The Messiest Presidential Election

 by

       M. Richard Maxson

      The 1876 United States presidential election was the 23rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1876, in which Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes faced Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. It was one of the most contentious and controversial presidential elections in American history, and gave rise to the Compromise of 1877 by which the Democrats conceded the election to Hayes in return for an end to Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. After a controversial post-election process, Hayes was declared the winner.

      When President Ulysses S. Grant declined to seek a third term despite previously being expected to do so, Congressman James G. Blaine emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination. However, Blaine was unable to win a majority at the 1876 Republican National Convention, which settled on Governor Hayes of Ohio as a compromise candidate. The 1876 Democratic National Convention nominated Governor Tilden of New York on the second ballot.

      The results of the election remain among the most disputed ever. Although it is not disputed that Tilden out-polled Hayes in the popular vote, after a first count of votes, Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes from four states unresolved: in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, each party reported its candidate had won the state, while in Oregon, one elector was replaced after being declared illegal for being an "elected or appointed official". The question of who should have been awarded these electoral votes is the source of the continued controversy.

      An informal deal was struck to resolve the dispute: the Compromise of 1877, which awarded all 20 electoral votes to Hayes; in return for the Democrats' acquiescence to Hayes' election, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. Southern Black Republicans felt betrayed as they lost power, being subject to discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting. The Compromise in effect ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic Redeemers. Redeemers were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. They sought to regain their political power and enforce white supremacy. They proceeded to disenfranchise black voters and by 1905, virtually all black men were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every Southern state.

      The 1876 election is the second of five presidential elections in which the person who won the most popular votes did not win the election, but the only such election in which the popular vote winner received a majority (rather than a plurality) of the popular vote. To date, it remains the election that recorded the smallest electoral vote victory (185–184), and the election that yielded the highest voter turnout of the eligible voting age population in American history, at 81.8%. Despite not becoming president, Tilden was the first Democratic presidential nominee since James Buchanan in 1856 to win the popular vote and the first since Franklin Pierce in 1852 to do so in an outright majority (in fact, Tilden received a slightly higher percentage than Pierce in 1852, despite the fact that Pierce won in a landslide).

George Washington Used His First Thanksgiving as President to Unite a New Country

 Guest Column 

by 

     Beth Daley*

       On Thursday, Nov. 26, 1789, George Washington woke early. Assisted by his enslaved valets – William “Billy” Lee and the young Christopher Sheels – he powdered his hair, put on his favorite black velvet suit, tied his white neckwear and donned his yellow gloves. Finally ready, he set out to travel the short distance from the President’s House, at what used to be 3 Cherry Street, New York, and St. Paul’s Chapel, which still stands at 209 Broadway.

      He had an important aim that day: to celebrate Thanksgiving. Washington had thought carefully about this Thanksgiving, the first of his presidency. On Oct. 3, 1789, following the recommendation of a joint committee of the Senate and House of Representatives, Washington had issued a proclamation. He urged the people of the United States to celebrate “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.”

      But Washington believed that particular Thanksgiving in 1789 was a crucial occasion. He would use it to call on the people he now led to hold their new country together in the face of forces that he knew could pull it apart.

      It was not the first Thanksgiving Americans celebrated. The first took place at Plymouth colony in the autumn of 1621 – Pilgrims held a feast to thank God for their first harvest and invited members of the neighboring Wampanoag tribe.

      It was not even the first national Thanksgiving – which was held on Dec. 18, 1777, at then-General Washington’s behest. Nor was Thanksgiving yet a federal holiday to be observed every last Thursday of November – it became so with the 1863 proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln.

      November 26, 1789, was a Thursday, and the weather was miserable. Few New Yorkers showed up at St. Paul’s Chapel to see the president: “I went to St. Pauls Chapel,” Washington wrote in his diary, “though it was most inclement and stormy.” There were “but few people at Church.”

      The president had prepared for the occasion. He also contributed a sizable sum of his own money to buy beer and food for prisoners confined for debt in the New York City jail. The donation was deemed to be a magnanimous and moving gesture, suitable to the spirit of the holiday. A week later, in an advertisement in the Dec. 3 issue of the New York Journal, those very prisoners returned their “grateful thanks” to their president “for his very acceptable donation on Thursday last.”

      Washington’s first Thanksgiving as a president may have not been tremendously successful, given the scarce attendance at the church service.

      Yet, as a scholar writing a biography about Washington, I believe it was an important step in his much larger political plan to bring the executive branch to the people’s doorstep.

      What Washington wanted was a virtuous kind of populism in the new country he led. Washington’s populism wasn’t about inciting an angry mob; it was about sharing in their rituals, worshiping their God, speaking their own language. And he did so in the sole interest of the American people.

      Thanksgiving 1789, for Washington, was at once religious and more than religious. Washington’s proclamation invoked devotional language, literally. The upcoming festivity, in his words, could “be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

      But Washington’s main concern was political. The nation was recently formed, and he feared that it could easily collapse. Its many internal divisions and separate interests could be lethal. Consequently, the president wanted this holiday to be a civic celebration in which “we may then all unite.”

      As its first president, Washington recognized that the United States was born out of slavery, conquest and violence as much as of sacred principle. Civic unification required acknowledgment of these flaws. Thus, in the proclamation, Washington asked God “to pardon our national and other transgressions.”

