Tea Party Patriots Ordinary citizens reclaiming America's founding principles.

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

What Thanksgiving means To Americans

 

Image credit: en.wikipedia.org


Re-posted from earlier Cleveland Tea Party Thanksgiving blogs:


What Thanksgiving really means To Americans

A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories about Indians who befriended the early settlers. 

In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for them. After two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition, disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with surpluses available for trade.

Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual, private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this because an elder and Governor of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical background, is here.) 


It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. 

As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. 

After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

As my friend Reuven Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.

I’m often asked why our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism will fail?

No, they don’t. Not anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class. They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its acquisition.  All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally. History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the self-anointed.

That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.

But the Pilgrims learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we fade.  Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred. And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic, colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

The Rittenhouse Verdict and “Funded riots”

 

image at cartoonmovement.com


A contributor to TheAmericanSun named Fred Watson Jr. posted a column in the aftermath of the not-guilty verdict for Kyle Rittenhouse.  Mr. Watson begins:

On August 25, 2020, a seventeen year old young man shot and killed two convicted felons to death and shot and disarmed another. It was all caught on livestream. Within two days, charges were filed against that young shooter for a flurry of offenses. On November 19, 2021, a jury acquitted that young shooter of all charges. The trial, both actual judicial proceedings and broader media persecution, of Kyle Rittenhouse was complete. Society now has to live with the consequences of our new era of political trial spectacles.

. . .

Who did answer? A seventeen year old, doughy faced kid. He protected where his family lived, where he worked. He went and cleaned up the mess rioters made. He showed amazing cool under pressure and marksmanship to take out multiple attackers. He did it all alone with a mob chasing him. He shamed an entire group of people: right wingers. Someone finally stood up to the months’ worth of mobs and it was a kid. He became a folk hero overnight and energized an entire faction of America. Someone had finally said enough. Someone had finally stood their ground. He was the right’s boy, and they would defend his actions. It was all on tape, and he had defended his community and self. His instincts were all right and intentions were from the heart yet he was persecuted by our warped regime for it.

And he concludes:

This is going to repeat itself. Funded riots are a way of life for the left now. The procedure is in place for more instances like Kenosha because the upper echelons of the right allow them to happen. When Sen. Romney marches with BLM, there is no leadership. White America, right wing America, is on its own. The events of 2020 made that clear. The post-verdict outrage from the left, from top to bottom on social media, makes it clear that there is no de-escalation. The events of the 2020s will only ramp up the tension. The riot indulgence will not go away. Will the self-defense veto remain?

This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning. This is the beginning of the show trial era. Low level civil conflict is already here. America will see more of these flashpoints. The right needs to become fully aware of the stakes and circumstances so that these situations do not arise, and when they do, whatever protective powers are available, are still available for its people. Laws must be enacted. State power must be wielded. Consequences must be real for the left’s random soldiers spread throughout our nation at every level and institution. There were too many structural features geared towards a left wing victory. It seemed God was on Kyle’s side and a competent defense team. God? How else to explain the one surviving assailant being the one to testify and bolster Kyle’s case? How else to explain Kyle shooting three ex-cons and missing the one black who attacked him. The right will have to get off its ass and realize no man on a white horse is going to clean everything up. It’ll have to stop relying on a system thoroughly dominated by the left. The right is going to have to stop letting one boy watch the wolves.

Read the rest here. Sobering.

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Monday, November 22, 2021

Compilation Video: Flip-Flopping Fauci



A.F. Branco cartoon

JD Rucker as FreedomFirstNewtwork posted a 2-minute video that expose Dr Fauci for the fraud that he is:

Compilation Video Shows Definitively Why We Call Him
Flip-Flopping Fascist Fear Fuhrer Fauci

There is no greater flip-flopper in the world than Anthony Fauci. It’s not just that he’s able to change his perspectives back and forth at will; there are plenty of politicians and bureaucrats who do that well. But Fauci takes it up several notches by not only justifying it inexplicably by claiming to hold to “science,” but also by somehow keeping a straight face every time he debunks himself, which is quite often.

