NEA Teachers’ Union Commits to Shoving Critical Theories Down the Throats of Students and Parents Nationwide

July 5, 2021 John

BY STACEY LENNOX

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2021/07/05/teachers-union-commits-to-shoving-critical-theories-down-the-throats-of-students-and-parents-nationwide-n1459480;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

The largest teachers’ union in the nation, the National Education Association (NEA), committed to funding an investigation into groups that oppose the use of critical theories in K-12 education at their recent annual conference. This move was bad enough. However, the teachers’ union’s acceptance of agenda items did not end there. Indeed, it is setting up a showdown that the government system of education may not survive. At this point, it is legitimate to contemplate if perhaps it should not.

The NEA members approved two agenda items likely meant to chill opposition to turning the public school system into a left-wing indoctrination program. The first, called Business Item A, lays out a task force. The attendees laid out the foundational purpose of the task force in this preamble:

The National Education Association, in coordination with national partners, NEA state and local affiliates, racial justice advocates, allies, and community activists, shall build powerful education communities and continue our work together to eradicate institutional racism in our public school system by:

Now, as far as community activists are concerned, it is almost assured the NEA will not invite groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education to the table. It is also somewhat ironic that a teachers’ union that opposes all forms of school choice is attempting to root out institutional racism. School choice advocates could effectively argue that the one systemically racist system we have is tying predominantly black and brown students to underperforming and unsafe public schools based solely on their zip codes. This system receives the full support of the NEA.

The NEA is committing itself to pursue economic justice and primarily political aims such as equitable housing and healthcare in Item A. The teachers’ union also commits to programs that train staff in racial justice and equity:

Training specific school personnel to be full-time restorative practice coordinators and providing all school employees with professional development around cultural responsiveness, implicit bias, anti-racism, trauma-informed practices, restorative justice practices and other racial justice trainings

Training educators to lead on equity and racial justice, leveraging the Leaders for Just Schools curriculum and model

It is safe to assume these training classes will be similar to the struggle session model documented by journalist Christopher Rufo. Business Item A deals specifically with leading campaigns that:

Result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic (Native people, Asian, Black, Latin(o/a/x), Middle Eastern, North African, and Pacific Islander) Studies curriculum in pre- K-12 and higher education

These bullets are a small slice of what Business Item A touches, but they are the elements most directly related to New Business Item 39. Despite its length, it is included in full here to demonstrate the depth of commitment by the teachers’ union to curriculum and activities that many Americans object to (emphasis mine).

The NEA will, with guidance on implementation from the NEA president and chairs of the Ethnic Minority Affairs Caucuses:

A. Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) — what it is and what it is not; have a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric; and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members.

B. Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.

C. Publicly (through existing media) convey its support for the accurate and honest teaching of social studies topics, including truthful and age-appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history, such as slavery, and the oppression and discrimination of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other peoples of color, as well as the continued impact this history has on our current society. The Association will further convey that in teaching these topics, it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.

D. Join with Black Lives Matter at School and the Zinn Education Project to call for a rally this year on October 14—George Floyd’s birthday—as a national day of action to teach lessons about structural racism and oppression. Followed by one day of action that recognize and honor lives taken such as Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, and others. The National Education Association shall publicize these National Days of Action to all its members, including in NEA Today.

E. Conduct a virtual listening tour that will educate members on the tools and resources needed to defend honesty in education including but not limited to tools like CRT.

F. Commit President Becky Pringle to make public statements across all lines of media that support racial honesty in education including but not limited to critical race theory.

Public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay have been warning about the pernicious influence of the ideas of grievance studies and post-modernism on schools of education at our universities. New Business Item 39 and statements from American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten confirm that these radical ideas have influenced the leadership of teachers’ unions. Indeed, some teachers and administrators do not hold these views, but their ability to speak up or affect the direction of these institutions will become increasingly limited.

Our universities are on a continued trajectory of decline. In the 15 years I spent hiring, training, and developing employees, a college degree became more of a screening tool than a guarantee of a well-prepared entry-level employee capable of problem-solving, working in teams, and handling constructive criticism. The function of their costly education was one of selection and stamina. Employers assumed universities selected based on objective criteria of intelligence, so we hired the brightest and then took charge of training them in what they needed to know and do. Now that the admission process is increasingly about representation, it is not even clear universities serve this function.

