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With so many protest going on around the country in the supposed support of justice for the black community. I decided to go on a protest to the root of the issue. The place where black babies are being murdered at a higher rate that are being born!? Planned parenthood in NYC to fight for the ones who incapable to fight for themselves. Christopher Wright YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/cswright410
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
NEW YORK —Planned Parenthood of Greater New York (PPGNY) has announced that it will remove founder Margaret Sanger’s name from its Manhattan facility bearing her namesake, and is also working with city council to rename Margaret Sanger Square, due to her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement.”
The organization says that “the announcement reflects the first of many organizational shifts to address Sanger’s legacy and system of institutional racism, which negatively impacts the well-being of patients, staff and PPGNY’s broader communities.”
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, board chair of PPGNY, said in a statement.
“Margaret Sanger’s concerns and advocacy for reproductive health have been clearly documented, but so too has her racist legacy,” she said. “There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology, which runs completely counter to our values at PPGNY. Removing her name is an important step toward representing who we are as an organization and who we serve.”
The abortion facility on Bleecker Street had heretofore been named the Margaret Sanger Health Center, and a street sign currently marks the intersection of Bleecker and Mott Streets in recognizing Sanger.
However, the organization did not disavow the practice of abortion and will continue to offer its services to end the lives of the unborn. According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, 53,394 abortions were performed in New York City alone in 2017.
As previously reported, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in New York in 1921, which was originally known as the American Birth Control League. She later changed the name as some found it offensive.
Sanger generally opposed abortion, writing in her 1920 book “Woman and the New Race” that “the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
Her solution to countering abortion was birth control, as she believed that “[t]he most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children.” She claimed that children get lost in large families and end up in jail or as prostitutes.
Sanger was also a proponent of eugenics against the physically and mentally disabled, as she made a correlation between birth control and the purification of the human race. She additionally called for the sterilization of women in the “moron class,” referring to those with disabilities as being “morons,” “idiots” and “imbeciles.”
“Back then they used words like ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile,’ these were actually scientific terms, and classifying people according to their IQ. And she said women in these classes were not capable of being mothers, and therefore shouldn’t be mothers,” her grandson, Alex Sanger, told Vox in 2016, explaining that he disagreed with her position but otherwise admired Sanger. “She also talked about women with certain inherited diseases like epilepsy or alcoholism — they shouldn’t be mothers, because they’re going to pass these genes onto their children.”
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives,” Sanger wrote in the aforementioned “Woman and the New Race”. “If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.”
Sanger launched the Negro Project in 1939, offering birth control in African American communities — especially in the South, where there was significant poverty yet multiple children in a household. She thought that cutting down on the number of children born would better the economic status of a region and consequently the quality of life for society as a whole.
According to New York University, Sanger’s secretary, Florence Rose, wrote a report on “Birth Control and the Negro”, in which she opined that “negroes present the great problem of the South,” because they have “the greatest economic, health and social problems” yet “still breed carelessly and disastrously.”
“‘Constructive’ eugenics aims to arouse the enthusiasm or the interest of the people in the welfare of the world fifteen or twenty generations in the future. On its negative side it shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all — that the wealth of individuals and of states is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization,” Sanger also remarked in the 1922 publication “The Pivot of Civilization”.
“Birth control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science,” she continued. “As a matter of fact, birth control has been accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.”
2 Corinthians 5:15 states that Christ “died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them and rose again.”
Please visit Christian News Network’s Outlaw Abortion page to help us work to abolish the worldwide holocaust.
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If President Trump is really a “racist,” as Joe Biden claims, he is one of the strangest racists who ever lived: before the coronavirus hit, black and Hispanic unemployment was at record low levels, the president has repeatedly hailed the achievements of black Americans, and Trump himself, before he entered politics as an unapologetic, non-establishment Republican, was widely respected even by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for his work for the black community. But none of that matters to Joe Biden or whoever is putting words in his mouth: they want us to believe that Trump is a racist, indeed, the first racist president, because for years they’ve been destroying Republicans with this charge, however false it may be. Why stop now? But Biden has missed a few Democrats.
Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster recounts that progressive hero Woodrow Wilson, for example, was born in Virginia a bit more than four years before the Civil War broke out. Throughout his life, he retained the racist attitudes he learned in his youth, and when he became president, he made them U.S. government policy. In 1915, the notorious film The Birth of a Nation became the first motion picture to get a screening in the White House; the film portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, denigrated blacks in numerous ways, and quoted Wilson as a respected authority.
Wilson was also quoted decrying the supposed “policy of congressional leaders” to “put the white South under the heel of the black South.” In response, Wilson went on, as quoted in the film: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
The showing of The Birth of a Nation was indicative of Wilson’s attitudes: during his administration, government departments in Washington were segregated.
Rating America’s Presidents also shows how another Democrat, James Buchanan, presided over the dissolution of the Union in the years leading up to the Civil War, appealing to the South not to secede by adopting a full-hearted, enthusiastic endorsement of slavery and all it represented. On March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan took office, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, published its infamous ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, a case that had been brought by Dred Scott, a slave who had been taken into free territory and argued that, as a result, he was now free. The court voted 7–2 against Scott. In his opinion, Taney wrote that blacks were a “subordinate and inferior class of beings” who “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
Buchanan strongly endorsed the decision. However, the Dred Scott decision was fundamentally incoherent. As Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis noted in his dissent, blacks at the beginning of the republic had the right to vote in five states; how, then, could Taney declare that they were not and had never been intended to be citizens? (This was long before the idea became fashionable that non-citizens should vote in American elections and receive the fruit of American taxpayers’ labor.) But Buchanan had neither the wit nor the imagination to think through the implications of that fact, even if he had been inclined to do so.
At that time, the Kansas Territory had two governments: one in Topeka that outlawed slavery and enjoyed the support of a majority of Kansans and another in Lecompton that was pro-slavery. When the Lecompton government sent a proposed pro-slavery state constitution to Washington, Buchanan accepted it, despite the fact that he was committed to the principle of popular sovereignty and that slavery would almost certainly have been voted down in a free and fair election in Kansas. The president tried to win support for the Lecompton Constitution in Congress with a variety of favors and perks, but the House voted it down anyway. Buchanan kept pushing for Kansans to accept it, offering them all manner of inducements also, but they, too, voted it down. They didn’t want slavery, no matter how determined President Buchanan was that they have it.
