For as long as I can remember, there has been a divide between the young and the old. Middle aged men decry the waste of youth on the young and the young respond in kind; accusing the old men of stubbornness and of being single minded or worse, senile. Many have dismissed these difficulties as unavoidable noting that the old and young will always be at odds because the old have been tempered with the scars, bruises and pains of harsh experience and the young see the world in the simplest terms because their dreams have not been tested against brutal reality.
This is partially true. Plato wrote about the hardships parents had with their teenagers more than two thousand years ago and some of Shakespeare’s greatest works were centered on the passion of the young pitted against the blindness of their parents. The young look at our old photos, hear us talk about record players and black and white television and eventually argue that their meager experiences were earned in far more complex times than their parents knew and therefore, their experiences are at least equal, if not superior to those earned in the veritable stone age that their parents grew up in. The real shame is that these passionate young people don’t know how much they don’t know.
This is not to say that they are not capable individuals; many are highly intelligent and motivated and will invariably become the next generation of leaders. They are politically active and genuinely want to contribute to making America a better place. Their ideology is based largely on what they have learned in school, college and through a deeply flawed news media. If they only knew how much of the truth has been kept from them in order to shape their opinions and tenants, they might actually have very different ideas. In fact, I would bet that a wave of anger would sweep through the younger generations if they ever found out that they were being played as pawns by a group of globalist elitists far older and cynical than they ever imagined their parents to be.
The real game and the ultimate battleground is information. At first, only conservative leaning news organs, mostly Fox, would dare speak out against the President and his agenda. The Obama administration responded to those unflattering stories by dismissing Fox as not being a “real” news network. That worked for a while but now other networks and news outlets have started to come out of the ether and harsh criticisms have begun to seep into the coverage offered by CNN, MSNBC and even the L.A. Times! In order to counter the negative stories that have recently been taking a toll on Obama’s ratings, the President actually told a group of graduating students that too much information can be a distraction. After all, he couldn’t very well say that all of those media giants have somehow slipped out of the mainstream and have relinquished their status as “real” news networks simply because their coverage of him has become something less than the adoration he once enjoyed. Of course the real question is will those students heed the President’s advice or will they begin to ask themselves why an American President would suggest that public disregard any information and simply rely on official government sources?
In the past, even our most sinister Presidents were politically savvy enough to avoid hinting that they sought to actively control information. While they may have been silent on the issue, sadly, their records are rife with actions to sanitize not only the news, but history itself. Entire pieces of American history have been carefully scrubbed out of the text books and curriculum the American students see from the moment they walk into first grade right on through their college years. Fortunately, with the internet the truth is still out there but before you can find it, you have to know the right questions to ask.
The purge began in earnest during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat, saw to it that school text books were cleared of all information pertaining to African American patriots that fought and died as heroes in the American Revolution. Wilson actually went further than that; purging blacks from Federal jobs and in segregating the military. Isn’t it funny how those little tidbits of history are curiously left out of the studies of Woodrow Wilson? In fact, anything that doesn’t portray Progressivism as an enlightened and benevolent ideology is similarly struck from the public record. Of course, if you perform a simple Google search about Wilson’s segregation of the military, the elimination of blacks from civil service or the editing of school books during his administration; suddenly, pages and pages of documents begin to appear.
These students have been taught to believe that America was a bigoted nation founded on the belief that black slaves, and even white women, were denied basic rights by a ruling class of elderly white men. They have been taught that the three-fifths rule proves this legitimized racism when the Constitution was drafted with a provision that slaves represented only three-fifths of a human being. Would these students be surprised to know that more than five thousand African Americans fought side by side with whites in the Revolution; many serving with historical distinction. That is until Wilson’s school book purge made that information unavailable to students.
Would they be amazed to know that an African American was one of the first patriots killed in the Boston massacre and that many more would die a hero’s death in every major battle of the war? Would they be shocked to learn that not only did New England elect America’s first black judge during the early 1790’s but that he was continually re-elected, eventually serving for over forty years? Would they believe that America’s first black Speaker of the United States House of Representatives had been seated in 1869? Suddenly, this doesn’t sound like the history of a racist nation at all.
So what of the evil three-fifths rule? What the learned professors at our most lauded colleges will not tell their students is that the three-fifths rule was a carefully crafted strategy designed to deny the slave States governmental representation that included the full measure of the number of slaves they held. Even though the Northern States were populated with more citizens, slaves were few and far between. If it were not for the three-fifths rule, the Southern States would have enjoyed a sufficient majority within the House of Representatives to guarantee slavery in perpetuity simply by buying more slaves.
