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https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/thomas-paine

Thomas Paine was an England-born political philosopher and writer who supported revolutionary causes in America and Europe.

Published in 1776 to international acclaim, “Common Sense” was the first pamphlet to advocate American independence.

After writing the “The American Crisis” papers during the Revolutionary War, Paine returned to Europe and offered a stirring defense of the French Revolution with “Rights of Man.”

His political views led to a stint in prison; after his release, he produced his last great essay, “The Age of Reason,” a controversial critique of institutionalized religion and Christian theology.

Thomas Paine was born January 29, 1737, in Norfolk, England, the son of a Quaker corset maker and his older Anglican wife.

Paine apprenticed for his father but dreamed of a naval career, attempting once at age 16 to sign onto a ship called The Terrible, commanded by someone named Captain Death, but Paine’s father intervened.

Three years later he did join the crew of the privateer ship King of Prussia, serving for one year during the Seven Years’ War, we know it as the French and Indian War.

In 1768, Paine began work as an excise tax officer on the Sussex coast. In 1772, he wrote his first pamphlet, an argument tracing the work grievances of his fellow tax officers. Paine printed 4,000 copies and distributed them to members of British Parliament.

In 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin, who is believed to have persuaded Paine to immigrate to America, providing Paine with a letter of introduction. Three months later, Paine was on a ship to America, nearly dying from a bout of scurvy.

Paine immediately found work in journalism when he arrived in Philadelphia, becoming managing editor of Philadelphia Magazine.

He wrote in the magazine–under the pseudonyms “Amicus” and “Atlanticus”–criticizing the Quakers for their pacifism and endorsing a system similar to Social Security.

Paine’s most famous pamphlet, “Common Sense,” was first published on January 10, 1776, selling out its thousand printed copies immediately. By the end of that year, 150,000 copies–an enormous amount for its time–had been printed and sold. (It remains in print today.)

“Common Sense” is credited as playing a crucial role in convincing colonists to take up arms against England. In it, Paine argues that representational government is superior to a monarchy or other forms of government based on aristocracy and heredity.

The pamphlet proved so influential that John Adams reportedly declared, “Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Paine also claimed that the American colonies needed to break with England in order to survive and that there would never be a better moment in history for that to happen. He argued that America was related to Europe as a whole, not just England, and that it needed to freely trade with nations like France and Spain.

As the Revolutionary War began, Paine enlisted and met General George Washington, whom Paine served under.

The terrible condition of Washington’s troops during the winter of 1776 prompted Paine to publish a series of inspirational pamphlets known as “The American Crisis,” which opens with the famous line “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Starting in April 1777, Paine worked for two years as secretary to the Congressional Committee for Foreign Affairs and then became the clerk for the Pennsylvania Assembly at the end of 1779.

Paine didn’t make much money from his government work and no money from his pamphlets–despite their unprecedented popularity–and in 1781 he approached Washington for help. Washington appealed to Congress to no avail, and went so far as to plead with all the state assemblies to pay Paine a reward for his work.

Only two states agreed: New York gifted Paine a house and a 277-acre estate in New Rochelle, while Pennsylvania awarded him a small monetary compensation.

The Revolution over, Paine explored other pursuits, including inventing a smokeless candle and designing bridges.

Paine published his book Rights of Man in two parts in 1791 and 1792, a rebuttal of the writing of Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke and his attack on the French Revolution, which Paine supported.

Paine journeyed to Paris to oversee a French translation of the book in the summer of 1792. Paine’s visit was concurrent with the capture of Louis XVI, and he witnessed the monarch’s return to Paris.

Paine himself was threatened with execution by hanging when he was mistaken for an aristocrat, and he soon ran afoul of the Jacobins, who eventually ruled over France during the Reign of Terror, the bloodiest and most tumultuous years of the French Revolution.

In 1793 Paine was arrested for treason because of his opposition to the death penalty, most specifically the mass use of the guillotine and the execution of Louis XVI. He was detained in Luxembourg, prison.

https://www.bartleby.com/400/prose/453.html

So how did Paine survive his death sentence? Here in his own words is the answer.

“One hundred and sixty-eight persons were taken out of the Luxemburg in one night, and a hundred and sixty of them guillotined the next day, of which I know I was to have been one; and the manner in which I escaped that fate is curious, and has all the appearance of accident.	5
The room in which I was lodged was on the ground floor, and one of a long range of rooms under a gallery, and the door of it opened outward and flat against the wall; so that when it was open the inside of the door appeared outward, and the contrary when it was shut. I had three comrades, fellow-prisoners with me, Joseph Vanhuile, of Bruges, since president of the municipality of that town, Michael Robins, and Bastini, of Louvain.	6
When persons by scores and hundreds were to be taken out of prison for the guillotine, it was always done in the night, and those who performed that office had a private mark or signal by which they knew what rooms to go to, and what number to take. We, as I have said, were four, and the door of our room was marked unobserved by us, with that number in chalk; but it happened, if happening is a proper word, that the mark was put on when the door was open and flat against the wall, and thereby came on the inside when we shut it at night, and the destroying angel passed by it. A few days after this Robespierre fell, and the American ambassador arrived and reclaimed me and invited me to his house.	7

While in Prison, Paine began work on his two-volume treatise on religion, The Age of Reason, which was published in 1794 and 1795, with a third part appearing in 1802.

The first volume was a criticism of Christian theology and organized religion in favor of reason and scientific inquiry. Though often mistaken as an atheist text, The Age of Reason is actually an advocacy of deism and a belief in God.

The second volume is a critical analysis of the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible, questioning the divinity of Jesus Christ.

The Age of Reason marked the end of Paine’s credibility in the United States, where he became largely despised.

In addition to his attack on religion, he also wrote a letter to George Washington lashing out at the President whom he blamed for not coming to his rescue in France.

By 1802, Paine was able to sail to Baltimore. Welcomed by President Thomas Jefferson, whom he had met in France, Paine was a recurring guest at the White House.

Still, newspapers denounced him and he was sometimes refused services. A minister in New York was dismissed because he shook hands with Paine.

Paine died on June 8, 1809, in New York City, and was buried on his property in New Rochelle.

Paine’s remains were stolen in 1819 by British radical newspaperman William Cobbett and shipped to England in order to give Paine a more worthy burial. Paine’s bones were discovered by customs inspectors in Liverpool, but allowed to pass through.

Cobbett claimed that his plan was to display Paine’s bones in order to raise money for a proper memorial.

He also fashioned jewelry made with hair removed from Paine’s skull for fundraising purposes.

Cobbett spent some time in Newgate Prison and after briefly being displayed, Paine’s bones ended up in Cobbett’s cellar until he died.

Estate auctioneers refused to sell human remains and the bones became hard to trace.

Rumors of the remains’ whereabouts sprouted up through the years with little or no validation, including an Australian businessman who claimed to purchase the skull in the 1990s.

In 2001, the city of New Rochelle launched an effort to gather the remains and give Paine a final resting place. The Thomas Paine National Historical Association in New Rochelle claims to have possession of brain fragments and locks of hair.

In Harvey J. Kaye’s recent book, in Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. Kaye identifies Paine as a “radical democrat” and dubs him the father of two centuries of leftists, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Franklin D. Roosevelt and C. Wright Mills (far left Columbia University Prof.).

“Paine,” Kaye writes, “had turned Americans into radicals—and we have remained radicals at heart ever since.”

As Kaye sees it, Paine laid an ideological foundation for such modern liberal bulwarks as education grants and pensions for the elderly, not to mention railing against the abuses of “the propertied, powerful, and pious.”

Today, Paine’s words still resonate in thundering tones. Their leading point—that the Colonies should unite to throw off the rule of the king—we now take for granted, because it came to pass. But another theme of Common Sense leaps out at us today because it is the object of so much contention.

With a mystical fervor, Paine argued that the new nation possessed an inherent virtue that would spark a fire to burn the old order down. “The cause of America,” he wrote, “is in a great measure the cause of all mankind…. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

But the left is hardly alone in claiming Paine. He is also a neoconservative hero for his assault against the tyranny of established governments and his call to spread democracy—if necessary, at gunpoint.

After many decades as an official abomination—Theodore Roosevelt dismissed him as a “filthy little atheist”—Paine has had a resurgence recently, in no small part because figures like Ronald Reagan embraced him, entranced by his narrative of America’s special destiny.

Yet trying to enlist Paine as a modern-day liberal or conservative is impossible to do.

The themes of his life clearly resonate today, not because he can be neatly summed up, but because he provoked basic debates that still define our national life: How should the American experiment in democracy evolve, and how should it apply abroad?

Which rights are natural to all people, and which can be assigned or revoked by the state?

What role should institutional religion play in national life?

Perhaps no subject of Paine’s is more relevant than that last one, and perhaps none is more discouraging for the left.

Paine’s triumph came when he cast America as the cradle of freedom and the executioner of tyranny.

He fell from favor when he denounced the country as fallen and fearlessly took on the great, quiet power of American life: organized religion.

This helps explain why both sides in today’s debate may claim Paine, and why one evokes the revolutionary hero of 1776 and the other the disheveled old revolutionary who couldn’t find a place to rest his weary bones.

UCLA Prof on Critical Theory and Marxism: Conservatives Were Right

UCLA Prof on Critical Theory and Marxism: Conservatives Were Right

Just how long have American universities been brainwashing students?

By: Sarah Cowgill

Conservatives have been labeled racist, radical right, every phobic ever documented, and the most shameful conspiracy theorists for decades. All because they warned America that university indoctrination of the young mind would produce Marxist activism.

Now according to one professor, they were right all along. Remember in 1987 when former President Ronald Reagan spoke in Berlin? “Mr. Gorbachev,” he urged the then-Soviet leader, “tear down this wall.” It was a defining moment in the fight against communism and a patriotic push for freedom.

It was powerful, outwardly American, but did not hint at the events taking place in secular institutions under our very noses. Those seeds planted have now come to fruition.

Multiple texts in the eighties claimed offshoots of Marxist-derived “critical theories” were being forced upon students and would create radical activists on a grander scale than ever witnessed.

In addition, several bestsellers were causing a ruckus: Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education,and The Closing of the American Mind.

 Liberal educators scoffed and responded by labeling conservatives as “wingnuts.” But today, one UCLA professor emeritus, Russell Jacoby, admits, “In 1987, I published ‘The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe,’ which elicited heated responses. Only now do I see I got something wrong – as did my critics.”

Critical Theory

Chaos has gripped western civilization. The tenets of freedom, commerce, and capitalism are being chipped away by socialism.

Violent protests, embracing communist icons like Bolivian revolutionary Che Guevara, and kneeling during the National Anthem are all not-so-subtle hints that the American way of life is being mocked from within and is in danger.

As I stated in my show last week, it is now politically incorrect to refer to yourself as American!

Yet, somehow, slang and institutional vernacular jargon are now mainstream talking points. “Critical theory” is a code word for Marxism, according to the book American Exile of the Frankfurt School. And buzz words like diversity, inclusion, microaggression, white privilege, and safe spaces have left the campus and are employed by the activist media. It is not difficult to connect the dots.

Jacoby describes the mindset over matter and explains the no-win argument relied upon by progressives:

“Justifications for liberal desired talking points, however, almost immunize themselves to objections. If you question diversity mania, you support Western imperialism. Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You incite the suicide of fragile adolescents.”

Does that sound like every discussion on cable and network news between indignant liberal talking heads and conservative guests?

But back in the late eighties, Jacoby found such fears ridiculous, “He argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks.”

That has changed recently, and he’s speaking out on what might be a long-lost cause of redirecting the seriously damaged American ship. But what will an apology do at this point?

The Horse has Left the Barn

Jacoby’s retelling of what conservatives have sensed all along does not diminish his guilt. At least not for the damage our own institutions have inflicted on an entire culture.

Sure, it’s refreshing to see a former revolutionary liberal professor who once ridiculed an entire way of life change his tune and admit he was wrong.

But the horse left the barn decades ago. Jacoby notes that “self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students who filter into the public square.”

So, what exactly is Critical Theory?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/deconstructing_marxist_critical_theory.html

Deconstructing Marxist Critical Theory

By E.M. Cadwaladr

For those of you who haven’t been formally introduced to the sociological doomsday weapon of the 20th century, critical theory is an approach to analyzing society not for the purpose of understanding it, but for the purpose of transforming it by undermining its existing institutions.  

The hard work of understanding how and why people do things is unnecessary if your goal is merely to take a sledgehammer to the machinery.  