      A tremendously self-aware man, Washington knew that he was a deeply flawed person himself. He was a slave owner, a relentless pursuer of African American fugitives and a destroyer of Native American villages. He was also a warrior who deployed brutality against enemies. He was a commander who resorted to corporal punishment with his own soldiers. Washington believed that he was not a saint to be mindlessly imitated. This made him humble in his duties. More importantly, Washington also grasped the power of his symbolic position as president. He sought to leverage that for the good of the nation.

      As president, Washington could not advertise his actions effectively via Twitter and social media. He had to show himself around constantly, no matter the weather. He had to painstakingly attend balls, plays, dinners, public receptions and of course the church. Every occasion, every Thanksgiving counted.

      Through his outings, Washington met with a diversity of people, including those who were second-class citizens or were not citizens at all. Women, for example, greeted Washington at nearly every stop of the extended presidential trips he took between 1789 and 1791. Textile workers in New England, Jewish leaders in Newport, many enslaved persons in the South and churchgoers everywhere did the same.

      These women and men, in bondage or free, believers or skeptics, played a part in the invention of a new political theater. Maybe, it was just a theatrical illusion. But these individuals – just like the prisoners in the New York City jail – thanked President Washington because they felt they were voices in a larger political culture.

      Washington made sure his Thanksgiving message – not simply a message, but a “proclamation” – sounded clear and strong: May God “render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed.”

*Beth Daley - Editor and General Manager, The Conversation

Coup D’etat in America: A Limey Viewpoint

Guest Column

by

       Paul Weston

"If you overturn democracy then America will become just another part of the brutal undemocratic world and if that happens nothing will ever, ever be the same again."

      Here’s a view of what’s happening in the USA right now from Paul Weston, a tea-drinking, roast-beef-eating, pub-crawling Brit.Actually, scratch the pub-crawling — Britain is currently suffering under a lockdown of the utmost malignancy, and I think the pubs are closed again. One can only hope that off-licences are considered essential businesses, as ABC stores are here in Virginia.

      OK, the first thing to say is to apologise for the sheer cheek of some upstart limey like me commenting on the election in America, but I have to say something because I am sitting here in shocked astonishment looking at what appears to be an engineered tyrannical coup d’état against not just President Trump but against the very ideal of democracy itself.

      I’m not going to go into the details of the numerous unprecedented issues of corruption and fraud surrounding this election because those details are many and some are already in the public domain anyway. I am simply going to observe that this is a monumental moment not just in the history of America but in the history of the world, and a monumentally catastrophic moment in terms of freedom, democracy, morality decency and honesty. Those who understand what is actually happening don’t need the whole thing spelled out to them, but those who think nothing terribly untoward is happening other than that President Trump is behaving badly, should listen carefully. Very, very carefully.

      The world outside the democratic West is a very brutal place. No left-leaning liberal would wish to live in Saudi Arabia, or Sierra Leone, or countless other such places. No left leaning liberal would wish to have lived in Europe during most of the decades of the 20th century which saw so much devastation and death courtesy of political totalitarians seeking nothing more than power and nothing other than power. These corrupt, totalitarian systems were finally defeated because America fought on the right side of good v evil, of freedom versus tyranny and did so at great sacrifice in terms of the many young men who never made it home again, who died in foreign fields and foreign seas in order to preserve freedom and democracy.

      Yet here we are, toward the end of 2020 looking at the very real possibility of the breakdown of democracy in America itself. What would have been unthinkable for so long, over so many generations of Americans, can no longer be considered unthinkable. If this gross subversion of democracy is not dealt with in a satisfactory manner by the lawyers then I see no reason, no reason at all why America should not descend into violence and potential civil war in the worst case scenario, or simply lose all confidence in any future elections as a best case scenario — which can only and inexorably lead to the worse case scenario again.

      Young, left-wing Americans will consider such a viewpoint insane, but young left-wing Americans know little of the brutality of the non-democratic parts of the world and little about just why that brutality never encroached upon their decadent lives.

      They know nothing about Nazism, fascism, socialism or Communism. Indeed, they believe President Trump and the people who admire and respect Trump are Nazis and fascists all, whilst they believe socialism and communism to be pure and good. This type of brainwashed ignorance is extraordinarily dangerous in a people of any country because no matter their ignorance and no matter how wrong they are, they truly believe they are standing up for what is good, for what is right and for what is moral. And because they feel that they, and they alone hold the moral high ground, then all who oppose them are not just wrong, they are evil and when it comes to evil and the defeat of evil, then the ends justify the means — just as so many people amongst so many previous generations have similarly believed which is why the history book of the world is a history book of war, horror and atrocity.

      What we are looking at today in America is just another iteration of purported good versus purported evil where the end justifies the means. President Trump is evil and must be removed scream the Left, but lacking the democratic means to remove him, he must instead be removed by any means necessary because the end justifies the means.

      The foolish, spoiled, decadent, ignorant little children in adult bodies who are

now, right now engineering the coup d’état to remove President Trump are playing with fire. In their hazy, fuddled, naïve, closed minded thinking they feel there will be no real world consequences resulting from their action, but their naïveté is dangerously unlike the pragmatism of revolutionaries in the brutal and undemocratic parts of the world who know full well that if they fail in their coup they will be killed and if they win they will do the killing.