The young are also being taught that Capitalism has failed and the free market is only a tool used by the rich to retain their wealth. How the free market can be fairly judged when Progressive giants like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt have instituted Federal programs and policies that have strangled the free market for nearly one hundred years is beyond me. Ask anyone educated in the public school system in the last fifty years and they will tell you that FDR ended the Great Depression through a myriad of government programs that stimulated employment and bolstered the economy. The truth is that after ten years of government intervention, there was no measurable improvement in either the unemployment rate or any of the leading economic indicators of the day. It was World War Two that ended the Great Depression, not FDR.
The other economic factor that has been totally eliminated from the realm of academic study is the Depression of 1920. Whenever I mention the Depression of 1920 most will immediately say “No, it was 1929.” The Depression of 1920 that followed the fiscal mismanagement of the Wilson administration has been nearly eradicated from all discussion because the facts surrounding that financial disaster are devastating to the neo-socialist beliefs of modern Progressives. While FDR struggled with funding one massive government program after another to stave off the effects of the Great Depression, President Warren Harding halved government spending and cut taxes by nearly 75%. The end result? Roosevelt’s depression lingered for over a decade until World War Two changed the balance of industrial power in the world while the economic policies of Warren Harding revitalized the American economy, ending his depression in a brief two years; giving us the halcyon days of the “Roaring Twenties”. As an interesting note, the depression of 1929 is considered to be a direct result of the damage wrought to the economy when Calvin Coolidge left much of the economic and regulatory policy decisions up to Progressive activist, Herbert Hoover; then, Coolidge’s secretary of Commerce. Hoover then drove the final nails in our economic coffin when he assumed the Presidency in 1929 and completed his work of undoing the Harding tax and spending cuts.
All of these facts and more are out there for anyone that will take off their blinders and dares to seek the information for themselves. The President is wrong about information. It is not distracting; it is liberating. So long as America is free, the truth remains a potent reminder of the incredible genius of the founding fathers and the best laid path to our future prosperity as a nation. If these future leaders let that liberty slip away; if they allow Socialist Professors to ignore history and Washington bureaucrats to erode the Constitution, then the light of truth will be extinguished forever. Orwell warned that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. Don’t take my word for any of this. These facts may no longer be taught in American schools but they are still available to those who seek the truth. However, if we allow this “fundamental transformation” of America to continue unabated, those truths may be lost for all time and with them, our place in the world as a free people.
Paul
This is partially true. Plato wrote about the hardships parents had with their teenagers more than two thousand years ago and some of Shakespeare’s greatest works were centered on the passion of the young pitted against the blindness of their parents. The young look at our old photos, hear us talk about record players and black and white television and eventually argue that their meager experiences were earned in far more complex times than their parents knew and therefore, their experiences are at least equal, if not superior to those earned in the veritable stone age that their parents grew up in. The real shame is that these passionate young people don’t know how much they don’t know.
This is not to say that they are not capable individuals; many are highly intelligent and motivated and will invariably become the next generation of leaders. They are politically active and genuinely want to contribute to making America a better place. Their ideology is based largely on what they have learned in school, college and through a deeply flawed news media. If they only knew how much of the truth has been kept from them in order to shape their opinions and tenants, they might actually have very different ideas. In fact, I would bet that a wave of anger would sweep through the younger generations if they ever found out that they were being played as pawns by a group of globalist elitists far older and cynical than they ever imagined their parents to be.
The real game and the ultimate battleground is information. At first, only conservative leaning news organs, mostly Fox, would dare speak out against the President and his agenda. The Obama administration responded to those unflattering stories by dismissing Fox as not being a “real” news network. That worked for a while but now other networks and news outlets have started to come out of the ether and harsh criticisms have begun to seep into the coverage offered by CNN, MSNBC and even the L.A. Times! In order to counter the negative stories that have recently been taking a toll on Obama’s ratings, the President actually told a group of graduating students that too much information can be a distraction. After all, he couldn’t very well say that all of those media giants have somehow slipped out of the mainstream and have relinquished their status as “real” news networks simply because their coverage of him has become something less than the adoration he once enjoyed. Of course the real question is will those students heed the President’s advice or will they begin to ask themselves why an American President would suggest that public disregard any information and simply rely on official government sources?
In the past, even our most sinister Presidents were politically savvy enough to avoid hinting that they sought to actively control information. While they may have been silent on the issue, sadly, their records are rife with actions to sanitize not only the news, but history itself. Entire pieces of American history have been carefully scrubbed out of the text books and curriculum the American students see from the moment they walk into first grade right on through their college years. Fortunately, with the internet the truth is still out there but before you can find it, you have to know the right questions to ask.