Critical theory is the invention of the Marxist Frankfort School of the 1930s, so, as one might expect, it reinterprets everything it looks at through a Marxist (or neo-Marxist) lens.  

The women’s studies, racial studies, and gender studies curricula found in almost every university in the West are the direct products of the more general critical theory program.  Many things that end in “theory” (e.g., deconstruction theory, queer theory) are also critical theory’s progeny.

The connection between critical theory and Marxism is neither disputable nor often denied.  The discipline’s formulators (Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, et al.) were all self-identified Marxists teaching in an avowedly Marxist school.  

Modern academic proponents of critical theory and its descendants do not go to any great lengths to deny either the discipline’s origins or their own fundamentally Marxist intentions.  

In our deconstruction of this leftist tool, let’s begin with an examination of the promise Marxism has always made though never achieved.  While the language of the promise has changed from “emancipation” and “liberation” to “social justice” over the years, the basic sales pitch behind all leftist proselytism has remained consistent – the promotion of a better and fairer society.  

Well, who wouldn’t want that?  Any decent person, given a choice between a fair society and an unfair one, all else being equal, prefers a fair one.  For many reasons, I believe that the Marxist formulation is naïve and problematic, but for the sake of argument, let’s just accept the leftist claim as it stands: their goal is to build a better and fairer society.

In the pursuit of a better and fairer society, critical theory comes with one colossal rub.  If we accept that such a society can exist, one of the characteristics it has to possess is at least some degree of stability.  

Implicit in “better and fairer” must be the notion that most improvements made become permanent.  A utopia poised to blow itself apart at the end of one perfectly blissful generation certainly clashes with the left’s new buzzword: “sustainability.”  

Moreover, even the most rabid leftists will admit, if pressed, that change is not always good.  For them to believe that white colonizers wickedly oppressed the non-whites of the world, leftists have to imagine some better condition non-whites were living in prior to the colonization.  

In other words, they have to admit that conditions can get worse in history – that history isn’t rigged by nature to automatically make things better.  

Their argument against conservatism, if they have one, has to be that things can be deliberately improved – not simply that blowing up the status quo inevitably leads to an improvement.  

The indiscriminate destruction of the status quo, however, is precisely what critical theory was designed to accomplish.

An all too familiar scenario plays itself out daily on modern college campuses.  The old guard of liberal professors, who see themselves as the lineal descendants of Herbert Marcuse and Gloria Steinem (if not quite Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxembourg), are more and more seen by their politically indoctrinated students as the closest available examples of white privilege, entrenched authority, and (if they happen to be male) the dreaded patriarchy.  

Genuinely conservative professors (like me) have been hunted to near extinction, so liberal white or older profs must now genuflect embarrassingly to avoid the role of hated oppressors.  

They’re the authorities who come most easily to hand and are much more fragile targets than conservatives ever were.  They have few ideological places to run.  Even declaring sexual attraction to members of the same sex no longer offers victim status to the radical of yesteryear.  

For today’s more dedicated social justice warriors, full trans-sexuality is about the only refuge for the terminally Caucasian.  

The speech codes and trigger warnings we talked about last week, that have proliferated in today’s classrooms, are not the direct invention of the left’s old guard, but are instead demanded by the students.  

They are a grotesque byproduct of critical theory itself.  The monsters, it seems, grant no special deference to their ultimate creators.  The indoctrinated are not the minions of their forbears but are instead the ungovernable creation of a plan gone out of control.

This is what UCLA Professor Jacoby is warning us about.

When racial studies programs were originally formed, it was taken as a given that the goal was not honest research, but rather the production of a continuous moaning and howling over grievances.  That is precisely what critical theory was meant to produce.  

Papers written by black students asserting that whites (or cops) acted as a single, corporate, nefarious body could never have passed muster if viewed critically.  

Neither could the feminist re-invention of the Western world as a “rape culture.”  However, since the goal of racial and gender studies programs never was truth, but merely the raw articulation of a certain kind of outrage, normal academic standards never applied.  Reason was not the goal, but an impediment to the goal.

Measure people not by the quality of their arguments, but by the pungency of their hatred, and you will get exactly what we have gotten: generations of narcissistic nihilists who see themselves as right by virtue of the intensity of their feelings.  

For decades now, valid-looking academic credentials have been awarded for little more than unsupported posturing.  Many of these ideological monsters are now “educators” themselves.  Many others swell the bureaucracies of government.

If we are to overcome these people, we cannot lose sight of the methodology that created them.  Attempting to argue with anyone who helps himself to the idea that anyone who disagrees with him is wrong is obviously futile.  

Nevertheless, one sees innumerable instances in print, on television, and in social media of some frustrated conservative attempting to do just that.  We must stop wasting our time!  If progressives were amenable to reason, they would not be progressives.

The rational response to a madman is not to argue with the progressive, but to firmly separate him from any means of doing harm.  

Progressives must be removed from power, including, at a low level, taking away the public funding that allows them to make careers as full-time street agitators.  

While it may make us uncomfortable to deprive people of the freedoms to which Americans ought to be entitled, we must face certain facts.  

When someone explicitly makes war on any and all of our existing institutions, it is foolish to imagine that he is, somehow, just our fellow countryman with different opinions.  Such people are as much our enemies as any foreign invader.

When Muslims say they would like our Western laws and traditions replaced with sharia law, I see no reason not to take them at their word.  When a Marxist says something similar, we should take him at face value, too.

So, there you have it folks. Critical Theory. Even former liberal college professors are now admitting that they may have created a monster with their progressive lesson plans.

Now that they have unleashed an entire generation of indoctrinated students, how do we, who are trying to preserve our history, traditions, faith, and way of life, fight back?

How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?

While Christmas is a centuries old tradition, it was never an official American national holiday until 1870. When Burton Chauncey Cook, House Representative from Illinois, introduced a bill to make Christmas a national holiday which was passed by both the House and Senate in June 1870. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill which made Christmas a legal holiday.

• Before the Civil War
  North and South were divided on the issue of Christmas, as well as the issue of slavery. Many of the North saw sin in the celebration of Christmas, to those people Thanksgiving was more appropriate. But in the South, Christmas was an important part of the social season. Not surprisingly, the first three states to Christmas a legal holiday were in the South: Alabama in 1836, Louisiana and Arkansas in 1838.

For most people, Christmas is all about the presents. But how did such a supposedly sacred holiday become a festival of greed?

Not many people know the history behind Christmas gift giving, and it will probably shock you.

This year, Americans will spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 billion dollars on Christmas, but most people have no  explanation for why they are buying all of these gifts.

Those that are Christian will tell you that they are doing it to celebrate the birth of Christ, but gift giving on this holiday actually originated long before Christ was born.

Others will tell you that they are just following tradition, but most of them have absolutely no idea where the tradition of Christmas gift giving originally came from.

The truth is that most people simply don’t care about the history. They are just excited about all of the stuff that they are going to get on December 25th.

But you all know me. I just can’t pass up the chance to talk history. So here we go.

In early America, there was no Christmas gift giving. In fact, the Puritans disapproved of celebrating the holiday, and in some areas the celebration of Christmas was actually banned by law.

On May 11, 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature even went so far as to officially ban Christmas and gave anyone found celebrating it a fine of five shillings.

The legislature stated the ban was needed “For preventing disorders arising in several places within this jurisdiction, by reason of some still observing such festivalls as were superstitiously kept in other countrys, to the great dishonnor of God & offence of others. It is therefore ordered … that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings, as a fine to the county.”

The ban remained in place for 22 years until it was repealed in 1681 after a new surge of European immigrants brought a demand for the holiday.

However, opposition to the holiday lingered well into the 19th century, when many New England children were required to attend school on Christmas Day.

But weren’t the Puritans Christians?

Didn’t they want to honor the birth of Jesus?

Of course, they were Christians. They took their faith incredibly seriously. But they also knew their history a lot better than we do.

Most Christians do not realize this, but Christians did not celebrate anything in late December for the first 300 years after the time of Christ.

The only people that celebrated anything at that time were the pagans.

Some of you may be aware of the great Roman celebration known as Saturnalia.

But most people don’t know that our tradition of gift giving can be traced back to that holiday.

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the God Saturn, held on the 17th of December and later expanded with festivities through to the 23rd of December.

The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves.

Eventually, the Romans began holding a festival at the end of Saturnalia on December 25th called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, which means “the birthday of the unconquered sun”. 

Throughout the empire, the “rebirth of the sun” was celebrated. The winter solstice was past and now the days were starting to get longer again.  It was therefore a logical time to honor “the rebirth of the sun god”.

When the Roman Empire legalized Christianity in the early 4th century, the Roman government began to put a lot of pressure on church leaders to fit into the broader society.

So eventually the birthday of the Son of God was moved to the time when the rest of society was celebrating “the rebirth of the sun god”. 

December 25th was first celebrated as the birthday of Jesus in about 336 AD, and in the year 350 AD Pope Julius I officially decreed that Christians would celebrate that day from then on.

Of course Jesus was not actually born in late December.  The evidence that we have indicates that he was most probably born in the fall.

The only reason people celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25th today is because the Catholics of the 4th century wanted to appease the pagan Roman government and the pagan culture at large.

In the Middle ages Christmas was a two week period of celebration from Christmas Eve to the twelfth night of January 6th, hence the Twelve Days of Christmas Carol written in 1780. 

In the middle ages the twelve days was a time of feasting, parties, and of course the giving and receiving of seasonal gifts. 

The Christmas gifts would include generous lords giving items such as clothing and firewood to their serfs.

The origin of the English word ‘Christmas’ is from the Old English middle age ‘Cristes Maesse’ which literally means ‘Mass of Christ’. 

Over time, the practice of gift giving during late December faded, and by the early 19th century the big tradition was actually to open presents on New Year’s Day.

But then merchants saw an opportunity. According to historians, advertisements for “Christmas presents” began appearing in newspapers in the United States in the 1820s.

During the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to sell holiday trinkets and gifts in the streets, from carts and stalls.

Children, in particular, liked this way of celebrating Christmas. It was around 1840 that children began to hang their stockings by the fireplace, according to the Connecticut Historical Society.

New York’s population grew nearly tenfold between 1800 and 1850, and during that time elites became increasingly frightened of traditional December rituals of “social inversion,” in which poorer people could demand food and drink from the wealthy and celebrate in the streets, abandoning established social constraints much like on Halloween night or New Year’s Eve.

These rituals, which occurred any time between St. Nicholas Day (a Catholic feast day observed in Europe on December 6th) and New Year’s Day, had for centuries been a means of relieving European discontent during the traditional downtime of the agricultural cycle.

In a newly congested urban environment, though, aristocrats worried that such celebrations might become vehicles for protest when employers refused to give workers time off during the holidays or when a long winter of unemployment loomed for seasonal laborers.

In response to these concerns, a group of wealthy men who called themselves the Knickerbockers invented a new series of traditions for this time of year that gradually moved Christmas celebrations out of the city’s streets and into its homes.

They presented these traditions as a reinvigoration of Dutch customs practiced in New Amsterdam and New York during the colonial period.

Using two story collections written by Washington Irving, their most well-known member, these New Yorkers experimented with domestic festivities on St. Nicholas Day and New Year’s Day until another member of the group, Clement Clark Moore, established the tradition of celebrating on Christmas with his enormously popular poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night Before Christmas”) in 1822.

The St. Nicholas that Moore presented in his famous poem was like the other traditions the Knickerbockers borrowed and transformed.

His delivery of presents to children gave department stores a helping hand in selling toys, and by 1888, children were invited to meet a real live Santa at these stores.

By the early 1900s, newspapers even carried Page 1 stories about how Santa in his sleigh, filled with gifts, was on the way to reward those well- behaved children.

Around this same time, Charles Dickens‘,  “A Christmas Carol”, became a hit as it spread throughout the nation in 1867-68.

Being cheap and stingy at Christmas time would convey that you were too much like that money- grubbing Ebenezer Scrooge.

The myth of Santa, family rituals, and the desire to be generous have helped make this the most giving time of the year. The average consumer is expected to give 24 presents and spend about $900, according to the National Retail Federation’s survey.

However, for all the efforts of businessmen in the 1800’s to exploit the season, Americans persistently attempted to separate the influence of commerce from the gifts they gave.

What emerged was a kind of dialogue between consumers and merchants.