Joe Biden doesn’t know and almost certainly doesn’t care about any of this, and probably didn’t even when he was of sound mind. American history, the record of our successes and our missteps, and of our struggles and sacrifices to create the freest society the world has ever known, is of no importance whatsoever — indeed, it is actively offensive — to the leftists who are determined to “fundamentally transform” this free society into one that is decidedly unfree. That is why it is all the more important for patriots to arm themselves about our nation’s history so that we can defend it more effectively and beat back the opportunistic and corrosive lies of Biden and his handlers. What we do not know, we do not value. What we do not value, we will lose.
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The following is reprinted from The Stream, June 5, 2016, and it is more relevant today than ever. The author, Mark Tooley, is a conservative Methodist and president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). It is a brilliant and important rebuttal of Leftist mythology about American history.
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Last evening Native American activist Mark Charles, as the opening plenary speaker at the evangelical Justice Conference in Chicago [‘Let Justice Roll,’ June 3-4, 2016], denounced the Declaration of Independence as “systemically racist.” The Justice Conference tweeted this comment, to which I responded, leading to other retweets, and resulting in deletion of the original tweet, presumably to avoid further controversy. Charles apparently also denounced the Constitution as racist and told his audience: “Everything you own is stolen.”
According to my colleague Chelsen Vicari, who’s attending the Justice Conference, the crowd of mostly young evangelicals liked Charles’ comments, and subsequent speakers approvingly referenced them. Mark Reddy, the event’s executive director, spoke after Charles to encourage everyone to “sit in it,” be uncomfortable and “not allow yourselves to get offended” by what we heard.
Well, I’m offended, and anyone of any religion who cares about history, human rights and the uplift of humanity should be too. The Justice Conference is sponsored by World Relief, the global humanitarian arm of National Association of Evangelicals. Charles is an increasingly popular speaker at events for mostly white, upper middle class, highly educated urban evangelicals who evidently feel empowered and sophisticated by Charles’ guilt trip.
If Charles wants to provide a scholarly overview of centuries of injustices against American Indians, he could thoughtfully do so without smugly denouncing the whole American project as a wicked sham. The Declaration of Independence and its historically revolutionary affirmation of human equality have uplifted and inspired hundreds of millions of people globally of all races and ethnicities. Indeed, thanks a great deal to the Declaration and its startling claim, there are few regimes or ideologies today in the world that don’t at least pay insincere lip service to human equality. That claim is rooted in the ethical system and anthropology of Judaism and Christianity, asserting that all humans are of equal value before God, and that all societies seeking justice will recognize legal equality for all people.
There are many thousands of human rights advocates who have been persecuted, jailed, tortured and killed, across decades and around the world, continuing even today, because of their direct fidelity to the Declaration and its ideals. Heroic dissidents in Cuba, China, Vietnam, Sudan, or countless other places, would decidedly not share Charles’ disdain for America’s founding document. Nor did human rights crusaders like Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa.
As an escaped slave and fearless abolitionist, here’s what Douglas said:
I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
Here’s MLK in his “I Have a Dream” speech: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The high point of his peroration quoted the Declaration: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”
Here’s Nelson Mandela, recently released from prison after decades of resistance to Apartheid, addressing the U.S. Congress: “We could not have made an acquaintance through literature with human giants such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson and not been moved to act, as they were moved to act. We could not have heard of and admired John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. We could not have heard of these and not be moved to act as they were moved to act. We could not have known of your Declaration of Independence and not elected to join in the struggle to guarantee the people’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” ...
The writers of the Declaration of Independence were, like all of us, sinners and hypocrites. They didn’t fully live up to their own ideals, and neither does anyone. But their courage and insight, likely far superior to anybody among us alive today, enriched all humanity.
Charles challenges the Declaration’s brief reference to “merciless savages” whom the Americans complained the British crown supported in alliance against the colonies. How does Charles propose to describe the 18th century style of Indian warfare that unashamedly kidnapped, tortured and mutilated men, women and children indiscriminately, comparable to if not worse than ISIS today? My own Scots-Irish ancestors, having escaped hardships in Belfast, and living on the Virginia frontier in the 1700s, were attacked one day by warriors from distant Ohio. He was left for dead, she was kidnapped with her baby, her eye knocked out by one warrior, her crying baby repeatedly threatened with death. Mother and child were captive in Ohio until rescued months later. They got off easy compared to many others.
The Justice Conference is devoted especially to advocating for immigrants. The main victims of Indian attacks in the 1700s weren’t the established rich on the east coast but working class recent immigrant families like my ancestors who couldn’t afford to live in safer lands. Charles could correctly critique savagery in European and American warfare, but he should not minimize Indian savagery. The pagan tribes, like pagan cultures everywhere, from which we all ultimately descend, had their own rough ideas of honor and justice that are rightly abhorrent to nearly everyone today. Values descending from the Ten Commandments and Sermon on the Mount, as expressed in the Declaration’s assertion of human equality, however unevenly upheld, should seem infinitely preferable, especially at evangelical conferences.
As to Charles’ dark claim that “Everything you own is stolen,” alas, it is true everywhere among fallen humanity in some sense, and was true in America long before Europeans arrived. When the first English came to Virginia, the Powhatan Confederacy, founded by the great chief who was father to Pocahontas, had conquered, dispossessed and wiped out dozens of competing tribes while establishing his own vast empire. Even more than Europe at the time, pre-European America was a churning cauldron of tribal warfare, shifting alliances, conquests, genocides and constantly fluid boundaries. Today’s America, where millions from many races and ethnicities, constantly joined by arriving new immigrants, live in relative peace and equality, seems vastly preferable to the supposed Arcadia of ancient, constant tribal warfare.
If a Mark Charles of the early 1600s had sought to critique the conquests and rapaciousness of the Powhatan Confederacy, perhaps on a religious speaking circuit across the Virginia tidewater, the old Chief likely would have impatiently had obliging warriors bash the dissident’s head against a rock. Mercifully, thanks to the Declaration and Constitution, every American can speak his or her mind freely, whether wisely or not, to any receptive audience.
But I hope Mark Charles and his various evangelical hosts will consider a broader, less myopic perspective. It should be based not on the fashionable, reflexively anti-Western biases of secular academia, so rich in grievance, but instead on a realistic and generous Christian understanding that all humanity is sinful, with honesty about all our depravities, every culture’s, past and present. And it should also be grateful for our countless, incomparable blessings of today, with appreciation, not just contempt, for past generations who, by divine grace, helped make today possible.
— Author: Mark Tooley, Reprinted from The Stream, June 5, 2016
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Ever wonder exactly how schools breed America-haters? Here’s how.
