First Principles- First Impressions About America

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2020 elections, America-as-Founded, Education, Elitism and Class, Immigration, millennials, race and culture, Religion

The Death of Moses, as in Deuteronomy 34:1-12, Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company (cropped) Source: Wikimedia Commons

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Anyone, anywhere, who hears the name “America” already has a first impression about America; either positive or negative. It doesn’t matter if he/she is 18 or 80, and located anywhere in the world.

If abroad those impressions are a mixture of street talk, music, films, and of course, relatives who may have traveled there or live. One man from one village can go to America, and everyone in that valley has a impression of America that no government can conceal.

I knew such a family from Dayton whose father had come to America from a village in Slovakia before WWII, taking work in a steel mill. He left a wife and son back home. Just before the war he went back to bring his wife to America. But he had to leave his 6-year old behind with relatives to secure the family lands. Once in America, Papa and Mama Miluks started a new family, his youngest son my best friend for many years from the Army. In the late 1970s, while on duty in Germany, he was allowed to travel to Slovakia and meet his eldest brother and see the village and old home place, and of course, take gifts. When I visited his family in Dayton Mama Miluks showed me the special place she kept all her letters from her son, who she had not seen since 1940. But those letters! She wrote many-paged reports every week for over 40 years, giving a weekly account of things going on with his papa and brothers and sister, learning quickly to never speak of certain things, for by ’46 the Communists had moved in and her letters were first read and redacted by postal censors, cutting all references to the availability of consumer goods commonly available in America, especially food. Her son, in turn, would reply with heavily redacted letters. He would die in the early 1990’s of the general poor heath common to socialist countries so was never able to join his family. He never met his other two younger brothers or sister. And of course his last personal memory of his parents was when he was 6.

But I am quite sure every adult in that village had clear impressions of America because of Mr Miluks, who went to America.

I tell this story because one, it’s true, and two, it is, next to the Christian’s ideal of Heaven, an impression of America as a place that one has never been and most wants to go, which cannot be duplicated anywhere else. I have met people in several countries and four continents, including Palestinian Arabs (on an overnight sleeper in Russia) and from all I hear basically the same thing, “If only I could go to America.”

(This is not what we are seeing today on our southern border, by the way, so I won’t take this discussion in that direction, although just 30-40 years ago, down there, where I also lived, this was a common refrain, “If I can only get to America.” I deal with this subject in an upcoming conversation about Assimilation, which should be a topic of policy discussion if we can ever get fully in charge or our government again.)

So, abroad, America is viewed through two entirely different prisms, divided by two classes: 1) the political class and 2) all the rest[…]

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Handbook of Dark-Alley Counter-Revolution

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2020 elections, Democrat Party, Education, military and veterans

(Pixabay)

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

2019 and the Democrats have given clear evidence where they want to take America and how they intend to get us there. Sadly, a large number of sitting Republicans have allowed themselves to be steamrolled by donors to be part of this same one-world alliance.

Both sides are becoming more easily defined.

So, regular people out here, the eventual victims should they succeed, but still a strong majority, need to be able to do things other than just screech on Twitter and Facebook.

Citizens need to develop a ground game at least until we can see established a Congress that more clearly reflects what “the people”, as defined in the Constitution, want to be done about the current state of our government class.

That could take a few years.

We have a plan and a book, in the making for over ten years.

With three other friends around the country, I began a low-grade counter-insurgency-site in 2007 aimed at local government, leaving national politics out of the picture. I don’t know how many “cells” we help create around the country, or how many are still active, at least 40, since the idea then was that only the “target” would know what we had done, or why, No one else would ever know.

All we wanted to do was tell a crooked bureaucrat “we know what you did, and where you live” and suggest he stop.

Our purpose then, as it is now, is to use low-grade “inconvenience-misdemeanors” to property, from Gucci purses to rosebushes next to the house, to let the target know we meant business, then let his own imagination fill in the blanks. After all, he/she already knew they were guilty. They just didn’t know they’d been caught. Or how.

As in most criminal offenses of this nature, once caught then given a chance to stop and go straight, I think most do.

