.  Actually, it doesn't much matter because they still won't have the population necessary to restore their economy, and even if Europeans realized the demographic time bomb they're facing and started have a ton on babies it would still take twenty years before that could make any difference. 

Russia has Putin and he's merely playing a delaying game with all his seemingly clueless actions in the Ukraine and the Middle East. Putin's trying to save the ethnic Russian people. But no matter, Europe is doomed and so is Russia! In thirty years they won't have a majority of ethnic Russians in their own country.

The same question applies to all Western countries including the United States is why do western cultures need Somalis, Afghans, Eritreans, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, etc?  The answer?  We don't need them and we shouldn't want them since they don't want to assimilate, they want to destroy, and the policies being carried out by the Democrats and the Biden administration actually enable that destructive behavior, and may take decades to repair, if it can be done.  

Taking a look at what the Democrats have done to the nation's major cities seems to me these major cities are doomed, and may take decades to return, if ever. 

The only thing Muslims support is perpetrating violence, robbery, rape, having slaves, having multiple wives, the end of women’s rights, the end of freedom of religion and the end of any legitimate form of democracy and dhimmitude. Dhimmitude is where non-Muslims are taxed by Muslims. We need to get this: Islam is antithetical to Democracy.  Islam isn't a religion!  Islam is a political criminal movement masquerading as a religion. Just because they've managed to go on for over 1400 years is immaterial. 

Can anyone not wonder that leftism is a form of insanity?   Everything they promote and support is anathema to Muslims and yet they stand shoulder to shoulder in support of Muslim immigration into western cultures, the destruction of Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.  Make no mistake about this.  If Muslim culture dominates the west they will eviscerate the leftists who supported them.  These "Fags For Hamas" demonstrators must be insane, because they'd be among the first to be thrown off high buildings. 

• Rebels without a Clue -  Hamas had a firm grip on Gaza from 2007 until late October.  Under their rule, summary executions of Palestinian opponents, repression, the criminalization of same-sex relations, and rampant human and civil rights violations have occurred..........

This is Islam, and Islam means “submission”, and it’s not just rhetoric to Muslims. They are deadly serious about everyone submitting to Islam, and they will use any and every form of violence to make that happen, including the murder of other Muslims with whom they disagree, and that isn’t a small number.  If someone says they want to kill you, believe them.

Western civilization is descending into a leftist multicultural Islamic nightmare right out of Dante’s Inferno filled with bestial appetites, violence, perversion, fraud, malice, hatred of their fellow man and intellectual fraud.

This is the disaster leftists have made for society, and now we're going to have to deal with it.  Make no mistake about this, if western civilization is to survive it must collectively recognize Islam is a cancer that must be eradicated from their society, but that’s not going to happen as long as multicultural socialists continue to rule. 

It's time we started paying attention to history, because that's where all the questions have the correct answers, and the historical lies being promoted in America's education institutions must be attacked, and punished by suing them and ending their funding.  The "historian" liars like Zinn and Nicole Hannah-Jones must be challenged and called to task, if history is to be the firm paved walkway leading to the stepping stones of the future.  

Is Biden Really the 14th Greatest President in American History?

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey has officially announced its results. And the survey from the American Political Science Association says that Obama is greater than Eisenhower and JFK, that Bill Clinton was greater than John Adams and Biden is greater than Reagan (not to mention Ulysses S. Grant and James Monroe of the Monroe Doctrine).

Is Biden really the 14th greatest president in American history? Obviously not. But these same “political science experts” also ranked Obama as the 7th greatest president, Bill Clinton as the 12th greatest president and Carter near the upper middle as the 22nd greatest president.

The Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey reflects the partisan hijacking of American history within academia. The top level of the rankings have been stacked with contemporary Democrats with FDR in 2nd place, Truman in 6th (just behind Thomas Jefferson), Obama in 7th, LBJ in 9th, JFK in 10th, Bill Clinton in 12th, Biden in 14th place and Woodrow Wilson in 15th.

If you believe academia, every single White House Democrat in the last hundred plus years, except Carter, ranks among the top 15 presidents in American history. What are the odds?