A Leftist protester in Portland recently announced that the goal of the riots that have recently swept the nation is the “abolition of the United States as we know it,” to the applause of her audience (which included not just miseducated children, but a middle-aged priest who should have known better). Rioters around the country, who are overwhelmingly young, middle-class Americans, have made abundantly clear their incandescent hatred for the United States. In the midst of all this, the California Department of Education has given us a vivid illustration of how we got here. It has developed an “Ethnic Studies” curriculum that would make Joseph Goebbels proud.
The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported Thursday that “more than a dozen California school boards have adopted resolutions in support of the state’s proposed ethnic-studies model curriculum, despite it having come under fire for containing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content, and not addressing issues of anti-Semitism or including Jewish Americans.”
It’s all happening under the cover of darkness, deception, and coronavirus distraction, thanks to a group called “Save CA Ethnic Studies.” A letter to the California Department of Education (CDE) protesting the curriculum states: “School board members asked to vote on the resolution are not shown the original draft curriculum, and not informed about the enormous outpouring of criticism it engendered or that a CDE process is well underway for the curriculum’s redesign.”
The letter adds that school board members are “led to believe that in voting for the resolution they are showing support for AB-2016 and affirming the importance of ethnic studies classes in general, rather than endorsing the highly controversial draft curriculum that was condemned by dozens of state leaders and tens of thousands of Californians.”
The curriculum could have been devised in the editorial offices of Der Stürmer. According to JNS, “the proposed curriculum section on ‘Arab American Studies Course Outline’ contains a number of passages concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as ‘Direct Action Front for Palestine and Black Lives Matter,’ ‘Call to Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel’ and ‘Comparative Border Studies: Palestine and Mexico.’”
As if that weren’t enough, the curriculum “also includes studying national figures such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the late Columbia University professor Edward Said, Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, the late radio personality Casey Kasem, actress Alia Shawkat, and the late White House correspondent Helen Thomas—all of whom are associated with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric, and in the case of the congresswomen, a push to enact legislation punishing Israel.”
Even in California, this far-Left propaganda has aroused controversy. Nevertheless, “despite the ongoing debate over the ethnic-studies curriculum, at least 13 school boards in the state have recently passed resolutions affirming their support for the ethnic-studies model curriculum draft: Hayward (April 22), Castro Valley (April 23), Albany (April 28), San Francisco (April 28), West Contra Costa (May 6), Alhambra (May 19), Oakland (May 27), South San Francisco (May 28), Jefferson Union (June 2), Jefferson Elementary (June 17), San Mateo Foster City (June 18), El Monte Union (June 24) and Santa Rosa City Schools (July 8).”
Nor is this proposed curriculum remotely singular. The commitment to “multiculturalism” that has now taken over K-12 education in America has been a godsend for Muslims in particular who are anxious to use schools and textbooks not just to preach hatred of Jews and Israel, but to proselytize for Islam. Worried about appearing insufficiently “tolerant” and “inclusive,” too many public schools and individual teachers have succumbed to an organized campaign by U.S.-based Islamic organizations and their primary benefactor, Saudi Arabia, to present a view of Islam that whitewashes its violent history and intolerant doctrines.
Combine this with the deeply-rooted Leftist bias of curriculum material, and it is no surprise that American children graduate from all too many high schools, colleges and universities hating not just Israel, but their own country and heritage. It creates a population that is rife for insurrection. What we’re seeing now is the outcome of years, indeed decades, of this hard-Left, anti-American indoctrination. When the Left took over our educational system, what other outcome did anyone expect?
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July 26, 2018
Julius Streicher was the creator and editor of Der Sturmer, the notorious anti-Semitic newspaper of the Nazi era. He was a hateful bigot of mediocre intelligence, loved by his leader and despised by his fellow Nazis, not for his moral repugnance, but because they generally despised each other. Streicher’s hatred of the Jews was profound and malignant, his ideology rotten to the core, full of lies and contempt. Arrogant and cruel, Streicher showed no remorse for the hatred he spread or the devastation it wrought; rather, he reveled in it and pushed on, until all of Germany was infested with the foul stench of his hatred.
Born February 12, 1885 in the Bavarian town of Fleinhausen, Streicher’s childhood was poor, but happy. The youngest of nine children in a devout Catholic family, his mediocre intelligence ensured he matured into adulthood with a mind that was small and coarse. Though he knew no Jews growing up, his Catholicism provided fertile soil for his later hatred, courtesy of the erroneous foundation of Christian anti-Semitism: that the Jews killed their Christ.
When he left school, he became a teacher; and not a very good one by all accounts. He married and had two sons and looked set to live the life of a drudge, until an angry Bosnian took a potshot at an Austrian nobleman and sparked the First World War. Streicher fought valiantly for his country, gaining both distinction and an Iron Cross, First Class, a significant German military award. During his service, he earned the rank of lieutenant and several citations for bad behavior.
After the war, Streicher returned to a Germany that was seething over its loss of the war and reeling under the weight of the reparations imposed by the victors, to say nothing of the collective trauma of losing almost an entire generation of young men. Unemployment was high, the economy in ruins, and political extremism, rampant. In 1919, Streicher became involved in the German Nationalist Protection and Defense Federation, which was formed in response to the failed German Communist revolution of 1918. The Federation was deeply anti-Semitic and blamed Jews for the loss of the war and the spread of Bolshevism.
In 1921, Streicher attended a meeting of the National Socialist German Workers (NAZI) Party; he was there to hear the Party’s leader, Adolph Hitler, speak. Hitler’s hate-filled rhetoric penetrated Streicher on a spiritual level – like Saul on the road to Damascus – compelling him to join the Nazi Party and become a devoted follower of Hitler. In 1923, his devotion was made manifest with the founding of Der Sturmer (lit: The Stormer or Attacker). The chief aim of Streicher’s weekly rag was to disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda, which demonized Jews and championed the Nazi cause: namely, the building of an Aryan super state, free of Jews and other undesirables.
In its infancy, Der Sturmer was not well received. Most sensible minded Germans, including top Nazi officials, viewed it as nothing more than the libelous ravings of a nutjob. Hitler loved it. The courts agreed with everyone else, heavily fining Streicher for his lies.
Each issue of Der Sturmer relied on contemporary iterations of age-old anti-Semitic tropes, The Blood Libel and world domination among them, mixed in with titillating, semi-pornographic drivel, and the frontpage by-line: The Jews are our misfortune.
Like all good conspiracy theorists, Streicher included a grain of truth in his articles, usually in the form of an actual person, to whom he ascribed all manner of ridiculous misdeeds; tales so ludicrous, only a reader with the mental acuity of a gnat would believe.