Americans started wrapping the gifts they gave. The custom had once been merely to give a gift uncovered, but a present hidden in paper heightened the effect of the gesture, making the act of giving  a moment of revelation.

Wrapping also helped designate an item as a gift. Large stores began to wrap gifts purchased from their stock in distinctive, colored papers, with tinsel cords and bright ribbons, as part of their delivery services.

Over time, Christmas gifts came to be associated with a mythical gift giver in cultures all over the globe.

Of course, in the United States this mythical gift giver is known as “Santa Claus”.

So, what about this whole Black Friday mess?

Historians believe the name started in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. Bus drivers and police used “Black Friday” to describe the heavy traffic that would clog city streets the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers headed to the stores.

Businesses, however, didn’t like the negative tone associated with the Black Friday name. In the early 1980s, a more positive explanation of the name began to circulate.

According to this alternative explanation, Black Friday is the day when retailers finally begin to turn a profit for the year. In accounting terms, operating at a loss (losing money) is called being “in the red” because accountants traditionally used red ink to show negative amounts (losses).

Positive amounts (profits) were usually shown in black ink. Thus, being “in the black” is a good thing because it means stores are operating at a profit (making money).

Well, even In the first decade of the 20th century, people and organizations began to criticize this new pattern of gift-giving that had emerged in America.

Given the poor quality of the gifts and the considerable time that it took to purchase, wrap and deliver them, no wonder Progressive Era reformers looked for alternative ways to celebrate the holiday that were less burdensome and more gratifying.

That’s right folks, even back then, the liberal progressive movement was there telling us how things should be.

Their movement paved the way for Christmas cards, which became the ideal small gift for acquaintances and business associates.

A survey of the mail system in 1911 reflected the shift, showing that the total number of items posted had increased while their total weight had dropped significantly.

In 1906, the Consumer’s League formed the Shop Early Campaign to discourage last-minute purchasing, a practice that strained everyone in the retail trade.

The league also pressured stores to maintain regular store hours throughout the holiday season so that their employees could fully enjoy the celebration.

They maintained and publicized a list of stores that complied in the hope of encouraging shoppers to choose them over stores that placed more burdens on their employees.

In 1912, Progressives also established the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (known as SPUG).

 Its goals were to curtail the presentation of gimcracks (showy but shoddily made gifts), and to curb the practice of store clerks giving presents to their supervisors ( which they felt were “extorted” rather than heartfelt).

The general success of the Progressives in reforming Christmas, as well as previous efforts to mold the festivities, shows that the celebration can be changed, just like any other cultural phenomenon.

So don’t accept current complaints that Christmas has spun out of control and dictates our holiday behavior, driving us to ever-higher levels of spending.

What do you think callers? Are we stuck at the mercy of an ever expanding Christmas buying season? Or can we as consumers, reign in the control that retailers now have over the holiday season?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/trumpdesantis_2024.html

Trump/DeSantis 2024

By Brian C. Joondeph

As election day, November 8, is turning into election week or month, the outcomes are being dissected through the lens of the 2024 presidential election.

Florida was a major success with Governor Ron DeSantis winning big, along with Senator Marco Rubio. DeSantis should be the role model for the other 25 or so Republican governors, as he gave a master class in handling COVID prudently, based on science rather than hype, and punched back hard against the woke leftist culture infecting the rest of the country.

Many Republicans left blue hellholes like New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois, turning Florida into a deeper shade of red, leaving the hellholes a deeper shade of blue, simply by virtue of migration. This partially explains Florida’s electoral results, but much credit goes to Governor DeSantis and his governorship.

As such, DeSantis has become the darling of the media, Trump-hating RINOs, and much of the Republican establishment.

Are they enamored over his ability to punch back against the Left? Or is their newfound affection due to DeSantis possibly displacing former President Donald Trump as the Republican nominee in 2024? For the anyone-but-Trump crowd, DeSantis is a gift from the heavens.

Should he win the nomination, the left will turn on him on a dime, as they did on Trump once he became the nominee in 2016. Trump quickly morphed from being a regular on Morning Joe to his new persona as a racist buffoon as soon as he became Hillary Clinton’s electoral opponent.

If both Trump and Desantis run for President in 2024, it would be hard fought and nasty, as was the 2016 GOP primary season. Trump is the master at branding his opponents and not in a flattering way.

The last Florida governor to learn this was “Low Energy Jeb.” Will the next one be Ron “DeSanctimonious”?

Primaries are a time of choosing as each candidate makes their case to their party’s electorate. Whoever emerges victorious, assuming the candidates don’t annihilate each other, will be primed for the main event.

Democrats and the media hope that Trump and DeSantis destroy each other, leading to a Pence/Pompeo or Haley/Noem ticket that loses genteelly in a McCain or Romney fashion, allowing the deep state and ruling class to return to some semblance of pre-Trump normalcy.

The author of the article, Dr. Brian Joondeph, offers another possibility. Suppose all the Trump vs DeSantis sparring is nothing but theater? What if the two Florida residents have discussed plans and strategy already?

Trump still has his strong MAGA base, and in a CPAC straw poll a few months ago, was the favored 2024 nominee over DeSantis by 69-24 percent. It’s still Trump’s party.

DeSantis is an exemplary governor but has no national governing experience, unlike Trump who has already spent four years as President.

DeSantis, not being independently wealthy, will be beholden to the donor class supporting his candidacy, possibly clipping his wings should he become President. Trump doesn’t have this conflict of interest.

Trump has his baggage, his brash personality and inability to turn the other cheek, features that both annoy and thrill his detractors and supporters respectively, as few Republicans have the ability to punch back against the leftist forces against them — Hollywood, academia, corporate media, Wall Street, big pharma, big sports, and the coastal latte-sipping elites.

The ruling class would like nothing better than for Trump and DeSantis to split the GOP vote, leaving the door wide open for another destructive Democrat administration. Watch the media do their best to set up this scenario.

The author’s theory is that Trump and DeSantis formed a secret alliance, allowing the Trump-hating RINOs to pour hundreds of millions into DeSantis’s potential campaign.

The two can feud publicly, sucking the air out of the political room for the next year, then join forces. Not only will they have a huge campaign war chest, but the NeverTrumpers who loved DeSantis one minute will have no idea what to do when they get their wish, except that their guy is running for the White House with another guy they loathe.

This would be an unbeatable ticket, assuming the election systems, particularly in swing states, get fixed. DeSantis would have four years as an understudy, and after Trump cleans up the numerous flaming bags of poop created by the Biden-Obama administration, DeSantis would be well positioned to continue making America great again for another four or eight years.

All Trump would have to do is claim New York as his primary residence to avoid the Constitution’s effective prohibition on the president and vice president coming from the same state.*

{Article II: “The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.”}

This would prevent Florida’s electors from voting for the president and vice president, a handicap that no rational person would burden the ticket with.

Predictions are a dime a dozen these days, but Trump and DeSantis are too smart to destroy each other. Trump helped DeSantis win the governorship and DeSantis knows Trump could dispatch him as he did to 16 talented and experienced primary opponents in 2016, few of whom still have a political future.

Don’t listen to the hype from Fox News and other Trump-hating media that Trump is finished. This gaslighted “feud” is designed to dispirit Republican voters and boost sagging media ratings. Maybe this is all part of “the plan.”

So how bad will it get?

Let’s look at a little history of past elections.

Jefferson vs. Adams, 1800

In case you’re wondering exactly how down-and-dirty these campaigns got, consider the fact that this is the only election in history where a vice president has run against the president he was currently serving under. You can imagine that things were a little tense in the White House in the months leading up to the election.

Jefferson hired a writer to pen insults rather than dirty his own hands (at least at first). One of his most creative lines said that Adams was a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Adams’ Federalists carried things even further, asking voters, “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames… female chastity violated… children writhing on the pike? GREAT GOD OF COMPASSION AND JUSTICE, SHIELD MY COUNTRY FROM DESTRUCTION.” I bet the Federalists would be so very upset to know that Jefferson was immortalized in 1936 as one of America’s great presidents on Mount Rushmore.

1800 In the country’s first contested presidential election, supporters of Thomas Jefferson claimed incumbent John Adams wanted to marry off his son to the daughter of King George III, creating an American dynasty under British rule. Jefferson haters called the challenger a fraud, a coward, a thief, and “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” Jefferson won….

After such a nasty election, Congress passed the Twelfth Amendment, stating that the nominee to get the second-most number of votes would no longer be elected vice president.

Jackson vs. Adams, 1828

Apparently those Adams boys are scrappy fellows. When Andrew Jackson ran against incumbant John Quincy Adams in 1828, it was not pretty. Adams’ previous term had not been a very successful one, but he was prepared to sling a little mud anyway.

He and his handlers said Jackson had the personality of a dictator, was too uneducated to be president (they claimed he spelled Europe ‘Urope’), and hurled all sorts of horrible insults at his wife, Rachel. Rachel had been in an abusive marriage with a man who finally divorced her, but divorce was still quite the scandal at the time. The Federalists called her a “dirty black wench”, a “convicted adulteress” and said she was prone to “open and notorious lewdness”.

On their end, Jackson’s people said that Adams had sold his wife’s maid as a concubine to the czar of Russia.

Jackson won pretty handily – 642,553 votes to Adams’ 500,897.

Lincoln vs. Douglas, 1860

Yep, even Abraham Lincoln was dealt his share of crap. But he was pretty good at dealing it too. Although it’s normal – and expected – for candidates to stump across the country in any little small town that will have them, but in 1860 it was considered a little tacky. Stephen Douglas chose this tactic anyway, but claimed that he was really just taking a leisurely train ride from D.C. to New York to visit his mom. Lincoln and his supporters took note of the fact that it took him over a month to get there and even put out a “Lost Child” handbill that said he “Left Washington, D.C. some time in July, to go home to his mother… who is very anxious about him. Seen in Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford, Conn., and at a clambake in Rhode Island. Answers to the name Little Giant. Talks a great deal, very loud, always about himself.” ‘Little Giant’ was a potshot at Douglas’ height – he was only 5’4″. He was also said to be “about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way.”

Douglas took aim at Lincoln, too, saying he was a “horrid-looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman.” Another good one? “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.”

Cleveland vs. Blaine, 1884

Who knew Grover Cleveland was the Bill Clinton of his time? During his campaign, stories of his lecherousness were plentiful. One was verified, though – Cleveland, while still a bachelor, had fathered a child with a widow named Maria Halpin. He fully supported the child. So really, by today’s standards, it probably wouldn’t be that much of a scandal. No marriages ruined, no paternity tests, no child support issues. Nevertheless, the Republican party, who supported candidate James Blaine, took this and ran with it. They made up the chant, “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?” and used it to taunt Cleveland.

Blaine was no innocent, though. He was accused of shady dealings with the railroad, which was confirmed when a letter was found in which Blaine pretty much confirmed that he knew he was involved in corrupt business – he signed the letter, “My regards to Mrs. Fisher. Burn this letter!” Cleveland’s Democrats made up their own chant based on his writings – “Burn this letter! Burn this letter!”

Hoover vs Smith, 1928

Democrat Al Smith lost pretty badly to Republican Herbert Hoover, largely due to one reason: his religion. At the time of the election, the Holland Tunnel in New York was just being finished up. Republicans told everyone that the Catholic Smith had commissioned a secret tunnel 3,500 miles long, from the Holland Tunnel to the Vatican in Rome, and that the Pope would have say in all presidential matters should Smith be elected. It probably didn’t help matters that Babe Ruth was a staunch Smith supporter. You think it would work in his favor, but the Babe would show up at events wearing only his undershirt with a mug of beer in one hand. If people opposed his viewpoint, Ruth would simply say, “The hell with you,” and be done with them.

1. The very first one, 1788-1789

The first presidential election in our nation’s history was one-of-a-kind in that it was literally no contest. Organized political parties had yet to form, and George Washington ran unopposed. His victory is the only one in the nation’s history to feature 100 percent of the Electoral College vote.

The real question in 1788 was who would become vice president. At the time, this office was awarded to the runner-up in the electoral vote (each elector cast two votes to ensure there would be a runner-up.) Eleven candidates made a play for the vice-presidency, but John Adams came out on top.

2. It’s a tie, 1800

Electoral politics got serious in 1800. Forget the hand-holding peace of George Washington’s first run — political parties were in full swing by this time, and they battled over high-stakes issues (taxes, states’ rights and foreign policy alignments). Thomas Jefferson ran as the Democratic-Republican candidate and John Adams as the Federalist.

