NOTICE: Due to upcoming minor surgery on Wednesday of this week, this will likely be our last post for the week. Stick around – we will be back next Monday.
OH – you really think that things are going to change for the better while I am gone? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! See ya soon.~ J. Bennett
“I find a hundred thousand sorrows touching my heart, and there is a ringing in my ears, like an admonition eternal, an insistent call, ‘It must not be again! It must not be again!'” said a tearful President Warren G. Harding in May 1921, as 5,212 wooden caskets with the remains of American servicemen from France arrived on the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Warren Gamaliel Harding was a kind and generous man with a heart, a president who loved people, adored animals, and hated violence, bloodshed, and war. Yet he is often ridiculed as America’s worst president by the nation’s “scholars.” Despite these erroneous opinions, he was a president of great achievements. He reversed a severe economic depression in short order, restored the nation’s domestic tranquility, pardoned war dissenters, and called for equality for black Americans. But perhaps his most overlooked achievements were in foreign affairs. Continue reading
The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our previous president promised to “Make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?
“The Death of General Wolfe” (1770) by Benjamin West. In this scene from the French and Indian War, the artist—a colonist—depicts in the sky the light of British conquest overcoming the dark clouds of French rule in Canada.
If Americans have heard of the Seven Years’ War – a truly global struggle – it is most certainly under the title “The French and Indian War” (1754-1763). Popular images of the conflict are likely to stem from the 1992 movie “The Last of the Mohicans,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis. When Americans think of this war at all, or discuss it in school, they generally situate the central theater of the conflict in the northeast of North America. Yes, the savage Indians and their deceitful French allies were beaten back along the wooded frontier, allowing pacific English – soon to be American – farmers to live in peace. Ending in 1763, and saddling Britain with debt, the French and Indian War is often remembered as but a prelude to a coming colonial revolt over excessive taxation. Perhaps it was, but not in a direct, linear sense. Nothing historical is preordained. Chance and contingency ensure as much. Continue reading
WASHINGTON (AP) — An independent commission is recommending that the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery be dismantled and taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on the renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.
Panel members on Tuesday rolled out the final list of ships, base roads, buildings and other items that they said should be renamed. But unlike the commission’s recommendations earlier this year laying out new names for nine Army bases, there were no suggested names for the roughly 1,100 assets across the military that bear Confederate names.
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, vice-chair of the commission, said the final cost for all of its renaming recommendations will be $62,450,030. The total for the latest changes announced Tuesday is $40,957,729, and is included in that amount. Continue reading
While the filibuster started as a measure to protect the voices of a minority, more recently it has been used in quite literally the opposite way: to protect entrenched and powerful forces.
The most famous filibuster in American history is a fictional one. In Frank Capra’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart is Senator Jefferson Smith, a Washington outsider who has unwittingly been used and then betrayed by his late father’s friend, the powerful and corrupt Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains). In the stirring climax, Senator Smith filibusters for more than a full day, to the point of absolute exhaustion, in order to stand up for himself and challenge Paine’s crooked plans. Smith’s filibuster is a tribute to American ideals, but even more than that it represents an idealized vision of the filibuster itself, as a way in which the little guy can resist and eventually triumph over the Senate and U.S. government’s most powerful forces. Continue reading
I can recall, thinking back years ago now, that my friend and Mentor. Pastor Ennio Cugini, had talked about what needed to be done to ensure real educational freedom in this country. He mentioned two specific things I still remember. He said that you needed to get rid of compulsory attendance laws in the various states. At one point, years ago, the state of Mississippi had done that, but somewhere along the line that got changed so that Mississippi became just like the other states.
I had never heard of anyone else that advocated that except Pastor Cugini. He was ahead of his time, as he was on many other issues. It was and still is a fact that the majority of the property tax in most states goes to find the public schools. Continue reading
Americans might assume that requesting public records would be free. Worst case scenario, the charge would be a modest fee to handle the paperwork. But when it comes to making certain requests to see documents, progressive bureaucrats have jacked up the price… Continue reading
A British depiction of Bostonians tarring and feathering a British customs officer, John Malcolm, several weeks after the Boston Tea Party. The drawing was made by Philip Dawe in late 1774.
“Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?” John Adams once asked. “Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”
“Nobody,” Thomas Jefferson replied. “The life and soul of history must forever remain unknown.”
