Joseph R. John
To jrjassoc@earthlink.net
Today at 4:39 AM
Only 1 ½ minutes long, but an Excellent speech by Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4351026/clinton-1995-immigration
Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI
Regional Chairman, Veterans 4 Trump, Southern California (Orange County, Imperial County, and San Diego County)
San Diego, CA 92108
Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies
September 1, 2016 12:12 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
The media excuse her mendacity because it serves the progressive cause.
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.
But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.
Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.
Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.
In the 1980s and 1990s professors in the liberal arts became enamored of the French-speaking postmodern nihilists — among them notably Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. They refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. They were influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on absolute morality, and their youth was lived during the age of Joseph Goebbels and Pravda. The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the later shame that most of the nation either was passive or actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially hard pill to swallow for the postwar French postmodernists.
While this group comprised quite different thinkers, they mostly agreed that reality was socially constructed and arbitrarily defined by the language of those in power.
In fact, “truth” for a postmodernist is supposedly what those who control us say it is, largely in efforts to perpetuate their own race, class, and gender privilege. You can see how thoroughly popular culture has picked up this mostly banal relativist observation and transformed it into “the Truth”—and why today we assume that lying is simply a narrative, not a window into one’s character.
Relativist slogans abound (e.g., “One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”). “Hands up, don’t shoot” was never uttered by Michael Brown, who was not an innocent “gentle giant” but a strong-armed robber who sought to take a policeman’s gun and then charged at the cop. But since his fictitious last utterances should be true, therefore they are and, presto! became the slogan of Black Lives Matter.
In the opposite fashion, there is to be no such thing as Black Lives Matter protestors calling for frying police or killing cops, since negation of the truth serves a far more noble purpose than would confirmation.
Orwell was onto the game far earlier than the French postmodernists. He rightly saw it as a postwar pathway of the Left to assuming and keeping power: What was written on the barn wall on Monday as an absolute commandment was crossed out and replaced on Tuesday, in the fashion that the Soviet Union used to airbrush out sudden enemies of the people from all past pictorial records. Who knew what the party line would be by Wednesday? What frightened Orwell was not so much lying British industrialists or celebrities, but officers of the state who sought to dismiss the idea of the truth itself and justify the dismissal on ideological grounds.
“People’s Republic” after 1946 usually meant that the Communist country in question was never a republic or ratified by a vote of the people. “Sanctuary cities” today have neither the legal right nor the moral weight to offer exemption from federal immigration law. They do not serve any purpose other than self-interested “nullification” of the law in the fashion of 1850s Confederate states that arbitrarily declared federal statutes null and void in their jurisdictions. We know how that construct ended up.
Gender is now defined not by biology, but by culture or suspect patriarchically constructed norms. “Undocumented migrant” replaces “illegal alien” even as those who crossed illegally into the U.S. never had any documents to begin with, were foreign nationals, and were migrants going into the U.S., not mere directionless travelers.
Both Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill are Native Americans because they say they are. To question them on the basis that neither has any proven Indian ancestry is simply to offer a competing narrative, and one driven by racism, not their sort of altruism.
If Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King reconstruct themselves as black Americans, then their “stories” are as legitimate as any others, given their progressive agendas and their antitheses to the white male power structure.
When Hillary falls into her phony black patois to talk down to African-American audiences, in an accidental caricature of a snooty suburbanite trying to seem cool or authentic, she is no more false than she was earlier in her Annie Oakley incarnation of 2008, when she quaffed boilermakers and bowled to appeal to Obama’s despised clingers. All these are mere narrative moments, but disturbing evidence that she cheaply peddles identities for votes.
We claim there is no such thing as “truth,” as assertions gain credulity only by the degree of wealth and influence behind them (white, male, Christian heterosexuals usually are the bogeymen who establish self-interested “standards” of accuracy and fidelity). So fables in service to a progressive cause are not lying, as they would be if in league with reactionary forces.
Barack Obama can make up narratives about under-appreciated Islamic catalysts for the Western Renaissance or Enlightenment in his Cairo Speech because such mythmaking serves a noble cause of stopping “Islamophobia” and thus deserves the artificial currency of “truth.” Obama himself can invent large chunks of his “autobiography” and it is neither a lie nor a fable, given that his principled intent was to enlighten us about the burdens of growing up as the Other.
Lying for a Brian Williams or plagiarism for a Doris Kearns Goodwin or Fareed Zakaria can be passed off as the shoddy work of subordinates, or “misremembering,” or symptomatic of too full a schedule (not egoism, laziness, or efforts at career enhancement), given that all serve the progressive gods.
In 2012 the progressive future of the country hinged on the reelection of Barack Obama, so naturally ensuring that the imploding Middle East was quiet and that al-Qaeda was somnolent demanded a “truth” that an obscure videomaker and Islamophobic bigot had enraged otherwise peace-loving Muslims and incited them to burn down our consulate in Benghazi — an isolated act that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
If that narrative meant that National Security Adviser Susan Rice had to lie five times on Sunday talk shows, or Hillary Clinton had to deceive the families of the Benghazi dead, or Barack Obama’s Justice Department had to jail Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on a trumped-up old probation charge, then the ends of an Obama reelection more than outweighed the unethical means of achieving it. In each case, “conflicting narratives” or the “fog of war” made the idea of one absolute truth absurd. Who is to say whether $400 million in nocturnal cash transfers to the Iranians for hostages is, or is not, “ransom”?
Almost everything Hillary Clinton has said about her current scandals is a lie: No other secretary of state used a personal server; Colin Powell was certainly not her model for lawbreaking; she really did send and receive classified materials that she at the time knew were classified; she did not have lawyers examine all of her personal e-mails that she destroyed; they were not mostly about Chelsea and yoga; she did not accurately inform authorities of the actual number of her personal e-mails; there was no firewall between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation; rich individuals did meet with the secretary of state in a fashion that they would otherwise not have been able to, had they not donated vast amounts of money. And on and on. Again, all lies, but lies that in postmodern culture are merely competing progressive narratives that translate into the vulgar media as “Who is to say what pay-to-play actually is?”
Did anyone care that progressive Hillary long ago lied about her rigged $1,000 cattle-future investment beating 34 trillion to 1 odds to earn her $100,000, or her supposed foray into a combat zone in Serbia? Clinton’s lies, past and present, are fobbed off as either fantasies of right-wing conspiracists, who hope to derail her progressive agenda, or as psychodramas of a struggling progressive couple trying to do good. Either that, or they are minor problems of communication, or were courageous stances taken to advance the cause of the poor, the dispossessed, and the children.
The problem with the Clintons and all postmodern liars goes back to Epimenides’ ancient paradox of the Cretan liar: “All Cretans are liars.” Are we then to believe that the Cretan Epimenides was lying when he insisted that all Cretans (like himself) lie? Were Cretans, then, liars or not? Was Hillary lying when she set up the private server, when she explained away her criminal behavior, or when she insisted she had not lied about her prior lying about lying?
Postmodernist Hillary, however, does believe in absolute truth when it is a matter of checks to the Clinton Foundation not bouncing and aviation fuel being purchased for private jets. Postmodernists do not believe that truth exists for others in the abstract; but for themselves it most certainly does and advantageously so in the concrete.
The danger to democracy is never from the bad liars who patently fabricate for self, but from the sophisticated and progressive good liars who lie that their untruth is truth because it was all made up for us.
Imagine There’s No Border
September 1, 2016 12:08 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
A world without boundaries is a fantasy.
By Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal
Borders are in the news as never before. After millions of young, Muslim, and mostly male refugees flooded into the European Union last year from the war-torn Middle East, a popular revolt arose against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within Europe. The concurrent suspension of most E.U. external controls on immigration and asylum rendered the open-borders pact suddenly unworkable. The European masses are not racists, but they now apparently wish to accept Middle Eastern immigrants only to the degree that these newcomers arrive legally and promise to become European in values and outlook—protocols that the E.U. essentially discarded decades ago as intolerant. Europeans are relearning that the continent’s external borders mark off very different approaches to culture and society from what prevails in North Africa or the Middle East.
A similar crisis plays out in the United States, where President Barack Obama has renounced his former opposition to open borders and executive-order amnesties. Since 2012, the U.S. has basically ceased policing its southern border. The populist pushback against the opening of the border with Mexico gave rise to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump—predicated on the candidate’s promise to build an impenetrable border wall—much as the flood of migrants into Germany fueled opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Driving the growing populist outrage in Europe and North America is the ongoing elite push for a borderless world. Among elites, borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of our age—and, as with other such ideas, it has shaped the language we use. The descriptive term “illegal alien” has given way to the nebulous “unlawful immigrant.” This, in turn, has given way to “undocumented immigrant,” “immigrant,” or the entirely neutral “migrant”—a noun that obscures whether the individual in question is entering or leaving. Such linguistic gymnastics are unfortunately necessary. Since an enforceable southern border no longer exists, there can be no immigration law to break in the first place.