Only Clinton, who was impeached, Carter, who was a widely hated one-term president, and Biden, who is as unpopular as Carter, failed to crack the top 10.

This isn’t history, it’s revisionist history so shameless that it would make a Communist blush.

It is also no coincidence that no 20th century Republican who remained in his party cracks the top 10 except Eisenhower, that even Reagan ranks below Biden at 16th, George Bush I falls to 19th, Ford to 27th, slightly above Martin Van Buren, a corrupt and despised Tammany Hall leader (and one of the fathers of the Democratic Party), George Bush II is down in 32nd place, Nixon at 35th and Trump at 45th. Of the pre-New Deal Republicans, Coolidge is at 34th, Harding at 40th, and Hoover at 36th. In these same rankings, Biden is in 16th place.

The rankings represent an attempt at overruling the consensus of the age. Truman was widely unpopular, yet is named the 6th greatest president for little more than remaining at the wheel during the end of WWII, then presiding over the loss of China and near disaster in Korea, while Eisenhower, who was far more popular, takes 8th place after Obama. LBJ, who left office rejected by his party and the country, after disasters on every front, is ranked in 9th place.

But as wrongheaded as those rankings may be, at least Truman and LBJ presided over crucial moments in history and made momentous decisions. One can point to some of their accomplishments, but what did Obama accomplish to honor him as the 7th greatest president?

That is besides the same thing that led to him receiving a Nobel Peace Prize and a Grammy.

And what exactly entitles Bill Clinton to the 12th spot ahead of John Adams, Reagan, Grant, Monroe, Andrew Jackson and other genuinely pivotal figures? Did he fight for America’s independence, defeat Russia, or rebuild the nation after a civil war?

What is Bill Clinton even remembered for except a sex scandal (and assorted financial ones)?

It is bad enough that partisan historians are obsessed with pushing FDR to the top until he replaces Lincoln and, in the current survey, has already displaced George Washington, but they won’t stop until Bill Clinton’s red face is on Mount Rushmore only because of the D after his name.

And there’s Joe Biden, currently outranking Woodrow Wilson who, for all his flaws, presided over the country during WWI and, apart from a brief period when he was in a coma and his wife made the actual decisions, was conscious and able to communicate throughout his presidency.

It’s not just that leftists are bent on tearing down every historical figure, they’re equally determined to replace them with not only radicals, but corrupt and worthless mediocrities.

If William Henry Harrison, who died 31 days after his inauguration due to a bout of especially vigorous handshaking, is to be ranked down at number 41 on account of being incommunicado for most of it, what does that say about Biden? Biden could have only improved on his time in office if he were wholly unable to communicate, instead of only partially able, thereby preventing him from the folly of overseeing multiple economic, political and foreign policy disasters.

But then we must ask ourselves, what is greatness?

The revisionism started with a New Deal rewrite in which all of history began with FDR. Every Republican after Lincoln and Grant was ridiculed and written out of history with an exception made for Teddy Roosevelt whose splinter campaign was deemed to be progressive. Then when the Eisenhower era arrived, the ‘eggheads’ stewed and then with the arrival of JFK, began rewriting history once again.

After the chaos of the JFK and RFK assassinations, and then the frustrating rise of Nixon, the euphoria of his downfall, and the even more frustrating ascension of Reagan, it took some time to reboot history yet again into the form we are seeing again in the latest version of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey. The survey has come a long way since the Schlesinger presidential rankings. and it requires a new definition of greatness.

What makes Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama or Joe Biden great? Nothing outward. A conclave of experts assembled to explain their greatness can only spew gibberish. Both Clinton and Obama briefly touched off a spurt of media erotomania, but the spell quickly passed. And no one even fainted at Biden’s basement campaign rallies or believed that he loved them.

But in the New Deal revisionist history, greatness does not come from presiding over historic events, but in pursuing the leftist program of fundamentally transforming America. So while Biden may not make hearts flutter, like JFK, Obama and Clinton, he’s following the same plan.

Somewhere along the way the definition of greatness changed from making America great to making the Left great. It’s a greatness that is equally accessible to sleazy crooks, anti-colonialist hucksters and a fossilized D.C. hack who barely knows where he is half the time.