At the time, states got to pick their own election days, so voting ran from April to October (and you thought waiting for the West Coast polls to close was frustrating). Because of the complicated “pick two” voting structure in the Electoral College, the election ended up a tie between Jefferson and his vice-presidential pick, Aaron Burr. One South Carolina delegate was supposed to give one of his votes on another candidate, so as to arrange for Jefferson to win and Burr to come in second. The plan somehow went wrong, and both men ended up with 73 electoral votes.

That sent the tie-breaking vote to the House of Representatives, not all of whom were on board with a Jefferson presidency and Burr vice-presidency. Seven tense days of voting followed, but Jefferson finally pulled ahead of Burr. The drama triggered the passage of the 12th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that the Electoral College pick the president and vice-president separately, doing away with the runner-up complications.

3. Things get nasty, 1828

Anything involving dueling war veteran Andrew Jackson was liable to get dirty, but the 1828 electoral battle between Jackson and John Quincy Adams took the cake for mud slinging. Jackson had lost out to Adams in 1824 after Speaker of the House Henry Clay cast a tie-breaking vote. When Adams chose Clay as his Secretary of State, Jackson was furious and accused the two of a “corrupt bargain.”

And that was before the 1828 election even got started, when Adams was accused of pimping out an American girl to a Russian Czar. Jackson’s wife, Rachel, was called a “convicted adulteress,” because she had, years earlier, married Jackson before finalizing her divorce to her previous husband. Rachel died after Jackson won the election, but before his inauguration; at her funeral, Jackson blamed his opponents’ bigamy accusations. “May God Almighty forgiver her murderers, as I know she forgave them,” Jackson said. “I never can.”

To round out a rough election, Jackson’s inauguration party (open to the public) turned into a mob scene, with thousands of well-wishers crowding into the White House.

“Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses, and such a scene of confusion took place as is impossible to describe,” wrote Margaret Smith, a Washington socialite who attended the party.

4. Running against a corpse, 1872

In 1872, incumbent Ulysses S. Grant had an easy run for a second term — because his opponent died before the final votes were cast.

Grant had the election in the bag even before his opponent, Horace Greeley, died, however. The incumbent won 286 electoral votes compared with Greeley’s 66 after election day. But on Nov. 29, 1872, before the Electoral College votes were in, Greeley died and his electoral votes were split among other candidates. Greeley remains the only presidential candidate to die before the election was finalized.

Apple and China Want to Delete Apps on Your Phone

American Spectator by DANIEL J. FLYNN

In China, authoritarians flood Twitter with ads for prostitutes and pornography in an effort to prevent users from obtaining information about protests. Authoritarians in the United States threaten to remove Twitter from more than 1.5 billion devices worldwide.

“Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store,” Elon Musk tweeted, “but won’t tell us why.”

The powerful few want to impede the free flow of information to the vulnerable many. Suppression strikes intelligent observers as not a Chinese thing but a fetish of the powerful in whatever nation they reside.

It appears cruder and more thuggish in China, and more passive-aggressive and sophisticated in the United States. But whether the state or a monopoly suppresses expression, does the crushing effect of it on a free society really differ?

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke of “monitoring” and “keeping a close eye” on Twitter (big sister is watching!), which, she claims, bears a responsibility to “take action” against “misinformation” and “hate.”

Does not the federal government bear a responsibility to ensure that the United States remains a free society?

Instead of breaking out of the stranglehold Apple and Google have placed upon the information that we consume, the White House publicly nudges tech companies to censor.  

Traditionally, the federal government assumed a massive role in ensuring, particularly when it came to communications, that no company controlled too much of the market share.

During the 1940s, the feds forced NBC’s Blue Network to separate from the parent company. It eventually became NBC’s competitor ABC.

Later, after decades of litigation, the government broke up the Bell System into the seven “Baby Bells” (four of which once again folded into “Ma Bell,” otherwise known as AT&T). This similarly resulted in a competitor to the monopoly in Verizon.

Now people in positions of power cheer on the consolidation of information. Instead of breaking out of the stranglehold Apple and Google have placed upon the information that we consume, the White House publicly nudges tech companies to censor.

Privately, we may learn that political actors do much more than nudge.

“The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself,” Musk tweeted Monday.

“The public deserves to know what really happened.” And, of course, Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook’s decision to suppress the true Hunter Biden laptop story came about after the FBI issued a stern warning to them about disseminating “disinformation,” a euphemism that now means information that disturbs progressives.

Americans allow infringements on their freedom of speech because we imagine intolerance to that degree as remaining the domain of people who neither look like us nor sound like us. This speaks further to our small-mindedness.

This can happen here because it does happen here.

Later in the article, the author, Daniel Flynn states:

Elon Musk deserves gratitude for transforming Twitter from that woke wasteland into a vibrant Mecca for speech. Instead, Apple allegedly seeks to ruin his enterprise through restraint-of-trade practices. Similarly, Apple’s Chinese benefactors who make their iPhones now scour the devices of pedestrians to see if they contain Twitter and other apps.

The interests of Apple and China, then, coincide on much more than the manufacture of cheap iPhones.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple and Chinese President Xi Jinping imagine that they hold the right to dictate what apps you may keep on your phone.

“This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk accurately tweets. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”

Regulators should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.

What can history tell us?

Censorship was rampant throughout Nazi Germany. Censorship ensured that Germans could only see what the Nazi hierarchy wanted people to see, hear what they wanted them to hear and read only what the Nazis deemed acceptable.

The Nazi police dealt with anyone who went outside of these boundaries. Censorship dominated the lives of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany.

The prime mover in censorship was the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

It was his responsibility to see that the German people were fed with material acceptable to the Nazi state. Newspapers, radio, and all forms of media were put under the control of the Nazis.

Even the film and music industries were controlled by the Nazis.

Music by Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn was banned since they were both Jews. Jazz was also banned.

Even telling jokes about Hitler became a serious offence – one that could send you to the concentration camps and potentially death (think Saturday Night Live).

Censorship was enforced by a number of methods. First, the secret police or the local police ensured that the rules were kept to.

Secondly, anyone who wanted to go outside of the desired party norm faced the most serious of consequences.

Third, people in general were expected to report anything unacceptable to their local party chief. Those who knew something but did not report it were deemed as guilty as those who went against the system. This was key to enforcement.

Censorship ensured that the Nazis had the German public in their grip as they bombarded them on a daily basis on how their lives had been improved from the day Hitler became Germany’s leader.

The chief function of propaganda is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind………the slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. The one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a personal policy secures.”      Adolf Hitler from “Mein Kampf”

“Our way of taking power and using it would have been inconceivable without the radio and the airplane,” Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels claimed in August 1933.

Such statements are often cited—the head of Disney, Bob Iger, recently said that Adolf Hitler would have loved social media.

Goebbels was not saying that the Nazis had used both new technologies, the airplane and the radio, to come to power. Rather, the airplane helped the Nazis take power. Radio helped them keep it.

The history of radio, and in particular how it was regulated in interwar Germany, is more relevant than ever: Five years ago, the question was whether we would regulate social media. Now the questions are how and when we will regulate them.

As politicians and regulators in places as different as Berlin, Singapore, and Washington and even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg consider how best to do so, we should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.

Radio only became central to Nazi aims after Hitler was elected chancellor in January 1933, but Goebbels quickly exercised power over the medium, because the state already controlled its infrastructure and content.

State control over radio had been intended to defend democracy. It unintentionally laid the groundwork for the Nazi propaganda machine.

Radio emerged as a new technology in the early 1920s, and the bureaucrat tasked with developing regulations for it in the Weimar Republic, Hans Bredow, initially had high hopes.

He thought that radio could broadcast education and entertainment to bring the German population together after the divisive loss of World War I, and believed that radio should not broadcast political content, fearing it might exacerbate an already hostile environment.

Many thought the same of Twitter, Facebook, and Tik Tok.

Initially, Bredow allowed private companies to broadcast, and only from the mid-1920s on did stations start to air some news.

This seemed dangerous to Bredow and other officials, who worried that news could stoke uprisings or antidemocratic sentiment.

Weimar bureaucrats began exerting ever greater state supervision over radio content to try to depoliticize it. As the Weimar Republic became more and more politically unstable, Bredow and others pushed through reforms in 1926 and 1932 that mandated direct state supervision of radio content.

Bredow believed that increased state direction would prevent Weimar democracy from failing.

Can you see where I am going with this? Folks, we are repeating history if we allow the government to regulate free speech.

Back to our story.

Ironically, government regulation of radio played right into the Nazis’ hands, and meant that the Nazis could seize immediate control over radio content when they came to power.

Bredow was imprisoned for trying to stand up for democratic values. (After World War II, he helped to reestablish radio in democratic West Germany. There is now even a media institute in Hamburg named after him.)

The Nazi example, though extreme, reminds us that well-intentioned laws can have tragic unintended consequences.

We need to be wary of the long-term consequences of state control over content.

Now let’s turn to another great example of government controlled media. The Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 while championing freedom, yet one of their first decisions was to limit free speech through harsh censorship.

In early November 1917, the Soviet government signed the Decree on Press which prohibited publishing any “bourgeois” (affluent, middle class) articles criticizing the Bolsheviks’ authority.

As the years passed political censorship grew stronger, reaching its peak under Joseph Stalin’s reign. After his death the state relaxed its stance, but censorship remained until Mikhail Gorbachev declared glasnost in the late 1980s.

Lenin and Stalin claimedSoviet censorship had “a different character than the one existing in bourgeois states and aimed only at protecting the interests of the working class.”

This is a bold statement, especially given the fact the Soviet elite employed censorship for its own bloody gain, most notably during Stalin’s Great Purge.  

 “The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents was followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence,” British historian David King wrote in his book The Commissar Vanishes.

Retouchers worked hard erasing traces of fallen leaders from all photographs and images.

In 1921, the Soviet government created the Glavlit (General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press) which for decades remained the main instrument of controlling literature. Glavlit’s censors decided if a book was published in the USSR, or if it was banned.

As a result, Soviet citizens could not read many books, some of which are now regarded as classics – including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, not to mention most works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that criticized the Soviet regime.

The circulation of books written by immigrant writers who had fled Soviet Russia were, of course, prohibited.

Nevertheless, the Soviet government wasn’t able to completely eradicate literature it deemed “dangerous.”

Through the ages, people opposing censorship have circulated handmade copies of banned literature. In the Soviet Union, this was called samizdat (self-published) and scores of illegal books were enjoyed by readers as a result.

Now I know what a lot of you are thinking. “It will never happen here.” You are dead wrong.

During the Civil War, the battle for public opinion was almost as important as the battles fought with bullets and bayonets. President Abraham Lincoln was a master tactician when it came to using public opinion as both a political weapon as well as a military aid.

He used the press not only to get his message out in an era before electronic mass communication, but also to prevent his opponents from having similar access to the hearts and minds of the people.

He did this through the use of military censorship, control of the post office and telegraphs, and through the use of patronage (giving certain papers exclusive rights).

At that time, New York City was the media capital of the western world. The big three papers in New York City were the Tribune, the Herald, and the Times.

There were also many other influential newspapers in other parts of the country. Lincoln used censorship of those journalists and newspapers whose views did not fit with the administration or its prosecution of the war, justifying the practice as being one which saved lives by shortening the war.

Many newspapers that were critical of the Union cause were censored or shut down.

Some editors were jailed for their anti-administration views. Freedom of the press was a casualty of the Civil War, and the real debate is whether or not this was justified under the circumstances of the time.

In mid-August 1861, four newspapers in New York City: the New York Daily News, the Journal of Commerce, Day Book, and Freeman’s Journal were all given indictments by a Grand Jury of the United States Circuit Court for “frequently encouraging the rebels by expressions of sympathy and agreement”.

A series of federal prosecutions of newspapers throughout the northern United States followed. The target was any newspaper that printed expressions of sympathy for Southern causes or criticisms of the Lincoln Administration.

Lincoln was able to effect control of press censorship because in those days, stories were filed by telegraph and Lincoln controlled telegraph usage.

Do you see any similarities in what I have shared today? Wake up America!

In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, carrying 102 passengers—an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the New World. After a treacherous and uncomfortable crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are now commonly known, began the work of establishing a village at Plymouth.

Did you know? Lobster, seal and swans were on the Pilgrims’ menu.