      Destroying the democratic foundations of America will certainly have real world consequences. When Donald Trump won the Presidency in 2016 the far-left cried Russian collusion and displayed their visceral hatred across the entire left-wing spectrum, but their anger wasn’t based on the undermining of democracy; their anger was merely that of the petulant, spoiled child denied a shiny bauble. Their anger was lukewarm, false, unjustifiable. Their anger was mere political posturing and they now think the anger of Trump supporters is the same — mere political posturing.

      But how wrong they are. How dangerously wrong they are. The anger of Trump’s supporters is white hot, it is incendiary, it is real and it is entirely, eminently justifiable, and it is not the anger of the loser, it is the anger of the wronged and is about so much more than Trump, this is about the democratic future of the United States of America. When a country reaches the point of such legal corruption and such moral degeneracy that democracy can be overturned in full view of a complicit and unquestioning media and liberal establishment there is very little guarantee that democracy will ever recover. This is why the anger is at boiling point, and even now, the left cannot understand what they have done.

      Before we settled into peaceful, democratic nations, power was decided by Kings, swords, and armies. Power rested with bloody battle and bloody victory. Democratic politics replaced battle and war in the West, but it has always been understood that democratic politics is war by other means and that if democracy is removed from politics then we can only go back to bloody battle and bloody war.

      The trouble with the left-wing, especially the young and cossetted who have never experienced the horrors of war, is that they don’t understand this simple premise. They don’t understand the importance of democracy and thus they cannot appreciate the volcanic anger amongst those who would peacefully yet unhappily accept a fair political defeat, but who will never accept defeat if it comes from the grinding jackboot of a subverted democracy.

      When one local gang squares off with another gang, the violence is quickly over. But when one half of a country squares off with the other, the violence is slow and sporadic in the beginning and just as in 1990s Yugoslavia the levels of violence and tit-for-tat reprisals build and build until finally a genuine civil war breaks out in all its primeval savagery and mass slaughter.

      I don’t need to spell out the numbers of Americans with guns, but I do need, apparently, to point out that the anger of millions of armed Americans is being stoked to stratospherically dangerous levels and that these angry people are justifiably enraged. Many of you watching this video will hear my words resonate with your thoughts, and many supporters of the 2nd Amendment will right now be saying that the main, overriding reason for the 2nd Amendment is not to shoot deer but to defend America against a tyrannical government. Perhaps now is a good moment to say that in times of war our dead soldiers are always politely remembered for having died in the defence of democracy, but the dying part was never their intention. Their intention was to very impolitely kill the aggressors who wanted to impose a tyranny upon them and here we are today, in late 2020, looking at a scenario which consists of a tyrannical coup d’état in the face of a hundred million armed and angry Americans who are convinced their democratic rights have been trampled upon and subverted.

      I hope and pray this will be resolved by the legal process, but I implore the Democrats, the left-wingers, the socialists and the communists to stop pretending what you have done is acceptable. It is not, and the consequences could be catastrophic both for you, for America and for the world. You are amongst the luckiest people ever to have existed on this planet. You represent a fleeting moment in time when you can live as no people before you have ever lived. Yet still you are unhappy. Cut off and cosseted from a world of brutality, poverty and misery you exist at the furthest extremity of decadence where your immense good fortune goes unrecognised and is instead replaced with a misplaced sense of bitterness, envy and hatred. You live in a wonderful country at a time of never before seen peace and prosperity, of freedom and democracy, yet you are now engaged in an action that could bring about the horrors of 20th century Europe. I am, as I say, an upstart limey, but this upstart limey is filled with a sense of foreboding and I beg you to stop what you are doing before the unthinkable becomes a physical reality. If you overturn democracy then America will become just another part of the brutal undemocratic world and if that happens nothing will ever, ever be the same again.

*Paul Weston is a British-based writer who focuses on the damage done to Western Civilisation by the hard left’s ongoing cultural revolution, which seeks to destroy the Christian, capitalist and racial base of the West. For links to his previous essays, see the Paul Weston Archives.

The 400th Anniversary of the Pilgrims' Arrival

Guest Column

by

 Tom Cotton

      We are marking a great American anniversary this month. In November 1620 a battered old ship called the Mayflower arrived in the waters off Cape Cod in what is now the state of Massachusetts. The passengers aboard the Mayflower were our nation’s first founders — or, as Daniel Webster called them, “Our Pilgrim Fathers.”

      Webster delivered a speech to honor these Pilgrims on the 200th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival. Calvin Coolidge, then-governor of Massachusetts and president-elect, delivered an address on the 300th anniversary.

                                   Why haven't we heard more about it?

      Regrettably, we haven’t heard much about this year’s anniversary because the Pilgrims have fallen out of fashion in elite circles. Just this week, The New York Times food section published an article that called the Pilgrim story, including the First Thanksgiving, a “myth” and a “caricature.” In place of these so-called “myths,” the liberal newspaper seeks to substitute its own, claiming the history of our nation is an unbroken tale of conflict, oppression and misery.

      But that’s a lie about our country and its founders. No matter what the revisionist historians at the Times cook up, the truth about the Pilgrims is more remarkable than any story or holiday special. This Thanksgiving, it’s worth reflecting on why we celebrate the Pilgrims and their living legacy for our nation.