Sit down, James Madison (no. 11) and get out of Bill Clinton’s way. Learn your place John Adams (no. 13) and let Biden come on up front. We no longer measure the greatness of presidents by their character and their accomplishments, but by their destructiveness.

The greatest of presidents are now those who have done the most to destroy America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

P&D Today

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De Omnibus Dubitandum

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By Rich Kozlovich   

 

Well, another week has flown by, and, if I'm still alive, P&D will be back on Monday.  Now that I'm retired I'm always a bit surprised when Friday rolls around. Not that it matters because just about every day is now Friday....or Saturday for that matter.  I really like being retired.   

This picture montage is profound because it's history.  Real history.  And that's pretty much today's theme.   It boggles my mind when professional historians say some of the things they say because so much of it is horsepucky.  And they're being paid to spread it around.  Imagine that! Remarkable! 

Thomas Sowell is in my opinion one of the greatest thinkers in the world today, and he's always been brilliant in his simplicity.  He's been able to take really complex issues and simplify them so anyone could understand them, and his style been an inspiration for my writing style.  And creating simplicity out of complexity is not as easy as it may seem.  

At times this seems to be turning into a job.  Uhhh, just saying that gives me chills.  I really don't want a job, however, this weekend I will be working on two projects. One with my friend Jay Lehr to do 12 articles for America out Loud, and I want to get out another P&D Geopolitical Edition this weekend.  

I've stored so much stuff from the geopolitical sites to which I subscribe regarding China and Russia it will take some time or organize it.  Meaning to simplifying it all to create easy understanding.  The experts I follow generally have a ton of information on all this, so collating, correlating and condensing it all can be a bit of a challenge.  But I've developed a system I think works pretty well where I break everything down into three categories: demographics, geographics and economics, and usually much of it is repeated.  

Hopefully, I will have a P&D Geopolitical Edition for this weekend.  In the meanwhile, please enjoy today's offerings, four commentaries and three links. 

Commentaries

• Leftist Rights and Wrongs - or - Fixing Education is Job One in America  By Rich Kozlovich
• Time to Resuscitate the Flat Tax By Dan Mitchell
• Amnesty, Crack and Other RINO Senate Sellouts By Daniel Greenfield
• Creative Historical Interpretations Are Not History By Jack Bovee

Links

• The War Against Medical Tyranny Is Not Over
•  Canada Approves Euthanizing Patient Because He’s Poor
• The Most Dangerous President in American History

 

Constant as the North Star

 

Creative Historical Interpretations Are Not History

December 16, 2022 By Jack Bovee @ American Thinker 

 

(Editor's Note:  I have not asked for nor have I received permission to publish this piece in full.  However, as a history buff I know all this to be absolutely true and feel this piece needs the fullest distribution possible.  If American Thinker or the author object I will break it down to a link.  However, the last statements are all important: 

 

"This has been the toll of the false historical narrative. Literally, the survival of our nation is at stake. How do we correct the problem? Simple.  We demand a return to the honest teaching of American history."  RK)

The dominating narrative in American schools and the popular culture today is that slavery began in America in 1619.  Unfortunately, there is about as much truth in that scenario as there was in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” media crusade in August 2014.  Nikole Hannah-Jones and her Critical Race Theory comrades prove beyond doubt the accuracy of Arthur Schlesinger’s maxim that “history is a weapon.”  They distort the historical narrative by omitting key facts that, if told, would present an entirely different view of the past.

There seems to be a general consensus, regarding the arrival of African slaves at Jamestown in 1619. They were first captured in Angola, and sold to Portuguese slavers based in Luanda. While in transport towards Mexico, two English corsairs flying a Dutch flag captured this Portuguese ship in the Gulf and removed some of the slaves, who were then brought to Jamestown, which was in desperate need of laborers. Here, “some twenty odd” Africans were exchanged for “victuals.”

Then, the historical concurrence stops.  Hannah-Jones argues that all the Africans were reduced to slavery, while others argue that they were given the same status as White contracted laborers. Some argue that the word “servant” and not “slave” was used in Virginia’s first census of 1620. What complicates matters is that indentured servants sometimes referred to themselves as slaves.