Now, the largest teachers’ union is determined to take K-12 education down the same road, embracing a curriculum that rejects meritocracy in favor of equity. Wherever we have seen this ideology implemented, we have seen the lowering of the bar for everyone to standardize outcomes. New York City is eliminating entrance requirements at its selective public schools. The SAT is adding an adversity score to credit for economic and social disadvantages. Restorative justice programs made schools less safe for students and staff. There is also an increasing drumbeat to eliminate standardized tests broadly.

The NEA is vowing to accelerate programs and ideas like these. There are reasons to believe the AFT will go down a similar road. Together they represent 4.7 million active members in thousands of school districts nationwide. Parents opposed to the ideas the teachers’ unions seem determined to incorporate may need to consider that eradicating the critical theories from the K-12 classroom is not possible. Schools of education pump out these ideas with nearly every diploma, and the ideas even exist in districts not represented by a teachers’ union.

It may be time to think deeply about innovation in K-12 education. Instead of pushing bans on certain types of curricula, perhaps it is time to expand choice. The days of limiting the option to low-income students need to end. Petitioning state legislatures to pass legislation on education savings accounts for K-12 education, where every parent can have the dollars allocated to their child follow them to the program of their choice, would be ideal. At a minimum, that would provide parent groups with financial leverage because funding of public schools is often on a per-student basis.

American children need educators, not activists, in the classroom. It is no longer clear that a degree is required to provide most children with a K-12 education based on rational thinking, objective truth, and appropriate nuance. If doing that takes a village, parents should have the ability to determine the people to include in that group.

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Rumble — The country's largest teacher's union and socialist projects align themselves to fight against recent legislation banning critical race theory. One America's Zach Petersen has more.

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SEE ALSO:

The National Education Association’s Radical Agenda for Public Education

Turning classrooms into indoctrination centers for social activism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/neas-radical-agenda-public-education-richard-l-cravatts/

Racist ATLANTA Mayor: Keisha Lance Bottoms

July 5, 2021 John

13th in a series.

BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/racist-mayor-keisha-lance-bottoms-daniel-greenfield/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Editor's note: This is the 13th part in Frontpage Mag's series on Racist Mayors. (See previous parts below this article). Stay tuned for more installments.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms became the mayor of Atlanta by 759 votes by accusing her opponent of racism for exposing voter fraud.

Mary Norwood of Buckhead, who had lost the mayoral election against Bottoms' corrupt predecessor, Mohammed Kasim Reed, by 714 votes, had described how Democrats steal elections by bringing in “thugs” and pay people to vote.

Bottoms claimed that the word “thugs” was racist.

Even after winning by a margin suspiciously similar to that of Reed, who had endorsed her, Bottoms went on complaining about racism, and claiming that being accused of corruption was racist and “it was still shocking to me in Atlanta. I thought that we were way beyond that”.

After George Floyd’s overdose death while in police custody, Bottoms showed up on Oprah and told the racist billionaire celebrity "My mother recently said to me that this America didn't feel like 1965 to her. It felt like something before 1965.” A black mayor in a city with an uninterrupted string of them for generations was claiming that segregation was back.

When Rayshard Brooks, who had an extensive criminal record, was shot after struggling with police, Mayor Bottoms wasted no time with a press conference a few days later that falsely claimed, “we saw the murder of Rayshard Brooks” and cracked down on Atlanta police.

Bottoms played the race card, describing his death as "so personal to so many people of color."

"That could have been any one of us," the Atlanta politician, and daughter of the R&B singer behind "Monkey Time" who used to open for the Beatles, claimed. Keisha Lance Bottoms spent years growing up in England and then back home in upscale Collier Heights until her father, Major Lance, who had sold millions of records, got addicted to cocaine and wrecked the family.

The “us” rings hollow coming from the daughter of a superstar who had spent time studying at Cambridge University. Much as it did from Barack Obama and still does from Kamala Harris.

But when she was running for office, Bottoms hit Mary Norwood with an attack ad for not “immediately” agreeing that racial profiling existed, sneering, “Mary and I live very different lives” and falsely claiming that the police were endangering the lives of her three sons.

“I live in southwest Atlanta,” Bottoms declared, neglecting to mention that she lives in a massive 5,000 square foot mansion in a neighborhood described by real estate agents as “upscale” and “prestigious” that’s a far cry from the modest rundown home of her grandparents where she stages interviews to act like she can relate to her poor black constituents.