Unfortunately, hate begets stupidity; so, when Hitler seized power and hate-mongering became a national pastime, Der Sturmer readership rose from 10’s to 100,000’s per week, making Streicher a millionaire. The more patently ridiculous the stories, the more the Streicher’s readers gobbled them up. Hitler was in his element and read it cover to cover each week and insisted everyone else read it too. To aid this, special display cases (called Sturmerkasten) were erected in towns, so no one missed out.
Sturmerkasten, Worms, Germany
So delighted was Hitler with his vulgar lackey, he made Streicher the Gauleiter (regional leader) of the Bavarian region of Franconia. Streicher used his new-found power to wicked ends, organizing a boycott of Jewish shops in 1933, and the destruction of The Great Synagogue of Nuremberg in 1938, precipitating Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), during which 91 Jewish lives were lost, 8000 Jewish properties destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Streicher also took it upon himself to indoctrinate German youth with anti-Semitic ideology. To this end, he published three children’s books written by Ernst Hiemer and illustrated by Philipp Rupprecht (pen name Fips), Der Sturmer’s cartoonist since 1925. The most famous of these books was Der Giftpilz (“The Poisonous Mushroom”) an odious manual, warning children of the dangers of Jews.
The Poisonous Mushroom. Published 1938.
In 1940, Streicher was dismissed from his post as Gauleiter when it came to light he’d helped himself to Jewish property during Kristallnacht. Not that Nazis were averse to theft, rather, all stolen property belonged in the coffers of the Reich. Streicher’s release from his Gauleiter duties meant he had more time to dedicate to his pathological Jew-baiting, which continued unhindered until the bitter end.
That end came in 1945, when Germany lost the war (again) and Streicher was captured by the Americans and put on trial in his hometown of Nuremberg. Having taken no part in the waging of war or the decision-making process responsible for the Holocaust, Streicher was tried as a major war criminal based solely on the things that he said (a cautionary tale for any who suppose the privilege of free speech is bulwark against consequence).
What he said was considered so odious, so incendiary, that he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang. His hanging went badly. Having declared his allegiance to his dead Reich, the floor beneath him gave way, but his neck did not break, so he jiggled and moaned until the life was slowly choked out of him, receiving one last kindness from humanity when his executioner pulled on his legs.
References:
Bytwerk, Randall L. (2001) Julius Streicher, Cooper Square Press, New York.
Carruthers, B. (2014) Architects of Darkness: Julius Streicher, Total Content Digital
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The explosion of lawless rioting on American streets was only a matter of time. Sixty-two years ago, former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen wrote “The Naked Communist” to warn Americans about how communists planned to destroy our system from within, not by means of sudden revolution as envisioned by Karl Marx, but through a version of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s “cultural Marxism.” With a nod to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it has been a “long march through the institutions” that has brought us to the brink of catastrophe—and much of it began in our schools.
Chapter 13 of Skousen’s book lists 45 goals of communism in America. Number 17 reads: “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of the teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.” And so they did. While American parents were busy working to sustain their families and achieve a piece of the American dream, their children were at schools with teachers and textbooks that taught them to hate America, the Judeo-Christian foundations of our national identity, and the remarkable individuals who built this country on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and more.
As a result, the brainwashed generations of automatons marching in lockstep out of such schools possess neither critical thinking nor the intellectual ability to appreciate the brilliance and opportunity bequeathed to them by the great philosophers of Western Civilization. But, as Gramsci envisioned, they enter the ranks of art, film, music, literature, faith communities, government, media, and of course, academia, in droves. There will be no need for gulags or firing squads—or at least, not much. As KGB defector Yuriy Bezmenov told us, subversion is a far more destructive weapon than violence. Today, we face a situation perhaps only slightly exaggerated in this recent quote from Jeff Nyquist: “The Constitution of the United States is something alien to most of the persons who occupy the actual government formed under it”. [Emphasis in the original.]
So, how did this happen?
The plot to destroy Western Civilization was hatched in Moscow shortly after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and implemented through the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University (later simply, The Frankfurt School). John Dewey, Herbert Marcuse, and others brought socialist concepts of “progressivism” to U.S. schools through the National Education Association. Out went E Pluribus Unum; the firm, fixed principles of math and science; the accurate teaching of historical fact; and all religion. In their place came the indoctrination of critical race theory, identity grievance, and the angry psychobabble of “victimhood.”
Textbooks like Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” (1980) and “A Young People’s History of the United States” (2007) that are used across the U.S. from middle school through university, distort the true historical record and paint America as irredeemably oppressive, racist, and unjust. As I wrote in “Santa Barbara School District: Where Marxism & Black Lives Matter -- But Academics, Not So Much,” at Front Page Magazine on 19 June 2020, Zinn’s ‘solution’ was class warfare that pits identity and minority groups against one another, rejects American exceptionalism, abandons free market capitalism, and goads impressionable students to anger, despair, and hopelessness about their own country. Psychologically twisted revolutionaries steeped in Marxist hatred like Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground set off bombs, smashed windows, and assaulted police in the 1960s-1970s. But instead of going to prison, Ayers went into academia and later held the joint titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he imparted his hatred for his homeland to further generations of students. Proclaiming Justice to the Nations founder Laurie Cardoza-Moore appeared on Fox and Friends Weekend on 11 July 2020 and rightly noted that “The greatest national security threat to the United States is coming from U.S. history textbooks and the Common Core curriculum.”
Decades of such indoctrination have wreaked the havoc we see today on our streets: crazed mobs attack police, assault private citizens and business owners, vandalize property federal and private alike, tear down statues without even knowing whom they represent, set up “autonomous zones”, deface synagogues, and scream antisemitic slurs. The avatars of the current insurrection are Antifa and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Indeed, BLM even has a national organization called Black Lives Matter at School (BLMS), whose signature objective is the mandatory injection of Black History and Ethnic Studies into U.S. school curricula. A project of the Movement4BlackLives (whose horrifically antisemitic, racist 2016 Program is now archived online), BLMS offers an online Curriculum Resource Guide based on the BLM’s guiding principles and other materials that promote the three African-American Marxist women who founded BLM, “queer and transgender affirming,” “globalism,” and “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” BLMS has the endorsement of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the U.S.
