Revolutionary War Secrets And July 4th Trivia

“The endlessly repeated argument that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants ignores the fact most Americans are NOT descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants.”— Thomas Sowell

By Robin Itzler 

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors.  Any cartoons will have been added by me. If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free.

It took just over seven years for America to win our freedom. Although there were skirmishes before, it’s commonly thought that the American Revolution started on April 19, 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord. There was still some fighting, but basically the war is considered to have officially ended on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

At the beginning, we fought alone with little to no money. In time, Spain, the Netherlands and France helped America to win our freedom. But throughout the war, Patriots led the charge to freedom. Here are some interesting facts:

• Thomas Hickey was General George Washington’s personal bodyguard so you would think he might like the man he was protecting. Yet, Hickey was involved in a plot to assassinate Washington prior to the Declaration of Independence being signed. Others were involved, but only Hickey was executed for the plot.
• Support for the colonies breaking away from Great Britain never exceeded 45 percent. Unlike the Civil War, where the north fought south, in this fight neighbors fought neighbors.
• One day Great Britain was winning. The next day colonists were winning. Many people changed allegiance based on who they thought would eventually win.
• Some women fought in the Continental Army disguised as men.
• Invisible ink was used to send secret messages between General Washington and other Patriot leaders. The ink (ferrous sulfate mixed with water) was developed by Dr. James Jay, brother of Founding Father John Jay. Once the ink dried, you couldn’t see anything. Only when covered in a specific chemical or placed near heat did the message appear.
• George Washington did NOT have wooden teeth. His false teeth were made from cow’s teeth and ivory held together by springs.
• Lack of records makes confirmation impossible, but it’s believed that for every troop killed on the battlefield, two more died of disease.
• The National Archives in Washington, D.C. displays the Declaration of Independence, which many people believe is the one and only original. This copy has all 56 signatures of the Second Continental Congress. There were 200 copies of the original printed. The other 199 copies were officially signed by John Hancock and Charles Thompson. Of those 199 copies, 26 survived and the rest lost to history.

Sources: Genealogy Bank, Rochester University, The Archive, State of No. Carolina 

 July 4th Trivia

As you wait for the food to cook on the barbecue or the fireworks to start, amaze your family and friends with some interesting trivia about July Fourth: 

• Founding Fathers John Adams (2nd president) and Thomas Jefferson (3rd president) died on July 4, 1826—our nation’s 50th birthday. Adams was 91 and Jefferson was 83. 
• James Monroe (5th president) passed away on July 4, 1831.
• Calvin Coolidge (30th president) was born on July 4, 1872.
• The number 83 (Thomas Jefferson’s age when he died) is very interesting. If anyone in your group is 83 years old, that means they were born in 1942. Someone born 83 years before 1942 was born 1859. Someone born 83 years before 1859 was born in 1776. 
• The average age of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers was 44. Benjamin Franklin was the oldest at 70 years. He lived to age 84. 
• Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old.
• George Washington was 44 years old when the Declaration was signed. 
• King George of England was 38 years old.

BONUS: The height of the new World Trade Center in New York City is 1,776 feet high.

American Uprising

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution.

It’s midnight in America. The day before million of Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel that had been grinding them down. They stood there even though the media told them it was useless. They took their stand even while all the chattering classes laughed and taunted them.

They were fathers who couldn’t feed their families anymore. They were mothers who couldn’t afford health care. They were workers whose jobs had been sold off to foreign countries. They were sons who didn’t see a future for themselves. They were daughters afraid of being murdered by the “unaccompanied minors” flooding into their towns. They took a deep breath and they stood.

They held up their hands and the great iron wheel stopped.

The Great Blue Wall crumbled. The states fell one by one right down to Pennsylvania. The working class that had been overlooked and trampled on for so long got to its feet. It rose up against its oppressors and the rest of the nation, from coast to coast, rose up with it.

They fought back against their jobs being shipped overseas while their towns filled with migrants that got everything while they got nothing. They fought back against being told that they had to watch what they say. They fought back against being held in contempt because they wanted to work for a living and take care of their families.

They fought and they won.

This wasn’t a vote. It was an uprising. Like the ordinary men chipping away at the Berlin Wall, they tore down an unnatural thing that had towered over them. And as they watched it fall, they marveled at how weak and fragile it had always been. And how much stronger they were than they had ever known.

Who were these people? They were leftovers and flyover country. They didn’t talk right or think right. They had the wrong ideas, the wrong clothes and the ridiculous idea that they still mattered.

They couldn’t change anything. A thousand politicians and pundits had talked of getting them to adapt to the inevitable future. Instead they got in their pickup trucks and drove out to vote.

And they changed everything.

Americans were told that walls couldn’t be built and factories couldn’t be opened. That treaties couldn’t be unsigned and wars couldn’t be won. It was impossible to ban Muslim terrorists from coming to America or to deport the illegal aliens turning towns and cities into gangland territories. It was all impossible. And they did the impossible. They turned the world upside down.

It’s midnight in America. CNN is weeping. MSNBC is wailing. It wasn’t supposed to happen. The same machine that crushed the American people for two straight terms, the mass of government, corporations and non-profits that ran the country, was set to win.

Instead the people stood in front of the machine. They blocked it with their bodies. They went to vote even though the polls told them it was useless. They looked at the empty factories and barren farms. They drove through the early cold. They waited in line. They came home to their children to tell them that they had done their best for their future. They bet on America. And they won.

They won improbably. And they won amazingly.

They were tired of seeing their America disappear. And they stood up and fought back. This was their last hope. Their last chance to be heard.

The media had the election wrong all along. This wasn’t about personalities. It was about the impersonal. No one will ever interview all those men and women. We will never see all their faces. But they are us and we are them. They came to the aid of a nation in peril. They did what real Americans have always done. They did the impossible.

America is a nation of impossibilities. We exist because our forefathers did not take no for an answer. Not from kings or tyrants. Not from the elites who told them that it couldn’t be done.

The day when we stop being able to pull of the impossible is the day that America will cease to exist.

Today is not that day. Today fifty million Americans did the impossible.

Midnight has passed. A new day has come. And everything is about to change.

Daniel Greenfield is a columnist, an investigative journalist and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 

The Issue is the Revolution

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” mobs of college students chant at terror rallies.

What is there to ‘revolt’ against in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago? The Hamas rallies like the BLM, environmentalist and other radical rallies take place in cities run by mayors and city councils who support their efforts and sometimes even show up to their events.

Even before New York City and other municipalities paid out millions in voluntary settlements to the BLM rioters who had assaulted police officers, the dirty secret of the radical mobs was that the authorities were on their side. And will continue to be on their side no matter what they do.