Continue reading
Is a controversial curriculum, entrenched in New York City’s public schools for two decades, finally coming undone?
Illustration by Kiel Danger Mutschelknaus
In the first spring of the pandemic, as families across the country were acclimating to remote learning and countless other upheavals, I sat down on the living-room sofa with my daughter, who was in kindergarten, to go over a daily item on her academic schedule called Reading Workshop. She had selected a beginner-level book about the alliterative habitués of a back-yard garden: birds and butterflies, cats and caterpillars. Her decoding skills, at that stage, were limited to the starting letter of each word, and all else was hurried guesswork – pointing at “butterfly,” she might ask, “Bird?” and start to turn the page. I coaxed her to look at how the letters worked together, to sound them out, starting by taking apart the first few phonemes: bh-uh-tih, butt. She didn’t appear to be familiar with this approach. She seemed to find it frankly outrageous. Continue reading
An international object of desire, Mata Hari was a dancer, a spy, and everyone who knows about her casts her in a different light. She’s been described as a courtesan, a feminist, an espionage wannabe, and a victim of the military’s need to create an enemy. Regardless of how she was seen at the time, Mata Hari had a need to live a life constantly on fire. She threw herself towards excitement, which was her undoing in the end. Ted Brandsen, the choreographer and the director of the National Ballet explained:
What fascinated us is the story of a woman with an incredible lust for life and a powerful instinct to survive, and to reinvent herself and to transform herself. She had a lot of horrible things happen to her and she managed to somehow give a spin to it and find her way out.
Continue reading
Owing to the many federal records that have been released over the years relating to the Kennedy assassination, especially through the efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, many Americans are now aware of the war that was being waged between President Kennedy and the CIA throughout his presidency. The details of this war are set forth in FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.
In an interview conducted by Former Congressman Ron Paul and his colleague Dan McAdams, Robert Kennedy Jr., which focused in part on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was Kennedy Jr.’s uncle and revealed a fascinating aspect of this war with which I was unfamiliar. He stated that the deep animosity that the CIA had for the Kennedy family actually stretched back to something the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, did in the 1950s that incurred the wrath of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. Continue reading
After two years of lockdowns, masking, and related wrongs, many parents are awakening to the prospect of school choice.
It’s that time of year again… as families return from vacations, they start thinking about sending their kids back to school (if they’re not back already). But in the post-pandemic era, there’s an increasing likelihood that some parents aren’t sending their children back to the same school. In particular, data suggest that many parents have had enough with public school education altogether.
“In the past two years, a mass exodus of over 1.2 million students has left the public school system as parents seek alternative education routes, such as public charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling,” writes Marjorie Jackson at The Daily Signal. Jackson adds that some parents “believed the school’s handling of the pandemic was unsatisfactory, due to lockdowns, which inconvenienced many families, as well as masking and vaccination policies. Others were unhappy after taking a closer look at their local public school curriculum and wanted more say in what their children were learning.” Continue reading
President George Washington writes to Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, Virginia’s governor and a former general, regarding the Whiskey Rebellion, an insurrection that was the first great test of Washington’s authority as president of the United States. In the letter, Washington declared that he had no choice but to act to subdue the “insurgents,” fearing they would otherwise “shake the government to its foundation. Continue reading
In the post-COVID era, parents are increasingly taking their kids out of the school systems that damaged them.
It will take many years to understand the scope and unwind the damage that COVID wrought on our youngest generation, today’s schoolchildren. No, not the damage caused by the disease itself. Kids have proven remarkably resilient to it — far more so than adults. No, the damage we’re talking about is that which was done to our children by the educational bureaucracy that supposedly has their best interests at heart. Continue reading
Parents, Grandparents, and teachers should do everything they can to inspire and teach children to exercise their brains and get good grades in school. There are many reasons why children need help and inspiration to be taught thinking exercises, creativity, curiosity, and learning. There is an increasing need to face the increasing obstacles that will need to be overcome as they get older. Many parents, grandparents, and schools are lacking in preparing children for the many thinking and learning skills that create a curious and mentally active mind. A big challenge awaits them as they face technology and political problems as they got older.
The U.S. is not keeping up with the learning knowledge of other nations. Education is the key to motivation, learning skills, and technology which creates a higher education and greater paths that they can choose from in their future. Continue reading