True to our private agreement, we didn’t take credit for making them stop. The secret of our continued success was that no one ever knew we were there[…]

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OUR “VETS IN CLASS” TEACHING PROGRAM; LOOKING FOR SUPPORTING PARTNERS

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Education, military and veterans, Veterans' Tales

Unifed Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Since its inception, VeteransTales.org has been movinging toward the establishment of a teaching program for veterans in order to fill in the growing gap between modern education in America’s schools about America’s history, and the reasons America was created in the first place.

It takes only three generations for those things to be lost to a culture, and we’re about halfway there.

I set this process of disintegration out in an earlier piece, “Conservatism, Those Other Guys, and the Vetetans”.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1992 virtually no Soviet citizen had any memory or knowledge of the nation (or family) that extended beyond 70 years. I know, I was there. Freed in 1992, they were still had no fixed stars in their heavens to guide them; no history, no church, no moral base.

For nearly two hundred years since our Founding the extant family, our public schools and universities, and our several religious institutions passed these culture-surviving ingredients onto the next generation. And the next. But since the mid-1960s those institutions have been under assault or reshaped as a matter of government policy.

Veterans are uniquely situated to help hold the line, and even pass it on, while public institutions no longer try.

Our Program has three objectives; Find & Recruit, Teach & Train, then Place veterans.

As you already know, finding veterans isn’t hard.

Every town, every school district has veterans. Most towns have a VFW and American Legion chapter. Wounded veterans have their own unique sponsors, Wounded Warriors Project, Disabled American Veterans (DAV), and dozens of service organizations from every branch.

We’ll contact virtually every one in coming days via email and social media. But in larger bureaucratic organizations as many now are, I doubt the right people will ever see or read this.

More than donations, if you know any of these people, you would be doing our Cause a great service simply by passing this forward, preferably with a “Deserves a look” or “Attaboy” attached..

it would also be nice if you would contact me (contact info below) as piercing many of your corporate veils is a daunting task without a personal reference.

Allen and I were never palm-grippers in those circles.

All we have to offer are programs that need some sponsorship and partners, and the skill to design them. And a little administrative jump start.

Our objectives are simple:

To put as many veterans as possible in front of as many school kids, aged 11-to-18, as possible, in public schools if allowed, and in other parent-approved settings if the public schools are not available….

And to develop from that open door, other programs[…]

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The Canons of Conservatism, “Those Other Guys”, and the Veterans, A Preamble

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Communist Agenda, Conservatism, Constitution, Democrats, Education, Elitism and Class, military and veterans, Progrerssives, Religion, Veterans, Veterans' Tales

The twelve Apostles receiving inspiration from the Holy Spirit and composing the Creed Illumination by Somme_le_Roy_f.10v – Date: 1295 (Wikipedia)

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

William F Buckley, Jr. was the founding figure of modern conservatism in America. He wrote God and Man at Yale when he was 25, and wrote many books afterward until he died in 2008.

But he had an extra dimension which seems to have been lost on the newer generations of conservatives, which I’ll discuss here.

In 1960, at age 35, in his home, WFB and several other “founders”, penned the Sharon Statement, which became the founding statement of the Young Americans for Freedom, (the YAF) which went on to become the central conservative campus organization for over 50 years.

I never joined, as I was not a conservative in my college days.

It was not until 1964, and the Goldwater campaign, that I became aware of Mr Buckley, who was then still not yet 40, 4 years younger than my dad, who subscribed to National Review that year and sent back- issues to me every few weeks or so.

By the time Ronald Reagan was elected, and I was 35, I had been a conservative for only four years, but never disagreed with National Review in all those earlier years about conservatism, just still holding onto my own brand of “Civil Rights liberalism”.

Like many liberals of my generation, my error was in believing government could do good things, which, later reading and real-life experience proved to me was wrong-headed and that the Founders knew exactly what they were doing when they designed government small, and left the people in charge.

In 1976 I had my Road to Damascus moment while in the Army, during the Ford-Carter campaign. I read a Mary McGrory column in the Arizona Republic where she stated (and I paraphrase) that “Modern Liberalism stands for the proposition that all human conduct should be subject to the political process.”

