"All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, should also come down. They are a gross form of white supremacy," King said.

The man in the arena

What will be next?

Every conservative who compromised on tearing down confederate statues is complicit in the destruction of art across the country.

In Lincoln Park, Washington DC stands a statue called Emancipation Memorial, showing Abraham Lincoln and a freed slave. Activists want it down.

Two hundred thirty seven years ago, our forefathers sat in a hot room with closed windows arguing over the future of the thirteen colonies they represented. For a while they had thought of reconciliation with their motherland. But over time it became clear that neither King nor Parliament were interested in anything other than submission.

These fifty-six men did what had not been done before them.

They outlined their grievances on paper, declared their independence, and signed their names so both King and Parliament would know who the traitors were. The act was treason punishable by death. Some of them did die. Some were bankrupted. Many lost their homes and property. Some saw their wives and children taken and abused. But none recanted. All held firm.

237 years later we view the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America in the abstract. The grievances are distant if not surreal. But it was very real to them.

The United States of America today stands 69 years removed from D-Day.

D-Day was 79 years from the end of the Civil War, and 81 years removed from Gettysburg, which we are now 150 years separated from in time and history.

The beginning of the Civl War was 85 years from 1776 and only 72 years from the constitution being enacted.

The Revolution was only 88 years from the Glorious Revolution — a revolution from which we are separated by a chasm of 325 years.

It was the Glorious Revolution that so influenced our founders. It was not abstract to them. It was not far removed. It was an event in the lifetimes of some of their grand parents. Parliament’s supremacy was asserted. The British subjects became citizens and acquired certain rights under the Bill of Rights of 1689 while others from the Magna Carta were reinforced. Among the rights derived from the Glorious Revolution were prohibitions on taxation without representation in Parliament, prohibitions on a standing army, the right to petition the King without prosecution, the prohibition on dispensing with Acts of Parliament, and the prohibition of fines and forfeitures before convictions of crimes.

The colonists engaged in a conservative revolution — a revolution not for something wholly new, but for something 88 years old. They only rebeled for “new Guards for their future security” when neither King nor Parliament would grant them what they thought they already had: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What we find today to be so abstract — gun rights written into our constitution, prohibits on quartering soldiers, checks and balances and clear limits on power drawn up by men deeply skeptical of themselves and others with power — were not abstract notions to our founders. They were real. They were present. Most importantly, they were worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for.

“The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it,” Sen. Kaine said.  //

Virginia was a black man named Anthony Johnson. There are also other accounts of black men owning slaves in early Virginia.

James Madison hated fighting in the world of public opinion and parties until he was left with no other choice. //

There are no roads in the American journey that we have not passed by before, and this time the subject of use is James Madison. During the Constitutional Convention and the ratification process, Madison believed that the structure of the document and new government it framed would be strong enough to protect against public opinion, party, or faction.

So diffused was the representation he thought, and so limiting of power the checks and balances that no one interested party or set of interested parties would be able to steer the ship of the state alone. But by the early 1790s, Madison found himself in Congress as the leader of the opposition to the Washington administration and the Alexander Hamilton-led Federalists. The mercantile class, in Madison’s view was running roughshod over the agrarian South and he believed violating the constitution.

It is at this point that Madison makes an astounding reversal. Suddenly he needed public opinion. Furthermore, the founder who most detested political parties was about to found one with Thomas Jefferson. What Madison learned was that no system, regardless of how magisterial, could on its own secure the freedom and liberty of its citizens. The best it can do is to offer a fair marketplace of ideas.

Conservatives need to ponder and understand this Madisonian moment. The fault of Frenchism is that it relies upon the structure of the Constitution, just as Madison had, to protect against government overreach. But it does so at a time when the marketplace of ideas is shrinking into a progressive media culture that brooks no opposition. The Constitution is a backstop, but it does not in and of itself create the common good, it leaves that to us.

Conservatives must demand to be part of the conversation about drag queens preforming for toddlers, or kids being taught they are inherently racist. We have to be loud when addressing those who would censor newspapers or defund websites. A robust and effective conservative movement founded on the reverence of Western values cannot be achieved by treating the Constitution as the Alamo, just waiting to get wiped out. //

It’s time to stop playing defense. Like Madison, we must open our eyes to the fact that politics is inherently about power, not just resisting power, but also asserting it. If we go too far, let the other side rely on the courts and the constitution for a little while.

Madison would go on to become president, but perhaps more importantly his Democratic-Republican Party would as the name suggests eventually branch into both of our modern parties. He knew when to fight. That is a lesson the right is badly in need of today.

The kente cloth isn't as friendly a symbol to black people as Dems think. //

But as USA Today points out, the Democrats publicity stunt was likely a little less researched than they thought. As it turns out, the kente cloth they wore were actually tied to affluent Africans who got rich selling their fellow Africans in the slave trade. //

The left is currently tearing down statues if the person depicted was even a little racist in their past, or just racist by today’s standards. They vandalized abolitionist Matthias Baldwin and he was saying “black lives matter” long before any of these activists were, so you don’t even have to be racist at all.