The revolution is also the thing that it’s revolting against.

Democrats secured control of the country’s major cities only to be faced with the timeless leftist challenge of making the intensification of their rule look like revolution rather than totalitarianism. The USSR and Cuba directed the ‘revolution’ outward by invading, conquering and intervening in other countries. Democrat cities nationalized their politics, building entire campaigns around Trump, abortion and (to their eventual regret) declaring themselves to be sanctuary cities.

As long as Republicans existed anywhere, urban Democrats could not sleep soundly at night.

Democrat control of cities and states didn’t end bipartisan politics, just turned it into a somewhat real and somewhat fake grudge match between the party’s really crazy and less crazy wings. Craziness was a variable like ‘X’ that was defined not by the common sense brakes of intellectual diversity, but by how far the really crazy wing could push the less crazy wing.

In 2010, open borders, freeing all the criminals, men pretending to be women and support for Hamas were fringe positions of the really crazy wing. By 2024, they’re Democrat positions.

The difference between the really crazy wing and the merely crazy wing is not that they have fundamentally different beliefs, but different tactics and comfort zones. It didn’t take long for the next generation to come home for winter breaks and win over the Democrat moms and dads to police defunding, drag queen story hour and the mass murder of Jews. But first the cultural establishment had to make these horrifying things seem respectable and normal.

Had to fit banning cars and Hamas on a lawn sign right under “in this house, love is love”.

What will the really crazy wing of the party normalize next? Check the academic calendar for the next year, social media for the year after and then the protest calendar for the next five years.

The ‘revolution’ is just about the radicals running the streets getting the feckless ex-liberals running the actual show to adopt some horrendous policy derived from the ravings of a 19th century philosopher and then given a glow up by activist academics and public intellectuals.

Classic town hall politics, limited constitutional government, and checks and balances in a bipartisan system would have prevented American cities from turning into the Paris Commune, but urban politics had made a rapid transition from Tammany Hall political machines to corporate consultants to Marxist struggle sessions with little democracy to be found in any of it.

Cities aren’t run by voters but by ‘stakeholders’. Lifelong community activists and their community groups, municipal unions and their members, and a few political clubs harvest ballots, turn out votes and then end up running cities. That 1% actually runs our lives.

A new generation of young radical activists with dot com money backing and social media savvy like AOC found it easy enough to harness the power of hipster grad students living in $3K a month walkups to disrupt the system and carve out their own extremist slice of the pie.

The new red guard, like the old, however had to find something to do besides stealing money.

The lofty promises of universal health care require more money than is available even if the wings of the old crazy party and the new really crazy party stopped stealing all the money. Defunding the police by moving money from law enforcement to their leftist activist social allies is easier. And a good pogrom against Jewish stores and synagogues is a great distraction.

The revolution isn’t about killing Jews (or not just about killing Jews) but wiping out entire classes of people, reactionaries, shopkeepers and whoever else ended up in the killing fields of Siberia, Guangxi and Choeung Ek for the power and profit of a rising new political elite.

The less crazy party thinks it will never have to come to that, but as with its views on men showering with girls or exposing schoolchildren to violent pornography, this is subject to change.

Life as an urban/suburban bourgeoise with regular stops at Starbucks, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods before charging the Tesla in the driveway is pretty comfortable, but being a pol commissar with a dacha in the Outer Banks and the power to gulag your enemies might just be better. All of that will require not just one revolution but a cycle of intermittent revolutions.

The causes matter less than the trajectory. One day it’s the police, the next day it’s car owners and then it’s the Jews. (Say what you will, but the Jews are always a popular one.) The issue, as a certain Marxist once said, is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

Causes provide narratives. Berkeley professors and Wall Street personal assistants who have no idea where the river or the sea may be are chanting for the destruction of Israel because it’s a nice change of pace. Like all of us, leftists like to feel that they’re growing as people by embracing new murderous causes. Freeing all the criminals didn’t work so well, but freeing all the terrorists to kill Jewish people thousands of miles away feels both heroic and safe.

But the exoticism of chanting for an “intifada” boils down to a call for revolution here and now.

Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that the ultimate purpose of the anti-Israel BDS movement is “eradicate America as we know it.” Eradicating America as we know it might seem a bit off-putting to the suburban soy dads and wine moms who make up the middle class base of the party, but they’ll come around just like they did on turning Tim into Tammy and Tammy into Tim. What else are they going to do anyway: become Republicans and have people sneer at them in Whole Foods and risk their kids refusing to come home for the holidays?

The revolution is about eradicating America as we know it. A lot of it’s gone already, but there’s still plenty of work of destruction to be done until we’re all on the right side of history. Or dead.

Revolution is all about being on the right side of history. And the revolution consists of old liberals who are terrified of being on the wrong side of it, stammering their way through pronouns and handling popular critical race theory texts like they were the sacred scriptures of a religion they don’t believe in, and young radicals certain that they are on the right side of it.

But ‘revolution’ is also just dictatorship misspelled. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The dictatorship in urban and sub Democrat areas is already here.

The stream of monthly revolutions make the deepening totalitarianism, the higher confiscatory taxes, the daily government scrutiny of everything from trash content to social media posts (in cities where violent muggings earn thugs no more than a free therapy session) and the ideology tests for employment, seem like liberation. But that’s what the Russians called it too.

Each revolution makes us more enslaved and less free. We are not free to walk the streets, not free to think for ourselves and not free to even work for a living. We are however free to protest.

But only as long as it’s for the revolution of the political machine taking away all our freedoms.

The issue isn’t drug dealers shot while assaulting police officers. It’s not Israel. It’s not oil or illegals. Those are just the levers which make the dictatorships running our lives more extreme. They are also how those dictatorships pretend that there’s a vibrant system of political dissent.

The issue is not the issue. The issue is that the fake revolutions are a tyranny. The issue is that we have become the slaves of a system that keeps promising to liberate us from our freedoms.

The issue is that we cannot go on living this way.

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.

 

The Issue is the Revolution

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” mobs of college students chant at terror rallies.

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

What is there to ‘revolt’ against in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago? The Hamas rallies like the BLM, environmentalist and other radical rallies take place in cities run by mayors and city councils who support their efforts and sometimes even show up to their events.

Even before New York City and other municipalities paid out millions in voluntary settlements to the BLM rioters who had assaulted police officers, the dirty secret of the radical mobs was that the authorities were on their side. And will continue to be on their side no matter what they do.

The revolution is also the thing that it’s revolting against.

Democrats secured control of the country’s major cities only to be faced with the timeless leftist challenge of making the intensification of their rule look like revolution rather than totalitarianism. The USSR and Cuba directed the ‘revolution’ outward by invading, conquering and intervening in other countries. Democrat cities nationalized their politics, building entire campaigns around Trump, abortion and (to their eventual regret) declaring themselves to be sanctuary cities.