In California, a proposed Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC), which is among other things both antisemitic and anti-Israel, has been under consideration and revision for more than a year. But even as the revision process grinds on, a group calling itself Save CA Ethnic Studies reportedly is attempting an end-run around the system to hoodwink individual district school boards in CA to vote on a previously criticized and rejected version of the curriculum (sometimes without even being shown the original draft). More than a dozen CA school boards so far have adopted resolutions in support of that earlier proposed ethnic studies curriculum. In response, a letter signed by some 88 state and national organizations has been sent to the California Department of Education to protest the Save CA Ethnic Studies attempted deception as well as its efforts to “indoctrinate students into a highly controversial and divisive set of ideological beliefs that we feared would exacerbate ethnic divisions and foment bigotry in California schools.” Signatories include the American Truth Project, Americans for Peace and Tolerance, B'nai B'rith International, the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), the Legal Insurrection Foundation, Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, The Lawfare Project, the Zionist Organization of America, among many more.
Across the country, however, including in private secondary schools like Phillips Academy Andover, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Sidwell Friends, school systems are pronouncing support for the Marxist BLM agenda as they come under pressure to include materials on “institutionalized racism” in their curricula. In public school systems in New York City, Wake County, NC, the Santa Barbara Unified School District, and others, hard leftist school boards are kowtowing to the belligerent demands of Black Student Youth groups and others. At the Santa Barbara Unified School District Board Meeting of 9 June 2020, for example, resolutions were accepted declaring that “all Students Deserve Justice, Equity, and Freedom” and declaring February 2-5, 2021 as Black Lives Matter In School Week (one of the demands of the BLMS group). Then, two weeks later, in a Resolution dated 23 June 2020, the Santa Barbara School District passed a resolution declaring, among other things, that “racism is a public health emergency,” and resolving that “the Santa Barbara Unified School District will develop and purchase culturally relevant resources for educators and families for distribution and posting on the district website that 1) teach about, celebrate, uphold, and affirm the lives of Black people…” (It is not specified from whom or in accordance with which regular bidding process such purchase of “relevant resources” would be affected.)
This is but an overview of the Marxist agenda that has been for decades and is continuing to this day to be jammed down the throats of America’s students. Hitherto unsuspecting parents are waking up, though, especially during this time of online instruction during the coronavirus crisis. They are seeing, sometimes for the first time, what their children are being taught—and many are furious. The more questions the parents are asking, the more the school boards are resorting to deception and obfuscation, deliberately to exclude the very families with whose children they have been entrusted. It’s not their children and it’s not their money. Parents increasingly are attending school board meetings and demanding answers. They are doing what any patriotic and responsible American parents would do to ensure their children are not being indoctrinated and recruited by shadowy Marxist interests to hate them and the country they love.
With our nation under siege, as Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft wrote in a 7 July 2020 piece, “We cannot claim to truly appreciate the Founders and the nation they secured for us while simultaneously refusing to do what it takes to keep and maintain this nation.”
“We are the keepers of the flame of liberty” (President Ronald Reagan, 1986)
Clare M. Lopez is the Founder/President of Lopez Liberty LLC.
MARXIST-INFLUENCED LOS ANGELES TEACHERS UNION CALLS FOR DEFUNDING THE POLICE (Friday Church News Notes, July 24, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - A fundamental part of America’s destruction is the radicalization of the public schools, which have become humanistic brainwashing centers. A major factor was the introduction of Darwinianism in the first half of the 20th century. The radicalization is illustrated by the United Teachers Los Angeles, a union of 35,000 teachers and administrators. They are making the following demands before the schools can reopen: charter schools must be closed (these totalitarians don’t want to grant “minorities” a choice in education), police must be defunded, medicare-for-all and new taxes on the wealthy must be enacted (UTLA.net). We agree that the Los Angeles schools should not be reopened until those demands are met. Hopefully that will mean they will be closed permanently. We stopped supporting the public schools in America nearly 50 years ago, when the situation was not nearly as nutty and wicked as it is today. “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11).
TRANSSEXUAL ANTIFA ACTIVIST SAYS THEY ARE ORGANIZING FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE UNITED STATES (Friday Church News Notes, July 24, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - At a news event outside the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, an Antifa activist got applause from the crowd, including a Catholic priest, when she said she is organizing for the abolition of the United States. “My name is Lilith Sinclair, and I am an Afro-Indigenous non-binary local organizer here in Portland, organizing for the abolition of not just the militarized police state, but also the United States that we know” (@MrAndyNgo, July 19, 2020). (Non-binary refers to transsexualism.) Sinclair also identified herself as a “sex worker.” Antifa has been rioting night after night for two months in Portland, causing tens of millions of dollars in damage and many bodily injuries, including the vicious assault of a street preacher. Daryl Turner, head of the Portland Police Association, said, “The elected officials have condoned the destruction and chaos.” The Democratic city government refuses to let the police arrest the leaders and shut down the riots, trying to shift blame to federal agents who are tasked with guarding federal property. Ultimately, Antifa is at war with God and His holy laws, and that is a no-win situation. We recommend repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ before it is too late. The Bible describes the future of all evildoers. “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the LORD, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass. And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday. Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil. For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be (Psalm 37:1-10).
SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM’S MARXIST PROPAGANDA AGAINST CHRISTIANITY (Friday Church News Notes, July 24, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Smithsonian Goes Full Marxist,” PJMedia, July 15, 2020: “In June, while Americans were focused on the protests and riots that engulfed U.S. cities in the wake of the horrific police killing of George Floyd, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) released an online ‘teaching tool’ called ‘Talking About Race.’ ... According to the infographic, ‘whiteness’ includes cultural aspects like ‘Rugged Individualism’ and the ‘Family Structure’ (including the nuclear family, the husband as the breadwinner, and the wife as homemaker and subordinate to the husband). An ‘emphasis on the scientific method’ is supposedly part of ‘whiteness,’ including three bullet points: ‘Objective, rational linear thinking;’ ‘Cause and effect relationships;’ and ‘Quantitative emphasis.’ ... In the field of religion, the infographic claims that ‘Christianity is the norm,’ that ‘anything other than Judeo-Christian tradition is foreign’ and that there is ‘no tolerance for deviation from single god concept.’ ... Under ‘Justice,’ whiteness allegedly involves following English common law, protecting ‘property & entitlements,’ and considering the intent of an action. ... Even simple values like ‘be polite’ qualify as especially ‘white,’ according to the graphic. ... According to the [cultural] Marxist narrative, white males have oppressed blacks, Asians, women, transgender people, and others, and the key goal of ‘social justice’ is to dethrone the whites and empower the minorities. ... The Smithsonian carries a great deal of cultural weight and its decision to demonize many central aspects of American culture as relics of ‘whiteness’ will only add fuel to the movement to overhaul America’s culture and founding principles. ... The federally-funded institution should be defending American culture, not demonizing the nuclear family, capitalism, the Judeo-Christian heritage, and science.”
