Tag: Woodrow Wilson

The US Empire Targets Christians in their Cross-hairs – How Did it Come to This?

The journey of thirteen British colonies pushing out the British Empire towards becoming the American Empire is an interesting one. No one wants to be a target .. especially when the shooter is a global empire whether Roman, British or American.

The shift from federated republic to a centralized state with dreams of empire started early on even as the American Revolution drew to a close. Powerful people with their own version of empire on their mind would eventually get there way with the US Constitution coup d’etat in 1787 to Lincoln’s War on Southern Independence as well as the total war on Southerners and Indians to the blame placed on Spain for the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba harbor through Woodrow Wilson and beyond. As they say, the rest is history.

What really helped is summarized in a couple of recent articles, one by Bionic Mosquito called Evangelicalism and another by Brad Hoff called Syrians Were Quietly Warned Before the War.

As with all trends that impact nations and people groups, this all gets real messy real fast and stays that way. This is seen in the Bible as well as throughout most of history that evil forces seem to get the upper hand time and again as there is no real long term peace from this world’s experiences.

Specific to the US’s trajectory toward becoming a brutal empire was the bent for power and control, first of the land to the west of the thirteen colonies and eventually around the world especially after WWII.

Tracking the heart of American thought starting in the early 1800s it is apparent that a movement of Christian religious thought left the foundation that Jesus Himself emphasized during His lifetime. Bionic Mosquito rightly pinpoints several influencers that distorted what it meant to be a Jesus-Follower towards becoming a self-centered global terrorist, carrying a Bible.

[Regarding] the evangelical timeline and splintering… What I view as, perhaps, the most corrupting: John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield. A focus on end-times theology, a focus on a state for Israel (resulting in a worship of the modern state with that name). Scofield, a scoundrel in his personal life, would somehow have his reference Bible printed by the prestigious Oxford Press! Many denominations would read from his Bible.

There would be a further splintering in the form of “Bible-believing Christians” vs. liberal modernists – they would push for all having to conform (leftists never change). There would also be a mushy middle in every denomination, eventually leading to a growth in the liberal side – after all, if you don’t feel strongly about something, you won’t really fight for it.

Distractions like this attract the masses and are passed on throughout the generations and what you end up with is a political Christianity, one that Jesus would say “you still don’t get it do you?”.

In the US this culminated about the time of Woodrow Wilson:

There was revivalism: western New York, Tennessee, the Cumberland Valley. Charles Grandison Finney – emotionalism for the sake of emotionalism. People have the free will to choose salvation (see Luther and Calvin spinning in their graves). You don’t have to wait for God to do His work; you decide – just come forward (a prototype for Billy Graham, it seems).

L. Moody – the YMCA, hymnals, the Moody Press. Billy Sunday – went from professional baseball player to evangelist. He attracted the largest crowds of any in the late eighteenth-century – and he played a significant role in the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment (no booze).

Biblicism was weakened – just get a confession of faith; the door was opened to liberalism and the leftist version of the social justice movement. The Enlightenment contributed here: reason, divorced from God, could not accept many of the claims of the Bible. Let’s just try to hold onto the moral stuff, without the grounding in the Bible or in worship.

I am reminded of Murray Rothbard’s work, World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals:

Also animating both groups of progressives was a postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered “Yankee” areas of northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out “sin,” to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.

The high-bar (or low-bar, more accurately) of this merger can be summed up in two words: Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson with his dream, post WWI, of the League of Nations was a primer for the US entrance as the baton receiver when the British Empire lost its possessions during WWII. The US decided to do “empire” differently and more covertly. The US would target various countries for regime change to “manage” the world, and Christians themselves would be targeted just like during the Roman Empire.

This is where the article by Brad Hoff takes over showing how Christians are blindsided when they become the target. I wonder how many US Christian still think that this policy can’t come “home” to domestic soil .. even Robert E. Lee saw this in 1866:

Below is the Syrian doctor Shaza’s story, excerpted from the book…

As Shaza mused on the catastrophic shift from an idyllic life to one of upheaval, she recounted being given a forewarning of the Syrian Christian tragedy. As a physician Shaza ministered to those displaced due to the Iraq War: “I worked with the Iraqi refugees from 2003 to 2010 in a charity center. It’s a program done by the Church, but they are accepting all the people – Christians and Muslims.” Little did Shaza foresee that less than a decade into the future it would be Syrian Christians themselves caught in dire straits.