A video posted to Twitter shows a compilation of Fauci vs Fauci incidents. Since it’s on Twitter it’s limited to just over two minutes long of Fauci’s greatest flip-flopping hits, but one could easily compile hours of footage where the medical tyrant backtracks, retracks, and takes his own narratives completely off the rails.

The worst part about all this isn’t that Fauci is driven by agenda, though that’s bad enough. The worst part is that millions of brainwashed Americans still believe this guy is credible. This is due in large part by the Biden-Harris regime’s unwillingness to call him out as well as mainstream media incessantly propping him up, but here’s the thing. Americans have a responsibility to educate themselves. The information is readily available. There is an overabundance of evidence that Fauci is an evil, narcissistic, totalitarian pawn of the architects of The Great Reset. Those who don’t realize this are delusional.

The science doesn’t “evolve” as Fauci often says. The narrative surrounding the science evolves. Nothing in the science has changed about face masks since the initial studies released last year showed they don’t stop Covid-19 and can be detrimental to those who wear them for any extended period of time. The only things that keep changing are the short-term goals of Fauci’s puppetmasters, and they use him to play the public like little children fawning over a birthday party magician.

Source link is here.  And it includes the video (approx. 2 minutes);  I have been unable to locate it elsewhere online; it may already have been cancelled.

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Sunday, November 21, 2021

Scott Adams: Are Things Really That Bad?

 


This past year has been overwhelming to patriots everywhere – and not in a good sense.  Is it as bad as we think?  Dilbert creator Scott Adams apparently thinks so;  he recorded a podcast, and since I rarely listen to podcasts, I was grateful to see that Mark Wauck at Meaning in History transcribed some of it.  Here’s what Mr. Wauck posted:

A reader sent me a link to the Scott Adams podcast from yesterday. It’s nearly an hour long, but I’ve transcribed a brief portion of it. Adams is talking about the feeling he has that people have had enough, that there’s a growing sentiment of: We’ve had enough. He goes on a mild rant about the way he—and we—used to think just a few years ago, compared to where we’re at now. Of course it’s subjective, but I think it can be supported by a wide range of events that speak to public sentiment:

I think a lot of people have hit a wall.

...

We used to think that official data from government and big companies was probably mostly honest and sufficiently accurate, even if it had some problems. Do you believe that anymore?

I think now we believe that all data is fake. Because it mostly is. Maybe not intentionally, but there's always some context left out or something. I think we're now more likely to think that all data is fake as the default assumption. Whereas, it used to be the opposite. Just a few years ago.

Just a year ago a lot of people--smart people!--would have said the Second Amendment doesn't protect you from your government, because the government has better guns. Do you believe that now? Today, does anyone believe that guns are NOT the only thing keeping us from being Australia? I think Australia gave you all the learning you needed on that. The lockdown that Australia is experiencing, that can't happen here in America--because of the Second Amendment.

And then, of course, the Russian Collusion Hoax taught us that there's no limit to government corruption. I honestly thought there was a limit. ... When the people on the Right were first talking about the Russian Collusion Hoax being a Hillary Clinton paid operation with the Deep State behind it, CIA was part of it, and all that--do you know what I thought? I thought, well, there's certainly something sketchy going on here, but it's not THAT bad. It's not like collusion between Intel agencies and Democrats. It's not THAT. But it was. It was every bit of that. The worst thing you can imagine that anyone could do to this country? They were doing it. It's the worst thing your government could have done to you--and they were doing it HARD.

So my understanding of how far my government would go to retain power and screw the citizens is way different than it was a few years ago. Now I know they'll do ANYTHING. I didn't think that before. And they'll tell any lie because they can get away with it. I didn't think THAT. I didn't think anybody would lie in public if it was easy to fact check them. Wrong. WRONG. You can lie all you want in public, cuz you've got your own fact checkers. ...