      The Pilgrims were not the first European settlers to arrive in America, but they were exceptional nonetheless. As President John Quincy Adams put it, earlier European settlers were traders and adventurers motivated by “avarice and ambition.” They came principally to fish, farm and trap furs. By contrast, the Pilgrims braved the rough seas “under the single inspiration of conscience,” as Puritan Separatists from the Church of England seeking the freedom to practice their faith.

People on a wharf watch as the Mayflower II arrives in Plymouth Harbor on June 6, 2016. It is a  replica, built in 1957, of the famed ship that carried the Pilgrims to Massachusetts in 1620.

      These Pilgrims distinguished themselves further by drafting a remarkable document to govern their community in the New World: the Mayflower Compact. In this covenant, the ship’s passengers agreed to form a “civil body politic” of “just and equal laws” based on the consent of the governed and dedicated to the “Glory of God” and the “general good of the colony.”

      Immediately after signing the compact, the signatories conducted a democratic election to choose their first governor.

      This little compact, at less than 200 words, foreshadowed many of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution more than a century later, including faith in God, the natural equality of mankind, government by consent, and the rule of law.

      Little wonder, then, that Adams referred to the Mayflower Compact and the Pilgrims’ arrival as the “birth-day of your nation.” Or that Webster, despite all the events preceding Plymouth, said “the first scene of our history was laid” there.

      But that history was only just beginning. The Pilgrims still had to conquer the desolate wilderness and establish their settlement. And they still had to survive their first winter, which has come to be known as “the starving time.”

      Upon landfall, the Pilgrims “fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean,” according to the journal of William Bradford, a Pilgrim leader.

      But it would be a “sad and lamentable” winter of disease, starvation, and death. Half the settlers died during that first winter. Seldom did more than a half-dozen have the strength to care for the ill, provide food and shelter, and protect the camp.

      At that rate, there might not have been any camp left to protect by spring. But what can only be called a providential moment came in March, when a lone Native American walked boldly into the Pilgrim’s camp and greeted them in English. His name was Samoset.

      Samoset had learned some broken English by working with English fishermen in the waters off what is now Maine. He and the Pilgrims exchanged gifts and he promised to return with another Native American, Squanto, who spoke fluent English.

      Squanto’s tribe had been wiped out a few years earlier by an epidemic plague; he now lived among the Wampanoag tribe in what is today southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The plague had also weakened the Wampanoags, though not neighboring rival tribes.

      The Wampanoag chief, Massasoit, thus had good reason to form an alliance with the Pilgrims. Squanto introduced him to the settlers and facilitated their peace and mutual-aid treaty, which lasted more than 50 years.

      Squanto remained with the Pilgrims, acting, in Bradford’s words, as their interpreter and “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectations.” He instructed them on the cultivation of native crops like corn, squash, and beans. He showed them where to fish and hunt. He guided them on land and sea to new destinations.

      And you probably remember learning what happened next. As the Pilgrims recovered and prospered throughout 1621, they received the blessings of a bountiful fall harvest. The Pilgrims invited Massasoit and the Wampanoags to join them in a feast to express their gratitude to their allies and to give thanks to God for His abundant gifts. This meal, of course, was the First Thanksgiving.

      Now the Thanksgiving season is upon us and once again we have much to give thanks for. But this year we ought to be especially thankful for the Pilgrims on the 400th anniversary of their arrival.

      The story of the Pilgrims is not a myth or a caricature — it’s the living truth of history. What’s more, the faith, bravery and wisdom of the Pilgrims places them in the American pantheon. Alongside the patriots of 1776, the Pilgrims of 1620 deserve the honor of America’s founders.

*Republican Tom Cotton represents Arkansas in the United States Senate.

Big Pharma Down - Another Huge Accomplishment for the President That Will Go Unreported

 by

       George Sontag

      Big Pharma has long had a stranglehold on Americans. Politicians are given huge amounts of campaign money to vote to keep prices for prescription drugs at five, ten times, and sometimes more, than the rest of the world pays. They have used the “lie” that drugs from overseas cannot be trusted to be pure and safe while the drugs for say Europe, Asia, and the United States were made at the same facility.

• “When you think that our nation, for the exact same pill out of the exact same box, often made in the exact same factory, same company — and you take a look at the — the cost was so much more.” - Donald Trump

      President Trump, in keeping with another campaign promise

and before the next administration interferes, signed an executive order to bring down prices in the U.S. to that of the rest of the world. Here are some of his remarks:

      “Today, I have to tell you it’s a great honor for me to announce that my administration is issuing two groundbreaking rules to very dramatically lower the price of prescription drugs for the American people, especially for our cherished seniors.”

      “The unprecedented reforms we’re completing today are the direct result of the historic drug pricing executive orders I signed in July. Statutorily, we had to go through a very long process, and we got it done. I was very proud to have gotten this done. We were pushing it very hard, as we did with the vaccines and other things."

      “The first action will save American seniors billions of dollars by preventing middlemen — the famous middlemen, they call them — from ripping off Medicare patients with high prescription prices.”

      “Currently, drug companies provide large discounts on the price of prescription medicines, including nearly $40 billion in rebates to Medicare Part D plans last year alone. Yet often, middlemen stop those discounts from going to the patients — which is what we’re interested in; not the middlemen — who need it the most. So the patients are going to be now getting the benefit, instead of these very wealthy individuals.”