Today’s open-borders agenda has its roots not only in economic factors—the need for low-wage workers who will do the work that native-born Americans or Europeans supposedly will not—but also in several decades of intellectual ferment, in which Western academics have created a trendy field of “borders discourse.” What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs, methods of marginalization designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatize and oppress the “other”—usually the poorer and less Western—who arbitrarily ended up on the wrong side of the divide. “Where borders are drawn, power is exercised,” as one European scholar put it. This view assumes that where borders are not drawn, power is not exercised—as if a million Middle Eastern immigrants pouring into Germany do not wield considerable power by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western notions of victimization and grievance politics. Indeed, Western leftists seek political empowerment by encouraging the arrival of millions of impoverished migrants.
Dreams of a borderless world are not new, however. The biographer and moralist Plutarch claimed in his essay “On Exile” that Socrates had once asserted that he was not just an Athenian but instead “a citizen of the cosmos.” In later European thought, Communist ideas of universal labor solidarity drew heavily on the idea of a world without borders. “Workers of the world, unite!” exhorted Marx and Engels. Wars broke out, in this thinking, only because of needless quarreling over obsolete state boundaries. The solution to this state of endless war, some argued, was to eliminate borders in favor of transnational governance. H. G. Wells’s prewar science-fiction novel The Shape of Things to Come envisioned borders eventually disappearing as elite transnational polymaths enforced enlightened world governance. Such fictions prompt fads in the contemporary real world, though attempts to render borders unimportant—as, in Wells’s time, the League of Nations sought to do—have always failed. Undaunted, the Left continues to cherish the vision of a borderless world as morally superior, a triumph over artificially imposed difference.
Yet the truth is that borders do not create difference—they reflect it. Elites’ continued attempts to erase borders are both futile and destructive.
H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel “The Shape of Things to Come”; envisioned a borderless world run by transnational superelites. (KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES)
H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel “The Shape of Things to Come” envisioned a borderless world run by transnational superelites. (KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES)
Borders—and the fights to keep or change them—are as old as agricultural civilization. In ancient Greece, most wars broke out over border scrubland. The contested upland eschatia offered little profit for farming but possessed enormous symbolic value for a city-state to define where its own culture began and ended. The self-acclaimed “citizen of the cosmos” Socrates nonetheless fought his greatest battle as a parochial Athenian hoplite in the ranks of the phalanx at the Battle of Delium—waged over the contested borderlands between Athens and Thebes. Fifth-century Athenians such as Socrates envisioned Attica as a distinct cultural, political, and linguistic entity, within which its tenets of radical democracy and maritime-based imperialism could function quite differently from the neighboring oligarchical agrarianism at Thebes. Attica in the fourth century BC built a system of border forts to protect its northern boundary.
Throughout history, the trigger points of war have traditionally been such borderlands—the methoria between Argos and Sparta, the Rhine and Danube as the frontiers of Rome, or the Alsace-Lorraine powder keg between France and Germany. These disputes did not always arise, at least at first, as efforts to invade and conquer a neighbor. They were instead mutual expressions of distinct societies that valued clear-cut borders—not just as matters of economic necessity or military security but also as a means of ensuring that one society could go about its unique business without the interference and hectoring of its neighbors.
Advocates for open borders often question the historical legitimacy of such territorial boundaries. For instance, some say that when “Alta” California declared its autonomy from Mexico in 1846, the new border stranded an indigenous Latino population in what would shortly become the 31st of the United States. “We didn’t cross the border,” these revisionists say. “The border crossed us.” In fact, there were probably fewer than 10,000 Spanish-speakers residing in California at the time. Thus, almost no contemporary Californians of Latino descent can trace their state residency back to the mid-nineteenth century. They were not “crossed” by borders. And north–south demarcation, for good or evil, didn’t arbitrarily separate people.
What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs.
The history of borders has been one of constant recalibration, whether dividing up land or unifying it. The Versailles Treaty of 1919 was idealistic not for eliminating borders but for drawing new ones. The old borders, established by imperial powers, supposedly caused World War I; the new ones would better reflect, it was hoped, ethnic and linguistic realities, and thus bring perpetual peace. But the world created at Versailles was blown apart by the Third Reich. German chancellor Adolf Hitler didn’t object to the idea of borders per se; rather, he sought to remake them to encompass all German-speakers—and later so-called Aryans—within one political entity, under his absolute control. Many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German intellectuals and artists—among them the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, historian Oswald Spengler, and composer Richard Wagner—agreed that the Roman Empire’s borders marked the boundaries of civilization. Perversely, however, they celebrated their status as the unique “other” that had been kept out of a multiracial Western civilization. Instead, Germany mythologized itself as racially exceptional, precisely because, unlike other Western European nations, it was definable not only by geography or language but also by its supposed racial purity. The fairy-tale origins of the German Volk were traced back before the fifth century AD and predicated on the idea that Germanic tribes for centuries were kept on the northern and eastern sides of the Danube and Rhine Rivers. Thus, in National Socialist ideology, early German, white-skinned, Aryan noble savages paradoxically avoided a mongrelizing and enervating assimilation into the civilized Roman Empire—an outcome dear to the heart of Nazi crackpot racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg (The Myth of the Twentieth Century) and the autodidact Adolf Hitler. World War II was fought to restore the old Eastern European borders that Hitler and Mussolini had erased—but it ended with the creation of entirely new ones, reflecting the power and presence of Soviet continental Communism, enforced by the huge Russian Red Army.
Few escape petty hypocrisy when preaching the universal gospel of borderlessness. Barack Obama has caricatured the building of a wall on the U.S. southern border as nonsensical, as if borders are discriminatory and walls never work. Obama, remember, declared in his 2008 speech in Berlin that he wasn’t just an American but also a “citizen of the world.” Yet the Secret Service is currently adding five feet to the White House fence—presumably on the retrograde logic that what is inside the White House grounds is different from what is outside and that the higher the fence goes (“higher and stronger,” the Secret Service promises), the more of a deterrent it will be to would-be trespassers. If Obama’s previous wall was six feet high, the proposed 11 feet should be even better.
In 2011, open-borders advocate Antonio Villaraigosa became the first mayor in Los Angeles history to build a wall around the official mayoral residence. His un-walled neighbors objected, first, that there was no need for such a barricade and, second, that it violated a city ordinance prohibiting residential walls higher than four feet. But Villaraigosa apparently wished to emphasize the difference between his home and others (or between his home and the street itself), or was worried about security, or saw a new wall as iconic of his exalted office.
“You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world,” Secretary of State John Kerry recently enthused to the graduating class at Northeastern University. He didn’t sound envious, though, perhaps because Kerry himself doesn’t live in such a world. If he did, he never would have moved his 76-foot luxury yacht from Boston Harbor across the state border to Rhode Island in order to avoid $500,000 in sales taxes and assorted state and local taxes.
While elites can build walls or switch zip codes to insulate themselves, the consequences of their policies fall heavily on the nonelites who lack the money and influence to navigate around them. The contrast between the two groups—Peggy Noonan described them as the “protected” and the “unprotected”—was dramatized in the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush. When the former Florida governor called illegal immigration from Mexico “an act of love,” his candidacy was doomed. It seemed that Bush had the capital and influence to pick and choose how the consequences of his ideas fell upon himself and his family—in a way impossible for most of those living in the southwestern United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offers another case study. The multibillionaire advocates for a fluid southern border and lax immigration enforcement, but he has also stealthily spent $30 million to buy up four homes surrounding his Palo Alto estate. They form a sort of no-man’s-land defense outside his own Maginot Line fence, presumably designed against hoi polloi who might not share Zuckerberg’s taste or sense of privacy. Zuckerberg’s other estate in San Francisco is prompting neighbors’ complaints because his security team takes up all the best parking spaces. Walls and border security seem dear to the heart of the open-borders multibillionaire—when it’s his wall, his border security.