Regardless, the Democrats are now guilty of wearing a symbol of a rich, slave-trading empire that made its money on the backs of enslaved Africans and passing it off as showing solidarity with the American black community. What the kente cloth represented might have been forgotten over time, but rest assured, this is its history.

Which is probably appropriate, seeing as how the Democrats have a long history of taking part in and defending slavery, even to the point of going to war over it. If they were looking to leave that image behind and be embraced as the party that protects and supports minorities, maybe they should get a different symbol.

As the trend of tearing down statues gains steam, one leader is taking a stand and making it clear that no statues are coming down no matter what the subject of the statue did during their lifetime.

French President Emmanuel Macron released a video statement that made it clear that racism is deplorable but that France’s history is what it is. As such, no statue will be torn down regardless of the reasoning for it.

“We will be inflexible when it comes to tackling racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination, and new strong decisions will be made to reinforce the egality of chances,” Macron said in the video. “But this noble fight is perverted when it turns into communitarianism, into a false rewriting of history.”

“This is unacceptable when it is picked up by separatists. I tell you very clearly tonight my dear fellow citizens, the Republic will not erase any trace or name from its history,” he continued. “It will not forget any of its deeds or take down any statue. What we need to do is to look all together with lucidity on all of our history and all our memory. Our relation to Africa in particular so we can build a present and a possible future from one to the other side of the Mediterranean.” //

Emmanuel Macron has the right idea, but this shouldn’t be considered a bold stance. It should be more along the lines of common sense. //

civil_truth • 4 hours ago

I guess the history of the French Revolution and its aftermath is still being impressed on French citizens enough that their president, for all his faults, knows how tearing down statues and rejecting history ends up. What remains to be seen if whether he has the support of enough of those who hold political power in the country to maintain his position.

What does any of this have to do with healing our nation? The answer is, 'nothing.' And that’s the point.  //:

You’d think the way some in the media talk about this country that they’re sad we’re still not fighting the Civil War. They would like us to fight a new civil war in our culture, day and night, without end.

I’d suggest to my colleagues that the Civil War not only gave us villains, it also gave us heroes and a more perfect union to love.

Maybe we should learn from those heroes. We should learn from Lincoln, who called our nation to unity at Gettysburg.

“It is for us the living,“ he told us, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced … to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” //

The Americans who visit these hallowed grounds, all across our country, want to know why this nation fought a war against itself — why brothers could not live under one flag together. We teach them there, in those places, how we became a better nation through the crucible of that terrible war. And we teach them there to be proud that we did so.

When President George W. Bush 13 years ago on June 12, 2007, dedicated a U.S. memorial in Washington, D.C., to the more than 100 million victims of communism, both the Chinese communists and the Russian communists immediately attacked the president and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington dismissed the memorial as “an attempt to defame China.” Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party, called the memorial “clumsy propaganda” intended to divert the world’s attention “from the true bloody crimes of U.S. imperialism.”

Tellingly, what neither the Chinese communists nor the Russian communist boss tried to do was to deny the bloody crimes of communist imperialism. After stating that “we the living have a solemn obligation to the victims to acknowledge their sacrifice and honor their memory,” Bush listed some of communism’s victims:

They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded on cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet communism.

They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest and Ethiopians slaughtered in the “Red Terror”; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.

We should preserve not destroy. //

A very interesting conundrum developed Tuesday when HBO Max decided to temporarily remove the 1939 classic cinematic masterpiece “Gone With the Wind” from its available offerings because the film depicts events that take place during the American South at a time when the region embraced slavery during and immediately following the Civil War.

That conundrum was this: if the film version of “Gone With the Wind” is forever memory-holed, then the accomplishment of Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy to the very English Vivian Leigh’s Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, would go down the memory hole as well. And that accomplishment is very much something we as a society would certainly hate to lose. Because McDaniel was the first African-American to win an Oscar. And we won’t even discuss the fact that she was a woman. //

Baseball1969
16 hours ago
Slavery was a European practice and was based on economics
Racism is a different issue. Slavery does not equal racism, if it did then blacks and native Americans would be guilty.
How many of you knew In 1830 there were 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves? That’s before the civil war

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vangoghssister Baseball1969
14 hours ago
Not to mention the Africans who sold their brethren to the slave traders.

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Baseball1969 vangoghssister
14 hours ago
Yes. And most went to South America

///

If we destroy the history of indignity we lose the reason for correcting historical and institutionalized racism.

By eliminating anything that can be questioned it prevents us from coming up with answers //

how are the problems being addressed by erasing these historical realities?