Shaza related how a number of Iraq refugees tried to warn her:

They talk about horrible stories. They’re kidnapping, killing, raping. When they trust me after a couple of years, they keep saying, “Have a plan B. They are going to do this with Syrian Christians.” I keep saying, “No, it will not happen.” They keep saying, “No, it’s going to happen, so think about what is your next step if it’s happened.” And we didn’t think about that. We never thought that this will happen in Syria. Most of the Syrians – they keep saying that it’s protected because it’s a strong region. I have been to Iraq and to Jordan, to Egypt, in the past as a tourist – I saw poor people. We never see them in Syria. We have no homeless people in Syria. It’s a prosperous country. It was a good country, but after, I think, 2006 or ’07 till 2010, we began to notice something. Maybe politics, maybe economic, I don’t know what’s the problem, but something happened, you know. Makes the people more poor so more suffer. They have these thoughts of revolution. I think that made them easily accepted this. 

I think the last part of this snippet is key. The empire targets people groups and impoverishes them so they become revolutionaries so the state can use that excuse to crush the rebellion. The state/empire always claims it is bringing “democracy”, however in fact it brings terror and poverty to destabilize the region to ensure regime changed nations remain 3rd world status. This is the American Empire’s MO (modus operandi )

At the end of the day, Christians became the target in the Middle East when the American Empire was playing “find the terrorists” especially since the 1990s.  I am pretty certain the American Empire is as secular as it can get as any “Christian Principles” were thrown out decades if not centuries ago. You can count on the American Empire to have its eyes on Christians domestically in the years and decades to come. Are you ready for this?

Peace out.

-SF1

“Land of the Free”? Not So Fast – the Trend-line is Not Linear!

1938 USA Communist Party Convention -Abraham Lincoln as centerpiece

Like most people my age, #60+, I can remember a time when we all were a LOT more free. Rifles in the pickup trucks, shooting guns near suburban neighborhoods, playing outside ALL day with the parents not really knowing where their kids were at. This was all “normal”.

Also during this time, it was the college campuses that allowed and even encouraged thinking and expressing one’s own thoughts no matter how popular they might be. Anti-government speech was not just tolerated, it was at the heart of what it meant to be an American, the Spirit of ’76!

Well those days are long gone, and the transition to where we are today was not a linear one at all. At first there was some minor deviation, but in the past 5-10 years, the college campuses are more group-think than ever, where the narrative of the day is king, where thought police thrive.

This is not the first time this has happened, but it does seem to be the first time it has happened without a war in the past 150 years, but it does have some similarities to a time in American history over 220 years ago where the thought police surfaced, when the “Land of the Free” enacted the Alien and Sedition Act in 1798 which …:

made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing – even if true – about the president or the federal government

You see, freedom of speech is a natural, God-given right that governments can and will take away. In the “Land of the Free” in 1798, there were many who took issue with this course change that occurred only 22 years after the thirteen American colonies sought independence from the British Empire. When Thomas Jefferson became president, he and his administration repealed this act. However, one this course change is embedded in a nation’s/empire’s DNA, there is no going back:

Abraham Lincoln arrested Northerners who challenged the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson arrested Americans who challenged World War I. FDR arrested Americans he thought might not support World War II. LBJ and Richard Nixon used the FBI to harass hundreds whose anti-Vietnam protests frustrated them.

In our own post 9/11 era, the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act permits FBI agents to write their own search warrants and gives those warrants the patriotic and harmless-sounding name of national security letters (NSLs). This authorization is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that the people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that that security can only be violated by a search warrant issued by a neutral judge and based upon probable cause of crime.

To most libertarians, this is where we are today, where the government has successfully transitioned the US Empire to a static point where the “Land of the Free” is no more. However, there is yet another effort that has been made in the past five years or so to continue the transition towards a totalitarian state, and this one comes from the corporate side of Lincoln’s dream of mercantilism, where government and big corporations become two wings of the same bird.

– Murray Rothbard on Mercantilism

As Rod Dreher of Russian Insider indicates in this article, “A Russian Woman Working as a College Professor in the US Writes About the Sovietization of Amerika”, it seems that it is the former citizens of the old USSR are the most sensitized to this trend the most while typical Americans see this as no big deal, much like the Germans in 1930’s Germany as the Nazi’s came to power.