As long as Republicans existed anywhere, urban Democrats could not sleep soundly at night.

Democrat control of cities and states didn’t end bipartisan politics, just turned it into a somewhat real and somewhat fake grudge match between the party’s really crazy and less crazy wings. Craziness was a variable like ‘X’ that was defined not by the common sense brakes of intellectual diversity, but by how far the really crazy wing could push the less crazy wing.

In 2010, open borders, freeing all the criminals, men pretending to be women and support for Hamas were fringe positions of the really crazy wing. By 2024, they’re Democrat positions.

The difference between the really crazy wing and the merely crazy wing is not that they have fundamentally different beliefs, but different tactics and comfort zones. It didn’t take long for the next generation to come home for winter breaks and win over the Democrat moms and dads to police defunding, drag queen story hour and the mass murder of Jews. But first the cultural establishment had to make these horrifying things seem respectable and normal.

Had to fit banning cars and Hamas on a lawn sign right under “in this house, love is love”.

What will the really crazy wing of the party normalize next? Check the academic calendar for the next year, social media for the year after and then the protest calendar for the next five years.

The ‘revolution’ is just about the radicals running the streets getting the feckless ex-liberals running the actual show to adopt some horrendous policy derived from the ravings of a 19th century philosopher and then given a glow up by activist academics and public intellectuals.

Classic town hall politics, limited constitutional government, and checks and balances in a bipartisan system would have prevented American cities from turning into the Paris Commune, but urban politics had made a rapid transition from Tammany Hall political machines to corporate consultants to Marxist struggle sessions with little democracy to be found in any of it.

Cities aren’t run by voters but by ‘stakeholders’. Lifelong community activists and their community groups, municipal unions and their members, and a few political clubs harvest ballots, turn out votes and then end up running cities. That 1% actually runs our lives.

A new generation of young radical activists with dot com money backing and social media savvy like AOC found it easy enough to harness the power of hipster grad students living in $3K a month walkups to disrupt the system and carve out their own extremist slice of the pie.

The new red guard, like the old, however had to find something to do besides stealing money.

The lofty promises of universal health care require more money than is available even if the wings of the old crazy party and the new really crazy party stopped stealing all the money. Defunding the police by moving money from law enforcement to their leftist activist social allies is easier. And a good pogrom against Jewish stores and synagogues is a great distraction.

The revolution isn’t about killing Jews (or not just about killing Jews) but wiping out entire classes of people, reactionaries, shopkeepers and whoever else ended up in the killing fields of Siberia, Guangxi and Choeung Ek for the power and profit of a rising new political elite.

The less crazy party thinks it will never have to come to that, but as with its views on men showering with girls or exposing schoolchildren to violent pornography, this is subject to change.

Life as an urban/suburban bourgeoise with regular stops at Starbucks, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods before charging the Tesla in the driveway is pretty comfortable, but being a pol commissar with a dacha in the Outer Banks and the power to gulag your enemies might just be better. All of that will require not just one revolution but a cycle of intermittent revolutions.

The causes matter less than the trajectory. One day it’s the police, the next day it’s car owners and then it’s the Jews. (Say what you will, but the Jews are always a popular one.) The issue, as a certain Marxist once said, is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

Causes provide narratives. Berkeley professors and Wall Street personal assistants who have no idea where the river or the sea may be are chanting for the destruction of Israel because it’s a nice change of pace. Like all of us, leftists like to feel that they’re growing as people by embracing new murderous causes. Freeing all the criminals didn’t work so well, but freeing all the terrorists to kill Jewish people thousands of miles away feels both heroic and safe.

But the exoticism of chanting for an “intifada” boils down to a call for revolution here and now.

Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that the ultimate purpose of the anti-Israel BDS movement is “eradicate America as we know it.” Eradicating America as we know it might seem a bit off-putting to the suburban soy dads and wine moms who make up the middle class base of the party, but they’ll come around just like they did on turning Tim into Tammy and Tammy into Tim. What else are they going to do anyway: become Republicans and have people sneer at them in Whole Foods and risk their kids refusing to come home for the holidays?

The revolution is about eradicating America as we know it. A lot of it’s gone already, but there’s still plenty of work of destruction to be done until we’re all on the right side of history. Or dead.

Revolution is all about being on the right side of history. And the revolution consists of old liberals who are terrified of being on the wrong side of it, stammering their way through pronouns and handling popular critical race theory texts like they were the sacred scriptures of a religion they don’t believe in, and young radicals certain that they are on the right side of it.

But ‘revolution’ is also just dictatorship misspelled. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The dictatorship in urban and sub Democrat areas is already here.

The stream of monthly revolutions make the deepening totalitarianism, the higher confiscatory taxes, the daily government scrutiny of everything from trash content to social media posts (in cities where violent muggings earn thugs no more than a free therapy session) and the ideology tests for employment, seem like liberation. But that’s what the Russians called it too.

Each revolution makes us more enslaved and less free. We are not free to walk the streets, not free to think for ourselves and not free to even work for a living. We are however free to protest.

But only as long as it’s for the revolution of the political machine taking away all our freedoms.

The issue isn’t drug dealers shot while assaulting police officers. It’s not Israel. It’s not oil or illegals. Those are just the levers which make the dictatorships running our lives more extreme. They are also how those dictatorships pretend that there’s a vibrant system of political dissent.

The issue is not the issue. The issue is that the fake revolutions are a tyranny. The issue is that we have become the slaves of a system that keeps promising to liberate us from our freedoms.

The issue is that we cannot go on living this way.

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.

What Are All These Illegals Going to Do?

Mark Lewis May

So, the gate to illegal entrance into America is now open wider than it was before.  Well, since Biden became President, there hasn’t been a gate.  By the time he leaves office, there will be...how many people illegally in the United States, having crossed our non-existent southern border, by far the greatest breakdown of the federal government whose first job is to protect Americans from invasion by those who are not legally allowed into the land.  This will be Biden’s most horrendous legacy historically—the worst of all his failures.  

What will the total figure end up being?  25 million?  30 million?  There is no way we will know, until they are all given amnesty, which will happen eventually.  That’s what the Democrats want and, well, what else can we do with them?  Ship them back across the Mexican border and let them die in the desert?  They are here to stay, folks, you know it, I know it, they know it, and Biden knows it.  And that’s been the plan all along.

But what will they do?  Well, a variety of things, none good because they are here illegally—at least for a while.  But here are some possibilities to keep them occupied.