The status of the Africans is also unclear because after the 1625 census we lost sight of them.  In putting forth the claim that those Africans who arrived in 1619 were life-long slaves it’s necessary to generalize events and omit key facts. For example, in 2011 Barack Obama signed a proclamation at the landing site, which read:

The first enslaved Africans in England’s colonies in America were brought to this peninsula on a ship flying the Dutch flag in 1619, beginning a long ignoble period of slavery in the colonies and, later, this Nation.

Unfortunately, that’s not the entire story. The words probably, may, and likely, are freely used to support the argument that the enslavement of Africans in colonial America began in 1619.  The Africans were indeed slaves when they arrived in Virginia, and they undoubtedly would have continued to remain slaves had they reached their intended destination in Mexico.  What the historical record in Virginia does show is that the small group of Africans was repeatedly referred to as “servants” in the annual censuses of 1620, 1624, and 1625.  Moreover, several of them appear later as free persons.  For this to happen, they undoubtedly had to have been accorded the status of their White equals (indentured servants).  Anthony  Johnson — one of the earliest Africans to arrive — began his life in Virginia as an indentured servant who gained his freedom and eventually became the owner of 250 acres of land through the headright system. His African wife, Mary, arrived in Virginia around 1622 or 1623 and was reported as living with Anthony in 1625.  They were both free before 1645 and “became comparatively prosperous landowners” on Virginia’s eastern shore.  In February 1653, Johnson’s home and some outbuildings were consumed by fire and he received public assistance from the colony because of his “hard labor and known service.” There’s more:

Two years later, when he and his family had again attained a modicum of prosperity, he successfully sued a prominent planter who he accused of illegally confiscating some of his livestock. Then in 1654, an incident took place that proved that Johnson, a black man, not only owned another member of his race, but was able to keep him in bondage for the rest of his life. The man in question was a ‘Negro called John Casor,’ who convinced a white neighbor that he was an indentured servant who should have been freed at the expiration of his tenure. Believing Casor, the man took him home to work in his own tobacco fields . . . In the end, the justices decided that Casor ‘shall forthwith be returned unto the service of his master Anthony Johnson.’

It’s ironic that this civil suit, which is cited as the first example of an enslaved African, had an African master.  The life of John Pedro provides another example: in 1625, John was listed in the household of Francis West, but was a free landowner in Lancaster, Virginia by the 1650s. Another, John Phillip, was thought to have been “the only African to arrive in Virginia free.”

Unfortunately, the scant records do not tell us much about the lives of these few dozen Africans.  Some Africans achieved free status and successfully sued — not just once, but twice — more prominent White colonists.  It is true that by the 1660s, the colonies were increasingly moving towards the institution of slavery, but when viewed within the context of global events, this is hardly seem surprising.  English civilians had long been at risk of enslavement themselves by Africans — as the White aristocrats in charge of the early Virginia colony were fully aware.  The coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland had been targeted by Muslim slavers from North Africa.  Since the Berber invasion of Spain and France, large Islamic armies had launched massive slave raids against Christian Europe.  Unlike Europe, which sought spices, Muslim armies sought “white gold” — slaves.  Men  were prized as galley slaves, eunuchs, and laborers who were worked to death in the mines and  quarries of North Africa.  Between 1400 and 1700, hundreds of thousands of white Christian boys and girls were seized by the Ottoman Empire in a form of “child tax” called devshirme.  It should be noted the early English explorer of Virginia, James Smith, was a soldier of fortune whose military experience fighting the Ottomans helped the colony to survive.  In August 1625 — the very year the Virginia census listed 25 Africans living there — Muslim slavers from Africa seized over 60 English residents who sought refuge in a church in Cornwall.  That same month, the Plymouth mayor decried that “27 ships had been taken and all the men on board, over 200 of them – had been made slaves.”