While Bottoms enjoys her mansion, she’s pushing for an end to single-family zoning.

The Democrat campaign to urbanize Atlanta suburbs and other suburbs across the country is meant to shatter middle-class communities transforming homeowners into renters. That won’t affect Bottoms’ mansion, but it’s another reason why Buckhead is fighting to escape Atlanta.

Destroying Atlanta’s black and white middle class by eliminating homeowners would kill what’s left of the city’s civic culture and allow the Democrats a tighter grip on power. Even as they are finishing up destroying the cities, the Democrats are moving to wreck the suburbs.

Mayor Bottoms has overseen another burning of Atlanta while hiding behind racism smears. Atlanta’s new mayor, like other inauthentic Democrat elites, is adept at playing the race card.

The death of Brooks led to another in a series of BLM riots and the site of the Wendy’s became the epicenter of a lawless zone occupied by criminals. BLM barricades were used to confront drivers who faced a choice between being terrorized or driving through the mob.

Those who drove through the mob went to jail.

In one of the cars was an 8-year-old girl named Secoriea Turner. As the car tried to turn around, the men at the BLM barricades opened fire killing the little girl.

"They say Black Lives Matter. You killed your own this time," Secoriea's father said. "You killed my baby because she crossed a barrier and made a U-turn? She's a child. She didn't do nothing to nobody."

It was July 4th. That weekend, 31 people were shot in Atlanta. The violence was so extreme that Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency and sent out the Georgia National Guard.

The lawyer for Julian Conley, one of the alleged gunmen, claimed that he was just "peacefully protesting".

Secoriea's family sued Mayor Bottoms, along with other city officials, for having "negligently performed their ministerial duties relating to the protection of the public’s health and safety, by omitting to act and clear the area of the barricade and the violent armed civilians that surrounded it." The officer wrongly fired over Brooks' death also sued Bottoms.

Bottoms began her rise through the political ranks as a speechwriter for Attorney General Thurbert Baker. The first black Democrat AG in the state, despite having a partisan agenda on ObamaCare and redistricting, was popular because he was tough on crime. Three strikes weren’t good enough for Baker: he championed “Two Strikes and You’re Out”, electrocuting criminals, and advocated abolishing parole. Bottoms however championed criminals.

When Black Lives Matter racists took to the street demanding police defunding, Bottoms claimed that she had already been defunding the police for years. Atlanta jails were going to be shut down and turned into community centers. Police defunding, like all pro-crime policies, always gets results and it was no different in Atlanta where murders shot up 60%.

After the BLM riots, the chances of being murdered in Chicago and Atlanta were the same.

Shootings went up 51%, while rapes and aggravated assaults rose by double digits after arrests dropped by over 40%. As the violence spun out of control, the suburb of Buckhead announced that it was planning to secede from a city that was hitting rock bottom under Mayor Bottoms.

As Atlanta burned, Bottoms reversed course from talking police defunding to hiring 250 more cops. Councilman Michael Julian Bond, who is black, blamed Bottoms for anti-police moves. “Everybody watches the news and that includes the criminals. So if they know Atlanta is perceived to be soft on crime, they are going to come to Atlanta to cut up."

And Mayor Bottoms decided to blame Gov. Kemp and Republicans for reopening the state along with "systemic issues of gun violence" and people with "mental illness" buying guns.

It was the latest in a series of desperate excuses in which Bottoms tried to blame everyone else.

The same gun laws, a typical Bottoms excuse, were there in 2019. And Atlanta’s crime wave began with the BLM riots, not with the reopening of the state. Secoriea Turner, as her family’s lawsuit testifies, was not murdered because of mental illness or gun laws, but because Bottoms turned over Atlanta to criminals in the hopes of moving up the political ladder of the Democrats.

Her hopes have been dashed.

Once touted as a potential Veep pick for Biden, Bottoms is not even running for reelection. But Kasim Reed, her predecessor, is thinking of making a comeback.

As Buckhead, the home of Mary Norwood, ponders secession, it may become impossible for anyone except the same old mafia to win Atlanta. But Norwood’s narrow losses and the allegations of corruption will make it just as urgent for Bottoms’ successor to cry racism.

Bottoms ran a racially charged campaign to dissuade black voters, some of whom were thinking of voting for Norwood. Before the election, voters across Atlanta received a call telling them, "Keep Atlanta black. Vote Keisha Lance Bottoms.” Bottoms denied any involvement.