      “Patients pay very high prices, and they have for many years — although we brought it down; first time in 51 years — with the costs adding up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year, per patient.”

      “Today’s action ends this injustice and requires that these discounts go directly to the people. These are the people that need it. This will save patients up to 30 percent. It could be 40 percent, could be 50 percent, could be much higher than that. These are numbers that nobody has ever even contemplated, and that doesn’t include lifesaving drugs like insulin, which will be even higher. Insulin was destroying lives and destroying families because the cost was so high, and now it’s at a level that nobody can even believe.”

      “The second rule we are finalizing today will transform the way the U.S. government pays for drugs to end global freeloading on the backs of American citizens and American patients. Until now, Americans have often been charged more than twice as much for the exact same drug as other medically advanced countries. We would be having a drug — identical drug, same company — and we’d pay many times the price of what that drug would sell for in certain countries.”

      “In case after case, our citizens pay massively higher prices than other nations pay for the same exact pill, from the same factory, effectively subsidizing socialism abroad with skyrocketing prices at home. So we would spend tremendous amounts of money in order to provide inexpensive drugs to another country. And when I say the price is different, you can see some examples where the price is beyond anything — four times, five times different.”

      “To address this unfairness and to lower prices for Americans, we’re finalizing the Most Favored Nation rule. Remember that name. Most Favored Nation rule. Nobody has ever done this. The drug companies don’t like me too much, but we had to do it. It took a long time before we were able to do this because, statutorily, we had to go through a process. But they’ll — there’ll never be anything like this. I just hope they keep it. I hope they have the courage to keep it, because the powerful drug lobby — Big Pharma — is putting pressure on people like you wouldn’t believe.”

      “ Medicare will now look at the price that other developed nations pay for their drugs. And instead of paying the highest price on that list — and we are substantially higher than any other country in the world — we will pay the lowest price. In other words, we take the lowest price, and we match whatever the lowest price is, leading to colossal savings for all Americans. And we’re talking about savings of 50, 60, 70 percent, 80 percent — different drugs, different prices.”

      “Together, these reforms will save American patients many, many billions of dollars every single year. For generations, the American people have been abused by big pharma and their army of lawyers, lobbyists, and bought-and-paid-for politicians. But I’ve [never] been loyal to the special interests; I have been loyal to our patients and our people that need drugs — prescription drugs — and devoted myself completely to fighting for the American people. You see that. This is not an easy thing to do. Big Pharma ran millions of dollars of negative advertisements against me during the campaign.”

      “In a few weeks, my administration will also finalize rules requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and EpiPens directly to patients. We capped insulin costs for many seniors at just $35 a month, as I said, saving them an average of nearly $500 to $1,000 a year just on insulin.”

      “We ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from telling patients how to buy less expensive drugs. As you know, pharmacists could not talk to patients about how to buy drugs. We approved a record number of affordable generic drugs for three years in a row. And we put a very heavy emphasis on generic drugs. And the pricing there has become very good, but that pricing will also go down very substantially.”

      “In four short years, we’ve instituted the most dramatic series of drug pricing reforms in decades, and you’ll see that. It all comes to fruition right now, starting on January 1st. And the American people will benefit from our actions for many, many decades.”

      All Americans must be grateful for these actions. It was long, long overdue. Let us now hope that the Socialist elite, who won the election, don't fall back into the pockets of Big Pharma and reverse these historical price cuts. This was the right thing to do. It should have been done long ago.

How Biden’s Media Czar Endorsed Decades-old Tradition of Indoctrinating Americans

 Guest Column 

 by  

        Kit Klarenberg*

      The man Joe Biden tapped to head Washington’s umbrella agency for international media is a fan of internal propaganda. The practice is a well-established one in the US, despite repeated attempts to end it. Joe Biden named Richard Stengel as lead transition volunteer for the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) review team. USAGM manages five global media brands – Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Radio Free Asia, and Alhurra.

Advancing US propaganda

      During his lengthy public diplomacy and public affairs tenure, he was responsible for creating the Global Engagement Center. While its ostensible raison d’etre is “combating Russian disinformation,” Grayzone suggests the initiative actually amounts to “a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.”  After leaving his post, he became a fellow at dubious ‘think tank’ the Atlantic Council, NATO’s intellectual wing-cum-propaganda arm, which is funded to the tune of millions annually by the State Department, US embassies of UAE and Bahrain, Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, defense giant Raytheon, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and other questionable sources. He concurrently served as an MSNBC analyst.

WESTERN MEDIA HEGEMONY

      Grayzone moreover exposed a number of absolutely extraordinary comments Stengel made during a May 2018 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) panel discussion, Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News.  Over the course of the talk, Stengel advocated a “rethink” of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press in the US, and laughingly referred to his State Department role as “chief propagandist.”

 “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful,” he added.

Information warfare at home

      Stengel’s support for internally targeted propaganda, and unabashed self-characterization as the State Department’s “chief propagandist,” is particularly disquieting given that the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act explicitly banned stations like Voice of America from broadcasting its programming domestically.