Throughout that first brutal winter, most of the colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy and outbreaks of contagious disease. Only half of the Mayflower’s original passengers and crew lived to see their first New England spring. In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from an Abenaki Indian who greeted them in English. Several days later, he returned with another Native American, Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. He also helped the settlers forge an alliance with the Wampanoag, a local tribe, which would endure for more than 50 years and tragically remains one of the sole examples of harmony between European colonists and Native Americans.

In November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Now remembered as American’s “first Thanksgiving”—although the Pilgrims themselves may not have used the term at the time—the festival lasted for three days. While no record exists of the historic banquet’s exact menu, the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote in his journal that Governor Bradford sent four men on a “fowling” mission in preparation for the event, and that the Wampanoag guests arrived bearing five deer. Historians have suggested that many of the dishes were likely prepared using traditional Native American spices and cooking methods. Because the Pilgrims had no oven and the Mayflower’s sugar supply had dwindled by the fall of 1621, the meal did not feature pies, cakes or other desserts, which have become a hallmark of contemporary celebrations.

Pilgrims held their second Thanksgiving celebration in 1623 to mark the end of a long drought that had threatened the year’s harvest and prompted Governor Bradford to call for a religious fast. Days of fasting and thanksgiving on an annual or occasional basis became common practice in other New England settlements as well. During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress designated one or more days of thanksgiving a year, and in 1789 George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the national government of the United States; in it, he called upon Americans to express their gratitude for the happy conclusion to the country’s war of independence and the successful ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His successors John Adams and James Madison also designated days of thanks during their presidencies.

In 1817, New York became the first of several states to officially adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday; each celebrated it on a different day, however, and the American South remained largely unfamiliar with the tradition. In 1827, the noted magazine editor and prolific writer Sarah Josepha Hale—author, among countless other things, of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—launched a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. For 36 years, she published numerous editorials and sent scores of letters to governors, senators, presidents and other politicians. Abraham Lincoln finally heeded her request in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, in a proclamation entreating all Americans to ask God to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.” He scheduled Thanksgiving for the final Thursday in November, and it was celebrated on that day every year until 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in an attempt to spur retail sales during the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s plan, known derisively as Franksgiving, was met with passionate opposition, and in 1941 the president reluctantly signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November.

Thanksgiving Controversies

For some scholars, the jury is still out on whether the feast at Plymouth really constituted the first Thanksgiving in the United States. Indeed, historians have recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America that predate the Pilgrims’ celebration. In 1565, for instance, the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited members of the local Timucua tribe to a dinner in St. Augustine, Florida, after holding a mass to thank God for his crew’s safe arrival. On December 4, 1619, when 38 British settlers reached a site known as Berkeley Hundred on the banks of Virginia’s James River, they read a proclamation designating the date as “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Some Native Americans and others take issue with how the Thanksgiving story is presented to the American public, and especially to schoolchildren. In their view, the traditional narrative paints a deceptively sunny portrait of relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people, masking the long and bloody history of conflict between Native Americans and European settlers that resulted in the deaths of millions. Since 1970, protesters have gathered on the day designated as Thanksgiving at the top of Cole’s Hill, which overlooks Plymouth Rock, to commemorate a “National Day of Mourning.” Similar events are held in other parts of the country.

Thanksgiving’s Ancient Origins

Although the American concept of Thanksgiving developed in the colonies of New England, its roots can be traced back to the other side of the Atlantic. Both the Separatists who came over on the Mayflower and the Puritans who arrived soon after brought with them a tradition of providential holidays—days of fasting during difficult or pivotal moments and days of feasting and celebration to thank God in times of plenty.

As an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty, moreover, Thanksgiving falls under a category of festivals that spans cultures, continents and millennia. In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans feasted and paid tribute to their gods after the fall harvest. Thanksgiving also bears a resemblance to the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. Finally, historians have noted that Native Americans had a rich tradition of commemorating the fall harvest with feasting and merrymaking long before Europeans set foot on their shores.

When most Americans think of the first Thanksgiving, their minds probably turn to a semi-mythical 17th-century feast shared by pilgrims and Native Americans. Fewer may know that the modern version of a nation-wide Thanksgiving holiday didn’t actually come about until the late 19th century.

It was 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise,” the culmination of a 36-year campaign started by so-called “mother” or “godmother” of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale—a magazine editor and writer who many say also wrote the poem that became the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Born on a New Hampshire farm in 1788, Hale was known as the “Lady Editor” of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a periodical founded by the “plump, benign” publisher Louis Godey and “[b]y far the most phenomenally successful of any magazine issued before the Civil War,” as TIME put it in 1930. Under her leadership, the publication popularized white wedding dresses and Christmas trees, trends often credited to Britain’s Queen Victoria. In the magazine’s pages, Hale swore by the wrinkle-busting power of applying brown butcher paper soaked in apple vinegar to the forehead and described pigeons as “about the only bird in New England worth cooking.”

TIME also characterized her as “a crusader urging the admission of women to the practice of medicine, more thorough female education, foreign missions,” while Fortune‘s columnist John Chamberlain wrote that “she was annoyed by the menial position of pre-Civil War women and proceeded to put the flattering term ‘domestic science’ into the language” in the magazine’s A History of American Business. She even helped finance the all-female Vassar College, founded in 1861. But she did not believe in women’s suffrage, nor did she believe that women could do all professions just as well as men. Rather, as a widow and mother of five children, she believed that a high-quality education was essential to preparing women for “the most important vocation on earth…that of the Christian mother in the nursery.”

Her lobbying effort to make Thanksgiving holiday can be traced back to a passage of her 1827 novel Northwood. “We have too few holidays,” she wrote. “Thanksgiving like the Fourth of July should be a national festival observed by all the people … as an exponent of our republican institutions.” According to Melanie Kirkpatrick’s history of the occasion, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience, in addition to publishing editorials in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale would promote her campaign by publishing Thanksgiving-themed poems, tales of families happily dining together, and recipes for autumnal fare like roast turkey, pumpkin pie and sweet potato pudding, to make people hunger for a day when they could eat all of these delicious foods.

She also launched a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress, governors and Presidents. President Zachary Taylor said around 1849 that it was up to the states to decide when and whether to declare a Thanksgiving holiday; in that period, such a holiday was often celebrated anywhere from September to December, depending on the place. Some politicians thought the “day of public thanksgiving and prayer” declared by George Washington in 1789 violated the separation of church and state. And some in the South saw Thanksgiving as “another manifestation of intrusive, New England moralism,” according to Ryan P. Jordan’s Church, State, and Race: The Discourse of American Religious Liberty, 1750-1900. That’s one reason why Virginia Governor Henry Wise said he would not support this “theatrical national claptrap that is Thanksgiving.”

But, in a Sept. 28, 1863 letter to Lincoln, Hale argued the other side. She made the case that a “National and fixed Union Festival” should occur on the last Thursday of November, annually, because the last Thursday of November was when George Washington had declared the first national Thanksgiving in 1789. On Oct. 3, Lincoln issued the proclamation designating “the last Thursday of November” as a day of Thanksgiving, arguing in several newspaper editorials that, “in the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, the American people should take some time for gratitude.”

Next, Hale turned her efforts to making Thanksgiving a law of the land through an act of Congress—but she passed away in 1879 at the age of 91. It would be more than 60 years until President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a joint resolution, passed by Congress, which took into account years when there are five Thursdays in November and declared the fourth Thursday of the month a Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Poet, Sarah Josepha Hale is best known for creating the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” However, her work extends far beyond her writing. Her influence can be seen in historic sites and a famous national holiday still widely celebrated today.

Sarah Josepha Hale was born on October 24^th, 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire. Her parents were strong advocates for education of both sexes. Therefore, Hale was taught well beyond the normal age for a woman. Later, she married a lawyer David Hale, who supported her in all scholarly endeavors. Sadly, her husband died after only nine years of marriage, leaving Hale a widow with five children. She turned to poetry as a form of income.  Her most famous book, titled Poems for Our Children included a beloved story from her childhood. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was instantly a popular nursey rhyme.

In 1837, she became the editor of the Godey’s Lady’s Book. Her work with the magazine made her one of the most influential voices in the 19^th century. Her columns covered everything from women’s education to child rearing. Hale also used her platform to support other causes, including abolishing slavery and, later, colonization (freeing African Americans and sending them to Africa). While working as editor, she raised money for various historic sites. Hale helped to preserve George Washington’s home and financially supported the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument. Her work in historic preservation has stood the test of time, as both sites are still open to public.

Hale has been criticized heavily for her support of gender roles. As an editor, she encouraged women to focus their efforts in the domestic realm. A proper woman, to Hale not only managed the home but she also imparted religion to her children. Godey’s Lady Book was widely known for its conservative views for much of the 19^th century. Additionally, Hale did not support the women’s suffrage movement because she believed that women’s participation in politics would limit their influence in the home. However, Hale did use the magazine to advocate for the education of women and the rights of women as property owners.

Hale used her persuasive writings to support the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Beginning in 1846, she charged the president and other leading politicians to push for the national celebration of Thanksgiving, which was then only celebrated in the Northeast. Her requests for recognition were largely ignored by politicians until 1863. While the nation was in the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln signed into action “A National Day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” Hale’s letter to Lincoln is often cited as the main factor in his decision. Hale retired as editor in 1877 and died two years later at the age of 92.

China’s Cash Drives America Towards Electrification

This piece originally appeared in Forbes

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianafurchtgott-roth/2022/11/08/chinas-cash-drives-america-towards-electrification/?sh=29757de02bd5

Diana Furchtgott-Roth

Director, Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment

China is actively attempting to steer America in the direction of greater dependence on battery-powered vehicles.

America is walking into a problem of dependence in its vital transportation sector, just as Europe walked into a problem of dependence on Russia.

Through federal and state targets for renewable energy and battery-powered electric vehicles, America is becoming more dependent on China. 

Last week Foxconn, a Taiwanese company under the influence of China, injected another $170 million in Lordstown Motors, the Ohio electric truck company. This follows Foxconn’s purchase of Lordstown’s plant and $50 million worth of stock in November 2021.

Although America has achieved independence in oil and gas production, China is actively attempting to steer America in the direction of greater dependence on battery-powered vehicles. A new Congress should consider whether this makes sense.

Lordstown Motors was in great financial difficulties in 2021 and might have gone under, but Foxconn bailed it out. Although the new funding is dependent on approval from the U.S. Treasury’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), it’s likely that the Chinese government will be permitted its expanded stake in Lordstown Motors.

The Foxconn investment and other electrification projects make the United States more reliant on China. It’s to China’s advantage to prop up America’s battery electric vehicle companies because China makes the batteries. The greater the number of battery-powered buses, trucks, and cars in the United States, the more batteries China can sell.

China has purchased other U.S. electric vehicle and electric battery companies. The Chinese company BYD won a contract in 2018 to sell electric buses to the State of Georgia. Smith Electric partnered with Wanziang to make electric vehicles.

Chinese companies can list on American stock exchanges, raising capital in America for Chinese companies. But American companies do not list on Chinese stock exchanges. Li Auto, a Chinese hybrid auto company, went public on NASDAQ last year, and it aims to sell hybrids in the American market.

Consider that our laws allow Chinese companies to buy 100 percent of American companies, but American companies often cannot buy 100 percent of Chinese companies. The government of China keeps a stake in Chinese companies purchased by American companies.

Teens are switching from Facebook and Instagram to Tik Tok, the Chinese social media darling. But Gmail and many other American social media apps are prohibited in China.

China’s algorithms can be used to influence and track our teens, but Chinese teens cannot access our platforms.

China sets up Confucius Centers at American universities to teach American students the advantages of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet China would not allow Federalist Societies, or Adam Smith Societies, to be set up in Chinese universities.

Current energy policies weaken rather than strengthen America. Through federal and state targets for renewable energy and battery-powered electric vehicles, America is becoming more dependent on China.

What to do?

Either America has to accept dependence on China, and live in a constrained way, or it needs to forcibly disconnect with China, and abandon mandates for battery-powered electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels. America gradually needs to incur the costs of shifting overseas manufacturing elsewhere.

The next Congress needs to consider the ramifications of both options. Because the second one is difficult, the temptation will be to keep the status quo and accept the first option by default.

This would be a serious mistake. It’s time to stop giving China leverage over the United States.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/china-taiwan-war-us-defnse-munitions

By Jamie McIntyre, Senior Writer

A disarming prospect

 On a warm August day last year, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was drawing the ire of Beijing with her high-profile visit to Taiwan , a small group of national security experts was huddled around two big game boards in a small window-lit conference room in Washington, D.C.