Growing up, Bottoms described a world in which she believed that there were no white people in America. One magazine article described her surprise "as a preschooler at seeing a white woman working at a grocery store. Up to then, she’d thought only black people lived in the United States. England was for whites." It’s doubtful that Bottoms experienced much racism, but playing the race card to distract from her privilege has been her only political gambit.

In the previous election, a black strategist described black voters saying, “‘What the [heck] has a black mayor done for me?’ They are the ones saying, ‘Let’s give white folks a chance.’”

Any Democrat candidate who succeeds Bottoms will have to race bait even harder. And hope that black voters put racism ahead of the violence in the streets and the poverty in their homes.

Previous Parts of the Series:

Part I: Chicago's Lori Lightfoot.
Part 2: LA's Eric Garcetti.
Part 3: DC's Muriel Bowser.
Part 4: KC's Quinton Lucas.
Part 5: SF's London Breed.
Part 6: Philly's Jim Kenney.
Part 7: St. Louis' Tishaura Jones.
Part 8: Jackson's Chokwe Antar Lumumba.
Part 9: Seattle's Jenny Durkan.
Part 10: Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey.
Part 11: Charlottesville's Nikuyah Walker.
Part 12: Portland’s Ted Wheeler.

US Army Directs Commands To Prep For MANDATORY COVID Shots For Troops

July 5, 2021 John

"The directive came from an execute order sent to the force by Department of the Army Headquarters"

BY STEVE WATSON

SEE: https://www.infowars.com/posts/report-us-army-directs-commands-to-prep-for-mandatory-covid-shots-for-troops/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

The US Army is preparing to enforce mandatory coronavirus vaccinations for service members from the beginning of September, according to an Army Times report.

The report published Saturday notes “The Army has directed commands to prepare to administer mandatory COVID-19 vaccines as early as Sept. 1, pending full Food and Drug Administration licensure.”

“The directive came from an execute order sent to the force by Department of the Army Headquarters,” the report adds.

An update to a purported leaked military directive says that “Commands will be prepared to provide a back brief on servicemember vaccination status and way ahead for completion once the vaccine is mandated.”

Both the Army and the DoD have denied that there are plans for mandatory vaccinations.

Army spokesperson Maj. Jackie Wren stated that “As a matter of policy we do not comment on leaked documents. The vaccine continues to be voluntary.”

“If we are directed by DoD to change our posture, we are prepared to do so,” Wren added.

The military is experiencing vaccine hesitancy, just as in the greater population. This is sure to continue, with new research linking heart issues and chest pains in soldiers to mRNA vaccines.

The latest study, published in JAMA’s Cardiology Journal on Tuesday, showed that 23 male soldiers (including 22 who were deemed “previously health”) between the ages of 20 and 51 presented “acute onset of marked chest pain” within four days of receiving their second dose. Patients who sought care for chest pain in the military health-care system following COVID-19 vaccination and were subsequently diagnosed with clinical myocarditis were included in the case study.

In the UK, soldiers have been warned that if they decline the vaccine they will face ‘punishment and re-education’.

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Biden Set to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccines for Military as Soon as September

SEE: https://thenewamerican.com/biden-set-to-mandate-covid-19-vaccines-for-military-as-soon-as-september

Americans Must Rekindle the Sacred Fire of Liberty This July 4

July 5, 2021 John

BY JONATHAN W. EMORD

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jonathanemord/2021/07/04/americans-must-rekindle-the-sacred-fire-of-liberty-this-july-4-n1459302;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

This year July 4 takes on added meaning, as it has every year since 1776 when individual liberty has been threatened by forces that would replace our constitutional republic with a dictatorial regime antithetical to rights to life, liberty, and property. Once again Americans are called upon to defend their individual liberties against threats, this time arising not from foreign enemies alone but from new domestic ones: those who riot, steal and destroy property, and commit acts of violence (BLM and Antifa activists) and those who support or condone that destruction and violence by not acting against it (the Democrats who control the legislative and executive branches).

This July 4 we are at a critical juncture. We must decide whether we will allow those who run our country and our cities, who control mainstream media and online avenues of communication, and who educate our children to replace reverence for a Constitution of liberty (and of those who so brilliantly and courageously brought it about) with a condemnation of that higher law and those heroes to usher in state servitude, relinquishment of individual liberty in favor of the collective, official censorship, and government without limits.