How are the problems cited today repaired by dredging up decades-old Halloween costumes, censoring movies that have long been released, and removing historical landmarks and renaming buildings to remove figures from the past, all because you cannot handle being triggered by supposed offenses? Avoiding the reality that these things happened and pretending the monuments did not exist does nothing to fix what are claimed to be serious problems today.

If you do not want to hear about what happened in the past you will not be able to have the needed conversations to come up with solutions going forward. Erasure Culture is abject denial. It will not provide the remedies that are being demanded.

For the Pan Am flight attendants, there were no parades after the war, nor much movement to celebrate their role or their place as accidental pioneers in military history. //

In the winter of 1968, a Boeing 707, heavy with American troops and body bags, took rounds of antiaircraft fire immediately upon takeoff from Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. At once, a right engine burst into flames. It was the middle of the Tet Offensive, when coordinated Viet Cong raids pounded American installations in South Vietnam. A GI sitting by the wing spotted the engine fire outside his window and caught the attention of one of the stewardesses, Gayle Larson, then 25 years old, who sped to the front to alert the cockpit crew of three.

The flight engineer raced into the cabin to inspect. As Larson remembers, the planeload of GIs was unimpressed, "paying no attention to the disaster outside the cabin windows." The flight was redirected from its original destination — some holiday spot in the Pacific: maybe Hong Kong, Bangkok or Tokyo, no one remembers now — and instead flew to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The 707 was a first-generation long-distance jet with four engines, but it could fly on just three. In an all-economy configuration, it could carry 180 GIs. //

For a small and unrecognized group of women, now mostly in their 70s, such high-drama, meet-cute moments are the personal and pedestrian memories of a war that otherwise divided a nation. These Pan Am stewardesses (now an outdated term but common at the time) were volunteers and got no special training for flying into war, though their pilots were mostly World War II or Korean War vets. Their aircraft routinely took ground fire. The pilots, all male, received hazardous-duty pay for flights into the combat zone. The women aboard did not.

For the Pan Am flight attendants, there were no parades after the war, nor much movement to celebrate their role or their place as accidental pioneers in military history. //

During the Vietnam War, Pan Am had an exclusive contract with the Department of Defense to run R&R (rest and recreation) flights for soldiers on leave throughout the Pacific. Rented to the nation for $1, it was effectively a military airline within the airline, starting with a fleet of six DC-6 propeller aircraft and, ultimately, 707 jets, calling daily at three air bases in the theater of combat. "We staff it with our best and most beautiful stewardesses, and the food and service are the finest," said the Pan Am vice president in 1966 to The Associated Press. Over the course of the war, some of the women would fly as many as 200 times into the combat zone.

Next month will mark 82 years since the Boeing 314 Clipper took to the skies. On June 7th,…

Instagram is claiming a children's book about a girl transporting back in time to learn about the history of women's suffrage might influence an election.

Going forward, U.S. space exploration will be mostly done by the private sector, that is, if we wish to retain our lead @teamcavuto //

Cavuto had to throw cold water on the excitement. With no less than 5 of his guests, he insisted on asking, “What do you think about private companies taking the lead in space flight?” His tone and tenor implied that this was a bad thing—something wrong. //

Well, Mr. Cavuto, private enterprise has been at the forefront of aviation since its beginnings here in these United States. When the Wright Brothers took their famous flight, they were not employees of the Federal Government. Robert Goddard, long looked at as one of the pioneers of American rocketry, was a private citizen, funded mostly by private organizations. Throughout the rise of first aviation and then rocketry, private citizens, either alone or in private companies, were leading the charge on new discoveries and technological innovation.

One major exception to this, was when NACA/NASA was given the mission to beat the Soviets into space and thence to the Moon. Indeed, many of the researchers and designers were federal employees. But that was a crash program and itself an aberration. //

One tool that enabled this private sector innovation was the use of prize money or private sponsorships. In aviation, prize money, either from private donations or even sometimes from government, was quite commonly used to incentivize the private sector to solve a technological problem. Here is a clip from the December 1947 issue of Flying Magazine. Note the public-private partnership and use of prize money. //

Our education system is sadly failing our citizens. The fact that one of the lead anchors on an allegedly center-right news organization looks at a privately-led exploration effort in space and considers that not only some sort of aberration, but implies that there is something wrong with it, bothers me. It’s an insult to explorers and innovators like Drake, Cook, Shackleton, Goddard, Frank, and Orville Wright, to name but a few. Mr. Cavuto, it’s NASA that is the aberration, not Space-X.

When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration came into existence in 1958, the stereotypical computer was the "UNIVAC," a collection of spinning tape drives, noisy printers, and featureless boxes, filling a house-sized room. Expensive to purchase and operate, the giant computer needed a small army of technicians in constant attendance to keep it running. Within a decade and a half, NASA had one of the world's largest collections of such monster computers, scattered in each of its centers. Moreover, to the amazement of anyone who knew the computer field in 1958, NASA also flew computers in orbit, to the moon, and to Mars, the latter machines running unattended for months on end.