1. Pick crops.  Many of them are already doing that, and have been for years.  They shouldn’t be doing it, of course, not just because they shouldn’t be here in the first place, but because they are taking work from American citizens........... 
2. Some illegals will sell drugs.  That’s what many of them came to do—work for the cartels.  They can make pretty good money killing Americans............... 
3. Menial jobs, welfare, homelessness, crime.  Very few of the illegals are skilled laborers (except for picking Nancy’s crops), so they won’t be able to get high paying jobs.  They will live together in hovels, 8, 10, 12 to a house, or on the streets, and be in poverty.  Many will, of course, get on welfare and you and I will take care of them through our tax dollars.  There are a lot of other criminals crossing the border as well, and thus the Democrat-caused crime wave will escalate.  All this chaos is exactly what the Left wants because..............
4. These people are a revolution waiting to happen.  The illegals are going to discover that Joe Biden’s America is not what it was advertised to be.  Most of them will exist in squalor and deep poverty, with no easy avenue of escape................

I’ve seen it too many times in history.  Once the avalanche starts, there is no way to stop it.......... To Read More...

How Much Longer Can Western Governments Spit on Their People?

March 30, 2023 By J.B. Shurk

Labor strikes and fiery riots dominate French news after King Macron's imperial decision to raise the nation's retirement age without any vote from parliament.  In reaction to spiraling inflation, German transportation workers shut down the country on Monday in one of the largest European walkouts in decades.  In the Netherlands, a new anti-globalist, pro-farmer political party fighting back against the World Economic Forum's climate change–obsessed "Great Reset" agenda just dominated Dutch elections.  In "defiance of establishment elites," Italians chose Giorgia Meloni to free the nation from subjugation to Brussels and "defend God, country, and family."  And as left-wing protesters in Israel threaten civil war, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been forced to temporarily suspend his efforts to reform the nation's powerful Judiciary, which operates largely free from competing checks and balances.  Clearly, revolution is in the air.............. To Read More....

How Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' Helped Inspire the American Revolution

The 47-page pamphlet took colonial America by storm in 1776 and made critical arguments for declaring independence from England.  

Patrick J. Kiger @ History

But a single 47-page pamphlet—the 18th-century equivalent of a paperback book—did a lot to quickly change that, and shift American sentiment toward independence. Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine and first published in Philadelphia in January 1776, was in part a scathing polemic against the injustice of rule by a king. But its author also made an equally eloquent argument that Americans had a unique opportunity to change the course of history by creating a new sort of government in which people were free and had the power to rule themselves.

'Common Sense,' published in 1776, inspired American colonists to declare independence from England. Joy of Museums/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

“We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth,” Paine wrote. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Centuries before the existence of the internet, Common Sense managed to go viral, selling an estimated 500,000 copies. By the end of the Revolutionary War, an estimated half-million copies were in circulation throughout the colonies.

By promoting the idea of American exceptionalism and the need to form a new nation to realize its promise, Paine’s pamphlet not only attracted public support for the Revolution, but put the rebellion’s leaders under pressure to declare independence. And even after the victory over the British, Paine’s influence persisted, and some of his ideas found their way into the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Who Was Thomas Paine and Why Did He Write 'Common Sense'?

Paine’s provocative pamphlet was the first real success in his life. Born in 1737 in England to a financially struggling family, he had to quit school at age 13 to labor as an apprentice in his father’s corset shop. He did a brief stint as a sailor on a privateer ship at age 20, and tried and failed to start a craftsman business. He managed to land a government job as an excise tax collector, but was fired twice, the second time after leading an unsuccessful campaign to get higher wages for him and his colleagues. His failed efforts to lobby Parliament left him with a dim view of the British system of government.

Bereft of prospects at age 37, he convinced Benjamin Franklin, whom he’d met in London, to give him a letter of recommendation, and emigrated to America in hopes of catching a break at last.

When Paine arrived in America in 1774 and found work as a journalist in Philadelphia, the colonies already were in tumult over opposition to Britain’s attempts to impose new taxes and restrict trade.

“Paine witnessed it all, and thought, these people are ripe for a revolution,” explains Harvey J. Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America.

In 1775, with the encouragement of Franklin and Benjamin Rush, the physician and activist who became a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Paine began writing a pamphlet that would urge Americans to go beyond merely resisting British authority. “He encouraged them to realize that they weren’t British, that they were Americans,” Kaye explains.

Paine originally wanted to call his pamphlet The Plain Truth, but Rush, who informally served as his editor, persuaded him to name it Common Sense instead, according to Stephen Fried’s biography of the physician. That phrase fit one of Paine’s most important notions, that Americans should trust their feelings, rather than get bogged down in abstract political debates.

“The Almighty hath implanted in us these unextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes,” Paine wrote. “They are the guardians of his image in our hearts.”

Key Points Made in 'Common Sense'

Here are some of Paine’s key points:

• Government's purpose was to serve the people. Paine described government as a “necessary evil,” which existed to give people a structure so they could work together to solve problems and prosper. But to do that, it had to be responsive to people’s needs. The British system, Paine argued, failed at that, because it gave the monarchy and nobles in Parliament too much power to thwart the people’s elected representatives. “The constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine,” Paine wrote.

• Having a king was a bad idea. Paine didn't just find fault with British rule of the colonies. He ridiculed the very idea of having a hereditary monarch at all. "In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places, which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears," Paine wrote. "A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshiped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived."

• America as the home of the free. Paine refuted the notion that Americans should be loyal to a mother country that he considered a bad parent. “Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families,” he wrote. Besides, he argued, America’s real connection was to people everywhere who yearned to escape oppression. "This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe," Paine proclaimed. "Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still."

• America had a rare opportunity to create a new nation based on self-rule. As Paine saw it, both Americans and the British knew it was inevitable that the colonies would break free. "I have never met with a man, either in England or America, who hath not confessed his opinion, that a separation between the countries, would take place one time or other." And that time had come. America had raw materials, from timber and hemp to iron, and the skills that it needed to build and equip an army and navy for its defense. Just as important, the individual colonies had the potential to put aside differences and form a powerful nation. But they needed to do it quickly, before the population grew to a point where new divisions might develop. The moment in history was "that peculiar time, which never happens to a nation but once," he wrote.

• A strong central government was needed. Paine envisioned that the new nation would have a strong central government, with a constitution that protected individual rights, including freedom of religion. "A firm bargain and a right reckoning make long friends," he argued.

Why Did Paine’s Pamphlet Become So Influential?

Jefferson considered Paine to be the best writer of the Revolution, according to Kaye. But it wasn’t just his arguments that appealed to people. Unlike other American leaders who were well-educated landed gentry, Paine could reach into his own humble background to find his voice.

"He knew people weren’t thinking in the abstract," Kaye explains. "Paine wrote to his peers, in a language everyone could understand."