From Lundy Island, Muslim slavers established a permanent base and preyed upon England and Ireland for years. On two occasions, they sailed to Iceland, successfully capturing nearly 400 people, leaving more than 36 dead, some burned alive.  In 1631, African slavers seized 89 women and children and 20 men from Ireland, selling them in Algiers.  African-based slavers even attacked the Faroe Islands while continuing to ravage helpless towns all over coastal Europe. One Icelandic historian writes:

By the 1650s, there were 30,000 prisoners from coastal lands all over Europe in Algiers alone… As one of the hapless 400, Guðríður spent nine years in what’s now Algiers before the Danish government finally came up with ransom money… She was ransomed in June 1636 but had to leave her son behind in Algiers.

Ben Johnson succinctly summarizes it here:

For over 300 years, the coastlines of the south west of England were at the mercy of Barbary pirates (corsairs) from the coast of North Africa… Between 1677 and 1680 the English were losing 3,000 people to Muslim slavers per year, highlighting a problem that had not abated for the entirety of the century.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, more White Europeans were seized and taken to Africa than Black Africans seized and taken to America.

Nor were the English unfamiliar with events in eastern Europe — Ottoman slave raids from the Crimean Khanate enslaved an estimated 2 million people over hundreds of years.  Nor were the colonists in America immune.  The enslavement of White Americans and Europeans continued until actions by the United States in 1815 and England in 1816 finally brought it to an end. By this time, both the nations had outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade by stationing fleets of warships to intercept and free any slaves they encountered.  It’s worth remembering that very few of the slaves from Africa ever arrived in North America.  African-American historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that — of the 10.7 million who disembarked in the New World — only 450,000 African slaves were ever brought to North America.  Africans from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, on the other hand, are estimated to have enslaved 1.25 to 1.5 million  White Europeans.  Just as the facts surrounding the details of those few dozen Africans who disembarked in Virginia remain unclear, so the total number of Europeans who suffered enslavement by people of color remains hazy.

What is clear is that there has been a deliberate omission of the historical record in American schools regarding the subject of slavery and how it influenced the foundation of America.  Nor are many Americans aware that in its first 100 years as a nation, the U.S. fought three anti-slavery wars — two to free White slaves and one to free Blacks.  To deliberately ignore these historical truths is not only deceitful and wrong, it’s malicious.  What has been the result of this deliberate distortion of our nation’s past? National division.  Increased racial tension and hate crimes, emanating from a false narrative.  A lack of patriotism in our younger generation.  New forms of discrimination and racial segregation aimed against those who supposedly “enjoy” the benefits of “White privilege.”  Increased social upheaval within our once grand cities.  A collapse of our educational system.  A weakened military. Increased tribalism all across the nation.

This has been the toll of the false historical narrative. Literally, the survival of our nation is at stake.

How do we correct the problem? Simple.  We demand a return to the honest teaching of American history.

 

Don't laugh off the left's attempts to change history

May 26, 2022 By Blaine L. Pardoe

This week, Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project tweeted, "Black people posed a danger to the country's idea of itself; they held up a mirror into which the nation preferred not to peer.  So the inhumanity visited on Black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past and the inequality of the present."  She added, "The North did not fight the Civil War to end slavery." 

At the start of the Civil War, she was, technically correct.  The Union Army was just that: an army raised to preserve the United States.  However, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln changed the context of the war with the Emancipation Proclamation.  For the next three years, the North was fighting to put an end to the institution of slavery and to bring the rebel states back into the fold.  Let's not forget that the South initiated the secession because of the fear that President Lincoln and the North would abolish slavery in the first place. 

This isn't the first attempt by the Progressives to rewrite our history. Most of these instances, such as the one above, are laughable — at least on the surface.  Conservatives tend to view them with scorn.  Instances like this latest tweet are glossed over and mocked.  Yet they are out there, propagating a twisted narrative.

What is that narrative?  The United States was never a great country.  It was built by slaves and other oppressed people.  It was flawed from its inception.  Our country's iconic heroes such as Washington, Jackson, Jefferson, and others should be cast down because they owned slaves.  Capitalism is a system of racial and social oppression that, by its nature, makes it corrupt and evil.  There is no American dream.  To the Progressives, America is so deeply corrupted that it must be changed from the ground up — starting with the history of the nation.