This self-serving dynamic operates beyond the individual level as well. “Sanctuary cities,” for instance, proclaim amnesty for illegal aliens within their municipal boundaries. But proud as they are of their cities’ disdain for federal immigration law, residents of these liberal jurisdictions wouldn’t approve of other cities nullifying other federal laws. What would San Franciscans say if Salt Lake City declared the Endangered Species Act null and void within its city limits, or if Carson City unilaterally suspended federal background checks and waiting periods for handgun purchases? Moreover, San Francisco and Los Angeles do believe in clearly delineated borders when it comes to their right to maintain a distinct culture, with distinct rules and customs. Their self-righteousness aside, sanctuary cities neither object to the idea of borders nor to their enforcement—only to the notion that protecting the southern U.S. border is predicated on the very same principles.
More broadly, ironies and contradictions abound in the arguments and practices of open-borders advocates. In academia, even modern historians of the ancient world, sensing the mood and direction of larger elite culture, increasingly rewrite the fall of fifth-century AD Rome, not as a disaster of barbarians pouring across the traditional fortified northern borders of the Rhine and Danube—the final limites that for centuries kept out perceived barbarism from classical civilization—but rather as “late antiquity,” an intriguing osmosis of melting borders and cross-fertilization, leading to a more diverse and dynamic intersection of cultures and ideas. Why, then, don’t they cite Vandal treatises on medicine, Visigothic aqueducts, or Hunnish advances in dome construction that contributed to this rich new culture of the sixth or seventh century AD? Because these things never existed.
Academics may now caricature borders, but key to their posturing is either an ignorance of, or an unwillingness to address, why tens of millions of people choose to cross borders in the first place, leaving their homelands, language fluency, or capital—and at great personal risk. The answer is obvious, and it has little to do with natural resources or climate: migration, as it was in Rome during the fifth century AD, or as it was in the 1960s between mainland China and Hong Kong—and is now in the case of North and South Korea—has usually been a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or its Westernized manifestations. People walk, climb, swim, and fly across borders, secure in the knowledge that boundaries mark different approaches to human experience, with one side usually perceived as more successful or inviting than the other.
Western rules that promote a greater likelihood of consensual government, personal freedom, religious tolerance, transparency, rationalism, an independent judiciary, free-market capitalism, and the protection of private property combine to offer the individual a level of prosperity, freedom, and personal security rarely enjoyed at home. As a result, most migrants make the necessary travel adjustments to go westward—especially given that Western civilization, uniquely so, has usually defined itself by culture, not race, and thus alone is willing to accept and integrate those of different races who wish to share its protocols.
Many unassimilated Muslims in the West often are confused about borders and assume that they can ignore Western jurisprudence and yet rely on it in extremis. Today’s migrant from Morocco might resent the bare arms of women in France, or the Pakistani new arrival in London might wish to follow sharia law as he knew it in Punjab. But implicit are two unmentionable constants: the migrant most certainly does not wish to return to face sharia law in Morocco or Pakistan. Second, if he had his way, institutionalizing his native culture into that of his newly adopted land, he would eventually flee the results—and once again likely go somewhere else, for the same reasons that he left home in the first place. London Muslims may say that they demand sharia law on matters of religion and sex, but such a posture assumes the unspoken condition that the English legal system remains supreme, and thus, as Muslim minorities, they will not be thrown out of Britain as religious infidels—as Christians are now expelled from the Middle East.
Even the most adamant ethnic chauvinists who want to erase the southern border assume that some sort of border is central to their own racial essence. The National Council of La Raza (“the race”; Latin, radix) is the largest lobbying body for open borders with Mexico. Yet Mexico itself supports the idea of boundaries. Mexico City may harp about alleged racism in the United States directed at its immigrants, but nothing in U.S. immigration law compares with Mexico’s 1974 revision of its “General Law of Population” and its emphasis on migrants not upsetting the racial makeup of Mexico—euphemistically expressed as preserving “the equilibrium of the national demographics.” In sum, Mexican nationals implicitly argue that borders, which unfairly keep them out of the United States, are nonetheless essential to maintaining their own pure raza.
Migration has usually been a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or its Westernized manifestations.
Mexico, in general, furiously opposes enforcing the U.S.–Mexican border and, in particular, the proposed Trump wall that would bar unauthorized entry into the U.S.—not on any theory of borders discourse but rather because Mexico enjoys fiscal advantages in exporting its citizens northward, whether in ensuring nearly $30 billion in remittances, creating a powerful lobby of expatriates in the U.S., or finding a safety valve for internal dissent. Note that this view does not hold when it comes to accepting northward migrations of poorer Central Americans. In early 2016, Mexico ramped up its border enforcement with Guatemala, adding more security forces, and rumors even circulated of a plan to erect occasional fences to augment the natural barriers of jungle and rivers. Apparently, Mexican officials view poorer Central Americans as quite distinct from Mexicans—and thus want to ensure that Mexico remains separate from a poorer Guatemala.
When I wrote an article titled “Do We Want Mexifornia?” for City Journal ’s Spring 2002 issue, I neither invented the word “Mexifornia” nor intended it as a pejorative. Instead, I expropriated the celebratory term from Latino activists, both in the academy and in ethnic gangs in California prisons. In Chicano studies departments, the fusion of Mexico and California was envisioned as a desirable and exciting third-way culture. Mexifornia was said to be arising within 200 to 300 miles on either side of an ossified Rio Grande border. Less clearly articulated were Mexifornia’s premises: millions of Latinos and mestizos would create a new ethnic zone, which, for some mysterious reason, would also enjoy universities, sophisticated medical services, nondiscrimination laws, equality between the sexes, modern housing, policing, jobs, commerce, and a judiciary—all of which would make Mexifornia strikingly different from what is currently found in Mexico and Central America.
When Latino youths disrupt a Donald Trump rally, they often wave Mexican flags or flash placards bearing slogans such as “Make America Mexico Again.” But note the emotional paradox: in anger at possible deportation, undocumented aliens nonsensically wave the flag of the country that they most certainly do not wish to return to, while ignoring the flag of the nation in which they adamantly wish to remain. Apparently, demonstrators wish to brand themselves with an ethnic cachet but without sacrificing the advantages that being an American resident has over being a Mexican citizen inside Mexico. If no borders existed between California and Mexico, then migrants in a few decades might head to Oregon, even as they demonstrated in Portland to “Make Oregon into California.”
Removing borders in theory, then, never seems to match expectations in fact, except in those rare occasions when nearly like societies exist side by side. No one objects to a generally open Canadian border because passage across it, numbers-wise, is roughly identical in either direction—and Canadians and Americans share a language and similar traditions and standard of living, along with a roughly identical approach to democracy, jurisprudence, law enforcement, popular culture, and economic practice. By contrast, weakening demarcated borders between diverse peoples has never appealed to the citizens of distinct nations. Take even the most vociferous opponents of a distinguishable and enforceable border, and one will observe a disconnect between what they say and do—given the universal human need to circumscribe, demarcate, and protect one’s perceived private space.
Again, the dissipation of national borders is possible only between quite similar countries, such as Canada and the U.S. or France and Belgium, or on those few occasions when a supranational state or empire can incorporate different peoples by integrating, assimilating, and intermarrying tribes of diverse religions, languages, and ethnicities into a common culture—and then, of course, protect them with distinct and defensible external borders. But aside from Rome before the fourth century AD and America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, few societies have been able to achieve E pluribus unum. Napoleon’s transnational empire didn’t last 20 years. Britain never tried to create a holistic overseas body politic in the way that, after centuries of strife, it had forged the English-speaking United Kingdom. The Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires all fell apart after World War I, in a manner mimicked by the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s. Rwanda and Iraq don’t reflect the meaninglessness of borders but the desire of distinct peoples to redraw colonial lines to create more logical borders to reflect current religious, ethnic, and linguistic realities. When Ronald Reagan thundered at the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” he assumed that by 1987, German-speakers on both sides of the Berlin Wall were more alike than not and in no need of a Soviet-imposed boundary inside Germany. Both sides preferred shared consensual government to Communist authoritarianism. Note that Reagan did not demand that Western nations dismantle their own borders with the Communist bloc.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost famously wrote, “That wants it down.” True, but the poet concedes in his “Mending Wall” that in the end, he accepts the logic of his crustier neighbor: “He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ” From my own experience in farming, two issues—water and boundaries—cause almost all feuds with neighbors. As I write, I’m involved in a border dispute with a new neighbor. He insists that the last row of his almond orchard should be nearer to the property line than is mine. That way, he can use more of my land as common space to turn his equipment than I will use of his land. I wish that I could afford to erect a wall between us.
The end of borders, and the accompanying uncontrolled immigration, will never become a natural condition—any more than sanctuary cities, unless forced by the federal government, will voluntarily allow out-of-state agencies to enter their city limits to deport illegal aliens, or Mexico will institutionalize free entry into its country from similarly Spanish-speaking Central American countries.