Just as importantly, Paine understood that philosophical abstractions weren't as powerful as emotion and experience. Instead, Paine urged Americans to embrace "common sense," and trust their own feelings about what was right and just and how the country should be run, just as they did with other everyday decisions. "They recognized themselves in that argument,” Kaye says.

"I attribute its success to two things," Jack Fructman, Jr., author of The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine and Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, explains. "First, it was the first published piece that I know of advocating separation from the British Empire. And second, there were pirated copies circulating, a rather common phenomenon in the 18th century before copyright laws." In addition, he notes, "it was often read aloud, which helped spread its popularity and notoriety."

The popularity of Common Sense made it tough for colonial leaders to take a halfway stance against the British. As John Adams wrote to his wife in April 1776: "Common Sense, like a ray of revelation, has come in seasonably to clear our doubts, and to fix our choice."

As Thomas Jefferson biographer Joseph J. Ellis has written, Common Sense "swept through the colonies like a firestorm, destroying any final vestige of loyalty to the British crown." Within a few months of its publication, the Continental Congress instructed each colony to draft new state constitutions, an act that set the colonies clearly on the path to declaring independence. 

Thomas Jefferson, who had received an early copy of Common Sense in February 1776, began writing a formal document in June that would announce to the world that the new nation had been created.

But Paine's pamphlet might actually have done more than the declaration than to unify Americans and win converts to the cause. Paine’s espousal of religious freedom, for example, appealed to people who resented being forced to pay tithes to churches they didn't belong to.

During the Revolution, "most Americans thought Common Sense was the revolutionary document, not the Declaration of Independence," Kaye says.

Over the nearly 250 years since Paine's publication of Common Sense, Paine, whom some call "the forgotten founder," hasn't received as much recognition as other important figures in the Revolution. There isn’t even a statue of him in the nation's capital. Nevertheless, Paine's pamphlet continues to be read, and the ideas in it—particularly the idea of American exceptionalism—continue to resonate among new generations of Americans.

 

The Coming Coup?

Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

9/4/20 Michael Anton 

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”............... 

The Cover-Up in Plain Sight

These items are, to repeat, merely a short but representative list of what Byron York recently labeled “coup porn.” York seems to think this is just harmless fantasizing on the part of the ruling class and its Democratic servants. For some of them, no doubt that’s true. But for all of them? I’m not so sure.

.........To Read More.....

The Plot to Change America

Replying to Matthew J. Peterson, "The Racial Marxism of BLM"

By Mike Gonzalez

How Marxist ideologues took over our culture.

Increasingly, calls for wealth and power redistribution are dressed as compensatory justice for members of different identity groups. We see this playing out on our campuses, in our corporations, and, recently, in our streets. But when did the world shift away from a Marxism based on economic classes (the worker v. the bourgeois) into one based on immutable characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and even disability status?

A story has to start somewhere, and I suggest the best place for this one is a fascist prison in Italy in the late 1920s and 1930s. There languished the Italian Com­munist leader Antonio Gramsci. Now he had the time to write down thoughts he’d been entertaining for over a decade.

It had long since dawned on Gramsci that, though Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had promised almost a century earlier that the working class would rise up, overthrow the capital­ists, and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, until that time revolutions had been few.

In Europe, the revolutions of 1848 had failed. The Bolsheviks had succeeded in Russia in 1917, but the rest of Europe was run by capitalists. America was even more hope­less. There, as Engels had written in 1892, “society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois basis” (though he added, wrongly as it turned out, that things were about to turn).

Where had Marx and Engels gone wrong? Gramsci came up with a meta-explanation. The bourgeoisie had acculturated the working­ man to do its bidding, giving him “false consciousness.” In this manner, the bourgeois did not even have to coerce the worker into submission........To Read More...

Waking A Sleeping Giant

By Ray DiLorenzo —— Bio and Archives--June 20, 2020 @ Canada Free Press


The air is still, but there is a tension. You can feel it. It’s a stillness that makes one nervous, as a sleeping volcano that’s beginning to awaken, showing smoke and ash. For right now, people are quiet, wondering what is around the corner.

Common folk are continuing to be bombarded by the Left, behind their high walls with a self-righteous, phony ‘heart felt’ drone of why the country we all love, having so many of us fought and died for, is a sham, a fraud, illegitimate, irredeemable. Former Secretary of State, John Kerry is even predicting a revolution if Trump wins re-election.

 Left has deliberately planned and carried out the gradual destruction of our culture

The Left recruits the protesters, the placard walkers, the mindless bull-horn loudmouths spilling their gratuitous and absurd cacophony. It’s the reticent, restrained, hard-working citizen who plays by the rules, wasting no time complaining, that is muted, and for the time being controlled. These folk listen in silence, growing immune to the continuous noise.

For many decades, at least since the sixties, the Left has deliberately planned and carried out the gradual destruction of our culture, what made us the greatest country in all of human history, to a point unrecognizable. They went from blue jeans to three piece suits…destruction from the inside. They have dismissed God from the public square, devastated our schools, taught our children to hate God, country, and parents, destroyed countless Black and White families with welfare and handouts, keeping them in ‘their place.’ They killed millions of children, disproportionately Black, and called it ‘healthcare.’ Everything God declares as sin, they call good. No big deal, they don’t believe in God anyway. To them. everyone creates their own reality.

 Theirs is an evil, disordered, Marxist culture of the superiority of government over God and mankind. They hate everything that is good and clean. They needed to divide us and so they have. They say they hate fascism, but don’t really know what it is. They are willing to accept communism, but have no idea what they are asking for.

This Left has many faces…teachers, professors, politicians, media personalities, old hippy Marxists who lost their chance in the sixties, Hollywood types seeking relevance, judges of the Supreme Court on down, and high tech, the self-appointed keepers of morality, however bogus.

The Left wants limited free speech. Unlike what we were taught as children, they believe words can actually hurt them. They demand no guns (while they stockpile weapons), no borders, police, prisons (except for political prisoners), or churches. What they want is a full Red Chinese-style, student-led, paramilitary, socio-political cultural revolution. Unacceptable history, movies, speech, private property, books, especially the Bible, will be banned. Thought police have already arrived.

Police killed nine Blacks total in 2019, while Blacks killed Blacks in the thousands

Democrat governors and mayors are winking at the discord. Police in all their states are being ordered to stand down to one extent or another while they tear cities apart. The Washington state governor, Jay Inslee, claimed recently he actually didn’t know anything about the partial city takeover in Seattle. New York City, on Mayor de Blasio’s orders, released 250 prisoners. They have since been rearrested 450 times, having committed unspeakable crimes. One of them walked past a 92-year old woman and for no reason hit her hard in the face as she passed with her walker, dropping her to the ground where her head hit a fire hydrant. Police are being shot, and ambushed. Precincts are being stormed. People are being assaulted wholesale in all the Democrat strongholds just for being White. Murder in New York City is up 25%.