The professionals from MIT and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were playing another iteration of a tabletop exercise designed to game out what might really happen if China were to launch an invasion of Taiwan and the United States went to war to thwart them.

With two competing teams matching wits and moving tiny game pieces around on the two maps — one showing China, the other the U.S., Japan, and Taiwan — the results from 24 different scenarios, stretching over several months, varied, always with both sides suffering big losses but usually with the U.S. prevailing, albeit at enormous cost.

“The good guys win in the sense that we are able to maintain an autonomous Taiwan and the Chinese are not able to conquer the island, but the bad news is that we take a lot of casualties,” said Mark Cancian, senior adviser at CSIS, one of the participants in the real-world version of Risk.

“For example, often we lose 500 aircraft, two aircraft carriers, and Taiwanese economy is devastated, so there’s a very high price,” Cancian told the Washington Examiner. “The Chinese also lose a lot of ships and aircraft, so it’s costly all around.”

There was, however, one glaring deficiency on the U.S. side, which months later would be echoed in a display of Russia’s embarrassingly flawed plan to invade and subjugate Ukraine — namely a critical shortage of certain kinds of precision munitions.

Ukraine is primarily a ground war with stationary targets that can be attacked by cruise missiles and drones, which, as the war dragged on much longer that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned, began to be in short supply.

In a war with China over Taiwan, which is an island, the weapons of choice would be air-to-air and anti-ship missiles, especially the LRASM (Lockheed Martin’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile ).

“It’s the preferred munition because it can attack surface ships from long distances. Otherwise, you have to get in very close — that gets very dangerous,” Cancian said. “Increasing the inventory of long-range anti-ship missiles is critically important for the United States and also for Taiwan.”

“If we look at the roughly two dozen iterations of a war game in the Taiwan Strait … the U.S. expended all of its joint air-to-surface standoff missiles and long-range precision-guided anti-ship missiles within the first week of the conflict,” said Seth Jones, director of CSIS’s International Security Program. “We’ve seen similar war games done by government agencies, including one where the U.K.’s third division exhausted national stockpiles in just over a week.”

The war in Ukraine exposed not only Russia’s inability to produce more precision munitions, in part due to sanctions from the West, but also gaps in the capabilities of American defense contractors to ramp up assembly lines on a wartime schedule to replace the stocks of armaments the Pentagon was pulling out of U.S. inventory and shipping to Ukraine.

“We burned through seven years’ worth of Javelins [shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles] in a couple of months,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) told the Washington Examiner. “We’re running low on all our stockpiles. We have to turbocharge our munitions industrial base.”

“There is a gap between what the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy says and what the U.S. is prepared for,” said Jones. “This really is an industrial base that, at least in my judgment, is in no way fully prepared to fight, let alone deter, the Chinese.”

“The war in Ukraine … exposed deficiencies in the U.S. defense industrial base — did the same thing with our European partners and allies,” Jones said at a CSIS event in late October. “It’s depleted stocks of some weapon systems and munitions, Stingers [anti-aircraft missiles], for example, M-777 howitzers, 155 mm ammunition and Howitzers, Javelin anti-tank missile systems.”

Rearming the U.S. military comes with an array of impediments, including increased demand, labor shortages, supply chain constraints, and a shortage of rare earth metals, of which China has a near monopoly.

But one of the bigger problems is the inability of Congress to pass a defense budget on time, instead relying on short-term funding bills known as continuing resolutions that freeze spending at last year’s levels and prevent the Pentagon from entering into multiyear contracts, which defense companies need in order to invest in new production lines.

Last month, Lockheed Martin, maker of the now-famous HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System), announced that it was ramping up production of the multiple-launch rocket systems from 60 to 96 a year in anticipation that demand would be high for the precision weapons that have wreaked destruction on Russian ammo dumps and supply lines.

“We advance funded ahead of a $65 million contract to shorten the manufacturing lead time,” said Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet on an earnings call . “That was without a contract or even any other memo or whatnot back from the government. We just went ahead and did that because we expected it to happen.”

But defense contractors shouldn’t have to guess what the Pentagon wants to buy, say leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee who last month proposed an amendment to the annual defense policy bill to give the Pentagon emergency procurement powers to cut through peacetime red tape and replenish missiles and other munitions in wartime quantities.

“We need to give the Pentagon multiyear procurement authority for munitions, and they just need to start buying these things,” Gallagher said. “We can draw upon some recent lessons of Operation Warp Speed (Covid Vaccine Development) to modernize the Defense Production Act, to really build out our defense industrial base and get new defense companies involved in the munitions business.”

The Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer says he expects Congress to approve new authorities this month when the National Defense Authorization Act comes up for a vote in the Senate.

“They are supportive of this. They’re going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base,” said Bill LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, at an event at George Mason University.

“I’m talking billions of dollars,” he said. “We have not done that since the Cold War.”

Are they going to fund this? I found another interesting article that could save billions and achieve the same goals.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/congress-must-address-americas-dependency-on-chinese-technology-in-defense-bill

Congress must address America’s dependency on Chinese technology in defense bill

By Jon Schweppe

Jon Schweppe is the director of policy and government affairs for the American Principles Project.

While China may have recently closed the military capability gap, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has introduced legislative language that could spoil the Chinese Communist Party’s predatory military plans in one fell swoop.

Building off the important work of former President Donald Trump , who imposed 25% tariffs on Chinese-made microchips, the senator’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would restrict the U.S. from purchasing microchips from companies that work with the CCP.

Microchips are what make much of America’s modern warfare equipment hum. Yet, the U.S. remains dependent on China for its supply. That’s a problem when companies with ties to the CCP make them and sell them to contractors and suppliers working with the federal government. And it’s especially a problem when the bulk of China’s strategy to defeat the U.S. military hinges upon these chips.

According to a new report released in October by the Special Competitive Studies Project, China is seeking to use advanced technologies to apply military force “with the aim of eroding or even leapfrogging the United States’ military strengths.”

China wants to become the “first movers” in “intelligentized warfare” — warfare that uses emerging technologies such as AI, 5G networks, and quantum computing to beat military rivals — to supersede the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower. And it’s developed a Made in China 2025 road map to make becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI), 5G wireless, quantum computing, and other related industries a reality in dangerously short order.

Guess what technology is necessary to operationalize this intelligentized warfare technology ? You guessed it: microchips. So why would Congress allow the federal government to purchase ones that have ties to the same CCP trying to use them to destroy America and its interests?

That doesn’t sound safe — not by a long shot. It raises many issues, including but not limited to the prospect of future supply chain problems and backdoors that could lead to cyber-attacks and espionage.

While both sides of the aisle agree on the need to reduce dependency on these Chinese-made chips, they have disagreed on the best approach.

Some opposed the CHIPS Act, which aimed to reduce dependency on this foreign technology by bolstering U.S. production, because they found its $250 billion price tag too expensive and too favorable to large, wealthy corporations.

Sen. Cornyn’s NDAA proposal eliminates all those concerns. It doesn’t spend a ton of money we don’t have; it doesn’t even ban all microchips — it just gets to the root of the problem by stopping microchips built by companies with known ties from the CCP from coming the federal government’s way.

After hearing the chilling speeches and proclamations that came out of the CCP’s 20th Party Congress last month, including the party’s plans to prioritize tech and innovationfor strategic purposes, every legislator should agree that protecting America from potential Chinese technology threats should be a top national priority.

Passing the Cornyn amendment to the NDAA would be a great place to start.

Here’s hoping the rational heads prevail. Our national security depends on it.

Missouri’s Contribution to the WWII Effort

Every state in the Union played its part in turning American industry into the mighty war machine that brought down the Axis powers. Missouri was a very important player in the war effort, supplying soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines with everything it could to do its part in this monumental undertaking.

The industrial base in the United States at the time relied heavily on the small businesses, so much so that ninety-five percent of American business in the 1930’s was done through small businesses. One hundred seventy thousand of the businesses and small plants produced seventy percent of all United States goods, while another one hundred large corporations produced the other thirty percent of products. By 1943, the tables had turned and those one hundred large corporations made seventy percent of the goods and those of the one hundred seventy thousand that had survived produced only ten percent of goods (62nd J.O.T.H. 410).

Industry was only a portion of what Missouri had to offer in the war. Missouri’s farms played as much of a part in the supply of American troops as Missouri industry.

Laws were enacted that allowed many skilled farmers and farm-hands to be exempt from selective service due to the dire need for their experience and skills they could provide in producing the much needed food for the country and the troops(62^nd J.O.T.H. 411). Citizens were also asked to do their part in home front activities during the war. Cultivating home or “victory” gardens, increasing the cutting of timber that can be used for war, to recruit manpower for farms, to collect scrap metals, to set up councils of defense, and to encourage recruitment into the armed services were all activities that any American at home could do to contribute to the war effort (62^nd J.O.T.H. 413).

In Missouri more than twenty-two thousand people went to trade schools and most of them were with a war training program. Vocational training for war production was a law that was enacted by Congress in June of 1940. Congress recognized that if the United States were to enter the war they would have the same problem that the nation had encountered in 1917, the nation was short of the millions of workers that were needed for war time production. Under Public Law 647 and 135, passed in 1942 and 1943, respectively, one hundred eighty million dollars was appropriated for war time production training. This program was known as VE-ND (Vocational Education for National Defense) and there were twenty-six centers set up in Missouri to teach Missourians the necessary skills for production. These twenty-six centers were entirely funded by the Federal Government, with no local or state money going to their set up or operation. Nationwide centers, like the ones in Missouri, trained over forty thousand men and women per year in various different jobs for war production (63^rd H.A.S.J.A. 48&51).

St. Louis may have been the single most important city in the United States for war production. It held the largest percent of war contracts over any other city in the nation. St. Louis accounted for only around one percent of the nation’s population, but supplied about four and a half percent of work for the war. The war was very good for the St. Louis economy, bringing around a billion dollars into the area (Flynn, 485).

St. Louis’ Schlueter Manufacturing Company was one of two manufactures in the nation that produced the M1 helmet.

Schlueter was a peacetime maker of pots and pans who converted with the United States’ entrance into the war (GD 9/12/1943). Diagraph-Bradley Stencil Machine Corporation was another St. Louis industry that was one of few to produce their goods. Diagraph-Bradley was one of three manufacturers in the world of stencil cutting machines. The machines were important because of the logistical aspect of war and the shipped goods needed to be well marked to avoid confusion (letter from V/P of Diagraph-Bradley to STSOM, 6/14/1946).

St. Louis Ordnance plant may have been one of the most important war plants that Missouri had during the war.

The ammo produced there was used by the infantry soldier all the way up to the machine guns on fighter planes.

Ground was broken for the plant on March 28, 1941 on the northern edge of St. Louis’ industrial district. The plant sprawled across three hundred acres and by war’s end had over four million feet of floor space in its three hundred buildings after it was decided an additional plant that was one and a half times bigger than the first would be needed. The two plants combined would become the St. Louis Ordnance Plant, and the biggest industrial plant in the Midwest (BBTB). Much like the other ammunition plants across the nation, and the one on the other side of the state, St. Louis Ordnance was owned by the United States but was run by a private company; Western Cartridge,.

To illustrate the size of the operation there are some interesting facts about the plant that should be said. The plant used over six million gallons of water per day and also used forty-four hundred gallons of lubricating oil on their machinery per day. Four hundred twenty-eight trucks were required to bring in materials each day and sixty carloads of brass were used each day. The plant required nearly five hundred eighty thousand kilowatt hours of electricity, nearly five million cubic feet of gas, and eighty-eight tons of coal per day for energy. There were twenty-six cafeterias open around the clock. A first aid station and registered nurse were stationed in every manufacturing unit. There was also a fully equipped and staffed hospital inside of the plant’s area to provide care to any sick or injured workers (BBTB).

Ammunition was being produced just seven months after breaking ground for the plant and cartridges were first accepted by the Ordnance Department on December 8^th, one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the end of the war St. Louis produced nearly thirteen billion rounds of small arms ammunition. In other words, enough ammunition to circle the earth six and a half times if laid end to end.

. Small arms ammunition produced at the St. Louis Plant were the .30 carbine (made for the M1 carbine), 30.06 (used in the M1 Garand, 1903A3, and light machine guns), and the .50 caliber (used in heavy machine guns).