George Orwell wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future."  The far left has adopted this mantra and is running with it.  Leftists intend to reboot the United States.  Our history, our true history, stands in the way of that.  So do our American values, our love of country, and the moral center that our religions provide..............  Read More @ American Thinker

The Judgement of Time

Truth isn't unkind.  It's just the truth.

By Rich Kozlovich 

We need to abandon our penchant to accede all thinking, reasoning, and conclusions about life to the "experts", all of whom are highly educated.  Many of whom are seriously flawed human beings.  I'm an autodidact, and as I've often noted that I'm not formally educated in any of the subjects I pontificate about, and I think done with well sourced information and reasoned intelligence. Often in opposition to the "experts". Often with the theme - "if the bugman knows this, how can these "experts" not know it?"

I've always been insatiably curious, and that's proven to be good, and bad.  It's been my experience that being insatiably curious is its own reward, and its own punishment.  The reward is, "you know".  The punishment is, "you know". 

• The reward is the satisfaction of digging into a subject in order to see it farther, deeper and wider than others, and then end up "knowing" that which is true and right.
  
• The punishment is knowing that which is true and right, and finding yourself at odds with everyone else. 

Which brings me to traditional wisdom versus conventional wisdom.  What are they and which is right?  How do you "know"?  There's a difference between traditional wisdom and conventional wisdom. Traditional wisdom has stood the test of time. Conventional wisdom is merely what everyone believes at the moment, and may only last until the next philosophical flavor of the day appears.

We have the desire to “know” things, to have the right answers, but that requires an understanding of a great many things. It has also been my experience that most things aren’t as complicated as they appear on the surface.  We just fail to understand the root problem properly.  We fail in definition.   As a result, we increase the difficulty of problem solving. 

There has always been an amazingly intricate interplay between people that has been at the heart of it all.   It's a fact that everything in life is about paradigms (the values of a society) and demographics (the make up of that society) as a result, paradigms create demographics and demographics create paradigms.  That can make things complicated in a multicultural society such as ours. 

So many demand perfection, yet history has shown that the “best we can hope for us the most tolerable imperfection”. A man once said that if you ever find the perfect organization, join it! However, he said, remember the minute you've joined, it has now become somewhat less than perfect! Why?  Because people will be people, and people act in their own self interest.

It is also true that ignorance is the natural state because we all start our lives ignorant. And for all of our lives we will remain ignorant about a great many things, because there is so much to learn about so many subjects, therefore a varying degree of ignorance is part of our lives and completely understandable. Ignorance simply means we don’t know. That's fixable by learning about things, many things, then we reduce our level of ignorance continually, but "never" totally! 

However, if we choose to remain ignorant, that's stupidity.  It's the stupidity I hate.

Reading history is one way of avoiding being more ignorant than everyone else. Mostly because history is the fruitage of the work of millions of people over thousands of years.  History is the source of traditional wisdom.   Unfortunately it only matters when we read it. It only works if we understand it, remember it correctly, and then apply it positively.

History has all the answers. There is really nothing new under the sun.  Everything that exists today has its foundation in man’s history.  The technology may become more advanced, but the application of all things is still based on that intricate interplay between human beings.  The correct information and necessary understanding to make the right decisions are all there, if we read it.   

We have at our disposal more information from more sources, all at our finger tips, than any society in the history of the world. Yet we, as a society, don’t read, we don't understand, and we don't understand because we lack sufficient information to properly define things.  And it seems to me we don't care about our history as a society, or the history of those who present challenges to our society.  That's a sure fire way of getting lost in time.  

That makes us easily fooled by those who twist and manipulate history and reality for their own ends.  And so many times those ends are in direct violation of traditional wisdom. I find those who twist history seem to have one thing in common.  Their interpretation of events usually denigrates or diminishes traditional wisdom and the values those traditions created.

That doesn’t necessarily make what they're promoting wrong by the way.  But it should at least ring a warning bell in the back of our minds that should make us want to dig deeper into the subject to find out the truth for ourselves.