And yet, people are still, taking it all in.

Hypocrites abound. They ‘liberate’ a section of Seattle and call it their Autonomous Zone to show the world how to live. In the meantime they put up walls, destroy almost everything in sight, arm themselves to the teeth, accept deliveries of food and sanitation from people who actually work for a living, beat a man senseless by their ‘police’ for stealing. How’s that for police brutality? Police without law or inhibition. A true Animal Farm. I doubt they even see the irony of it all. The mayor of Seattle, being the hapless public servant, decides it’s just a block party…true anarchy with government approval.

Many ask why the anarchy? It is simple. The Left needs a total societal breakdown so as to introduce their own form of law and order, a tyrannical, communist, godless government. Think Soviet Union, North Korea, Red China. They will promise Scandinavia, but will deliver Red China. They’re hoping people will demand it.

In the sixties, the Left had the Vietnam War to protest. When the war ended, the movement disintegrated. Now, in a desperate search for a cause, they think they found it…racism. While he was president, Obama and his minions, anxious to finish the job, pulled all the scabs off what was a long healing wound and called us all racists, from a Black president mind you. Police killed nine Blacks total in 2019, while Blacks killed Blacks in the thousands, but never mind, police are not allowed to kill Blacks, only Blacks are. The Left will not allow healing. They need division so they encourage it.

Their cause remains a thin veneer, cheap, a counterfeit

Their cause remains a thin veneer, cheap, a counterfeit. We paid too dear a price for it to be anything else. Hence, they will lose this war, this revolution, once again. People are waking up, beginning to feel their families and stuff being threatened. In America, you don’t mess with one’s family and stuff. They worked too hard to find some happiness in this troubled world. The Left thinks they are gaining the upper hand, using treason and insurrection at a time when no one seems to meet with justice. They have miscalculated.

While the insurgents burn cities, the Left hopes people will demand change that only they can deliver. Yes, the people will make demands, but not to their liking.

If the anemic response such as what we have seen from both Democrats and Republicans continues, vigilante justice will come and it will not be pleasant. The people will not cower, they will not cringe. They will do what no one else is willing to do.

Paris Burns. Can you Feel the Bern?

By Rich Kozlovich

I would love for someone, anyone, to tell me of a socialist state that's not a mess.  The only socialist state economies that have survived are those that abandoned socialism and instituted capitalist reforms.  France is not going to be one of them, and just like the EU, is doomed.

On November 24, 2018 Thomas Adamson posted the article, French protesters angry over fuel taxes clash with police, saying: 

French police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse violent demonstrators in Paris on Saturday, as thousands gathered in the capital and beyond and staged road blockades to vent anger against rising fuel taxes...........Tense clashes on the Champs-Elysees that ended by dusk Saturday saw police face off with demonstrators who burned plywood, wielded placards reading “Death to Taxes” and upturned a large vehicle. 

At least 19 people, including four police officers, were slightly hurt and one person had more serious injuries in the day of unrest in Paris, according to police.   Macron responded in a strongly worded tweet: “Shame on those who attacked (police). Shame on those who were violent against other citizens ... No place for this violence in the Republic.” 

“It’s going to trigger a civil war and me, like most other citizens, we’re all ready,” said Benjamin Vrignaud, a 21-year-old protester from Chartres.  “They take everything from us. They steal everything from us,” said 21-year-old Laura Cordonnier.......

France is fast becoming unrulable, and the current President is just as incompetent as his predecessors, and worse yet, he's arrogant in his incompetence.  The people of France are socialists, and absolutely reject any concept of fiscal responsibility, demanding benefits that can't be paid for, and now they're having a fit. 

"They take everything from us.  They steal everything from us".  Remarkable!  I love that, it's a typical socialist meme.  These snowflakes take and take and then these economic and social infants, who've been treated like babies for decades, riot when anything doesn't go their way. 

Like Greece and so many other European countries, the French government has been a big sugar daddy for these socialists and now they're finally running out of other people's money and the piper has to be paid.  This current mess should have been obvious to the most casual observer.  The ruling elites have encouraged it with their constant appeasement for those who can't be appeased. That why babies have tantrums. 

Emmanuel Macron Legitimized the Violent Far-Left in France Young Voices Advocates | Posted: Jan 29, 2018 - Recently, Emmanuel Macron’s government decided to can an infrastructure project for the construction of an airport. In 2008, the government approved the construction of this airport, which was supposed to hold 9 million passengers by 2050, located close to the northwestern city of Nantes. For almost ten years, environmentalist radicals and violent far-left activists have squatted on the property in order to prevent the project becoming a reality. The French president, by giving in to violent protesters, has created a worrying precedence case........To Read More....

Well, now it's time to pay the piper, and this isn't going to stop over taxes.  They may temporarily get this under control, but it's just a matter of time before it erupts again, and this is going to spread over issues regarding immigration and Muslim violence. 

Europe's Next World War Begins in France Posted by Daniel Greenfield Saturday, October 21, 2017 @ Sultan Knish Blog  - Interior Minister Gerard Collomb made it official. France is "in a state of war”. It’s not just rhetoric. Bombs turn up in a posh Parisian suburb. Two young women are butchered at a train station. And it’s just another week of an Islamic World War III being fought in France..........To Read More...

Can any reasonable person be surprised at the current riotous events taking place in France?  No one can satisfy the French, they're spoiled children, and have demonstrated it over and over again when anyone has tried to install anything resembling economic and fiscal responsibility.  France is a mess, and it's not going to get better. 

Who Will Prevail in Sunday’s French Presidential Contest and Earn the Right to Preside over the Nation’s Decline? - by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty - The last time there was a presidential election in France, I like to think my endorsement made a difference in the outcome. Now that another election is about to take place, with a first round this Sunday and a runoff election between the top-2 candidates two week later, it’s time to once again pontificate about the political situation in France. But before looking at the major candidates, let’s consider a couple of pieces of economic data to get a sense of the enormous challenges that will have to be overcome to boost France’s anemic economy..........To Read More....

Oh, one more thing. All the Hollywood lefties keep "threatening" to move to Canada if America votes in someone that's not just another leftie socialist like Clinton or Obama. Well, I suggest they move to France, just one more socialist paradise where government takes care of everything. 

Including their money.....and take Bernie with them.