Emerson Electric Manufacturing Company was another important asset in Missouri’s production arsenal. Their production of power turrets was extremely important to the war effort because it allowed bombers and transport planes to protect themselves from enemy fighter planes. Like many other plants, Emerson’s turret plant was part of the Defense Plant Corporation, with Emerson building and operating the government owned plant. The plant started to be built in July of 1941 and was built for the sole purpose of producing power turrets. Machinery was operational and turrets were being built just six months after ground breaking.

Emerson made five different types of turrets during the war, all of which contributed to victory. They built the Sperry Ball Turret which was used on the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator, heavy bombers. They built the Sperry Upper Deck Turret which was used on the B-17 Flying Fortress, the Grumman Upper Deck Turret which was used on Grumman Avengers, a carrier based dive bomber. They also built the Martin Upper Deck Turret that was used on the B-24 Liberator, and the Emerson Electric Nose Turret which was used on the B-24 Liberator, heavy bomber (Emerson Electric catalog). The plant was so important to the war effort that the government classified it as one of seven irreplaceable war plants in operation.

Kansas City also played an important part in Missouri’s war production.

One out of every hundred American war dollars were spent in Jackson, Clay, and Wyandotte counties.

In total there were almost four hundred war plants in the Kansas City area.

Lake City Ordnance Plant was the backbone of government ammunition, becoming the first of its kind. American Aviation produced numbers of bombers for the war and became a significant asset to American war production.

Lake City Ordnance Plant played a major role in arming the troops with the ammunition they needed for the war.

To start, the Ordnance Department began by building three plants that would be able to meet their production goals of one million .30 caliber ammunition and six hundred thousand rounds of .50 caliber ammunition per day (Remington 3-4). It was expected that these plants would be operational in eleven months from ground breaking. Lake City was to be the first in operation followed by Denver and St. Louis. Remington Arms was given operational command over Lake City and Denver.

It took just ten months transforming a Missouri farm into a plant that was supplying ammunition to the forces.

The initial plan of one million rounds of caliber .30 was increased in the first contract with Lake City to two million rounds per day. The expected need for .50 caliber remained the same (Remington 6). This meant the plant had the challenge of producing nearly twenty-four .30 caliber rounds per second and seven .50 caliber rounds per second!

The plant required at least sixty-five hundred employees to operate at full production. During peak production the number of workers at the plant was over three times that number. In 1943 Lake City had an astounding twenty thousand people working at the plant.

The plant had to deal with problems such as health, transportation, safety, and any other needs a large group of people would need. Lake City had to provide and maintain its own water and sanitation facilities to provide potable water and take care of its sewage. The plant also had twenty-five miles of roads and had its own bus system to transport the workers. This was to combat some of the traffic that would congest the plant’s roads. With forty-five hundred cars entering and leaving the plant daily, traffic and parking were a large problem for the plant. There was also a large utilities operation on the plant’s premises. It had to distribute gas and electricity and provide telephone service throughout the compound (Remington 59).

The twenty thousand workers all needed to be feed, so the plant had six cafeterias that were open night and day. There was also a hospital staffed with ten doctors and nearly fifty nurses. The hospital had sections for men and women, a surgical unit, x-ray, laboratory, and an ambulance service. There were also seven first aid stations scattered throughout the plant that were operated 24 hours a day. Along with personal care, the plant had to provide its own security and protection. This was very important because of the type of production that was occurring at Lake City. At the time, Lake City’s police department was larger than Kansas City’s police department. The compound had twenty-four miles of fences, with police guarding the posts. Even more important to the plant than security, was the fire department. The fire department was very well equipped and was staffed by eighty-two men. Fire would be catastrophic if it made it to powder supply or loaded ammunition (Remington 59-61).

American Aviation, Inc. played a very important role in Kansas City’s war production efforts. American Aviation produced B-25 bombers that would put fear into the Axis forces. Leading up to the war, American Aviation produced many trainers for various countries, but the largest was for England, building six hundred trainers in 1939 for the newly made British purchasing commission (KCS  1/4/1941).

          Ground breaking for the new plant was held on March 8, 1941 and the plant was turning out bombers three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). American Aviation’s plant was built to be used as a war plant and had features to protect itself from possible enemy attacks. It was one of the first “black out” plants that were built in the United States. This meant that the plant could operate twenty-four hours a day, without the risk of a possible enemy plane seeing the glow from the lighting at night. The entire plant was air-conditioned so the doors could be left closed and not let out light from the fourteen miles of fluorescent bulbs that were required to light the plant (KCS 1/4/1941). Kansas City and Inglewood, California were the only two plants that would produce the B-25 bombers. Much like other war plants, the American Aviation plant became its own city. It provided many of the amenities that the workers needed such as cafeterias. It also provided its own emergency electricity, police and fire departments, and anything else it needed to operate the plant without outside assistance or utilities in case of an emergency (KCS 1/4/1941).

          The B-25 was the single most armed bomber in the world during WWII. The nose of the plane had an impressive eight .50 caliber machine guns pointing straight ahead. It had another two on each side of the fuselage, two more on the roof turret giving the plane the forward firepower of fourteen guns, all of which could be fired at one time. It also had door guns on the rear of the fuselage, and two tail guns. This gave the bomber eighteen .50 caliber machine guns in all to protect itself on missions. The B-25’s impressive arsenal gave in the nickname the “flying fifties”.

In 1943 more bombers were made in Kansas City than any other plant in the world. On April 3, 1945 the six thousandth bomber was delivered by American Aviation (KCS 6/24/1945).  By the end of the war they plant had delivered nearly seven thousand bombers to the government. At the peak of production the plant employed over twenty-five thousand workers that worked shifts around the clock (KCS 8/17/1945). Two-thirds of all B-25’s were made at the Kansas City plant and at peak production the plant was turning out an average of thirteen bombers per day. In August of 1945, American Aviation produced three hundred bombers in twenty-three days.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/elections_have_consequences.html

‘Elections have consequences’

By James Poplar

Shortly after his 2009 inauguration, newly-elected President Obama met with congressional Republicans about his economic proposals. Infamously, he told them that “elections have consequences,” and, in case there was any doubt, he added, “I won.” He was right on both counts.

So, the election results are in.

What exactly does this mean and how will this shape our future? For starters, Kevin McCarthy laid out his plans when he takes the gavel as speaker of the House from the incumbent Nancy Pelosi.

“On the very first day, we’ll repeal the 87,000 new IRS agents because we think the government should be there to help you, not to go after you.”

This army of IRS agents resulted from the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act” which President Biden signed into law in August. This would grant an $80 billion boost to the IRS over a 10-year period, with more than half of the funds intended to help the agency crack down on tax evasion by hiring tens of thousands of agents that would more than double the agency’s current size.

In addition, McCarthy also promised, “We will become energy independent and focus on energy in America to make the price of gasoline less, the price of home heating less, to make America stronger and the world more secure. We will secure our border, we will make sure we don’t defund the police, but we’ll fund the police.”

“We will go after tackling inflation that Democrats have created,” he said. “We’ll pass a Parents’ Bill of Rights so that parents have a say in their kids’ educations, and then, we’ll hold government accountable so the people have a say in how their money is being spent, and we will eliminate waste.”

For years the Democrat Party has pushed a false narrative of Russian collusion which the Mueller Investigation determined to be unfounded.

The only collusion was between the campaign of Hillary Clinton and Russian political operatives. We also now know that social media, technology companies, and the mainstream media suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story before the last presidential election.

In addition, Mark Zuckerburg acknowledged that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election based on a general request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

By itself, this could have altered the last Presidential election. Additionally, the Democrats impeached President Trump twice in a purely partisan effort to maintain and expand their political power.

So yes, elections “do have consequences” and let’s just hope the Republican Party is up to the challenge of governing and, for once, facing the Democrat party head on.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/03/if-republicans-win-they-will-raze-your-home-steal-your-possessions-take-your-lives-and-laugh-when-they-enslave-your-children/

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist

Last week, the President of the United States, a man whose pathological lying has been ratcheted up to surreal levels lately, gave one of the most transparently toxic partisan speeches in memory.

Biden, quite absurdly, warned that American “democracy” could only survive if the nation functioned under one-party rule. Despite historic early turnouts, the president lied about widespread attacks on voting rights, preemptively engaging in the kind of election denialism he contends is “un-American.” Biden has probably forgotten that virtually every major Democrat was an “election denialist” not only in 2016 but in 2000, as well.

The president then blamed the actions of the mentally ill, drug-addled individual who viciously attacked the husband of Nancy Pelosi on all of MAGAdom — which, according to Democrats, includes everyone who disagrees with any of their positions, including a pro-life movement that’s been around forever.

Biden, who has likely engaged in more blatant executive abuses than any post-war president, leads a party that makes little distinction between “democracy” and its own power, treating any deviation, whether it be by the courts or voters, as illegitimate and “undemocratic” — a word that has been sapped of any real meaning.

This corrosive hyperbole isn’t only found in the rantings of absurd Twitter celebrities or in the desperate, last-ditch campaigning of a cognitively suspect president. Historian Michael Beschloss, a man who imparts his alleged wisdom on the president on a regular basis, warned that the nation was “six days away” from a new GOP dictatorship in which innocent children were at risk of being “arrested and conceivably killed.”

This is not the first time Beschloss has dropped insane hyperbole, not long ago claiming “that we are all in existential danger of having our democracy and democracies around the world destroyed,” and it surely won’t be the last.

Sunny Hostin, a cohost of the popular daytime television show, The View, claimed that white suburban women who backed the GOP were “like roaches voting for Raid.” Hostin is a historical illiterate, perhaps, but surely even she understands that comparing people to bugs is dehumanizing, racist language that would never stand if “white” was replaced by any other identity.

If Tucker Carlson had suggested something similar about anyone, we would be knee-deep in a national conversation, and the Anti Defamation League would be sending all-points bulletins declaring the country at Defcon one.

That was just in the last week.

So, we may have won a battle, but the war rages on. What are our newly elected officials up against?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/the_attempt_to_install_a_oneparty_oligarchy_is_predestined_to_fail.html

January 26, 2021

The Attempt to Install a One-Party Oligarchy is Predestined to Fail

By Steve McCann

George Orwell in a letter written in 1944 (5 years prior to the publication of his seminal work 1984) wrote the following:

“There is this fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. Overall, the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but at the price of accepting Stalin.  Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systemic falsification of history etc. as long as they feel it is on ‘our’ side.”

The current iteration of the American Ruling Class has not only embraced dictatorial methods as a means to their ends but are astonishingly ill-educated thanks to decades of indoctrination rather than education at America’s universities.  

This ill-education encompasses not only an inability by the vast majority to reason and generate an original thought but also a breathtaking ignorance of the history of mankind, and a profound inability to comprehend the American experience and citizenry.

The history of the 20th Century is full of examples of nations that have succumbed to one-party tyrannical rule.  In all cases these countries share at least one of two common threads. 

First, due to global or regional wars, they suffered overwhelming destruction to their societies and economies, opening the door for those espousing Marxism/socialism as a cure for the nation’s ills. 

Second, none of these nations had a centuries long history of freedom and self-determination. 

The most notable examples of totalitarian one-party rule were Germany and Italy, and currently Russia and China.   

The devastating physical and financial destruction of World War I triggered chaos throughout these European nations. 

World War II opened the door in China for Mao Zedong to solidify his party’s supremacy as he had been unable to do so in previous internal conflicts.  

These hostilities were the catalyst for the rise to power of one-party rule in all these nations under either the banner of Fascism, Nazism or Communism.  

Further, none of these nations (and others with dysfunctional impoverished societies that succumbed to one-party rule, such as Cuba) had any meaningful history of  being a successful multi-cultural society steeped in freedom and unfettered capitalism.  

The United States is not reeling from the aftermath of a devastating war on its soil.  Its citizenry is not suffering the effects of a massive depression. 

This nation for 245 years has promoted and reveled in individual freedom and free enterprise.  As a result, its economy, particularly over the past century is the most successful and dominant in world history. 

America is the only country in the annals of mankind that has sanctioned the unrestricted right of the populace to own and bear arms as a bulwark against an oppressive central government.  This is not now, nor has it ever been, a nation ripe for the ascension of one-party totalitarian rule. 

Thus, the current infatuation with themselves by this nation’s elites is about to run headfirst into a brick wall.  Their attempt to transform the United States into their hybrid version of a one-party oligarchy under the banner of a new hybrid of socialism is doomed to failure. 