      The legislation was in-part influenced by fears of US government propaganda agencies unduly influencing public opinion and discourse at home. In the 1970s, as tensions between Washington and Moscow began to thaw, there was even a push to end BBG’s externally directed activities, led by Democratic senator and then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William Fulbright. In 1972, he suggested Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty “should be given an opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s entreaties have been ignored ever after, even when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and there was by definition no more Cold War to fight.

      The intervening years saw the creation of a dedicated, secret US government department for domestic propaganda. Founded in 1983, the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) sought to influence public opinion. In 2005, the Bush administration’s aggressive use of ‘prepackaged news’, or ‘video news releases’, was revealed. The Departments of Defense, State and others had produced hundreds of slick video clips indistinguishable from actual news reports, which were subsequently provided to national and local news stations and broadcast without changes, or disclaimers identifying them as government-made advertisements.

      In May that year, the GAO issued a damning report, and its appraisal was indistinguishable from its ruling on the ODP. Government departments which had produced and disseminated ‘prepackaged news’ had “violated the federal prohibition on the use of appropriated funds for purposes of publicity or propaganda not authorized by Congress.”

      However, penalties, much less action to end the policy, were not forthcoming – the office merely wrote a circular letter to the heads of all federal agencies “to remind them of the prohibition on publicity or propaganda.” As of November 2020, no government department or employee, or news network, has been punished in any way for engaging in the practice.   

 *Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.(Article edited for size)

Trump Won, Regardless of the Election Outcome Because Trumpism is Here to Stay

Guest Column 

 by 

        Samantha Chang*

       No matter the eventual election result, President Donald Trump’s legacy is intact. He has reignited an enthusiasm for nationalism the world over, but his true impact has been obscured by ridiculous accusations of racism.

      As the fate of the US presidential election hangs in the balance pending resolution of multiple voter-fraud lawsuits, President Donald Trump has already won – no matter who takes the White House.

      Trump’s enduring legacy is the populist, nationalist movement he ignited in 2016. This coalition is growing by the day – both in the US and abroad – and will continue to expand, long after he leaves office. Why? Because “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” as French author Victor Hugo eloquently noted.

      That idea is populist nationalism. The mainstream media (which is predominantly left-wing) has rabidly attacked nationalism and populism as “racist.” In reality, there is nothing racist about being proud of who you are and where you come from. This is why Trump supporters enthusiastically wave American flags at their gatherings, which are celebrations of their country. 

      Similarly, countless patriots in other countries support Trump because as the US president, he boldly declared that it’s OK to be proud of your nation. 

      Being a patriot does not mean you don’t like other countries. It means you respect the sovereignty of each nation and acknowledge that they have as much right to be proud of who they are as you do for who you are.

      For decades, Western nations were taught to be ashamed of their histories, claiming they were “racist.” In contrast, such self-hatred was not espoused in the Middle East, Asia or Africa, even though those regions arguably have more blatant histories of overt racism. 

      President Trump was voted into office in 2016 by a movement that championed everyday Americans – not the snobby, elitist groupthink embraced by the Washington swamp and Hollywood celebrities. 

      Trump supporters were disgusted at America’s decades-long submission to a globalist agenda that taught that all white people are racist, all people of color are helpless victims and everyone should depend on the government to solve their problems.

      This flawed, race-hustling mindset stoked widespread racial animus, leading to the rise of the militant, anti-white, anti-police Black Lives Matter movement.

      The media breathlessly blamed Trump for the BLM race riots that erupted across the US this summer, as if they happened because he was president. In reality, this racial division was brewing for decades; Trump was merely the catalyst that exposed the volcanic fury bubbling below the surface.

      The media have championed Black Lives Matter’s destructive riots while deriding white people as racists if they dared to question BLM’s Marxist agenda. 

      But numerous black commentators say the racial resentment goes both ways. Just ask attorney and political scientist Dr. Carol Swain. Swain says the nationalist movement in America started gaining momentum 15 years before Trump became president. She predicted the rise of nationalism in her 2002 book, ‘The New White Nationalism in America’. “The rise of the new white nationalism occurred long before the election of President Donald Trump,” Swain told Judge Jeanine Pirro. Swain noted that “white nationalism” is different from “white supremacy,” even though the left and their media lapdogs intentionally conflate the two movements. “I distinguish it from white supremacy because the people who were involved [in the white nationalism movement] were more intellectual,” said Swain, a graduate of Yale Law School. She continued, “They were not espousing racial violence or using epithets, but they had grievances. They felt that white people’s rights were being trampled on and no one was speaking up or listening to their grievances.”

      Swain said the white nationalism movement mushroomed, because whites were being marginalized and disenfranchised after decades of affirmative action and other government programs designed to benefit minorities.

      The media and academia exacerbated the situation by constantly browbeating all white people as racist and claiming they have no right to complain about anything because they have ‘white privilege.’ But look around you: There are plenty of poor, underprivileged whites.

      White nationalism is becoming heightened since whites will soon no longer be the majority race in the US. It makes you wonder: Once whites become a minority, will society allow them to constantly whine and demand preferential treatment?

      But this is a narrative you’ll struggle to hear amid the cacophony of anti-Trump noise we are constantly subjected to. It’s also why these very real changes in America’s political landscape, all influenced by Trump, will be underplayed.

• The media’s bias has been exposed and its credibility decimated. According to a recent Gallup poll, a whopping 94 percent of Americans do not trust the press.