Let those of us who still remember and revere freedom act this very day against our new domestic enemies. Let us do so civilly but vocally with an unrelenting will to ensure that governments return to their constitutional moorings and schools do not deny the next generation the magnificent truth of the American revolution and the promise of the Declaration of Independence. We must not allow the new enemies of freedom to succeed in devolving a government instituted to protect the rights of the governed into a socialist dictatorship. In short, as part of that “full measure of devotion,” to which Lincoln spoke in remembering the Union dead at Gettysburg, let us “highly resolve that” those extraordinary Americans who died in defense of liberty did not do so “in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Declaration of Independence was (and will be forever) the most brilliant exposition in favor of individual rights against the oppressive power of unlimited government. At root, it arose from patriots unique in the history of the world. They forsook power and personal aggrandizement to unite in a quest to establish a republic where no dictatorship would be allowed and where, by virtue of a written Constitution, the government would be restrained so the people could be forever free. Throughout the world, people marveled, as indeed King George III did, that there came to be a government whose pristine purpose of protecting individual liberty defined its existence. Two years after Lieutenant-General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown, on October 18, 1781, King George III asked the American painter Benjamin West, then at Buckingham Palace, what would become of the great American general (apparently expecting that he would use his renown and the allegiance of the continental army to become a king or dictator of America).

West astonished the king when instead of describing an ascension to power by General Washington, he described a declamation from it. George Washington would remain true to his republican principles, he would forsake power in favor of individual liberty: “They say he will return to his farm,” West replied. To which the king, flabbergasted, remarked: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” George III stood in disbelief that one so enabled by power would in deference to the ideal of liberty relinquish that power to return to the status of a mere farmer, emulating the civic virtue of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who retired to be a farmer rather than assume the station of a permanent Roman dictator.

Our forebears understood that individual liberty was indispensable to progress and happiness, that without it man was but a slave to the state, and that with it there could be no limits to human potential. Among the subjects of the Crown were a revolutionary few who fought and died for freedom, so that their families, kinsmen, and future generations would enjoy the blessings of liberty. Oh how very grateful we should now be for them, but oh how betrayed they have been by those among the present generation who, ignorant of the accomplishments of America’s first generation of revolutionaries, nevertheless condemn them with the broadest and most undeserved appellations of racism. Then, as now, the enemies of liberty are the same: those who lust for political power to impose their will on all others (who enjoy freedom themselves but presume to deny that freedom to everyone else).

Faced with the unwillingness of the colonists to accept any form of taxation without representation even to the point of tarring and feathering tax collectors, the administration of George III adopted the so-called Coercive Acts to punish the citizens of Boston. Through committees of correspondence, patriots in all colonies adopted the cause of Boston as their own, viewing the threat against one as against them all (“e pluribus unum”). Although a subset of the universe of all British subjects, and constantly revealed to the British by Tories in their midst, the patriots avoided confiscatory and unrepresentative taxes, overcame restrictions on trade, and in due course defeated tyranny in favor of a Constitution of liberty.

Viewed with disdain, even disgust, by George III and the Tory leadership in Parliament, the American cause for liberty nonetheless inspired members of Parliament sympathetic to the American cause, who defended the right of the colonists to leave free of entanglements. The language of liberty recorded in America became universal, inspiring revolutions outside of the colonies, including the overthrow of the monarchy in France, albeit with a tyranny of democracy run riot. Indeed, so popular was the concept of a government where the people were sovereign and protected in their individual liberty that it caused Jefferson to remark to Tench Coxe on June 1, 1795: “[T]his ball of liberty . . . is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together.”

The extraordinary encapsulation of the rights of man and of just governance in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence became a powerful rallying cry against which neither the British king nor the Tory Administration ever offered an alternative thesis of comparable suasion. Indeed, the world has yet to witness a defense of tyranny that can compare with the stirring “self-evident” truths that animate the Preamble. The Preamble defines what it means to be American, is our true origin, and states forever our aspirational goals.

We, as Americans, believe fundamentally and accept as self-evident, that all are created equal. We believe that all are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights, among them rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We believe governments are instituted to protect those rights (that, indeed, is government’s very purpose and only basis of legitimacy). We believe governments may govern justly only if they derive their powers from the consent of the governed. Those truths define who we are. And while BLM and Antifa oppose each of them and mean to deprive us of them, the truths stand in their simple yet profound honesty and tug dearly at our hearts because, if we are honest, we know them to be true, undeniable, and eternal. Moreover, through experience, we know they have proven their superiority over every dogma offered to justify the denial of individual rights, freedom of choice, and pursuit of individual happiness.