We need to understand that if we don’t bother to read, and develop the correct understanding of history, we will be like the waves being washed back and forth by every new wind that blows our way.  

Definition leads to clarity.  Clarity leads to understanding.  Wisdom is the application of knowledge and understanding.  Without correct knowledge we can't define things as they are, which leads to an lack o understanding.  From that point on we have no anchor for our thinking, no touchstone by which to gauge our values.  We are then incapable of any real direction, as a result we fail in our judgments.   Judgments that will have a negative impact on our lives and society over the long haul. That society is our children and our grandchildren.

Some things really are right and some things really are wrong.  There really is such a thing as good and evil in the world.

There, now, that is a good start for foundational thinking, but you first have to abandon ignorance and arrogance.  

De Omnibus Dubitandum.  Everything is to be questioned.

Providence Teachers Union Confirms Affinity Group Segregation, Historical Books Destroyed, Holocaust Education Ended (Ramona Bessinger Update)

Union president: “So there’s people of color in one group and white folks in another group…. both the people of color and our teachers of color and our white teachers have said that they’re uncomfortable with it … some people feel like this is further segregationist and feel like it’s more divisive than helpful.”

William A. Jacobson Friday, July 16, 2021 8 Comments

Ramona Bessinger is the Providence, Rhode Island, middle school teacher who went public in a post at Legal Insurrection about the negative impact of Critical Race teaching, I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School:

This past 2020/21 school year was a sad and worrisome turning point for me as an educator. Providence K-8 teachers were introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.

Yes, I am speaking about the controversial critical race theory that has infiltrated our public schools here in Rhode Island under the umbrella of Cuturally Responsive learning and teaching, which includes a focus on identities. You won’t see the words “critical race theory” on the materials, but those are the concepts taught. The new, radicalized curriculum and materials focuses almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative, and have created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before….To Read More....

No Victory Lap For Governors Who Locked Down America

James Bovard – July 14, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

There are no fact-checkers for victory laps. Last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo summarized his experience with the Covid-19 crisis: “Speaking for myself, it was a tremendous personal benefit.” Cuomo made that declaration in a speech concluding his one-year chairmanship of the National Governors Association. Because Cuomo’s spiel sought to rewrite history to exonerate politicians who ravaged Americans’ rights and liberties, it requires a rebuttal. 

Cuomo declared that “we maximized the moment as governors. Governors have a new credibility. Governors have a new status.” Cuomo epitomized the rush to “absolute power” that occurred in governor’s mansions across the nation. After he fueled pandemic fears, the New York Times proclaimed, “Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now.” A New Yorker profile, titled “Andrew Cuomo, King of New York,” explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.” Cuomo denounced anyone who disobeyed his edicts, including condemning sheriffs as “dictators” for refusing to enforce his mask mandate inside people’s homes. 

Cuomo justified placing almost 20 million people under house arrest: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” Though his repressive policies failed to prevent New York from having among the nation’s highest Covid death rates, he became a superhero thanks largely to media scoring that ignored almost all of the harms he inflicted. Cuomo won an Emmy Award for his “masterful use of television” during the pandemic. Media valorization helped make Cuomo’s self-tribute book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a bestseller. 

Cuomo had plenty of power-mad accomplices in the governors’ association.  Oregon Governor Kate Brown banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions and also banned all recreational travel. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer imposed some of the most severe restrictions, prohibiting anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti even banned people from walking or bicycling outside. The CDC eventually admitted that there was almost no risk of Covid contagion from outdoors activity not amidst a throng of people. But that did not stop politicians from claiming that “science and data” justified locking people in their homes. 

Some governors have acted as if their shutdown orders gave them unlimited sway to decree when normal life could resume. California Gov. Gavin Newsom decreed that Covid restrictions would be perpetuated in California counties based on voter turnout, alcohol availability, and other non-health factors. California assemblyman Kevin Kiley groused, “An entire county can be kept shut down because certain areas are judged to be lacking in ‘equity,’ even if the whole county has relatively few cases of Covid.” The end of Covid restrictions turned into hostage release negotiations with domineering rulers clinging to all their new prerogatives. 