Borders are to distinct countries what fences are to neighbors: means of demarcating that something on one side is different from what lies on the other side, a reflection of the singularity of one entity in comparison with another. Borders amplify the innate human desire to own and protect property and physical space, which is impossible to do unless it is seen—and can be so understood—as distinct and separate. Clearly delineated borders and their enforcement, either by walls and fences or by security patrols, won’t go away because they go to the heart of the human condition—what jurists from Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment called meum et tuum, mine and yours. Between friends, unfenced borders enhance friendship; among the unfriendly, when fortified, they help keep the peace.
Hillary, the emails, and critical thinking
15 August 2016
Before leaving for work, I had Maria Bartiromo on, FOX Business News. There was a Hillary surrogate commenting on the “33,000” emails that the FBI had gone through and found only a dozen or so that were classified, and, according to him, what did it matter?
So, let’s review and see where both he and the media, mainstream and cable, have screwed up, yet once again.
Hillary sets up at least two servers that we know of, gets caught, her servers and their contents subpoenaed by congress, her lawyers search the servers using “search” protocols, at the very least 33,000 emails are deleted, and the mess is made public.
First thing that should be considered is that no emails were deleted before the subpoena was served. Destroying evidence after that is a felony. Hillary and her attorneys are all guilty at this point.
Second, in order to get that many emails, the search command must have included keywords such as, secret, top secret, confidential, &c. Thus, ALL of the deleted emails must have been classified. It’s called critical thinking.
Thirdly, everyone keeps talking about the 33,000 emails. There were over 65,000 emails because one MUST count the deleted emails. How is it that everyone in the news media, mainstream and cable, have missed this rather glaring fact. Yep, those kept and those deleted add to over 66,000 suspect emails. How is it all of these college educated news people have missed this? How is it that no one has pointed out that because of ‘search’, almost all of the classified emails were wiped? Especially since those classified emails found in the preserved 33,000 were NOT marked secret, confidential, &c. Wouldn’t critical thinking sort of require that ALL of the suspect emails were wiped, and therefore using the Federal Rules of Evidence, is an admission that they were classified?
Yah, that last bit, under the FRE if a party refuses to provide or destroys evidence, the jury is told by the judge that they may consider the missing evidence in the worst light; that the claims of the person as to what was contained in the missing evidence is as the claimant claims or worse. Sorta means that every one of those missing emails was classified as a matter of law, doesn’t it?
Where are the media and the F.B.I. on this, especially considering that the F.B.I. knows the rules of evidence, doesn’t it?
Y’all, y’all need to consider this before the election.
The Declaration of Independence: America’s Most Famous Direct-Response Ad
Gary North – July 04, 2016
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On this day 240 years ago, New England’s most famous independent wholesaler, John Hancock, and Congress’s stenographer, Charles Thomson, signed a parchment. We celebrate that signing annually, often by setting off low-tariff fireworks imported from China.
Most Americans know little about the background of this event. The details they recall from a high school textbook are incorrect. There is great confusion. The amount of misinformation is shocking. I am here to clear up some widely held misconceptions. (Note: I have a Ph.D in colonial American history. I have also been involved since 1974 in direct-response marketing. As far as I know, no one else has combined these two careers.)
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
In 1776, Hancock was well known to consumers in New England as a highly price-competitive wholesaler. His main competitor, the British East India Company, called him a smuggler. That’s what high-cost competitors who are losing market share often do. They smear the competition. This accusation went to court, but it was was not proven. His defense attorney had been John Adams.
Hancock’s competitor in 1773 had adopted a new marketing strategy. It cut prices to just below what Hancock could afford to meet. How? By persuading Parliament to cut import taxes on the company’s main item of commerce, tea. Only a small tax remained, which went to pay the salary of the governor of Massachusetts and a few officials.
Next, a group of Hancock’s associates who operated out of the Green Dragon Tavern responded by throwing the competition’s tea into Boston harbor. So, Parliament closed Boston’s harbor in 1774.
The debate grew more heated throughout 1774. British tea was now cheaper than the duty-free but illegal Dutch tea, which Hancock imported. But there was a solution: a highly successful direct-response marketing campaign run by Hancock’s long-term associate, Sam Adams. Adams had a serious marketing problem. He had to persuade people that reduced taxes and lower tea prices were a threat to liberty. This was a hard sell. But Adams was up to it. He ignored the obvious: low taxes and low prices are a good thing. Instead, he warned readers that Parliament could close every port. He also skipped over the reason why the Parliament closed the port: protesters had thrown private property into the water. In today’s money, this was over a million dollars’ worth of tea.
Beginning in 1772, Adams had begun putting together an in-house mailing list known as the Committees on Correspondence. The letters began going out. Incredibly, outraged readers began a national boycott against low-cost British tea. It another context, this would be called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I realize that this is not the way all this is described in textbooks. This is a tribute to the effectiveness of Adams’ direct-mail campaign. There is even a movement called the Tea Party that has adopted the name given to the event in the 1830’s. The Tea Party is for lower taxes.
So was Parliament in 1773.
The entry for “Boston Tea Party” on Wikipedia describes things accurately.
The North ministry’s solution was the Tea Act, which received the assent of King George on May 10, 1773. This act restored the East India Company’s full refund on the duty for importing tea into Britain, and also permitted the company, for the first time, to export tea to the colonies on its own account. This would allow the company to reduce costs by eliminating the middlemen who bought the tea at wholesale auctions in London. Instead of selling to middlemen, the company now appointed colonial merchants to receive the tea on consignment; the consignees would in turn sell the tea for a commission. In July 1773, tea consignees were selected in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston.
Hancock was New England’s #1 middleman for tea. He was cut out of the deal.
The British East India Company now had a new marketing slogan. “Lower taxes. Lower prices.” (Walmart’s recently adopted slogan is similar: “Save Money. Live Better.”) Hancock had to do something, and he had to do it fast. Fortunately for Hancock, Sam Adams was up to the task.
Back in 1765, Adams had helped organize a regional sales force, the Sons of Liberty. This group had made tax collectors offers that they simply could not refuse. He had recruited Hancock into the organization. They had worked together ever since. Adams had revived the organization in 1774. It called for a boycott of tea sold by retailers for British tea. This campaign led to the first Continental Congress in September.
Adams was highly successful in politics, but in nothing else. So, honoring market responses, he specialized in politics. He had been a beer brewer, but he had gone bankrupt. (The successful beer company named Sam Adams took the name of a man who had been a complete failure as a brewer. This would be like calling a company two centuries from now “Enron Securities.” But good marketing can accomplish miracles, as I am trying to demonstrate here.)
Adams had also been a tax collector, but had failed to collect all of the required taxes. He got out of the field. This is something that he had in common with a recent immigrant from England, Thomas Paine. Earlier in the year, Paine had proven himself to be a highly skilled practitioner of direct-response marketing. His January 1776 marketing campaign was based on a classic long-copy ad with this headline: Common Sense. The campaign pulled spectacularly. It still does — a phenomenon known in the direct-response trade as “drag.” From Wikipedia:
It was sold and distributed widely and read aloud at taverns and meeting places. In proportion to the population of the colonies at that time (2.5 million), it had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history. As of 2006, it remains the all-time best selling American title, and is still in print today. . . .
The pamphlet was also highly successful because of a brilliant marketing tactic planned by Paine. He and Bell timed the first edition to be published at around the same time as a proclamation on the colonies by King George III, hoping to contrast the strong, monarchical message with the heavily anti-monarchical Common Sense. Luckily, the speech and the first advertisement of the pamphlet appeared on the same day within the pages of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.
Paine’s marketing was revolutionary. Literally.
Summary: In July 1776, Hancock was in charge of a national marketing campaign against the British East India Company. Yet the company was never mentioned. Officially, he was fighting Parliament. This was why he signed the parchment.
What was odd about the document was that it never mentioned Parliament. It only mentioned the king, who had almost no power, and who had not been involved in Parliament’s decision to cut the tax on tea. He had dutifully signed the bill when it was handed to him — a strictly formal procedure. He had remained on the sidelines until the Green Dragon boys tossed tea overboard. This attack on private property angered him. He thought it was mob violence, just as it had been a decade earlier with Adams’ Sons of Liberty. So, he closed the port of Boston when Parliament demanded this action. He sent ships to enforce this joint decision.
Hancock had great name identification, so he wrote his signature large enough to be eye-catching, but not so large as to generate envy among his associates — he hoped. He wanted to head off murmuring: “Pretty fancy signature for a smuggler.”
He need not have worried. His peers did not want to put their John Hancocks on the document — not yet, anyway.