At that instant I ceased being a liberal, and never looked back.

The Sharon Statement, which I link here, while aimed at defining the YAF, is essentially the Canons of Conservatism. Virtually every conservative, including #NeverTrumpers, would agree with it, if they’d bother to read it.

So I recommend every millennial and Gen X’er to do just that.

But in 1960 it was written for college students who already possessed a core set of principles that inclined them to see threats to democracy, internal and external, and the freedom found in free markets and the uniqueness of America in the first place[…]

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“An Extremity of Nominal Democracy”

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2018 election, American revolution, Barbara W. Tuchman, Business and economy, Constitution, Education, race and culture, Republican Party establishment, The Dutch

The Five Senses: Smell by Adriaen Brouwer [Circa 1631] Source: Wikipedia

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

Barbara Tuchman was one of my two favorite historians, (the other is still alive). She published The First Salute in 1988, then died of a stroke early the next year, so this book was to have been her last salute. I have three well-underlined volumes on my bookshelf, and this last volume is about the American Revolution’s impact on Europe, principally the Dutch and the French, but ultimately, the world.

France we know about, the Netherlands not so much. The book’s title is based on the entry of an American vessel, the Andrea Doria, into the harbor of the tiny Dutch trading outpost of St Eustatius in the Caribbean in November 1776, just a few months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Hoisting the American colors, the Andrea Doria fired a 13-gun salute and the coastal battery returned a 9-gun salute, thus acknowledging the new American revolutionaries as a member nation.

The First Salute.

A big deal, actually, for the English, who owned just about all the remaining islands in the Leeward Island chain, were infuriated, some of their governors and admirals writing long letters of protest making even some of my essays seem like a quick read. In one letter I counted 14-lines without a single period. (For harrumphs and bluster, no one beats the Brits.)

But tiny St Eustatius (only 21 sq kilometers) was an important port in those days, with today a population of less than 4000. In those days its only product was money in trade. And the Dutch had decided to trade arms to  the Colonies in exchange for all the products we could send them, because of only one thing; location, location, location. The island sits at the northernmost tip of the Leeward chain, so is first in line in the seagoing traffic moving south from the  Colonies.

It was profit, and not philosophical simpatico, that caused the Dutch to risk the anger of the stronger English Navy.

When John Adams went to Amsterdam in 1780 to obtain a loan that would keep the Americans less in debt to France and Louis XVI (who also had  mercenary reasons for taking our side against England, namely a long term plan to annex the American colonies for itself) Adams wrote that he had entered  “the capital of the reign of Mammon (the Biblical name for Money and Greed)”[…]

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One Ring to Rule Them All

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2018 election, Ayn Rand, Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, Conservatism, Democrat Party, Donald Trump, Education, Elitism and Class, Lord of the Rings, race and culture, Veterans' Tales

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

When a political end trumps personal destruction of the innocent, we know we are among evil people, from Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, to DiFi, to CNN and dozens more.

The cynical indifference to the infliction of pain and suffering on innocent people is the greatest sin…

…cold blooded murder or rape not even close seconds…for it is a judgment against the greater society.

It’s not that there is still not a scintilla of evidence that supports the assault claim by Ms Christine Blasey-Ford, for that only points the finger of guilt at her. A single soul lost to burn. Happens every day.

But when men and women, feigning conscience and good faith can hide behind their high offices in the fortress of an institution seen by the People as the fountain of law and justice and honor, and are not only willing but attempting to destroy good men and their entire families for a shallow political end, or perhaps only for mere spite and malice of a personal nature, they are betraying everything that is holy to this Republic.

I know what you’re thinking, I’d like to be building the scaffold right now, but we really need to diagram these people so as to better understand their Game:

Ayn Rand, in her 1971 essay, “The Age of Envy” and which I referred to as “Children of the Damned” in my 2013 essay, diagrammed these players.

Haters: Miss Rand portrayed the school culture of Christine Blasey as that of privileged spoiled children, only in high school, as Christine was a few years away from being taught the hate part in college, only the self-indulgence part, K-12. The appetizer before the entrée[…]

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