President Trump: Shinzo Abe assassinated

 

Mr. Abe was one of the good guys.  A sad day.

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America on the Grift

 

Michelle Malkin traces the corruption of one sounds-good-on-paper educational institution to demonstrate how American institutions and societies are collapsing.  And our tax dollars are funding failure and . . . lots and lots of illegal immigrants.  She starts off:

Our once-sovereign nation has become nothing more than a morbidly obese cash cow for what the Biden administration now openly calls the “liberal world order.”

Higher gas prices are just the tip of the sacrifice iceberg. It’s our posterity paying the globalist pipers. In the new “liberal world order” (which is really just the same old Bush family “New World Order” of more than three decades ago), homegrown children’s needs are subjugated to the hopes and dreams of the children of the rest of the world.

Stick with me and follow an open-borders bouncing ball that demonstrates how multinational elites exploit America Last — with the brazen complicity of our own U.S. government, nonprofits and corporations. As always, we must follow the money to find the truth. Let’s dig deeper behind this headline:

Former American Hebrew Academy
 will house unaccompanied immigrant children.

And dig she does.  Read her entire analysis here.  

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Tall Ships returning to Cleveland

 

The Tall Ships are returning to Cleveland, with the grand parade coming into the harbor around 4pm tomorrow, Thurs., July 7.  The Tall Ships website is here.  And here are some images of past parades taken by CTP roving photographer Pat Dooley.

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VDH: Who Are the Real Insurrectionists?

 

click on image to embiggen

Victor Davis Hanson is a national treasure, and his recent column at American Greatness begins:

For 120 days in summer 2020, violent protesters destroyed some $2 billion in property and injured 1,500 police officers in riots that led to over 35 deaths.  

Because blue-state mayors and governors saw BLM and Antifa instigators as useful street soldiers, most of those arrested were never tried in court. Street thugs paid no price for declaring themselves de facto owners of downtown areas of Seattle, which police themselves conceded were no-go zones. Why did public officials in blue states ignore the violence? They were certain that it enjoyed majority support among their leftwing constituencies. 

Indeed, some leftist icons cheered on the violence. Well after the failed attempt to storm the White House grounds, in June 2020, the Democratic candidate for vice president Kamala Harris warned us that protestors were “not going to let up, and they should not.” What did Harris mean by “should not?”—when she knew numerous protests that summer had ended in terrible violence? Was she reckless in the manner Trump was said to be by encouraging a demonstration on January 6? 

The architect of the “1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones assured the nation that vast destruction of (someone else’s property) was not a real crime. CNN’s Chris Cuomo gushed that violent demonstrations and riots were American traditions. Were these national voices urging calm during weeks of violent rioting and looting? 

There were no investigations, no congressional committees, and no voices of outrage from the left-wing establishment over months of such carnage. Indeed, much of the organization of the violent protests was facilitated by social media that was apparently unbothered that the medium under their stewardship was used to torch and loot. 

VDH chronicles the incitements to violence, the threats, and actual violence, all coming from the progressive left.  Full article is here.

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Mark Steyn: America The Beautiful

The great Mark Steyn has a regular feature on his website, Steyn's Song of the Week, and his column over this weekend offers the wonderful backstory to the song America The Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A Ward.  Here is most of the column:

. . . And to round out this Glorious Fourth in not so glorious times, at a time when we dwell mostly on what is ugly in our society, here is a hymn to beauty. This much requested essay is adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season:

In 1893, a Massachusetts professor called Katharine Lee Bates was giving a series of summer lectures on English literature at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. "One day," she recalled, "some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there."

Professor Bates had not previously traveled in the Rockies or seen much of her country at all beyond New England, and the unbounded beauty of the land awed her - and inspired her. It was "the most glorious scenery I ever beheld, and I had seen the Alps and the Pyrenees," she said.

"My memory of that supreme day of our Colorado sojourn is fairly distinct even across the stretch of 35 crowded years," Miss Bates wrote a year before her death in 1929. "We stood at last on that Gate-of-Heaven summit, hallowed by the worship of perished races, and gazed in wordless rapture over the far expanse."

Though she insisted "the sublimity of the Rockies smote my pencil with despair", she was not "wordless" for long. "It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind":

Oh beautiful for spacious skies

For amber waves of grain

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

She put them down on paper that evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel. Today you'd be hard put to find a quatrain known to more Americans. Whether it's Gary Larson's "Far Side" cartoon of Columbus approaching land and saying, "Look! Purple mountains! Spacious skies! ...Is someone writing this down?" or Rush Limbaugh at noon eastern welcoming listeners "across the fruited plain" to his daily radio show, every anchorman, cartoonist, comedian or advertising copywriter who evokes those words is assured that they're as instantly familiar to his audience as any lines ever written in American English.

Though they were born that day on Pikes Peak, they were not given to the world until the Fourth of July 1895, when they appeared in a weekly church publication in Boston called The Congregationalist. Whether or not Katharine Lee Bates could see actual amber waves or purple mountains in that thin air, she captured precisely the scale of America as no-one had done before: As the anonymous author of a long-ago booklet on patriotic music published by the John Hancock Insurance Company wrote: "Among our American songs, none surpasses in nationalistic idealism 'America, the Beautiful.' In it Katharine Lee Bates has caught the beauty, majesty, and immensity of this country of ours." The words have a humility before that beauty and majesty and immensity, yet they rise to the task and do them justice. In The Congregationalist, the editor's introductory note read:

Miss Bates's poem has the true patriotic ring pertinent to Fourth of July.

And over 125 Fourths later, those words are not just the accompaniment to the celebration but part of the fabric and foundation of it.

Mark’s full column is here.  Happy Independence Day to everyone across the fruited plain.

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Celebrating Independence Day

 

Gary Bauer at PatriotPost has a message for all of us on this Fourth of July weekend:

Independence Day is one of my favorite holidays – celebrating patriotism, our history and the tremendous courage, faith and sacrifices of our Founding Fathers. As the 246th birthday of America approaches, by all means, enjoy the day! Celebrate America and our freedoms!

But please take a moment to remind your children and grandchildren about America’s exceptionalism and the significance of Independence Day.

Remind them about the sacrifices at Bunker Hill and Concord Bridge that were necessary to create this nation and secure our freedoms. Tell them about the courage of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night.

Most importantly, tell them about America’s “mission statement.” It can be found in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

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…

Yes, the right to life is a God-given human right. It is the first right without which all others are meaningless!

Those were radical ideas in 1776, and they are still radical concepts in many parts of the world today.

Of course, we have struggled at times to live up to that standard, but there is a reason millions of people from all over the world want to come to America – and it’s not because we are a “systemically racist nation.” We are not!

There is a reason that courageous Chinese dissidents wave the American flag, and not the Canadian flag or the Iranian flag or the Swedish flag.

Sadly, in 21st century America it seems we are struggling with the concept of “truth” and the notion that our rights come from God, not government. As Ronald Reagan famously warned, freedom is not guaranteed. Reagan said:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

That warning has never seemed more dire than today as radical Marxists are attacking our history and demanding a “fundamental transformation of America.” Into what exactly?

They are not seeking to create “a more perfect union.” They are seeking to divide us in order to impose their will on us. The future of our liberty depends on whether folks like you and me can muster the courage to overcome this radical impulse to rule or ruin.

. . .

God bless you, my friends, and may God bless the United States of America!

Read the rest here. And Happy Independence Day.

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Klaus Schwab channels Karl Marx

Meme seen at Bookworm room:

 

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