THE MARKETING CAMPAIGN
The ad is a classic example of what is known as “reasons why” advertising. It was filled with reasons why it was time to create an independent franchise operation. It targeted the king.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
And so on. It was a long list. It lacked only bullet points. But by July 4, 1776, it did not lack bullets.
The ad had an inauspicious headline:
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776, A DECLARATION By the REPRESENTATIVES of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS assembled
This was not the stuff of high-response-rate advertising. The headline accounts for about 80% of an ad’s effectiveness. A good headline promises benefits. The copy did not get to the benefits until the second paragraph: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. These are good, of course, but they are general. A good ad needs specific benefits. The other two benefits were also overly general: Safety and Happiness. Still, this was better: not just the pursuit of happiness, but actual happiness. “Pursuit” is too vague.
Nevertheless, this document turned out to be the most important direct-response ad in American history. Had it not been effective, the two signers would be known in textbooks on British history as agents of a failed marketing campaign that led to a legendary bankruptcy. The two signers fully understood this at the time.
Discretion is the better part of valor. There were about 54 other men who approved of the document, but who chose not to sign it on July 4.
There was a good reason for this. In direct-response advertising, you had better do a test mailing. Only after the preliminary results are in do you do a full roll-out. If you violate this rule, the response could, as experienced copywriters like to say, get you killed.
The assembled co-signers fully understood the risks of a poor response to the mailing. So, they held off signing. They told the two signers: “You go first.”
About 200 copies of the ad were sent out the next day. John Dunlop printed them. They were printed as posters, called broadsides. You can see the broadside here. They went to state legislatures around the country. The mail was slow in those days — much slower than snail mail is today. So, they waited.
The initial response was favorable. So, on August 2, the participants took a vote:
Resolved That the Declaration passed on the 4th be fairly engrossed on parchment with the title and stile of “The unanimous declaration of the thirteen united states of America” & that the same when engrossed be signed by every member of Congress.
The resolution passed. So, they signed their names. Anyway, most of them did. Not all. These did not: John Alsop, George Clinton, John Dickinson, Charles Humphreys, Robert R. Livingston, John Rogers, Thomas Willing, and Henry Wisner. But they were offset by men who had not been involved in planning the details of the national marketing operation, but who had come onto the Board of Directors after July 4. They had been involved regionally: Matthew Thornton, William Williams, Benjamin Rush, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, George Ross, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton.
The entry for August 2 reads: “The declaration of Independence being engrossed & compared at the table was signed by the Members.” This new name, “declaration of independence,” had a better ring to it than the original. They hoped that this would increase the response rate.
Even so, a record of the vote was kept only in a second set of minutes. Charles Thomson, who died in 1824, decided not reveal the existence of these secret minutes for over 40 years. A man can’t be too careful. They were released in 1821.
As I said, these were men of discretion. They were still not ready to do a large mailing. They also wanted to have a receptive audience. The market in August was poor, as is typical for direct-response mailings. The previous winter, the company had done a test marketing program in Canada, which had failed. The survivors had retreated to New York by June. The group had been led by one of the promising sales directors, Benedict Arnold. Nevertheless, the company still had high hopes for him. He looked like a comer.
The next test came soon: on August 27. The results almost produced bankruptcy. The Director of Marketing, G. Washington, had organized a trial run, and after the trial, he and his associates ran. Actually, they sailed under cover of darkness and a seasonally rare fog. They left Long Island hurriedly.
So, they waited.
On December 26, the most successful post-Christmas sale in American history took place in Trenton, New Jersey. Washington and his associates presented a group of 1500 Hessian tourists with an offer they did not refuse.
On January 18, corporate headquarters sent out printed copies of the signed document to the state capitals for local distribution. This handout did quite well.
BURIAL AND RESURRECTION
As with all direct-mail campaigns, response rates fell off rapidly because of repeated mailings. The document went into obscurity by late 1777. But some recipients kept copies of it in their files. In direct-response marketing, these are called swipe files. This term was certainly appropriate for the most famous swipe in the history of Great Britain. A wholly owned subsidiary went independent. It refused to honor the implicit and universally recognized non-compete clauses in the original 13 regional by-laws.
Then, in 1800, the old document was revived. There was a split in the leadership of the new firm. Two of the original signers were competing for CEO. One of them, John Adams, had been on the committee of five that had drafted the original document. He was competing against Thomas Jefferson, who had been assigned the task of writing the first draft. Jefferson’s supporters were claiming that their man had done most of the writing.
Adams faced the grim task of anyone who resorts to a “me, too” marketing campaign. The product that gets into the market first has a huge advantage, called the unique selling proposition, or USP. Jefferson had gotten there first. His supporters made this clear.
Adams was having a tough time in 1800. A few weeks before the election, one of the members of his faction, Alexander Hamilton, had distributed a long letter calling Adams’s character into question. It was too late to respond. Adams’ supporters could only grumble, “that bastard!” It did no good.
Jefferson won. And from that day on, he attributed much of his career success to his authorship of the first draft of the original direct-response ad. As he put on his tombstone:
Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
& Father of the University of Virginia
But I still think he could have come up with a better headline than “In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776, A DECLARATION By the REPRESENTATIVES of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS assembled.”
[For my detailed study of the Declaration of Independence, go here.]
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Secession!
How else can you interpret this?
Read the secession argument again.
Petraeus was forced to plead guilty in order to not go to jail. The classified material in his possession was not subject to the hacking that Hillary’s was.
Over 40 people are now in jail for LESS than what Comey says Hillary did.
Secession.
[www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters]
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:
Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton
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Freedom and Obligation–2016 Commencement Address
June 2016 • Volume 45, Number 5/6 • Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
________________________________________
Clarence Thomas is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Born in Pinpoint, Georgia, he is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. Prior to his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991, he served as an assistant attorney general of Missouri, an attorney with the Monsanto Company, a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth, assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, chairman of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission, and a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 2007, he published My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir.
________________________________________
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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 14, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s 164th Commencement ceremony.
President Arnn, members of the board of trustees, assembled faculty, families and friends, and, most important, members of the Hillsdale College Class of 2016, I am both honored and grateful to participate in these commencement exercises. It has been some years since my wife Virginia and I have been to Hillsdale together. Of course we have known Dr. and Mrs. Arnn for many, many years, and we have been quite close to Hillsdale throughout his tenure. We admire the work that is being done here to educate young men and women—one of whom, Hillsdale graduate David Morrell, a wonderful young man, served as one of my law clerks a few years back.
This has been a most difficult term at the Court. The difficulty is underscored by the sudden and tragic passing of my colleague and friend, Justice Antonin Scalia. I think it is fitting to say a few words about him. Many will focus on his intellect and his legal prowess. I do not demur on either count. But there is so much more than that. When I think of Justice Scalia, I think of the good man who I could instinctively trust during my first days on the Court. He was, in the tradition of the South of my youth, a man of his word, a man of character. Over the almost 25 years that we were together on the Court, I think we made it a better place for each other. I know that he did for me. He was kind to me when it mattered most. He is, and will be, sorely missed.
As the years since I attended college edge toward a half century, I feel a bit out of place talking with college students or recent graduates. So much has changed since I left college in 1971. Things that were considered firm have long since lost their vitality, and much that seemed inconceivable is now firmly or universally established. Hallmarks of my youth, such as patriotism and religion, seem more like outliers, if not afterthoughts. So in a sense, I feel woefully out of place speaking at commencement ceremonies. My words will perhaps seem somewhat vintage in character rather than current or up-to-date. In that context, I admit to being unapologetically Catholic, unapologetically patriotic, and unapologetically a constitutionalist.
In my youth, we had a small farm. I am convinced that the time I spent there had much to do with my firm resolve never to farm again. Work seemed to spring eternal, like the weeds that consumed so much of our time and efforts. One of the messages constantly conveyed in those days was our obligation to take care of the land and to use it to produce food for ourselves and for others. If there was to be independence, self-sufficiency, or freedom, then we first had to understand, accept, and discharge our responsibilities. The latter were the necessary (but not always sufficient) antecedents or precursors of the former. The only guarantee was that if you did not discharge your responsibilities, there could be no independence, no self-sufficiency, and no freedom.
In a broader context, we were obligated in our neighborhood to be good neighbors so that the neighborhood would thrive. Whether there was to be a clean, thriving neighborhood was directly connected to our efforts. So there was always, to our way of thinking, a connection between the things we valued most and our personal obligations or efforts. There could be no freedom without each of us discharging our responsibilities. When we heard the words duty, honor, and country, no more needed to be said. But that is a bygone era. Today, we rarely hear of our personal responsibilities in discussions of broad notions such as freedom or liberty. It is as though freedom and liberty exist wholly independent of anything we do, as if they are predestined.