The Idiots That Don’t Concede Elections

By Christopher Chantrill January 30, 2018

Back when I was a young man I had a Greek-American friend that taught me Rule One about democratic politics. This was back in the mid-1970s when the Greek colonels had just conceded power back to the center-right party in Greece. What was needed now in Greece, my friend insisted, was that the center-right party concede power to the center-left party at the next election, and that the center-left party concede the next-but-one election to the center-right party.

Here in America, the Democrats have failed to concede the last two normal change elections that went against them: the 2000 presidential squeaker election and the 2016 election. But you will search long and hard among your liberal acquaintance for anyone that understands how serious this is.

Now we have a piece on “This Civil War” from Daniel Greenfield, a speech given to the Tea Party convention of South Carolina. When you have a party that doesn’t concede elections then you have a civil war, he says. How do you know you have a civil war? Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country.

And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country?

When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war. Moving on, Greenfield says there are two kinds of government. You can have a “voluntary government” or a “professional government.” This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves. Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment. Go ahead, read the whole thing....To Read More....

Identity Politics Works Until You Run Out of Other People

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 0 Comments Monday, January 01, 2018 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously observed that socialism works until you run out of other people’s money. Identity politics also works until you run out of other people.

And then #MeToo becomes #NotMeToo.

Other people’s money can be borrowed against. That’s why we have the national debt that we do. But identity politics has multiplied too abruptly and explosively to postpone the reckoning much longer. What were once simple categories of three races and two genders has mutated into an infinite alphabet of sexual identities, a Big Bang of ethnicities, national, cultural, racial and religious, each with its own microaggressions, that easily tops two hundred and shows no signs of slowing down its expansion.

Intersectionality, the Das Kapital of identity politics economics, tries to manage the complex network of interactions even as it purges Jews and white people. And now it’s even starting to purge men.

The left is running out of other people.

#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, the campus purges of ‘whiteness’ and ‘toxic masculinity’, the civil wars within the LGBT alphabet soup all point to the ‘other people’ crisis of the left. The latest social justice wave has made men, white people and even white gay men into hate objects. The resentment coalition of identity politics is fracturing into a tribal war of identity microgroups against everyone else.

The economics of socialism and the political economics of identity politics both come down to the core leftist creed of redistributing the wealth and privilege supposedly hoarded by a minority. Seize all the wealth from the rich and fund free health care. Take away white privilege and open up society. Open the borders of the United States to the Third World. Shut down factories and end all pollution. Destroy capitalism, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness and every other strawman raised up by the left.

That is the engine of the three radical R’s of the left: Resentment, Revolution and Redistribution.

It’s a scam. Like every scam, it relies on using the greed of the mark against him. Con artists are in the easy money business. They promise the men and women they scam that they can have easy money. But it’s only the con artist who ends up easily making money out of the deal. That’s the scam the left pulls.

It’s why leftist politics is the greatest and deadliest scam ever perpetrated in human history.

The Russian peasants who were promised their own land were instead chained to feudal collectivist farms. They were reduced to sharecroppers who were unable to leave the lands of their masters. The workers who were promised bread starved in the cities. The soldiers who were promised peace died in a more horrifying war. When Stalin told his mother that he was the new czar, the scam was complete.

It was the same story from the Soviet Union to Communist China, from Cuba to Cambodia, from the ghettoes of blue states to the rusting factories of union shops, from the decaying farmlands of Europe to the blighted working class of Britain. The scam ends with mass misery for everyone except the leftist scammers. The revolutionaries get rich and powerful while everyone else loses everything.

But every scam has a choke point. That’s where the bait turns out to be the hook. It’s where the revolution runs out of other people’s money and comes for your life savings. It’s when environmentalism doesn’t mean shutting someone else’s factory, but raising your energy bills, banning your plastic bags and shutting down the business that pays your wages.

It’s when the new horrible racist or sexist of the week isn’t that guy on the news. It’s you.

The choke point is when the revolution you supported runs out of all the other people who supposedly had it coming. And its machinery of smears, thievery and murder (for the people) reaches you.

The great scam of the left is convincing the majority that the solution to their problems lies with a small minority. Get rid of the 1 percent and the 99 percent will live like kings. Get rid of a few southern racists and we can all be brothers. Ban X, regulate Y and outlaw Z and we’ll all be better off for it.

The choke point is when the small minority expands to include you. And then it’s no longer a few billionaires. It’s the upper middle class. And then it’s the entire middle class. It’s all white people. It’s all men. And then it’s everyone. The minority turns out to be the majority. And that’s the scam.

Identity politics is approaching its own choke point. It’s running out of other people.

The theme of intersectionality is that everyone is privileged and everyone is oppressed. The choke point of identity politics is being hidden behind complex formulas that openly stigmatize all white people and all men, but that’s the bait that actually and ultimately lines up everyone for privilege redistribution.

The war on ‘whiteness’, a racist academic construct, is the identity politics equivalent of the denunciations of the middle class. The ‘white privilege’ slogan makes it clear that the left isn’t just coming for a small indefensible minority (which is where the left always starts its lynch mob), but for a narrow and envied majority. White people in identity politics, like the middle class in economics, are the choke point where the seductive 1 percent lie gives way to the lesser lie that splits society apart.

Intersectionality is the identity politics equivalent of Bolshevism. Inside its rhetoric and formulas is the final and fatal truth that it isn’t merely a narrow minority that must be dispossessed, but everyone. It’s not only a small minority or even a majority that is guilty. Everyone is oppressive. Everyone is guilty.

Universal guilt is the jagged hook waiting at the end of the shiny lure. The left educates its marks into resenting easy targets and then expands that resentment into circles that eventually encompass our entire society. No race, class or gender is truly exempt. Eventually the purges even reach the acolytes of the left. Just ask the old Bolsheviks of the USSR or the leftist media heads rolling under #MeToo.

It’s the final stop of leftist politics where all its rotten ideas sink into the muck. Everyone is guilty of polluting the environment. And everyone must pay the carbon tax. Everyone has privilege and must check their privilege. Everyone has too much money. Even if they hardly have anything at all.

The left is not in the business of partial revolutions. That too is part of the scam. Its revolutions are total. And totally fatal. The revolutions begin with the 1 percent, but they are meant to end with 100 percent.

Leftist revolutions run on resentment and greed. And when they have worked through the most obvious targets of that resentment and greed, they will turn on anyone who can be resented or envied.

And that’s everyone. Everyone is enviable to at least one other person. And that’s enough.

Intersectionality’s mantra of universal privilege and guilt is in the toxic DNA of leftist politics. Everyone is guilty. Everyone must pay. No race, gender or class provides any ultimate immunity from the reckoning. With so many identities, the next purge can come from anywhere. Even as the left rages against Trump, its own civil war is underway. Sandernistas are battling Clintonistas. Every group is asserting its own oppression. Leftists are readying a final purge of pro-life Dems. Campus culture denounces whiteness. Everyone is waiting for the next social justice hashtag to sweep through with its wave of political terror.