• Americans’ belief in the integrity of US elections has been reduced amid mounting evidence of alarming irregularities and lack of transparency in vote-counting.

• The Democrat Party is splintered and a civil war is brewing. For example, Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), whose district voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, said she will not support Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House.

      Bearing these in mind, it’s hard to argue that Trump truly lost – even though the election may eventually say otherwise.

*  Samantha Chang, a politics writer and financial editor based in New York City.

Massive Push Towards World-Wide Socialism Begins Again

 by

        M. Richard Maxson

       The massive anti-Trump propaganda campaign has achieved it's goal, to get rid of the American president who has been a monkey wrench in the plans of the world-wide elite. With President Trump out of the way, the push towards world-wide Socialism can continue unabated. Socialist and wanted man, (in multiple countries) George Soro's World Economic Forum will meet in Davos in January in order to move forward with their agenda. The world's elite, the planet's most powerful business leaders, government officials and activists will meet to decide the fate of the world. - YOUR FATE.

       Although many details won't be rolled out until after the Forum meets, the general principles of the plan are clear, "reset" the global economy. Instead of traditional capitalism, these "men in the shadows" said the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations, and massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those offered by American Socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan.
Or, put another way, we need a form of world-wide Socialism - a word the World Economic Forum has deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless Socialist and Progressive (Communist) plans.

        "The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." - Disraeli

      As one member stated, "the coronavirus pandemic has created an important opportunity for many of our members to enact their radical transformation of capitalism, which they acknowledged would likely not have been made possible without the pandemic. We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis - its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change," adding later, "It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again."

      You might be wondering how these leaders plan to convince the world to completely alter its economy over the long run, since the COVID-19 pandemic most assuredly won't remain a crisis forever. The answer is that they've already identified another "crisis" that will require expansive government intervention: Climate change.

       These government officials, activists and influencers can't impose a systemic change of this size on their own. Which is why they have already started to activate vast networks of left-wing activists from around the world, who will throughout 2021 demand changes in line with the Great Reset. We have witnessed these members rioting in the streets of our nation. According to the World Economic Forum, its 2021 Davos summit will include thousands of members of the Global Shapers Community, youth activists(embedded Socialists) located in 400 cities across the planet.

       Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the world. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.  As civilization has become more complex, and the evidence of an invisible western world government has been increasingly demonstrated, and which is the true ruling power. For those of us who support freedom and the Constituion, their Great Reset is nothing short of terrifying. Our current crony capitalist system has many flaws, to be sure, but granting more power to the government agents who created that crony system and eroding rights is not the best way forward. America is the world's most powerful, prosperous nation precisely because of the very market principles the Socialists loathe, not in spite of them.

 

 

Americans Didn’t Vote Against Trump, They Voted Against More Media Psychological Abuse

 Guest Column

by

       Caitlin Johnstone*

      The word "coup" is being thrown about in American liberal media today, not because US liberals suddenly became uncomfortable with the fact that their nation constantly stages coups and topples governments around the world as a matter of routine policy, but because they are all talking about (you guessed it) Donald Trump. 'Trump derangement syndrome' didn't come from Trump. It came from abusive media trying to spin the evils of his presidency as somehow worse than any other US president's.

      To be clear, none of the high-powered influencers who have been promoting the use of this word actually believe there is any possibility that Donald Trump will somehow remain in office after January of next year when he loses his legal appeals against the official results of the election, which would be the thing that a coup is. There is no means or institutional support through which the sitting president could accomplish such a thing….. Trump will leave office at the appointed time.

      The establishment narrative managers are not terrifying their audiences with this word because they believe there is any danger of a coup actually happening. They are doing it because it’s their last chance to use Trump to psychologically abuse their audiences for clicks.

      “Trump Anxiety Disorder” has continued to feature in mass media stories to this day, right up until shortly before the election. The narrative has been that Trump is so horrible that he is somehow causing liberals to have psychological breakdowns with his awfulness.

      What gets overlooked in these analyses, as is so often the case with human perception in general, is the means by which people are taking in the information that is making them so anxious – in this case the news media.

      It is not Trump himself who’s been making people feel terrified of a tyrannical Russian agent ending democracy in America and ruling with an iron fist, it is years of shrieking, hysterical coverage about Trump from the mass media.

      Without all the deranged and persistent fearmongering, driven by a disdain for Trump’s unrefined narrative management style and an insatiable hunger for ratings and clicks, it would never have occurred to Americans that they should be more terrified of this president than of any other sh***y Reaganite Republican. The Russian collusion narrative which dominated most of Trump’s presidency turned out to be essentially nothing. The concentration camps, millions of deportations and armed militias driving non-whites out of the country that we were promised never came; he never even came anywhere close to Obama’s deportation numbers and his support from minorities actually went up. He hasn’t been any more warlike than his predecessors overall, and by some measures arguably less so. Most Americans actually reported that their lives had improved over Trump’s term before the pandemic hit.

      If people had just been given raw information about Trump’s presidency, they would have seen a lot of bad things, but things that are bad in the same way all the horrible aspects of the most destructive government on earth are bad. They wouldn’t have known to be horrified and anxious and have headaches and irritable bowel syndrome. They would have handled themselves in about the same way they always handled themselves during the administration of a president they didn’t like.