Related to this, our era is one in which different treatment or different outcomes are inherently suspect. It is all too commonly thought that we all deserve the same reward or the same status, notwithstanding the differences in our efforts or in our abilities. This is why we hear so often about what is deserved or who is entitled. By this way of thinking, the student who treats spring break like a seven-day bacchanalia is entitled to the same success as the conscientious classmate who works and studies while he plays. And isn’t this same sense of entitlement often applied today to freedom?
At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked what the gathering had accomplished. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” Nearly a century later, in a two-minute speech at Gettysburg, President Lincoln spoke similarly. It is for the current generation, he said,
“to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
So many who have gone before us have done precisely that, dedicating their lives to preserving and enhancing our nation both in war and in peace, taking care that those who have given the last full measure of devotion have not done so in vain.”
Being at Hillsdale College, it is appropriate that we should reflect briefly on our ancestors’ understanding of what was to be earned and preserved. America’s Founders and many successive generations believed in natural rights. To establish a government based on the consent of the governed, as the Declaration of Independence makes clear, they gave up only that portion of their rights necessary to create a limited government of the kind needed to secure all of their rights. The Founders then structured that government so that it could not jeopardize the liberty that flowed from natural rights. Even though this liberty is inherent, it is not guaranteed. Indeed, the founding documents of our country are an assertion of this liberty against the King of England—arguably the most powerful man in the world at the time—at the risk of the Founders’ lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Over the lifespan of our great country, many occasions have arisen that required this liberty, and the form of government that ensures it, to be defended if it was to survive.
At the risk of understating what is necessary to preserve liberty and our form of government, I think more and more that it depends on good citizens discharging their daily duties and obligations. Here I resist what seems to be the formulaic or standard fare at commencement exercises—a broad complaint about societal injustice and an exhortation to the young graduates to go out and solve the problem and change the world. Having been a young graduate myself, I think it is hard enough to solve your own problems, which can sometimes seem to defy solution. And in addressing your own obligations and responsibilities in the right way, you actually do an important part on behalf of liberty and free government.
Throughout my youth, even as the contradiction of segregation persisted, we revered the ideals of our great nation. We knew, of course, that our country was flawed, as are all human institutions. But we also knew that our best hope lay in the ideal of liberty. I watched with anguish as so many of the older people in my life groped and stumbled through the darkness of near or total illiteracy. Yet they desperately wanted to learn and gain knowledge, and they understood implicitly how important it was to enjoy the fullness of American citizenship. They had spent an aggregation of lifetimes standing on the edge of the dual citizenship that is at the heart of the 14th Amendment.
During the Second World War, they were willing to fight for the right to die on foreign soil to defend their country, even as their patriotic love went unreciprocated. They returned from that horrific war with dignity to face the indignity of discrimination. Yet the desire persisted to push our nation to live up to its ideals.
I often wondered why my grandparents remained such model citizens, even when our country’s failures were so obvious. In the arrogance of my early adult life, I challenged my grandfather and doubted America’s ideals. He bluntly asked: “So, where else would you live?” Though not a lettered man, he knew that our constitutional ideals remained our best hope, and that we should work to achieve them rather than undermine them. “Son,” he said, “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” That is, don’t discard what is precious along with what is tainted.
Today, when it seems that grievance rather than responsibility is the main means of elevation, my grandfather’s beliefs may sound odd or discordant. But he and others like him at the time resolved to conduct themselves in a way consistent with America’s ideals. They were law-abiding, hardworking, and disciplined. They discharged their responsibilities to their families and neighbors as best they could. They taught us that despite unfair treatment, we were to be good citizens and good people. If we were to have a functioning neighborhood, we first had to be good neighbors. If we were to have a good city, state, and country, we first had to be good citizens. The same went for our school and our church. We were to keep in mind the corporal works of mercy and the great commandment: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Being wronged by others did not justify reciprocal conduct. Right was right, and two wrongs did not make a right. What we wanted to do did not define what was right—nor, I might add, did our capacious litany of wants define liberty. Rather, what was right defined what we were required to do and what we were permitted to do. It defined our duties and our responsibilities. Whether those duties meant cutting our neighbor’s lawn, visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, or going off to war as my brother did, we were to discharge them honorably.
Shortly before his death in 1983, I sought my grandfather’s advice about how to weather the first wave of harsh criticism directed at me, which I admit had somewhat unnerved me. His re-sponse was simple: “Son, you have to stand up for what you believe in.” To him, that was my obligation, my duty. Perhaps it is at times like that—when you lack strength and courage—that the clarity of our obligation supplies both: duty, honor, country.
As I admitted at the outset, I am of a different time. I knew no one, for example, who was surprised at President Kennedy’s famous exhortation in his 1961 Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” That sentiment was as common as saying the Pledge of Allegiance or singing the National Anthem, as pervasive as shopping at Army-Navy surplus stores. Today there is much more focus on our rights and on what we are owed, and much less on our obligations and duties—unless, of course, it is about our duty to submit to some new proposed policy.
My grandfather often reminded us that if we didn’t work, we didn’t eat, and that if we didn’t plant, we couldn’t harvest. There is always a relationship between responsibilities and benefits. In agrarian societies, that is more obvious. As society becomes more complex and specialized, it is more difficult to discern. But it is equally true. If you continue to run up charges on your credit card, at some point you reach your credit limit. If you continue to make withdrawals from your savings account, you eventually deplete your funds. Likewise, if we continue to consume the benefits of a free society without replenishing or nourishing that society, we will eventually deplete that as well. If we are content to let others do the work of replenishing and defending liberty while we consume the benefits, we will someday run out of other people’s willingness to sacrifice—or even out of courageous people willing to make the sacrifice.
But this is Hillsdale College, which is like a shining city on a hill. This College, in the words of your mission statement, “considers itself a trustee of a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.” The very existence of Hillsdale connotes independence, because Hillsdale, like America, was founded on the idea that liberty is an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government.
Let me offer you, this year’s graduates, a few brief suggestions about making your deposits in the account of liberty. Today is just the end of the beginning of your young lives, and the beginning, the commencement of the rest of your lives. There is much more to come, and it will not be with the guiding hands of your parents—indeed, they may someday need your hand to guide them. Some of you will most assuredly be called upon to do very hard things to preserve liberty. All of you will be called upon to provide a firm foundation of citizenship by carrying out your obligations in the way so many preceding generations have done. You are to be the example to others that those generations have been to us. And in being that example, what you do will matter far more than what you say.
As the years have moved swiftly by, I have often reflected on the important citizenship lessons of my life. For the most part, it was the unplanned array of small things. There was the kind gesture from a neighbor. There was my grandmother dividing our dinner because someone showed up unannounced. There was the stranger stopping to help us get our crops out of the field before a big storm. There were the nuns who believed in us and lived in our neighborhood. There was the librarian who brought books to Mass so that I would not be without reading on the farm. Small gestures such as these become large lessons about how to live our lives. We watched and learned what it means to be a good person, a good neighbor, a good citizen. Who will be watching you? And what will you be teaching them?
After this commencement ceremony ends, I implore you to take a few minutes to thank those who made it possible for you to come this far—your parents, your teachers, your pastor. These are the people who have shown you how to sacrifice for those you love, even when that sacrifice is not always appreciated. As you go through life, try to be a person whose actions teach others how to be better people and better citizens. Reach out to the shy person who is not so popular. Stand up for others when they’re being treated unfairly. Take the time to listen to the friend who’s having a difficult time. Do not hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket, especially in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness. Treat others the way you would like to be treated if you stood in their shoes.
These small lessons become the unplanned syllabus for learning citizenship, and your efforts to live them will help to form the fabric of a civil society and a free and prosperous nation where inherent equality and liberty are inviolable. You are men and women of Hillsdale College, a school that has stood fast on its principles and its traditions at great sacrifice. If you don’t lead by example, who will?
I have every faith that you will be a beacon of light for others to follow, like “a city on a hill [that] cannot be hidden.” May God bless each of you now and throughout your lives, and may God bless America.
Support For Flag Day 2016 and Respects for Americans Murdered in Orlando
Joseph R. John
To
jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Jun 15 at 2:12 AM
Support For Flag Day 2016 and Respect for Americans Murdered in Orlando
By Capt Joseph R. John, June 14, 2016
The below listed message from Rees Lloyd, Esq (USA) Honors Flag Day. On this Flag Day, it is appropriate to pay homage to the 49 innocent and gentle Americans who were murdered, and 50 others innocent Americans who were wounded in Orlando in the 86th terrorists attack on American soil by another Radical Islamic Terrorists.
