The Problem:
You probably don’t think about this very much, but you actually need to know stuff in order to qualify as a bone fide flag-loving Patriot.
I don’t do Twitter very much, only follow about 1500 people, and a little over 1000 follow me. I could confess to a robbery and local police still may never hear about it. I go to Twitter mostly to observe, take notes, and to conduct the occasional experiment. I write many of my findings here.
I don’t like Twitter because it’s like a mild narcotic. Start out with a single cigarette and before you know it you’re up to a pack a day, and it may be years before you realize of the 20 you smoked every day, the one you had with coffee in the morning, and with that pitcher of beer with pizza down at Tony’s with your mates, and, of course that post-coital puff after some healthy breathing exercises, are the only cigarettes you ever enjoyed in a given day. Three out of 20 isn’t healthy math, but it can take up to twenty years before you ever do that math, and have that long talk with yourself in the mirror and then actually decide to quit. Mark Twain once said “Quittin’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.” I was one of those kinds, and it took several starts before I finally stopped for good. Over 30 years ago.
If you didn’t know, “twitter” is a verb that goes back at least to the 19th Century, and was long associated with chirping women, which I associated with women at the back fence, gossiping (Mom), or after church in small circles (Mom), or in school hallways, where a few would gather to comment on a classmate’s attire (Big Sis).
Males did these very same things, mind you. We just didn’t chirp.
Twitter became known to me in 2008. I began writing at RedState.com in that year, when it was one of the most popular political opinion sites on the internet. A friend of mine, who is still alive and was behind the curtain at RedState in a technical capacity, told me that the editor there was spending all his time on Twitter, the new rage, and paying little attention to the management of the site, allowing his younger underlings to more or less run rough shod over commenters at the site. The editor was younger than my youngest son, so you can get the picture of the age, experience and maturity of many of those under him.
I left RedState rather summarily in 2011, and decided then to take a clinical look at Twitter, and found out that it did have an effect on people, encouraging, almost algorithmically, know-nothing-ism to an entire generation, most of whom knew few real facts, actually helping them cement into their consciousness a positive feeling, even pride, in this sort of ignorance. It may have been this ignorance that made them seem so very young.
Of course, my first takeaway was to acknowledge that Twitter was a platform designed for the low mental acuity of the Left, many of whom today were still in grade school when I first began with Twitter 8 years ago.
But these past 400+ words have not been about the sad condition of the trained seals of the Left, but to note that many on our Patriot side of the fence display the same knee jerk gullibility toward some conservative sites and Tweeters whose “facts” and headline ledes are also a little questionable.
We don’t want to be like those people on the Left.
Moreover, we want to race ahead of those “conservative” cosmopolitan elites who believe they have a birthright to tell us what’s best for us. And of course, highest on their list is that Donald Trump is the worst possible choice of a leader we could make, damning us as much as him.
Being a Patriot is not unlike a person of Faith. In fact they are often the same, as we’ve known since the Left openly became the party of Darkness in 2009.
Our duty is to broaden our education by becoming life-long students of “being American”, in every possible way, just like Christian parents who want their children to pass along to their children what they’d taught them about their Faith, only about the true meaning on “being American”.
Education matters, as does the ability to be able to work our way through thoughts that require connecting more than two-dots, which seems to be about the limit of the Left’s ability, and their inability to teach critical thinking (common sense) which is second nature to us….assuming we still teach our kids what it is.
Recent Proof:
Levar Stoney, age 38, is mayor of Richmond, acolyte of former governor and Clinton pal, Terry McAuliffe. Stoney just resigned as a member of the Jamestown-Yorktown Commemoration steering committee which will celebrate the 400th Anniversary of the first legislative assembly in North America this Tuesday, July 30th.
He did so to protest of Virginia’s Democrat governor’s (Ralph Northem) invitation to President Donald Trump to attend the Jamestown ceremonies on Tuesday.
Stoney’s reason was that this is also “the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in North America”.
This was factually incorrect in several different ways.
For one, the first slaves in North America came ashore in the 1500s, in Spanish Florida, primarily St Augustine.