Clarissa [not her real name] is a college professor who emigrated to the US from Russia as a young woman, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. She is yet another ex-Soviet bloc person who is extremely anxious about the emergence of soft totalitarianism here. Of course she can’t use her real name, because she fears professional retaliation. It should tell us something that not a single academic from a former communist country that I interviewed for this book was willing to speak using their own name — this, in the Land of the Free. Why not? Because they were afraid of facing professional consequences for speaking out against identity politics and the “social justice” regime.

I am pretty sure if I were to chart out freedom in the USA, we are now at an all-time low as both the government and corporate America are actively seeking out dissenters to the latest narratives. The tools are in place to “take out” people professionally both in social media attacks:

Totalitarianism is something that takes away from people the unbearable burden of freedom. It allows many people to hound and persecute with impunity. That is pleasant in many senses. There was a practice in the Soviet Union where people would be told to get together in groups at work and write letters to the newspaper to denounce famous poets or artists. We see that today in Twitter. People love that because it allows a little person to completely destroy somebody who has done something great.

.. as well inside universities and corporations with diversity and sensitivity training in the workplaces:

All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble, or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church communities. When you set people against each other, they are much easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.

So one might think I just need to be more careful about what I share in certain social circles. But that is not how this works, to see how any flavor of totalitarianism actually works, we need to learn from those who lived there:

… wokeness in corporate America is a weapon used by white-collar professionals to weed out competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. She said, “People find ideological purity tests useful to weed out people who compete for jobs you cover. Progressive forces are completely allied with globalist capitalism.”

She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media. “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today.

One would think that at least the church might be a place where one can be real in this regard. Anyone who understands the 1st century church, it was the underground Christians in the Roman Empire that actually turned the then-known-world upside-down NOT with violence or revolution, but with love of their neighbor where .. :

[NOTE: It seems that true “diversity” does not focus on division based on race, sex or anything else. A true team sees each unique God-created individual as part of the crew that can help to keep the ship afloat.]

Well, a note of caution, most of the churches today, especially ones with government registration in place (501c3), are part of the corporate woke-ness effort underway in this country. Most of the church of today bears little resemblance to the church in the generation after Jesus was killed by religion and empire.

Until this trend is reversed, the ‘circle of trust’ is going to get mighty small. Take your time in knowing who your friends are, it is better to be lonely than to be a fresh target for either empire or corporate-elite.

Peace out

-SF1

12OCT2019: Blog Post Trilogy Finale – Sedition Criminalization Back in Vogue

10 years after the Constitution was drafted, this act was signed by “patriot” John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

Just from my history education from the government, I know there were times in our history that one had to just agree with the government and not speak or write critically of their actions. Words like treason and sedition became mainstream.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. – John F. Kennedy

From the “Copperheads” during the Civil War (those who called out the tyrant Lincoln) to those critical of entering the “Great War” (WWI), who had to content with Woodrow Wilson’s  U.S. Sedition Act of 1918, the act that made it a crime to ”willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.” Less than 25 years later aviation hero Charles Lindbergh would be criticized by FDR by not going along with his secret plan to get America involved in yet another world war. (WWII) From George Bush stating “you are either with us or against us” in his decision to invade Iraq to the same treatment when Barack Obama decided to attack Libya and back ISIS in Syria, it is the same song, different verse ad nauseum.

This is my 3rd post today, a trilogy of sorts, which:

  1. covered the unhealthy big-business/government alliance and its impact on regions of this nation.
  2. covered on a macro scale how there were two visions of the American Colonies “cause” for independence from the British Empire.
  3. covered on a micro scale, where what one individual says or writes is held against them as a crime against the government.

Pure Redcoat.

Pure Soviet Union circa 1950s/1960s.

It turns out, it is also Pure America in 1798!

Today, under Trump, this whole critical views of government has again gotten personnel. In the last few years, individuals have been banned from social media or experienced a demonetization of their work online because of their words. The attitude these days aligns with that of John Adams back in 1798 when he signed the Alien and Sedition Act as described by Robert Ringer nearly 10 years ago:

… which made it a crime for anyone to criticize the government ”through writing or any other shape, form, or fashion.”

Specifically, criticizing the president, Congress, the military, or the flag was made illegal. This by a group of men who themselves had escaped bondage only twenty-two years earlier!

It was an audacious move by the Federalist-controlled Congress to silence the Republicans, particularly regarding their support of the French Revolution. It was, of course, in direct violation of the Bill of Rights, which clearly states, in the First Amendment, that ”Congress shall make no law … abridging freedom of speech, or of the press.”