Their psychotic obsession to rid themselves of the threat that Donald Trump posed to their plans has prompted unforced and fatal errors. 

The blatant hijacking of the 2020 election using the Chinese Coronavirus as cover.  Unabashedly, and with malice, defaming half of the voting citizenry as irredeemable domestic terrorists that must be vanquished.   

Accusing nearly 70% of the population of being racists solely because of their skin color.   Unable to control themselves and within hours of having assumed control of Congress and the White House, plunging headfirst into uncharted political overreach through an avalanche of Executive Orders.

These actions reveal a mindless faction in the process of imitating the final scenes in The Wizard of Oz drawing back the green curtain exposing their true colors, character and incompetence.

The vast majority of the denizens of the Ruling Class are not the best and brightest.  They are mere hangers-on who have an insatiable need to be considered part of the in-crowd. 

While many have framed elite university diplomas hanging on their walls, they are nearly devoid of what used to be generically known as common sense. 

Their most prominent personal characteristics are self-importance and greed. 

Their espousal of Marxism/socialism is self-serving as this philosophy empowers an omnipotent ruling class or oligarchy.  Yet, they could not survive a week in those repressive societies they glorify and wish to inflict upon on the rest of the country. 

When confronted with their failures they invariably blame others and are, for the most part, moral and physical cowards.  They will not stand up to an organized and determined citizenry.

Therefore, Americans must now mobilize to not just win skirmishes but to permanently dispatch these foolish megalomaniacs who have declared their determination to transform America and create a one-party oligarchy.  

The time has come for unfettered and peaceful civil disobedience as espoused by Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

The vast majority of Americans need to stop watching and reading the mainstream and social media and instead search out and support alternative news sources.

The citizens of each state must mobilize and demand that unlawful or illegal edicts and Executive Orders coming from Washington must be ignored by the individual state governors and not just challenged in the courts. 

The citizenry needs to forcefully and immediately concentrate on changing and codifying election laws in all the state legislatures.   Further, the focus in future elections should not be on Congress but rather governorships and state legislatures throughout the country.  

It is imperative that the people vote in the congressional primaries as if they were the general election in order to dispatch to the ash heap elected officials that aided and abetted the election fraud of 2020, the second impeachment of Donald Trump and any legislation advancing the tyrannical agenda of the Ruling Class.

Lastly, various elements of the populace need to stop falling prey to the not-so-subtle message put forth by various elements of the mainstream and social media monopoly that all is lost, and the left has won the war to transform the nation.  They have not and will not. 

Pessimism and defeatism are what the ruling elites are counting on.   Confidence and a willingness to fight for this country is a trait all of us who were rescued by the American people from either the cauldron of unconditional war or the tyranny of oppression experienced first-hand and continue to see in many of our fellow citizens to this day.

The above actions are rooted in the freedoms Americans have enjoyed since 1776 and thus cannot be eliminated by any faction or party without precipitating a violent civil war they will lose.  

That is why the current attempt to foist a one-party oligarchy on the United States will never succeed.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2014/10/18/truth-great-depression/

Originally appeared in the Washington Times.

What Really Ended the Great Depression

Stephen Moore / @StephenMoore / October 18, 2014

“What is history but a fable agreed upon?” as Napoleon once put it, and never has that been more true than the story of the Great Depression and its aftermath. With liberals again pitching more government spending “stimulus” in Washington, it’s critical we get this history right.

A great historical myth is that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs ended the Great Depression. After seven years of New Deal-era explosions in federal debt and spending, the U.S. economy was still flat on its back, and misery could be seen on the street corners.

By 1940, unemployment still averaged a sky-high 14.6 percent. That’s some recovery.

So, what did end the Great Depression? Again, the history books get this chapter of history wrong. Most history books tell us that it was government spending on steroids to mobilize for World War II after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Well, it is true that the economic output surged, and unemployment fell, but periods of all-out war are very different than periods of peace. Is it any surprise that unemployment fell dramatically when nearly 12 million Americans joined the military?

The author’s mother, a teenager in that period, used to tell him that during the war, when fuel was scarce and needed for the military, you wouldn’t be caught dead driving to the movie theater or a party.

It was regarded as unpatriotic and selfish. People continued to produce even with high tax rates (94 percent during the war) when their tax dollars were financing the fight against the Nazis and the Japanese.

For nearly four years — from 1942 to 1945 — America was not a free-market economy. We were an all-out wartime economy — with the normal laws of economics suspended.

However, a war is no way to fix an economy — obviously. Countering terrorist acts of the Islamic State is not a jobs program.

During World War II, when we built ships, tanks, fighter planes, dropped bombs and sent our troops into harm’s way, we weren’t creating wealth.

A war is no more stimulating to the economy than a burglar stealing your money, the Japanese tsunami in 2011, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or a tornado that levels an entire town.

Without such disasters, the resources spent reconstructing (or destroying in the case of war) would be spent either purchasing useful, life-enhancing products for consumption or investing in technology and capital equipment needed to increase economic output.

War in self-defense might be necessary to protect our families, but any economic growth derived from it is far less beneficial than growth derived from free people making individual decisions on what to consume and in what to invest.

In the 1940s, government spending did indeed surge. The federal share of gross domestic product (GDP) rose from less than 12 percent in 1941 to more than 40 percent in 1943-45.

In other words, almost half of everything that was produced in the nation was to fight the war. Domestic spending on many FDR New Deal programs in education, training and social services dropped more than 90 percent.

The real issue is what caused the economy to surge after the war was over.

This story is also not covered in the history books. Shortly after his third re-election in 1944, and at a time when the outcome of the war was no longer in question, FDR and his domestic advisers plotted a “new” New Deal with such spending items as national health insurance.

The Keynesians (pronounced cane-sians) (Government intervention, spending , is needed to stimulate the economy)were sure that the massive reduction in government spending would catastrophically tank the economy.

Paul Samuelson, the dean of neo-Keynesians at that time, warned in 1943 that unless wartime spending and controls were extended, there would be “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” Business Week predicted unemployment would hit 14 percent with the postwar cutbacks.

Here’s what happened. Government spending collapsed from 41 percent of GDP in 1945 to 24 percent in 1946 to less than 15 percent by 1947. And there was no “new” New Deal.

This was by far the biggest cut in government spending in U.S. history. Tax rates were cut and wartime price controls were lifted. There was a very short, eight-month recession, but then the private economy surged.

Here are the numbers on the private economy. Personal consumption grew by 6.2 percent in 1945 and 12.4 percent in 1946 even as government spending crashed.

At the same time, private investment spending grew by 28.6 percent in 45 and 139.6 percent in 1946.

The less the feds spent, the more people spent and invested. Keynesianism was turned on its head.

In 1946, the unemployment rate averaged below 4 percent, and it stayed that low for the better part of a decade. This all happened during the biggest reduction in government spending in American history under President Truman.

So, this brings us to our next big question.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/does_the_biden_administration_understand_inflation.html

July 10, 2021

Does the Biden Administration Understand Inflation?

By Jim Hollingsworth

There seems to be a lot of confusion today about inflation.  Pick up the paper or follow an internet site and you will read that the inflation rate this year is expected to be 2% or 3%.  What they really mean is that prices are expected to rise 2% or 3%. 

But is that inflation?

Inflation is an increase in the money supply.  So why is the difference in definition critical?  Prices rise because of inflation; they are the result of inflation but they are not inflation, nor are they the cause of inflation.

This is important because the government is the only one that can increase the money supply.  This is done in a number of ways, but for the moment just think of it as printing more money. 

That is what countries have done when they ran out of money; they just printed more money until it came to the point where their money was almost worthless, where a wheelbarrow load of money would just barely purchase a loaf of bread like post WWI Germany.

Recently, we have had a number of “gifts” from the government.  The last one was $1,400 per individual, or $2,800 for each couple.  But with more money in circulation, prices tend to rise. 

Thus, though all of us got the “free money” it is the middle to lower class who actually pay for that money in the rising cost of gasoline, food and other required expenses.

But what is inflation, actually? Few subjects are more misunderstood by the general public, which tends to view inflation as “rising prices.” This mistaken view, shared and promoted by many economists, obscures the true nature and origin of inflation.

First of all, rising prices are the effect of inflation, not inflation itself, which is simply an expansion of the money supply via money creation, resulting in diminishing purchasing power of the money already in circulation.

Governments have often resorted to inflation–printing money–to pay off debts.  This generally leads to soaring prices and devaluated currency.

So, what’s the difference, or is it just a matter of semantics?  The difference lies with who is responsible.  As prices rise we have a tendency to blame the “greedy” vendor.  He raised prices to make another buck.  But is that necessarily the case?  More likely he raised his prices because his costs have gone up; both labor and materials.

So, how about price-gouging?  Here is one definition from Wikipedia: 

“Price gouging is a term referring to when a seller spikes the prices of goods, services or commodities to a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair, and is considered exploitative, potentially to an unethical extent.”

But who decides what is reasonable or fair? And, further, what is considered exploitative?

Maybe we cannot provide a legal definition of price-gouging, it is just that we will know it when we see it.

But here is a factor we often do not think about: Commodities are scarce; all commodities.  So, the price rises until supply and demand tend to meet.  If a “disaster” causes supply to be interrupted, and supply is reduced the only choices are to raise prices or to limit demand by some process.

So, we blame the vendors when prices rise, but if inflation is actually caused by government “printing” more money, then we may more realistically blame the government.  I know this may be a subtle difference, but it is an important one.  When we place the blame where it belongs, with the government, then we are less apt to blame the particular vendors and work to reduce government hand outs.

This distinction is rarely made in the popular press. 

More often than not the press only talks about rising prices and calls that inflation, when in fact prices rise because when the government prints more money, with no additional product, more dollars for the same product simply means higher prices. 

Every economist knows this, yet few bother to make the distinction clear.

Even the White House appears to be confused on what is inflation.

The White House admitted recently that they were surprised by the rise in consumer prices in March, the largest jump since 2008. 

“So we hadn’t forecasted that. The forecasters hadn’t expected that,” White House Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Cecilia Rouse said, adding the Federal Reserve was also “a bit surprised by the jump.”

You would think that governments would have learned from history.  Truly they have not. 

Governments, especially socialist governments, have often resorted to printing money to get what they wanted rather than just raising taxes.  The only way to stop the rise in prices is simply to only spend the money on hand and stop just printing more money to pay for government services.

Don’t believe me about the history? One final point.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/myths_about_the_depression_and_franklin_roosevelts_program.html

February 17, 2022

Myths about the Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s program

By Mark C. Ross

Much mischaracterization surrounds the greatest economic crisis in American history.  Let’s look back to the election of 1932, where Franklin Roosevelt defeated the otherwise popular Herbert Hoover to become only the third Democrat to be elected president since the Civil War. 

The mythology concerns the why of Roosevelt’s superior popularity.  Most folks you might ask would say FDR had a grander vision of what it would take to end the Depression — and they would be wrong.

First off, the stock market crash of 1929 had not yet fully morphed into the Great Depression by 1932.  Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, makes the case that FDR won because he campaigned on ending Prohibition.  He was a “Wet” and Hoover was a “Dry.”  

Many still blame the Depression on Hoover — not as president, but rather as secretary of commerce under Coolidge.  Hoover sent boat-loads of money to Latin American nations to stimulate markets for American exports.  The recipient regimes were often soon overthrown, and the money was embezzled, damaging the financial resources of the US government.

The primary myth is that the New Deal worked.  

The reality is and what is fairly well understood, and thus not a myth, is that the Great Depression was brought to an end when a profound national emergency began at Pearl Harbor.  

From about 25% unemployment, we quickly went to nearly full employment, some via conscription and much also via an overwhelming demand for labor.  

Consumer products, such as automobiles, were not available, and workers were instead encouraged to take a portion of their pay in war bonds.  Over time, the conversion of disposable income into a form of savings bond was a significant source of individual wealth. 

When the war ended, there was serious worry that the Depression would start all over.  Plans were afoot to provide unemployment insurance for the many returning military personnel.  But the accumulated war bond wealth had a major impact.  

The construction boom of the 1920s that ended with the crash of 1929 started all over again, both with the war bond money and the added help of improved building technologies, largely associated with the Seabees.  And thus began the postwar Baby Boom.

So what have we learned today?

Is increasing welfare benefits, paying off student loans, and printing more money going to get us out of our current mess? Absolutely not.

It wasn’t government spending, but the shrinkage of government spending, that finally ended the Great Depression. That’s what should be in every history book — but isn’t.