‘There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology,’ says clinic’s board chair
Planned Parenthood of Greater New York
Dear Friend,
As a valued member of our community, we want to let you know that we are removing Margaret Sanger’s name from our Manhattan Health Center today.
The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color (learn more about Margaret Sanger’s legacy).
This is an important step, but only the beginning of the work we need to do to address our past and work toward becoming an anti-racist organization. The is part of PPGNY’s Reviving Radical initiative - an initial three-year commitment and framework for holding long overdue dialogues and uplifting a vision for repair and transformation that communities of color and reproductive justice leaders have been calling on for decades. Learn about PPGNY’s Reviving Radical initiative.
The work leading up to this moment at PPGNY is decades in the making and led by staff who are guided by women of color’s scholarship, advocacy and wisdom that shape our understanding of Sanger today and the need to broaden the framework of reproductive rights and access to include justice. We acknowledge staff and supporters that advocated over the years whose names and contributions are lost to time.
Here are the Reviving Radical Community Mandates put forth by those in attendance and that we are committing to as an organization:
Reckon with Planned Parenthood’s legacy and contributions to historical reproductive harm of communities of color
Divest from and dismantle white dominant organizational cultural norms and values
Adopt Individual and Institutional practices that value people of color
Center the voices, experiences and knowledge of self of communities of color
Build accountable relationships with communities of color
As of today, the health center is called the Manhattan Health Center. We are also starting conversations with the City Council, the Community Board, and the local community to rename an honorary street sign that marks the “Margaret Sanger Square” at the intersection of Bleecker and Mott Streets in Manhattan.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
A Planned Parenthood clinic in downtown New York is reckoning with the “racist legacy” of its founder Margaret Sanger, admitting her work in eugenics has had a negative impact on the reproduction of people of color.
The Planned Parenthood Clinic of Greater New York in Manhattan announced Tuesday it will remove Sanger’s name from its title, the Manhattan Health Center, and says it’s also working with the city to remove her name from an honorary street sign near the clinic.
Credit: Google Maps
The clinic’s board chair explained the move comes after re-examining how Sanger’s work in the field of eugenics affected communities of color.
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” said PPGNY board chair Karen Seltzer.
“Margaret Sanger’s concerns and advocacy for reproductive health have been clearly documented, but so too has her racist legacy. There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology, which runs completely counter to our values at PPGNY. Removing her name is an important step toward representing who we are as an organization and who we serve.”
While Seltzer gave no examples of Sanger’s “racist legacy” or her “eugenic ideology,” one need only look to her own writings to see how she wanted to exterminate much of humanity through population control, getting rid of so-called “undesirables” who would be sterilized, segregated or forced onto birth control.
“Eugenics” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic composition.”
In a 1919 letter titled, “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Sanger wrote how selective breeding could “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.”
“Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue in the solution of racial, political and social problems.”
As noted in Alex Jones’ 2007 documentary, “Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement,” Sanger also recommended in a letter to fellow eugenicist Clarence J. Gamble discussing the “Negro Project” that hiring a “negro physician” could be helpful in convincing “colored negroes” in the South about the value of eugenics.
“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” Sanger wrote.
While this one clinic is recognizing its founder’s evil past, the time is quickly approaching when the entire Planned Parenthood organization, built on Sanger’s work as a eugenicist, will have to answer for her – as the leftist cancel culture comes back home to roost.
Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic… The Constitution of the Republic should make special provisions for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom.”
– DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, George Washington’s personal doctor and a signer of the Declaration of Independence
What does freedom mean to you? The right to free speech? The right to bear arms? The right to worship as you see fit? At its core, freedom means autonomy. The right to decide how you want to live your life. The right to make decisions for you and your family without interference from governments, armies, or corporate interests.
That includes the freedom of medical choice. Can you imagine a world in which the government told you what you could and couldn’t eat? What if there was a mandate telling you how much you needed to exercise or when you should go to bed? The government has absolutely NO BUSINESS meddling in our health and medical choices.
And yet that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.
Whether you support medical interventions like vaccines and chemotherapy, we all share a common belief that American citizens should never be forced to undergo treatment against their will. But corrupt politicians – and the corporate interests that sponsor them – have been actively fighting to strip you of your fundamental rights.
From medical kidnapping to mandatory vaccinations and stay at home orders, our public servants have betrayed us. Those meant to serve the people have taken it upon themselves to strip us of the very freedoms that define us.
It’s time to fight back.
That’s why we created the United Medical Freedom Super PAC “UMFSP”. We believe that it’s time to end the totalitarian reign of fascist leaders and authoritarian mandates. It’s time that our government started working FOR the people instead of against them. And it’s time that the politicians in the pocket of Big Pharma are kicked out of office.
We created the UMFSP to educate, empower, and emancipate the American people. We want you to know exactly which elected officials are working in the service of freedom… and which officials have been corrupted by greed. By joining our cause, you can become a warrior on the front lines in the battle for freedom. You can protect your children and your children’s children from the dictatorial rule of those who oppose freedom and the American way.
The UMFSP has 7 specific objectives, and YOU can be among the first to join our righteous crusade for liberty. For too long, we have been deceived and manipulated. It’s time that we wake up, wise up, and rise up against this tyranny so that no American will ever again live in fear of their own government.
The following list represents the specific ways that we, working as a united front, can make a difference.
Censorship
In today’s world, information is more accessible than ever before. Unfortunately, misinformation can be spread just as quickly (if not moreso) than the truth. Major media outlets, social platforms, and targeted advertising have been mouthpieces for the propaganda of corporate interests and corrupt politicians.
For too long, major media outlets have oppressed one of the core values on which this country was founded: freedom of speech. Those who speak out against untested vaccines, corruption in our government, and pay-to-play chemotherapy have been labeled as “conspiracy theorists” and “quacks” and “fake news.”
Freedom of speech is one of the fundamental rights upon which this country was founded. And yet, virtually every mainstream outlet for exchanging information has become so biased that the truth is now hidden, “debunked,” or flat-out deleted. We need to end this assault on our freedoms and support platforms, representatives, and legislation that supports the right of every American to hear the TRUTH.
On our own, we have very little power against such massive media influence. But together, can overcome this push toward medical tyranny and domination over the people. We believe that we can restore this great Republic.