      Instead, they were psychologically terrorized. Made frightened, sick and traumatized by mass media pundits who only care about ratings and clicks, as was made clear when CBS chief Les Moonves famously said that Trump is bad for America but great for CBS. Dragged through years of Russia hysteria and Trump hysteria with any excuse to spin Trump’s presidency as a remarkable departure from norms, when in reality it was anything but. It was a fairly conventional Republican presidency.

      In reality, though most of them probably did not realize it, this is what Americans were actually voting against when they turned out in record numbers to cast their votes. Not against Trump, but against this continued psychological abuse they’ve been suffering both directly and indirectly from the mass media. Against being bashed in the face by shrieking, hysterical bull***t that hurts their bodies and makes them feel crazy, and against the unpleasantness of having to interact with stressed-out compatriots who haven’t been putting up well with the abuse.

      It wasn’t a “Get him out” vote, it was a “Make it stop” vote.

      Meanwhile, another pernicious effect of making Trump seem uniquely horrible has been retroactively making his predecessors seem nice by comparison, which is why George W Bush now enjoys majority support among Democrats after years of unpopularity. Their depravity is hidden behind a media-generated wall labeled “NOT TRUMP”. And when Biden steps into office, his depravity will be hidden from view in the same way, neutering all mainstream opposition to his most deadly and dangerous actions.

*Caitlin Johnstone is an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia.

The Slow Murder of Julian Assange - Update

 by

       Phillip Todd

      What has happened to Julian Assange? Since the Deep State pressured the newly elected president of Ecuador to boot him from their London embassy and he was arrested for a "failing to surrender to the court" on a bail jumping charge in Sweden. On May 1, 2019, Assange was jailed for 50 weeks for hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy and jumping bail. Why is he still there? We know he has been living in extreme isolation, and Retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski wrote in an article posted at Lew Rockwell’s website that Julian Assange is receiving the same treatment as suspected terrorists while in captivity at “Her Majesty’s Prison Service” at Belmarsh. He was then charged with multiple counts of violating the US Espionage Act and although he is not even a citizen. The U.S. demanded that he be held for extradition for a supposed crime that he, a non-citizen supposedly committed outside of the United States itself.

      It gets worse, now classified a “suspected terrorist” and not a U.S. citizen and on foreign soil, they can do as they please with him. The FBI, Pentagon, and CIA are “interviewing” Assange. according to retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. “Interviewing is the wrong word. I’d like to say doctoring him, because it would be more accurate, except that word implies some care for a positive outcome. Chemical Gina has her hands in this one, and we are being told that Assange is being “treated” with 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ” - *BZ is a powerful drug that produces hallucinations.

      Yes, they are using chemical torture to, if nothing else, destroy his mind. Colonel Kwiatkowski continues, “Soldiers on BZ could remember only fragments of the experience afterward. As the drug wore off, and the subjects had trouble discerning what was real, many experienced anxiety, aggression, even terror,” the New Yorker reported. “…The drug’s effect lasted for days. At its peak, volunteers were totally cut off in their own minds, jolting from one fragmented existence to the next. They saw visions: Lilliputian baseball players competing on a tabletop diamond; animals or people or objects that materialized and vanished.”

      “It is difficult to know if the state is more sociopathic or more psychopathic. What US government employees and/or contractors are currently doing to Julian Assange, and those who may have used Wikileaks as a journalistic avenue, may indicate it is the latter. Torture, isolation, brutality, and the use of psychotropic drugs during interrogations and hiding this from the defendant’s own lawyers by denying them access — this is Lubyanka(Soviet Union prison) in the 1950s, not London and DC in 2019.”

      As of this writing he has sometimes not appeared in court due to his health. We need not wonder why. When he has appeared he has been threatened with removal unless he remains completely quiet. His mind is fogged and he is suicidal. How far have we sunk if telling the truth becomes a crime? Most of the world knows why they hunted him, and why he’s been treated the way he’s been treated and tortured in prison. The same goes for people like Edward Snowden, it’s because they expose lies, corruption, deceit, immoral and unethical actions that their own governments, as well as governments around the world have participated in. In a democracy, the power does not belong to the government, but to the people. Secrecy disempowers the people because it prevents them from exercising democratic control, which is precisely why governments want secrecy.

      Politicians has become a cesspool of corruption, and their socialist controlled media, corporations, and big banks dictate political policy from the shadows. What we are presented with on our TV when it comes to geopolitical issues and war is far different from what’s happening in reality, and this is what Julian Assange made evident. Whether it’s the funding, arming and creation of terrorist organizations like ISIS or Al-Qaeda by our governments or creating problems so they can propose the solutions obtaining this information and using it to inform the public is not a “threat” to the people, it’s a threat to to the people in power. These people in power are using “national “security as they always due to justify the locking Assange up for the rest of his life or helping him to his demise.

Reps. Tulsi Gabbard & Thomas Massie Introduce Bipartisan Resolution Defending the Free Press & Call For Charges Against Julian Assange To Be Dropped 

“Freedom of the press is a vital function of a free democracy in which the government is accountable to the people. Julian Assange published information that exposed lies and abuses of power at the highest levels of our government. His indictment under the Espionage Act sends a chilling message to every member of the media and all Americans,”said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/reps-tulsi-gabbard-thomas-massie-introduce-bipartisan-resolution-defending-free