So here’s this 38 year old “kid”, NYC born and raised, as mayor of the capital of the old Confederacy, and as I mentioned, a stringer for former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, barking out loud the Democrat Party line about the invitation of President Trump, their party’s Public Enemy #1.
This much I can understand. Then Stoney retreats to a complete know-nothingness about the origins of slavery in America.
For many years now, Liberal thinking has been that if you can substitute political thinking, for real facts learned from history, you have it made in the shade, especially if your are otherwise bright, well-spoken and until only very recently, the least bit photogenic.
Had older black politicians said this, Maxine, Cummings, Jesse, I might have believed they were being cynical, just stating the party line. But there is a generational split here, and I don’t know each it is in African-American educational history; Obama, 57, is borderline GenX, especially having never really lived in the States until he was 19, Corey Booker, 50, my son’s age, so solid GenX. Who knows if they’d known they were speaking booshway had they said what Stoney said.
But Stoney may have pulled his “fact” about Jamestown out of thin air. Worse, for Stoney’s crack history lesson, is that those 19 slaves, dropped off by an English privateer, who had relieved them from a Portuguese slave ship, had all been baptized by a priest, and apparently had papers to prove it. So they were immediately switched from “slave” to “indentured servant”, and treated just like all the white indentured servants in those early days of the colonies. And they were freed at the end of their contract term…just 7 years!
Ironically, it could be argued that this was the first instance of black and white equality in America. So figure that by 1625-1630 those 19 blacks were as free as birds, maybe clearing their own land or taking jobs. Arriving in America before the Mayflower, they were free while the Mayflower folk were still trying to figure out to survive harsh Massachusetts winters.
In a free and open debate whatever happened to those 19 “slaves” cannot be called racism.
It gets worse.
You see, poor ol’ Levar had to go onto to refer to Donald Trump as racist, when in fact, in his short lifetime, born in 1981, Donald Trump has probably put more black people to work at real jobs in the private sector (vs those pretend jobs in the government sector) than all the Democrats since his parents were children….combined. And a large bloc of those black workers had previously lost their jobs to the indifference of America;s first African-American president, Barack Obama,
I’d normally call Levar a liar, knowing he’s not stupid. I could say he doesn’t know nothing except to be loyal to the political hand that feeds him, which is maybe why he ignored his own governor having his picture taken and posted in a college yearbook dressed either in black-face or under a white hood.
Levar Stoney is the perfect example of how a really smart kid at 12 can be indoctrinated and passed along until he is as dumb as a bag of rocks by the time he is 30, able only to do certain kinds of work.
It’s a sad thing to see any good mind go to waste, but our country places itself in a dire circumstance when we then subsidize that mis-education by finding jobs for them…usually in government service.
So with that in mind, I offer a home study plan.
Solution
Start with Schweikart and Allen’s “A Patriot’s History of the United States”. A must for every bookshelf, right next to the family Bible, it’s in a revised new edition now to include the Obama years, and since historical events are moving quickly I hope Dr’s Schweikart and Allen are planning on future revisions, in their names, that will last this entire period of restoration, another 30 years at least.
Patriots need to plan for the future in the same manner. If you have children, you are not only teaching them, but you are raising them to become teachers as well. Do not expect the public schools to do that for several years.
But be careful. Today there are several well-known historians who I’ve read at least in part, then dropped once I felt they were getting a little too loose with facts, or worse, attempting to use their superior clairvoyance (a particular annoyance of mine) to explain a subject’s intentions. I like Richard Brookhiser, who’s done many of the Founders bio’s, and made a marvelous link between Washington and Lincoln, all based in Lincoln’s own admissions about the role Washington played in developing his worldview. No clairvoyance.
Build your own library and develop your own study program. Cliff’s Notes are good for our purposes as is Wikipedia in areas that are politically charged. (Check their revision records.)
History books are now inexpensive since millennials don’t read books. Amazon is a good source for any title, especially used. If you get to page 97 and have fact-checked a historian’s facts with a few Google searches, as I did with Stoney, just dump the book. But trash can it, don’t give it to a charity. Spare the next fellow who may not be as discerning as yourself.
We’ll continue this conversation as time goes on.