Vaccines
No matter what your personal decision is regarding vaccines, we believe that every American has the constitutional and God-given right to choose what we put into our bodies. But the medical mafia, through bribery and lies, has ushered in an age where that choice is no longer ours to make.
It feels like we’re slowly slipping towards a dystopian nightmare in which a tyrannical medical industry decides what information is allowed and what isn’t. Questioning the industry is not allowed. If you’re hesitant to inject your newborn with dozens of viruses and harmful adjuvants before their first birthday, you’re crazy. Even suggesting that the companies developing these vaccines may not have our best interests in mind will leave you branded a menace to society.
Federal agencies are working vigorously on a propaganda campaign designed for one purpose: to increase vaccine administration at any cost. They’re accomplishing this by exaggerating and exploiting a crisis, inciting public outrage, tracking opponents, and controlling the media.
Simply take a look at the National Adult Immunization Plan (NAIP), which was published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS oversees the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Each of these operating divisions are essentially a revolving door for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries.
Not only are they heavily influenced by money from these industries, but their agents are often former industry employees, receiving high-level jobs in the private sector once their public service has ended, or both. In fact, it’s so convoluted that the private companies who manufacture vaccines are no longer liable for proper testing or any injuries caused by their products.
We will also provide access to important information from experts like Dr. Judy Mikovitz, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., all of whom are experts on vaccine safety and medical freedom. These people have been actively censored in the media because their message interferes with the interests of Big Pharma. We want to help spread their message of truth for all to hear.
We believe that no free American should be forced to inject themselves or their children with ANY drug against their will. When it comes to vaccine mandates, the UMFSP will work tirelessly to support candidates, legislation, and activist groups that will defend our right to medical freedom.
Sheriffs
No law truly matters if it is not enforced. All too often, it falls on local law enforcement to uphold totalitarian mandates like forced vaccination, court-ordered chemotherapy, or social distancing guidelines. These officials are the true muscle behind these laws and illegal orders. The way that they respond can mean the difference between liberty and slavery.
That’s why the UMFSP will work tirelessly to promote and support sheriffs that have vowed to uphold your constitutional freedoms – even if that means taking a stand against a corrupt government. Fortunately, there are still many elected leaders who will support your freedoms in the face of tyranny and unjust rule.
In Colorado, several Sheriffs have refused to enforce red flag laws that strip citizens of due process and put both gun owners and law enforcement officers in harm’s way. In Snohomish County, Wash., Sheriff Adam Fortney is refusing to enforce the governor’s stay-at-home order, which he says “intrudes on our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
In California, at least sheriffs have refused to enforce Governor Gavin Newsome’s illegal mandate for all citizens to wear masks. Sheriff Richard Mack of Graham County, Arizona took the defense of our liberties so seriously that he took his fight against unconstitutional laws all the way to the Supreme Court.
In 2011 Mack founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). The organization has a mission similar to Oath Keepers, encouraging members to refuse to enforce laws that they believe are unconstitutional.
The UMFSP will work to support sheriffs like Richard Mack who faithfully protect our liberty in the face of oppression.
Charities
The UMFSP is not the first group to fight back against medical tyranny, and we want to support our partners and other charities that have provided support for families who have been oppressed by an unjust government. One of these charities is Children’s Health Defense.
Founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Children’s Health Defense Team is devoted to the health of people and our planet. Their mission is to end the childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable, and establish safeguards so this never happens again.
Another charity that we support is the Informed Consent Action Network. Founded by Del Bigtree (one of the creators of Vaxxed), the Informed Consent Action Network believes that you hold the ultimate authority over your health choices and those of your children.
In a medical world manipulated by advertising and financial interests, true information is hard to find and often harder to understand. Their goal is to put the power of scientifically researched health information in your hands and to be bold and transparent in doing so, enabling your medical decisions to come from tangible understanding… not medical coercion.
We will actively seek out charities that support victims of medical kidnapping, unlawful vaccination, and those whose constitutional and religious freedoms have been trampled.
Volunteerism
There are many ways that you can get involved, and becoming a member of the UMFSP is just the beginning. You help by advocating for the oppressed and victims of vaccine injury, spreading the word about honest, loyal candidates who will protect our medical freedoms, or by donating to help us support sheriffs, politicians, and other organizations who will stand beside us as we take back our fundamental rights.
News
In order to combat the massive amounts of propaganda and misinformation that currently exist, we will keep you updated on all the latest medical and political news as it pertains to medical freedom. From pending legislation, to scientific studies, the UMFSP will be the first to get you the information you need to make educated decisions about your family’s health.
The Time is Now
We are at a dangerous tipping point in our nation’s history. Never before have our elected officials worked so aggressively – and so effectively – to strip away our medical freedom, religious freedos, and our freedom of speech. Big Pharma and the medical mafia wield so much power in our legislative processes that it may seem impossible to stop them.
But when we are united, we are strong.
There is an active propaganda machine working as a precursor to compulsory vaccination mandates around the world. Fear is already being manufactured, opposition is already being silenced, and ordinary people are already so polarized that civil discussion is hard to come by. But we are not alone. Elected officials like Rand Paul and Robert F Kennedy, Jr. have been vocal in their opposition to mandatory vaccination. As long as we have a voice, we have a choice.
You can stand up to your local state governments and demand that exemption policies remain intact. You can let politicians know that anyone taking money from big pharma stands no chance of re-election. You can vote with your dollars by refusing to support companies that actively stifle freedom. And you can make a difference by becoming well-informed so that you can have respectful, evidence-based discourse with those who disagree with you.
And you can get started right now by joining the United Medical Freedom Super PAC today.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
A Fox News poll conducted July 12-15 surveyed Americans’ views on our nation’s Founders. The result showed that while a majority of those polled still viewed our Founding Fathers favorably, the approval margin was not nearly as universal as it might have been a generation or two ago. Only 63 percent regarded our Founders as heroes, while 15 percent said they were villains. Another 15 percent said “it depends” and seven percent had no opinion.
There were major differences among those polled, according to their political affiliation, race, religious persuasion, age, or place of residence.
Survey participants most likely to call our Founders “heroes” included Republican women (82 percent), Republicans (79 percent), White evangelical Christians (77 percent), self-identified very conservatives (77 percent) and White suburban voters (72 percent).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, those most inclined to consider our Founders as “villains” included Black voters (39 percent), self-identified very liberals (37 percent), non-White women (35 percent), women under age 45 (29 percent), and millennials (24 percent). Even among these demographic groups, however, these were obviously minority opinions.