With the 21st century press looking more and more like the 20th century USSR mouthpiece “Pravda”, the only true “press” is the independent blogger, tweeter and friend of liberty that risks being the rebel in social settings both in the workplace/marketplace and in the neighborhood.

Daniel McAdams frames it nicely:

Are we agents of a foreign power for opposing the foreign policy of the US government? This is the way of thinking that dominated communist Europe for decades. The Party was always right, guided as it was by the inevitable and undeniable march of history. Any foreign policy position put forth by The Party was by definition the correct foreign policy. So anyone who disagreed was also by definition incorrect and a “wrecker.” When The Party is by definition correct, any deviationist must be punished and any deviation must be disappeared.

New interpretations by Trump’s Administration indicate that in its “Maximum Pressure” exercise with Iran have changed the rules to criminalize individuals who “associate” with Iranians. Originally intended to mean:

Responding to a query by a potential participant, an OFAC employee explained that ‘transaction’ and ‘dealing in transactions,’ as those terms are used by OFAC, are broadly construed to include not only monetary dealings or exchanges, but also ‘providing any sort of service’ and ‘non-monetary service,’ including giving a presentation at a conference.

So simple truth-telling about the US Empire’s sanctions that ban Iranian import of components to make medicine, there by indirectly causing unknown number of deaths in that nation, could subject one to fines and imprisonment.

We have all kinds of freedom in the USA today because of all the interventions around the world, especially in the Middle East, since 1990, NOT!

Pretty soon, your neighbors will be encouraged to “say something, if you hear something”, or maybe not, since your smartphone can report your words 24/7.

Sorry to end on a note like this, but there is a bright side, a silver lining if you will in the empire’s quest to silence us. A weakness.

Pride.

The myth of American Exceptionalism will help to unravel the powerful.

Pride will do 🙂

-SF!

Below: Script from the movie “The Patriot”:

MARTIN
	I've just been inside the mind of a
	genius.  Lord Cornwallis knows more
	about war than I could in a dozen
	lifetimes.

		BILLINGS
	Cheerful news to greet the morn.

		MARTIN
	His victories at Charleston and
	Camden were perfect, strategically,
	tactically, logistically.  But he
	has a weakness.

They all turn to Martin.

		MARTIN
	Lord Cornwallis is brilliant.  His
	weakness is that he knows it.

		GABRIEL
	Father?

		MARTIN
	Pride is his weakness.

The men consider that.

		DELANCEY
	Personally, I'd would prefer
	stupidity.

		MARTIN
	Pride will do.

Criticizing the Government is the American Way – All Day, Every Day

With the advent of 9/11 and the perpetual War on Terror, that causes more terrorists and is therefore self-perpetuating, the Patriot Act has opened the door once again toward silencing dissent.

I mentioned in my last post:

Words matter. You know, like the “Patriot” Act.

One can’t help but shake one’s head when we see the word “patriot” to describe something that requires one’s mouth to be closed, or face punishment.

The effort to have thirteen colonies separate from the British Empire involved a LOT of criticism, specific criticism at government, even naming names:

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…

The above list was only HALF of the criticisms. As Thomas Jefferson said:

Yes, not just words, but to consider the next step as well.

So as we saw with the introduction of the Patriot Act, there has been a continual assault on free speech in the history of this country, especially in time of war. No wonder the state loves the perpetual condition of war in their war on terror and war on drugs. Leaders in 2001 seemed to “go back in time” to dictate the new order of things:

Attorney General John Ashcroft has said that critics of the war effort “give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

John Whitehead’s latest column charts this historical path this country has had in attempting to balance this freedom of speech. A few clips follow:

  • In 1798, during the presidency of John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress or president of the United States. (less than 20 years after rightly criticizing the British Empire, Americans could not criticize the United States general government? )
  • President Abraham Lincoln seized telegraph lines, censored mail and newspaper dispatches, and shut down members of the press who criticized his administration. (not to mention sending hundreds of newspaper editors and printing press owners to prison ships)
  • President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to criticize the government’s war efforts.

This last one was especially broad in that it outlawed:

Uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn … as regards the form of government of the United States or Constitution, or the flag or the uniform of the Army or Navy … urging any curtailment of the war with intent to hinder its prosecution; advocating, teaching, defending, or acts supporting or favoring the cause of any country at war with the United States, or opposing the cause of the United States.