The revolution is here. And leftists are running out of other people to feed to the guillotine.

 

Revolution in Iran

Trump is no Obama and has voiced open support for the pro-freedom movement.

January 1, 2018 Kenneth R. Timmerman  6 

For Mansour Osanlou, the former head of the bus driver’s union in Tehran, a “new revolution” has begun in Iran.  The protests, which began on Thursday in Iran’s most religious cities and spread throughout the country within twenty four hours, now bring together workers and intellectuals, the unemployed, and the elites – a combination not seen since the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah.

On Saturday, security forces in Tehran used rubber bullets and truck-mounted water canon in an unsuccessful attempt to disperse protesters at Tehran University who were seeking to march on the Supreme Leader’s compound, Osanloo told me in a telephone interview.

They were chanting, “Death to the Dictator,” and “Khamenei should go.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, and until now, he has been portrayed as unassailable by friend and foe alike.

“We thank President Trump for his support, and call on the United States to hold the Islamic regime accountable if they kill or beat protestors or conduct mass arrests, as they did in 2009,” he told me.
The last time the Iranian people rose up, in June 2009, President Obama kept a shameful silence, allowing the regime to kill protesters in silence.

President Trump has the opportunity to change history by using his bully pulpit, which he began to do late Friday night through twitter............To Read More.....

Sow the Free Love Wind, Reap the Sexual Debasement Whirlwind

The bitter fruit of a destructive generation.

November 30, 2017 Bruce Thornton

The explosion of sexual harassment and assault claims, some going back forty years, is the inevitable consequence of the sexual revolution. Long before Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual escapades led him to impeachment, our culture had normalized public sexual behavior and mores once hidden away in the private realm, and kept there by laws, morals, and customs. Like many of our social pathologies today, our sexually saturated public culture and the unleashing of sexual predators are the bitter fruit of the free love movement of the Sixties.

Those who didn’t live through that period cannot imagine how quickly and radically our society was transformed. And that change was encouraged by certain species of dubious Pop-Freudian psychological ideas that had been combined with left-wing theories of political revolution. This synthesis was predicated on the delegitimization of the “bourgeois” virtues, morals, and values that had created the “false consciousness” empowering capitalist oppression. “If it feels good, do it” and “F... authority” became the most important personal and political imperatives.

Thus sexual liberation became an instrument of political “liberation,” and both revolutions enabled personal liberation, a weird mash-up of radical individualism and communist collectivism. Listen to Herbert Marcuse, denizen of the Frankfurt School and guru of the New Left:....To Read More....

 

Intellectuals and Thugs: The Russian Revolution

If ideas must be pursued at all costs, then anything standing in their way must be crushed.

By George Friedman Oct. 4, 2017

The 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution is approaching. It was a revolution based not merely on hope but on the certainty that the human condition could be filled with equality, plenty and freedom. It created a regime that was willing and felt compelled to go to any lengths to create that perfection, but that regime ended in 1991, exhausted by the squalor it had created.

The Russian Revolution was inspired by the work of Karl Marx, and that work was the reductio ad absurdum of the French Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had argued that humanity was engaged in progress – knowledge was constantly accumulating and, with that, the human condition was constantly improving. At the center of this process was reason, which would drive progress. And its main thrust was that the most perfect government was one that promoted the principle of human equality.

The agent of all of this was the intellectual, who placed reason at the center of all things, and therefore was the one who would deliver progress. The intellectual would understand the necessity of improving the human condition and therefore understand that anyone who impeded this was the enemy. The intellectual became a politician seeking power, and then driving the masses toward a transformation of human life.

But the Enlightenment presented a paradox. If human progress was certain, then why should the intellectual have to undertake the effort and risk of driving it forward? But there was another paradox.

The intellectual was also hungry for a significance beyond those with whom he shared his life. He hungered for power and recognition, and therefore the vision of progress being his to deliver to humanity was tremendously seductive. The paradox needed examination by the contemplative. But the contemplative bypassed the paradox and presided over the French Revolution. And those who thwarted progress had to be eliminated. The intellectuals displayed the ruthlessness of pure logic, a logic that saw the people as tools to be shaped........To Read More....

Reflections on the American Revolution: The Generals Part II of III

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary) | January 31st, 2013 at 04:11 PM | 5  

 

How did America win its independence? In Part I of this essay, I looked at the population trends, foreign alliances, and equipment and weather conditions under which the American Revolution was fought. Let’s add some thoughts on the leaders of the principal combatants: the American and British generals. The American command was far from perfect – but the war could have turned out very differently if the American side had not had the advantages of leadership it did, first and foremost the singular character of George Washington........ 

Any history of the Revolutionary War has to consider the unique leadership of George Washington. 43 years old when he assumed command, Washington came to the war with combat leadership experience from the French and Indian War, training as a surveyor that prepared him well to deal with maps and terrain, a decade of active fox hunting that had made him an excellent horseman, and experience in the Virginia House of Burgesses that had educated him in practical politics. 

Physically, Washington was a man of great strength, vigor and endurance and almost supernatural good luck. Washington’s robust constitution survived smallpox, diphtheria, multiple bouts of malaria, pleurisy, dysentery….. To Read More…..

My Take - Over the years I have read a great deal of Washington; about his weaknesses and his strengths.  What drives me crazy are the so-called historians who rave about this man.  Washington was a man with great natural leadership qualities and in my opinion he was the only man in the colonies who could have held the Continental Army together, and the only man who could have kept them in check when the Continental Congress decided to cheat them out of their pay.  

 But Washington was not a good tactician nor was he a competent strategist, but he was smart enough to recognize that.  In my mind it is clear that Washington always put the success of his mission far ahead of himself.  That is a sign of true leadership.    

This is an honest and valuable recitation of the facts that doesn't place him on planes which he did not exist nor does it diminish his character, except to note that he was a bit of a snot.   This does bring into perspective between those who really were the contributors that brought about a successful revolution, and those who so much has been written.  

This is a good read, and please make sure to read the comments.  I also didn't remember the back slapping situation that way either.  There is so much more to be said about this time, the people, the heroes, the villains and most importantly the details and facts that no one seems to know.  I would liked to have seen weekly installments that went into greater detail about the events and the characters. 

I find it fascinating at how many people tell me they hate history but will sit and listen attentively while I talk about it.  Why?  Because it is taught badly.  History shouldn't only be read; it should be recited by someone who knows the facts and 'tells' the story because he loves the story.  That is what history is.  A great story!  And the education system no longer has great storytellers, or lovers of history.