Unfortunately, few Americans are aware that Radical Islamic Terrorists have been attacking and/or killing hundreds of Americans citizens on US soil for the last 8 years; those attacks have been covered up by the left of center liberal media establishment, and the threat continues to be minimized and underestimated by the occupant of the Oval Office.
The United States has been under attack from coast to coast in places like Sacramento, Houston, Philadelphia, San Bernardino, Times Square, Moore, Detroit, Boise, Little Rock, Fort Hood Texas, Portland-ME, Chattanooga, Garland, Boston, Portland-OR, Minneapolis, Merced, Missouri, Kentucky, New York, Illinois, Washington-DC, Orlando, Oklahoma, and many more cities too numerous to list here.
The FBI has over 1000 open cases on Radical Islamic Terrorists planning attacks against Americans on US soil. To date 100 ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorist plots have been broken up by the FBI, resulting in the arrests of over 180 ISIS Muslim Refugees and Radical Islamic Terrorists from across the United States
We are saddened at the loss of any American lives to murderous attacks by Radical Islamic Terrorists who have “Declared War Against the United States”, and those terrorists have been employing bombs, knives, planes, and guns in 86 Terrorist Attacks to kill Americans on US soil.
We encourage very aggressive action by the US Armed Forces against Radical Islamic Terrorist, ISIS, Al Q’ieda in their overseas bases of operations to put them on the defensive and eradicate the terrorist threat. The best defense is a good offenses.
We also encourage the Obama administration to allow the FBI to interview all entering Middle East and African Refugees to determine if they have terrorist ties, before they are allowed to be resettled in 180 cities across the United States; to date Obama has allowed 915,000 Middle East and African Refugees to be resettled in the United States without allowing the FBI to vet their backgrounds to determine if they have terrorist ties.
We observe Flag Day again this year, and under the Flag of the United States, pay our respects to every American killed by Radical Islamic Terrorists as a result of their “Declared War Against the United States”.
Copyright 2016, Capt. Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. This material can only be posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without permission from the author
Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)/Formere FBI
Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC
2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184
San Diego, CA 92108
http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org
https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl
Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8
FLAG DAY 2016: Author William J. Federer’s history of Flag Day on http://www.AmericanMinute.com
Comrades, Colleagues, and Patriots:
It’s Flag Day 2016. Long may it wave, over what once was the “land of the free, and the home of the brave,” and will be again if we Americans are brave enough to restore it and thereby keep it free.
The Flag is the symbol of what was and is the first nation born as a constitutional republic established with the consent of the governed; the first nation in the history of the world of, by, and for “We, the People.”
In honoring the Flag we honor and remember the service and sacrifice of the some 1.4-million American veterans who have given their lives in defense of freedom from the War of Independence in 1776 through all the wars to the War Against Terrorism today. When we dishonor the Flag, we dishonor each and all of them, without whose sacrifice we would not be free.
On this Flag Day, I forward, with thanks to patriotic author William J. Federer, his http://www.AmericanMinute.com on the history of Flag Day. May God bless all who have served under the Flag, all who are serving, and all who will serve, and all patriots who remain brave enough to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” in order to preserve our American freedom.
FOR GOD AND COUNTRY FOREVER; SURRENDER TO TYRANNY–NEVER!
American Minute with Bill Federer
FLAG DAY “Millions of our school children will daily proclaim…dedication of our nation…to the Almighty” -Eisenhower
Thirteen Stars and Thirteen Stripes.
On JUNE 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress selected the FLAG of the United States.
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson designated JUNE 14 as “NATIONAL FLAG DAY.”
“I… call your attention to the approach of the anniversary of the day upon which THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES was adopted by the Congress as the emblem of the Union…
…I therefore… request that throughout the nation… the FOURTEENTH DAY of JUNE be observed as FLAG DAY with special patriotic exercises… to give significant expressions to our thoughtful love of America, our comprehension of the great mission of liberty and justice… for an America which no man can corrupt, no influence draw away from its ideals, no force divide against itself…
Done at the City of Washington…in the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixteen.”
On JUNE 14, 1783, General George Washington sent a “Circular Letter” to the thirteen Governors of the newly independent States:
“I am now preparing to resign…
Before I carry this resolution into effect, I think it a duty…to make this my last official communication, to congratulate you on the glorious events which Heaven has been pleased to produce in our favor…
The Citizens of America are from this period to be considered as the actors of a most conspicuous theater, which seems to be particularly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity…
Heaven has crowned all its other blessing, by giving a fairer opportunity for political happiness, than any other nation has ever been favored with…”
For God and Country
Washington continued, warning:
“According to the system of policy the States shall adopt at this moment, they will stand or fall;
and by their confirmation or lapse, it is yet to be decided, whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse…
not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved…”
Washington’s concern for “unborn millions” was indicative of the founders, who sacrificed their prosperity for their posterity.
This contrasted with later politicians who sacrificed their posterity for their prosperity, yoking children with an unpayable debt.
John Adams wrote, April 26, 1777:
“Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.”
Washington concluded:
“I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in His holy protection;
that He would incline the hearts of the citizens…to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another… and particularly for their brethren who have served in the field;
and finally, that He would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion,
and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation.”
Speaking of the Flag, President Calvin Coolidge stated May 31, 1926:
“Our condition today is not merely that of one people UNDER ONE FLAG, but of a thoroughly united people who have seen bitterness and enmity which once threatened to sever them pass away, and a spirit of kindness and good will reign over them all.”
President Calvin Coolidge stated May 25, 1924, at the Confederate Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia:
“It is the maintenance of our American ideals, BENEATH A COMMON FLAG, under the blessings of Almighty God… We know that Providence would have it so.”
For God and Country
President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated November 13, 1935:
“OUR FLAG for a century and a half has been the symbol of the principles of liberty of conscience, of religious freedom and equality before the law; and these concepts are deeply ingrained in our national character.”
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated on FLAG DAY, JUNE 14, 1942:
“The belief in man, created free, in the image of God – is the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today…
…We ask the German people, still dominated by their Nazi whip-masters, whether they would rather have the mechanized hell of Hitler’s ‘New’ Order or – in place of that, freedom of speech and religion…
…We ask the Japanese people, trampled by their savage lords of slaughter, whether they would rather continue slavery and blood or – in place of them, freedom of speech and religion…
…We know that man, born to freedom in the image of God, will not forever suffer the oppressors’ sword…”
Franklin Roosevelt continued:
“I am going to close by reading you a prayer…
‘God of the free, we pledge our hearts and lives today to the cause of all free mankind.
Grant us victory over the tyrants who would enslave all free men and Nations…
Grant us patience with the deluded and pity for the betrayed…
Grant us… valor that shall cleanse the world of oppression and the old base doctrine that the strong must eat the weak because they are strong.'”
Mentioning the Flag, Yale President Ezra Stiles warned May 8, 1783:
“That symbol of union, THE AMERICAN FLAG with it increasing stripes and stars, may have an equally combining efficacy for ages…
…The senatorial constitution and consulate of the Roman Empire lasted from Tarquin (last Roman king, 509 BC) to Caesar (Roman dictator, 49 BC)…
…The Assyrian endured without mutation through a tract of one thousand three hundred years from Semiramis (legendary ancient Babylonian queen) to Sardanapalus (alleged last Assyrian ruler, 627 BC)…
…Nor was the policy of Egypt overthrown for a longer period from the days of Metzraim (upper and lower Nile kingdoms, c.3,300 BC)
till the time of Cambyses (Persian conqueror of Egypt, 525 BC) and Amasis (last great Egpytian ruler, 526 BC)…
…The Medo-Persian (550-330 BC) and Alexandrine Empires (356-323 BC), and that of Timur (1370-1405 AD), who once reigned from Smyrna to the Indus, were…of short and transitory duration…
…Pragmatic sanction…secured the imperial succession in the House of Austria for ages (Habsburgs, 1020-1780)…
Whatever mutations may arise in the United States, perhaps hereditary monarchy and a standing army will be the last.”
Ben Franklin warned June 2, 1787:
“There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh – get first all the people’s money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants forever…
There is a natural inclination in mankind to kingly government… I am apprehensive…that the government of the States may, in future times, end in a monarchy.”
Yale President Ezra Stiles continued:
“This great American revolution, this recent political phenomenon… will be… contemplated by all nations….