The fallout from this law shows the extent the paranoid state will go in protecting itself, it is at its core a SNOWFLAKE!

Excess patriotic zeal resulted in a draconian crackdown on free expression, including:

  • Authorities in Pittsburgh banned music by the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven during the course of the war.
  • The Los Angeles Board of Education prohibited all discussions of peace.
  • An Ohio farmer, John White, was imprisoned for stating that soldiers in American camps were “dying off like flies” and that the “murder of innocent women and children by German soldiers was no worse than what the United States’ soldiers did in the Philippines.”
  • A Minnesota man was arrested under a state espionage law for criticizing women knitting socks for soldiers, saying: “No soldier ever sees these socks.”
  • Twenty-seven South Dakota farmers were convicted for sending a petition to the government objecting to the draft and calling the conflict a “capitalist war.”

With the so-called “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR signed similar legislation:

  • The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover emergency authority to censor all news and control all communications in and out of the country.
  • FDR proceeded with the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.

Even during Vietnam, when the peace protesting gained momentum:

Attorney General John Mitchell sought injunctions to prohibit the newspapers from publishing such information [ articles about some highly classified documents about the U.S. government and the Vietnam War ].

The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1971 ruled 6-3 in favor of the press. In his opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Now we have returned to the “Patriot” Act put in place during the Bush II administration:

Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.

The legacy extended into the “transparent” Obama (Bush III) administration:

President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”

Nor is Bush IV, Trump, exempt from this attack on free speech:

President Trump, who delights in exercising his right to speak (and tweet) freely about anything and everything that raises his ire, has shown himself to be far less tolerant of those with whom he disagrees, especially when they exercise their right to criticize the government.

In his first few years in office, Trump has declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.” More recently, Trump lashed out at four Democratic members of Congress—all women of color— who have been particularly critical of his policies, suggesting that they “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

While he probably delights in triggering these snowflakes, he himself comes across as the biggest snowflake and bully of all.

The US Constitution, the piece of paper all presidents have ignored since George Washington from time to time, says this:

Good, bad or ugly, it’s all free speech unless as defined by the government it falls into one of the following categories: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes.

We are no longer in a federated republic, we have not been for some time. The government has morphed step by step closer to the very thing it fought against in the past, national socialism, fascism and communism, all variants of collectivism. All of these entities see individuals as something to be used and then discarded. See for yourself at the local VA hospitals.

Our government is now at this juncture:

This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.

The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

It goes back to the saying:

We need to return to the character of people that would say the following:

  • “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson
  • “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” – Benjamin Franklin
  • “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” – Thomas Paine.
  • “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”- Marquis De Lafayette

Where we are at in 2019 is here:

… the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think. Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed … We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

The opposite of this is what we have been sold, as described during the Nuremberg trials:

Beware of tyranny. Beware of those who sound good but lead you to group think, a cult or even the religion of statism or nationalism. It does get ugly.

-SF1

When State-Run Media (Equivalent of USSR’s News Source ‘Pravda’) Thrives

You just can’t go by “state approved” sources in understanding the past OR the present. “History is written by the victors” – Winston Churchill

Lincoln closed hundreds of presses that did not agree with his agenda, jailed tens of thousands, .. FDR marginalized journalists and reporters, Wilson jailed anti-war people with the Congressional Sedition Act .. Adams did the same with the Alien and Sedition Act with people critical of government.

This article also uncovers the Clinton/Obama move of FDR and his wife Eleanor and son Elliot using the office to enrich themselves with millions of dollars.

“.. When we seek to understand the past, we must be careful to avoid drawing from a narrow selection of sources, especially if one side proved politically victorious in the end and completely dominated the later production of books and other commentary. Prior to the existence of the Internet, this was an especially difficult task, often requiring a considerable amount of scholarly effort, even if only to examine the bound volumes of once popular periodicals. Yet without such diligence, we can fall into very serious error.

The Iraq War and its aftermath was certainly one of the central events in American history during the 2000s. Yet suppose some readers in the distant future had only the collected archives of The Weekly Standard, National Review, the WSJ op-ed page, and FoxNews transcripts to furnish their understanding the history of that period, perhaps along with the books written by the contributors to those outlets. I doubt that more than a small fraction of what they would read could be categorized as outright lies. But the massively skewed coverage, the distortions, exaggerations, and especially the breathtaking omissions would surely provide them with an exceptionally unrealistic view of what had actually happened during that important period…”

From Lew Rockwell