Cuomo was proud that, when he visits a school, he is no longer asked “‘What does a governor do?” because “people know what governors do and how important governors are.” Governors can wreck kids’ futures by shutting down schools and placing children under indefinite home detention, costing millions of children almost an entire year of learning. In some areas, private schools remained open and took precautions that kept children safe in the classroom. As Washington Examiner editor Tim Carney noted, students in Catholic schools in Montgomery County, Maryland continued attending school and were kept safer than public school students: “Kids learning remotely got Covid at 3 times the rate as kids learning in person.” Unreliable “distance learning” produced a more than 500 percent increase in the number of black and Hispanic students failing classes in Montgomery County government schools.

A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis concluded that shutting down the schools would reduce the current crop of students’ collective years of life by more than five million, based on “lower income, reduced educational attainment, and worse health outcomes.” School shutdowns blighted the lives of millions of children in part because the Centers for Disease Control proclaimed that six feet of “social distancing” was necessary to avoid contagion – an arbitrary standard pulled out of thin air that was denounced by former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

The lockdowns that governors imposed also pointlessly ravaged many Americans’ mental health. The Centers for Disease Control last month reported a 51% increase in emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts by teenage girls in early 2021. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found a 300% increase in the percentage of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder and/or depressive disorder (41% of adults in January 2021). The CDC also reported a record number of drug overdose deaths last year, due in part to the lockdowns and other government-imposed disruptions. 

Cuomo boasted that the Covid-19 responses “were probably the most consequential decisions that governors had made in generations. They were literally about life and death. You make the wrong decision, people could die.” Thousands of New Yorkers died because of Cuomo’s mistakes and cover-ups. New York state initially reported barely half of the total of more than 12,000 New York nursing home patients who died of Covid – one out of eight nursing home residents in the state that occurred after Cuomo ordered nursing homes to admit Covid patients. Early in the pandemic, Cuomo pushed to include a legislative provision written by the Greater New York Hospital Association to give a waiver of liability to nursing homes and hospitals whose patients died of Covid. A report earlier this year by the New York Attorney General warned, “The immunity laws could be wrongly used to protect any individual or entity from liability, even if those decisions were not made in good faith or motivated by financial incentives.” As the Guardian noted, “Cuomo’s political machine received more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association, its executives and its lobbying firms.”

Any politician who recited the magic words “science and data” became entitled to outlaw any activity he chose. Cuomo and other governors acted as if they had discovered a “good intentions” exemption to all limits on their power. Federal judge William Stickman IV condemned Pennsylvania’s Covid restrictions: “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But Cuomo and other governors presumed that proclaiming emergencies nullified the constitutional rights of any citizen under their sway. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Cuomo’s restrictions on limited religious gatherings because they were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” 

Cuomo’s spiel to the governors included Washington’s most revered banality: “We spoke truth to power.” But Cuomo’s own appointees suppressed the data on nursing home deaths while he was negotiating a $5 million advance for his book on pandemic leadership lessons. Last August, the Justice Department announced an investigation into state nursing home policies that boosted Covid death tolls in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Cuomo is probably confident that Biden’s Justice Department will throttle any such investigation that could tarnish Democratic governors. But will other investigations or Freedom of Information Act disclosures eventually obliterate the bragging rights of the Covid lockdowners?

Governors’ response to Covid was supposedly a glorious triumph because not every nursing home patient died, not every small business was bankrupted, and not every teenager attempted suicide from isolation and despair. Despite the severe repression of everyday life, more than 620,000 Americans reportedly died of Covid and more than 114 million were infected. According to the CDC more than ten million jobs were lost thanks to lockdowns, a major reason why life expectancy in the United States last year had its sharpest plunge since World War Two. CNN reported last month that “New York’s economy is America’s worst,” with economic activity at only 83% of pre-pandemic levels.

In reality, Cuomo’s speech relied on what Hegel called “the truth which lies in power.” As long as politicians are exalted, the actual details of their decrees are irrelevant: they have been coronated as saviors. Cuomo assured his fellow Covid-profiteering governors that “this will happen again.” This is why Americans must recognize the catastrophic failure of political iron fists during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

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