As we celebrate Independence Day in the presence of governments federal and state that have far more in common with the overbearing power that characterized that of the Hanoverian kings of England toward the American colonies, we can nevertheless appreciate, as our forebears did then, that there is no force on earth equal to that of individual liberty. The history of the world is proof that even the most oppressive regimes fail in the end to arrest the spirit of liberty that animates every living person, a spirit that, as our Declaration of Independence recognized, is endowed by our Creator in each of us and can not be taken from us (is unalienable).

Repeatedly tyrannical regimes collapse as the spirit of liberty enlivens citizens to topple regimes that violate individual rights in the hope of establishing governments that defend them. Yet protections for liberties once lost are very difficult to regain and protections for liberties never experienced are even more difficult to acquire.

As our Declaration explains, just governments are instituted among men to protect the rights of the governed and whenever governments so instituted become an enemy of those rights, it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish them. The free will not willingly consent to socialism and the naïve, while not infrequently duped into favoring socialism by the false promise of something of value for nothing, invariably learn the hard truth Margaret Thatcher explained in her simple yet profound eloquence: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” And then there is the horrible misery, profound for the least fortunate among us, a misery for which there is no escape. A socialist slave to the state has one overpowering master whose plantation is the entire nation: For the socialist slave, there is no avenue of escape, no opportunity for freedom up North.

Freedom once taken is not regained except with extreme difficulty. The secret to self-fulfillment and prosperity is to avoid becoming so foolish as to part with freedom in the first place.

We today struggle as our forebears did against the arbitrary will of the administrative state and against a welling vocal and destructive body of socialists who have the ear, if not also the heart, of the president of the United States, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Senate majority leader. While modern governments depend on redistribution of wealth to curry favor with a class of dependents, roughly equal in number to the productive, the Achilles heel of government remains the same as it was in the 18^th century. In the end over-taxation and inflation born of profligate government spending exhaust the productive who flee from those dual evils and from regulation that stifles productivity. When that oppression thus affects all who produce and who pay, they abandon the state and the state finds its ability to redistribute wealth and provide services for the politically preferred impossible to maintain. Then, the entitled class who have depended on state benefits and services likewise turn against the state. The entitled class, effectively entitled no more, turn in support of the productive class, and all work to dismantle the tyrannical state in favor of one that defends the inalienable rights of the individual. We are caught up in that evolution at present. We will be the authors either of a great rejection of socialist misery or of our own destruction, but we, the American people, will be that “author and finisher,” for as Abraham Lincoln so poignantly stated in his Lyceum Address of January 27, 1838, “As a nation of [the] free we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

The struggle for liberty is eternal. It is so precisely because just as we come near the zenith of freedom following rejection of a tyrannical regime in favor of one that defends liberty, the political forces that naturally favor all power in single hands and use the resources of the productive to further that end continually work to undo the gains made for freedom. As my friend and author Cheryl Chumley explains, “socialists never sleep.” As our Founding Fathers well understood, those intent on accumulating power inevitably remove the barriers to tyranny that exist in the Constitution, rendering those barriers mere parchment with no effective meaning or constraint. And as they do so they ignite the sacred fire of liberty in those of us who love our Constitution and favor liberty over tyranny. While the articulate among us who defend liberty as a constant remain a minority, over time the message of liberty resonates in the hearts of a majority as the tyranny of the state becomes ever more unbearable for increasing numbers of people. We then reach a tipping point in politics like the tipping point at Saratoga in the revolutionary war. At that point, the friends of liberty arise and achieve victory. At first, they remain in a silent majority but over time as oppression increases, they arrive at a vocal majority, and then the work of restoring liberty begins.

My hope, my prayer, this Fourth of July, is that Americans will rekindle the sacred fire of liberty and will exert their will now and forevermore to arrest the movement attacking our great founding principles, defeating those forces that seek to divide us, enslave us to a socialist state, and rob the next generation of the spirit of liberty and of liberty itself. We cannot allow a loud and destructive minority to discredit the great defense of individual liberty that is the Declaration of Independence, and we cannot allow them to dishonor the lives of those brave men and women who sacrificed all in defense of the Declaration’s principles. We must fight for what we and the world have long understood to be what it means to be an American—to be free.