I have to say, that’s about where I’m at now. Not that I was gullible before, or slow to catch on to the various hoaxes that have been perpetrated by the Power Elite, but I guess—a bit like Adams—I resisted the notion that it could be THAT bad.

Source link is here.  Most of us can add to Adams's list:  election fraud; foot-dragging on election audits (thanks, GOPe); “infrastructure” spending (thanks, GOPe); “vaccine” mandates; an occupant of the White House who has some brand of dementia;  the dangerous pull-out from Afghanistan, esp. leaving behind billions of dollars in equipment for our enemies;  opening the borders;  illegal immigration;  and now, all-too-predictable inflation.  All of it THAT BAD.

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Saturday, November 20, 2021

PowerLine: Border Apprehensions


The PowerLine blog has a weekly feature called “The Geek in Pictures.” This week’s “Blowout Edition” is here, and below is one of the charts/graphs that I thought I’d share with CTP readers:


Click to embiggen or go to the link above and scroll down.

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Friday, November 19, 2021

Julie Kelly: horrific update on Jan 6 protesters

 

photo credit: timesofisrael.com


For months, Julie Kelly at American Greatness has been digging and digging into the arrest and detention without due process of protesters at the Capitol on January 6.  It’s worse than we thought.  Much worse.  Here’s a brief extract from Ms. Kelly's column yesterday:

. . . [Ryan] Nichols’ account is detailed in an appalling new court filing that confirms what American Greatness has reported for months: on January 6, D.C. Metro and Capitol police assaulted nonviolent protesters with explosive devices, rubber bullets, tear gas, and in some cases, their own fists and batons. A tunnel on the lower west side of the Capitol building became a dangerous—and, likely for at least one protester, deadly—battle scene as police viciously attacked American citizens on the “hallowed” grounds of the U.S. Congress.

Nichols, of Texas, has been behind bars since his January 18 arrest; he sits in the D.C. jail specifically used to house January 6 detainees, charged along with Harkrider with multiple offenses including assault of a police officer, civil disorder, and unlawful possession of pepper spray.

So, what on Earth turned two decorated veterans with a history of helping people in crisis into “insurrectionists” who attacked police officers? It was what they saw when they approached the tunnel around 3 p.m. on January 6. “They hear people screaming in pain and crying for help—women and old men are bloodied and injured,” McBride wrote in a motion seeking Nichols’ release. “Training and instincts kick in and they head to the tunnel, wondering if an accident had happened and if other people were even more seriously injured.”

McBride viewed three hours of surveillance video captured by Capitol security camera—the extensive system captured at least 14,000 hours of footage that the Justice Department and Capitol police are desperate to keep away from public view—and described for the first time what happened inside the tunnel where a combination of D.C. and Capitol police, ostensibly, were stationed to prevent protesters from entering the building:

“[Just] after 4:00 pm, Ryan is sprayed multiple times by an officer standing on a ledge in the tunnel,” McBride wrote in a November 1 filing. “He is also separated from a woman who stood next to Ryan at different times at the Western Terrace. She was middle aged and nice. Ryan promised to keep an eye on her. The woman was wearing a red shirt and a MAGA hat. Shortly thereafter, officers begin terrorizing people in and around the tunnel. People are screaming and getting crushed. There is a pile of human beings stacked on top of each other at the tunnel entrance. People are trapped and there is nowhere to go.”

McBride focused on the conduct of one officer in particular, with badge number L359 and wearing a white shirt. The unidentified officer begins “to beat a man for no apparent reason . . . [and] beats the man so badly that the man crawls over to the woman with the MAGA hat.” . . .

Much more here.  One reader comment suggested printing out the column and sending it to your representative in the House to ask what he/she can do. 

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Thursday, November 18, 2021