…Navigation will carry THE AMERICAN FLAG around the globe itself; and display the thirteen stripes and new constellation at Bengal and Canton, on the Indus and Ganges, on the Whang-ho and the Yang-tse-kiang; and with commerce will import the wisdom and literature of the east….
…That prophecy of Daniel is now literally fulfilling – there shall be a universal traveling to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
…This knowledge will be brought home and treasured up in America: and being here digested and carried to the highest perfection, may re-blaze back from America to Europe, Asia and Africa, and illumine the world with truth and liberty…”
America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations
Ezra Stiles added:
“John Adams…observes… ‘But the great designs of Providence must be accomplished… The progress of society will be accelerated by centuries by this revolution…
…American ideas of toleration and religious liberty…will become the fashionable system of Europe very soon. Light spreads from the dayspring in the west; and may it shine more and more until the perfect day…'”
Stiles concluded:
“The United States will embosom all the religious sects or denominations in Christendom…
The Presbyterian, the Church of England… the Unitas Fratrum… Moravian bishops… Ancient Bohemian churches… the Baptists, the Friends, the Lutherans, the Romanists… the Dutch, and Gallic, and German reformed or Calvinistic churches… There is a Greek church brought from Smyrna… There are Wesyans, Mennonites… all…who will give the religious complexion to America… Episcopal… Greek and Armenian patriarchates…
With a most generous benevolence….of a friendly cohabitation of all sects in America, proving that men may be good members of civil society, and yet differ in religion…
Little would civilians have thought ages ago, that the world should ever look to America for models of government.”
President James Buchanan stated March 4, 1857:
“We ought to cultivate peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations…in a spirit of Christian benevolence toward our fellow-men… The people, under the protection of THE AMERICAN FLAG, have enjoyed civil and religious liberty..”
In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln commented to State Senator James Scovel of New Jersey:
“If God gives me four years more to rule this country, I believe it will become what it ought to be – what its Divine Author intended it to be – no longer one vast plantation for breeding human beings for the purpose of lust and bondage.
But it will become a new Valley of Jehoshaphat, where all the nations of the earth will assemble together UNDER ONE FLAG, worshiping a common God, and they will celebrate the resurrection of human freedom.”
When Abraham Lincoln died, President Andrew Johnson stated April 25, 1865:
“In order to mitigate that grief on earth which can only be assuaged by communion with the Father in heaven…
I… appoint… the 25th day of May next, to be observed, wherever in the United States THE FLAG OF THE COUNTRY may be respected, as a day of humiliation and mourning, and I recommend… citizens… assemble in their respective places of worship, there to unite in solemn service to Almighty God.”
President Rutherford B. Hayes noted in his diary that during the Civil War:
“Archbishop John Baptist Purcell strung THE AMERICAN FLAG, in the crisis of our fate, from the top of the Cathedral in Cincinnati April 16, 1861! The spire was beautiful before, but the Catholic prelate made it radiant with hope and glory for our country!”
America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations
When Rutherford B. Hayes died, President Benjamin Harrison described him, January 18, 1893:
“He was a patriotic citizen, a lover of THE FLAG and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home.”
President Andrew Johnson stated while serving as a Senator from Tennessee (The Life and Public Services of Andrew Johnson – State Papers, Speeches and Addresses, by John Savage, NY: Derby & Miller, 1866, p. 247, appendix p. 87, Jan. 31, 1862):
“Let us look forward to the time when we can take THE FLAG OF OUR COUNTRY and nail it below the Cross, and there let it wave as it waved in the olden times, and let us gather around it and inscribe for our motto: ‘Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever,’ and exclaim, ‘Christ first, our country next!'”
In dedicating the Oregon Trail, President Warren G. Harding stated July 3, 1923:
“Never in the history of the world has there been a finer example of civilization following Christianity.
The missionaries led under the banner of the Cross, and the settlers moved close behind under the STAR-SPANGLED SYMBOL OF THE NATION.”
President Benjamin Harrison stated July 21, 1892
“Let THE NATIONAL FLAG float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship… Let there be expressions of gratitude to Divine Providence.”
On FLAG DAY, JUNE 14, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Public Law 396 adding the phrase “One Nation Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance:
“Sec. 7. The following is designated as the Pledge of Allegiance to THE FLAG: ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’
Such pledge should be rendered by standing with the right hand over the heart. However, civilians will always show full respect to the flag when the pledge is given by merely standing at attention, men removing the headdress. Persons in uniform shall render the military salute.”
President Eisenhower stood on the steps of the Capitol Building and recited the revised Pledge of Allegiance for the first time.
The Pledge of Allegiance was first written in 1892 by a Baptist minister from Boston named Francis Bellamy, who was ordained in the Baptist Church of Little Falls, New York.
Francis Bellamy was a member of the staff of The Youth’s Companion, which first published the Pledge on September 8, 1892, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Public-school children first recited it during the National School Celebration on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America, October 12, 1892, at the dedication of the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair.
The words “under God” were taken from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
“…that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
In 1979, a publication approved by and printed under authority of Congress titled “The Capitol-A Pictorial History of the Capitol and of the Congress” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 24, commented regarding the Pledge:
“This Pledge attests what has been true about America from the beginning. Faith in the transcendent, sovereign God was in the public philosophy-the American consensus. America’s story opened with the first words of the Bible, In the beginning God…
…We are truthfully one nation under God ‘and our institutions presuppose a Divine Being,’ wrote Justice William O. Douglas in 1966…
…Only a nation founded on theistic presupposition would adopt a first amendment to ensure the free exercise of all religions or of none.
…The government would be neutral among the many denominations and no one church would become the state church. But America and its institutions of government could not be neutral about God.”
The pledge is “to the Flag and to the Republic for which it stands.”
A “republic” is where the people are king, ruling through their public servants called representatives.
When people pledge allegiance to the Flag, they are saying that they are the king, not some usurping dictator.
When someone dishonors the flag they are saying they do not want to be king anymore, that they want to relinquish responsibility for their lives to someone else.
They are rejecting equality before the law, freedom of speech, conscience, religion; and inalienable rights from the Creator.
President Eisenhower stated on JUNE 14, 1954:
“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.
To anyone who truly loves America, nothing could be more inspiring than…this re-dedication of our youth, on each school morning, to our country’s true meaning.”
President Eisenhower ended:
“In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.”
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Trump’s Immigration Policy, Capt John, USN USNA [nc]
DONALD TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION POLICY AS STATED ON AUGUST 31, 2016
Number One: We will build a wall along the Southern Border.
Number Two: End Catch-And-Release
Number Three: Zero tolerance for criminal aliens.
Number Four: Block Funding For Sanctuary Cities
Number Five: Cancel Unconstitutional Executive Orders & Enforce All Immigration Laws
Number Six: We Are Going To Suspend The Issuance Of Visas To Any Place Where Adequate Screening Cannot Occur
Number Seven: We will ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported
Number Eight: We will finally complete the biometric entry-exit visa tracking system.
Number Nine: We will turn off the jobs and benefits magnet.
Number Ten: We will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers
The above listed 10 immigration policies are in support of US Federal Immigration Laws passed by Congress and signed into law by a US President.
Donald Trump is the first Republican Presidential candidate, since Governor Ronald Reagan ran for President, whose policies are aimed at putting 360 million American citizens first, especially the 94 million unemployed American; Mr Trump is not proposing immigration policies that are in the best interest of 20 million Illegal Aliens, and detrimental to 360 million American citizens.
Mr Trump is not in agreement with the Republican leadership in Congress, and the American Chamber of Commerce, who have been working very closely with the Democrat leadership in Congress for 8 years, betraying the best interest of American citizens by intentionally keeping the southern border wide open.
Congressional leaders, by their refusal to seal the wide open southern border, are responsible for permitting the entry of terrorists, drugs, white slavery traffickers, weapons smugglers, hundreds of thousands of Central American children with infectious diseases (TB, whooping cough. measles, mumps, scarlet fever, Zinke virus, etc.), millions of Illegal Aliens from Mexico, and hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East who are simply walking into the US.
For 8 years, Obama has tied the hands of the US Border Patrol and ICE Agents, preventing them from enforcing the US Federal Immigration Laws they were sworn to uphold. Yet for 8 years, the Republican leaders in Congress have not charged Obama’s appointees at DHS with violating US Federal Immigration Laws, or tried to put pressure on them to cease, by employing the power of the purse to put pressure on them.
Mr Trump’s full speech is attached.
Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI
Regional Chairman, Veterans 4 Trump Southern California (Orange County, Imperial County, and San Diego County)
2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184
San Diego, CA 92108