The purge began in earnest during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat, saw to it that school text books were cleared of all information pertaining to African American patriots that fought and died as heroes in the American Revolution. Wilson actually went further than that; purging blacks from Federal jobs and in segregating the military. Isn’t it funny how those little tidbits of history are curiously left out of the studies of Woodrow Wilson? In fact, anything that doesn’t portray Progressivism as an enlightened and benevolent ideology is similarly struck from the public record. Of course, if you perform a simple Google search about Wilson’s segregation of the military, the elimination of blacks from civil service or the editing of school books during his administration; suddenly, pages and pages of documents begin to appear.
These students have been taught to believe that America was a bigoted nation founded on the belief that black slaves, and even white women, were denied basic rights by a ruling class of elderly white men. They have been taught that the three-fifths rule proves this legitimized racism when the Constitution was drafted with a provision that slaves represented only three-fifths of a human being. Would these students be surprised to know that more than five thousand African Americans fought side by side with whites in the Revolution; many serving with historical distinction. That is until Wilson’s school book purge made that information unavailable to students.
Would they be amazed to know that an African American was one of the first patriots killed in the Boston massacre and that many more would die a hero’s death in every major battle of the war? Would they be shocked to learn that not only did New England elect America’s first black judge during the early 1790’s but that he was continually re-elected, eventually serving for over forty years? Would they believe that America’s first black Speaker of the United States House of Representatives had been seated in 1869? Suddenly, this doesn’t sound like the history of a racist nation at all.
So what of the evil three-fifths rule? What the learned professors at our most lauded colleges will not tell their students is that the three-fifths rule was a carefully crafted strategy designed to deny the slave States governmental representation that included the full measure of the number of slaves they held. Even though the Northern States were populated with more citizens, slaves were few and far between. If it were not for the three-fifths rule, the Southern States would have enjoyed a sufficient majority within the House of Representatives to guarantee slavery in perpetuity simply by buying more slaves.
The young are also being taught that Capitalism has failed and the free market is only a tool used by the rich to retain their wealth. How the free market can be fairly judged when Progressive giants like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt have instituted Federal programs and policies that have strangled the free market for nearly one hundred years is beyond me. Ask anyone educated in the public school system in the last fifty years and they will tell you that FDR ended the Great Depression through a myriad of government programs that stimulated employment and bolstered the economy. The truth is that after ten years of government intervention, there was no measurable improvement in either the unemployment rate or any of the leading economic indicators of the day. It was World War Two that ended the Great Depression, not FDR.
The other economic factor that has been totally eliminated from the realm of academic study is the Depression of 1920. Whenever I mention the Depression of 1920 most will immediately say “No, it was 1929.” The Depression of 1920 that followed the fiscal mismanagement of the Wilson administration has been nearly eradicated from all discussion because the facts surrounding that financial disaster are devastating to the neo-socialist beliefs of modern Progressives. While FDR struggled with funding one massive government program after another to stave off the effects of the Great Depression, President Warren Harding halved government spending and cut taxes by nearly 75%. The end result? Roosevelt’s depression lingered for over a decade until World War Two changed the balance of industrial power in the world while the economic policies of Warren Harding revitalized the American economy, ending his depression in a brief two years; giving us the halcyon days of the “Roaring Twenties”. As an interesting note, the depression of 1929 is considered to be a direct result of the damage wrought to the economy when Calvin Coolidge left much of the economic and regulatory policy decisions up to Progressive activist, Herbert Hoover; then, Coolidge’s secretary of Commerce. Hoover then drove the final nails in our economic coffin when he assumed the Presidency in 1929 and completed his work of undoing the Harding tax and spending cuts.
All of these facts and more are out there for anyone that will take off their blinders and dares to seek the information for themselves. The President is wrong about information. It is not distracting; it is liberating. So long as America is free, the truth remains a potent reminder of the incredible genius of the founding fathers and the best laid path to our future prosperity as a nation. If these future leaders let that liberty slip away; if they allow Socialist Professors to ignore history and Washington bureaucrats to erode the Constitution, then the light of truth will be extinguished forever. Orwell warned that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. Don’t take my word for any of this. These facts may no longer be taught in American schools but they are still available to those who seek the truth. However, if we allow this “fundamental transformation” of America to continue unabated, those truths may be lost for all time and with them, our place in the world as a free people.
Paul