When asked if they thought monuments and statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should stay up rather than be taken down, those who said the monuments should remain prevailed by a 57-point margin — 73 percent to 16 percent.
During an interview with Fox & Friends on July 20, political commentator and author Ben Shapiro stated that the fact that “only 63 percent of Americans describe the founders as heroes is devastating, that means that 37 percent of Americans do not describe the founders as heroes, they describe them as either villains or I don’t know.”
Shapiro said, “If you look at the racial cross-tabs it’s really devastating.”
“If you look at the Black community in the United States, according to this poll, a plurality [39-31 percent] of Black Americans believes that founders were villains rather than heroes, which is devastating to the future of the country,” Shapiro observed.
“If you believe that the country was innately founded on sin and evil, it's going to be very difficult to reach the sort of national unity that we require in order to move forward and I think that is something the radical Left has been promulgating,” he continued.
Shapiro also commented on his new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
“My book is really about how if a nation is to move forward it has to have a common philosophy, which is the Declaration of Independence, it has to have a common culture, a culture of tolerance, but also a culture of defense of rights and culture of entrepreneurship and the country has to have a common history,” he said.
“We have to share history and believe that we are all part of the same great stream of American history, trying to justify those founding principles, falling short, but eventually succeeding.”
“If we don't believe in those things, the country falls apart,” Shapiro noted.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
While we’re in the midst of a culture war in America right now — as leftists and Communists join hands to sing Kumbaya as the history of this great country is burned to the ground before our very eyes — we would expect the Church to stand as a rational witness to the testimony of Christ in the face of it all.
Let’s be real, the world hates the Church. They hate the Church so bad that they’ve actually co-opted it with leftists to turn her into a God-hating, gospel-denying social justice activism machine — and for many, it has worked.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is now virtually indistinguishable from the radical left on issues of culture. The Southern Baptist president has called on Christians to stand up for LGBTQ rights and his church marched with militant, pro-LGBTQ, anti-Christian anarchists to protest the government and police. This all happens as the gospel has been largely replaced with leftist social activism.
Now, a group of Southern Baptist bloggers who are popular in elite circles — though not all that widely read — are calling on the state of Georgia to replace a statue of Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, with a pro-abortion leftist politician.
“Stephens was the Vice President of the Confederacy and a virulent racist,” William Thornton writes at SBC Voices, “his statue wasn’t chosen almost a century ago by the Georgia legislature for placement in Statuary Hall for his being a progressive slave owner. He’s there because he was VP of the Confederacy and an unashamed racist.”
Besides the fact that the claim is absurd on the face of it, granted that Stephens was what Thornton says he was, his solution is to replace him with someone far worse.
“So, Georgia legislature, take a vote. Replace Stephen’s statue with that of the authentic Civil Rights hero, John Lewis who just died.”
“I’ve always liked Lewis even though his politics were such that I wouldn’t have voted for him in a thousand years,” Thornton writes, “I know of no ethical failures that attach to him.”
Really? Here’s what the National Abortion Federation writes about Lewis and his leftist politics:
“Representative John Lewis was a hero: a man of courage, conviction, and wisdom; an unrelenting champion of civil rights, racial justice, women’s rights, and abortion rights; an exemplar who never gave up hope for a more just country that would be a positive force for a better world.”
You see, these Southern Baptist men don’t view leftist politics such as abortion, feminism, and gay rights as a matter of ethics. To them, only “white supremacists” like Donald Trump and Alexander Stephens are capable of “ethical failures” because they don’t advance the politics of the left. The notion that Stephens’ statue should be replaced by Lewis’ is absolutely stupid. It’s absurd and doesn’t even deserve the rebuke it’s getting in this article. But, sadly, idiotic ideas have consequences, and if history says anything, it’s that dumb ideas like this gain traction really quickly — especially in this climate.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) has published a guide which asserts that hard work, the nuclear family and Christianity itself are negative forms of “whiteness” that should be reconsidered because they are “oppressive”.
Yes, really.
The (NMAAHC) is a Smithsonian Institution museum located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The museum’s guide to “whiteness & white culture” lists examples of “white dominant culture” that have become “normalized” in America and are used to prevent people of color from gaining institutional power.
These examples include;
– Rugged individualism – Self-reliance – The nuclear family, with a mother and a father and 2.3 children – Objective, rational, linear thinking – Hard work – Delayed gratification – Respect for authority – Following time schedules – Christianity as the norm – Planning for the future – English common law justice – Property rights – Being polite
That list is by no means exhaustive either. They detail a number of other perfectly healthy examples of what builds a strong society, suggesting that all of these things are oppressive in some way and are linked to white nationalism and white supremacy.
Perhaps someone should inform the museum that 40-45% of people in Africa are Christians, the vast majority of whom are black. Would they agree that Christianity and the nuclear family are malevolent forms of “whiteness” that need to be abolished?
This is yet another clear sign that the entire Black Lives Matter movement, which is stridently supported by virtually every major cultural, media and corporate institution in America, is based on completely demolishing everything that made America great in the first place.
Donald Trump Jnr. responded to the guide by tweeting, “These aren’t “white” values. They’re American values that built the world’s greatest civilization. They help you succeed here, no matter your color. So make no mistake, Biden’s radicals aren’t coming for “whites,” they’re coming for the entire American way of life.”
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
July 15, 2020
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
Politics is compromising, dirty business, at best, and we aren’t flag wavers for any political party. None of them are godly, to say the least. But truth in history is important.
The Republican Party was formed largely on an anti-slavery platform. It emerged in 1854 to combat the expansion of slavery into American territories and new states. The theme was “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” with “Free Soil” referring to granting western land to farmers.
“In 1865, the Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery.”
The first Republican Party president was Abraham Lincoln, who led the Union’s war against the Southern Confederacy, a war that was not wholly about slavery, but slavery was a fundamental aspect.
In 1865, the Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery.
In 1868, Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment granting citizenship to former slaves and equal protection under the law.
Under President Ulysses Grant (1868-1876), Republicans, backed by federal troops, sought to “Reconstruct” the South and enforce federal laws granting liberties to blacks. They formed “Union Leagues” and fought the Ku Klux Klan and other segregationist forces.
In 1872, the first seven black members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives were Republicans.
In 1873, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives at the federal level and formed “Redeemer” coalitions that gradually gained control over the state governments in the South.
In 1877, federal troops were removed from the Southern states and the era of Reconstruction ended. Democratic-controlled southern governments enacted segregation policies, called “Jim Crow Laws, which effectively disenfranchised blacks and segregated all aspects of society. “The region then became the Solid South, giving overwhelming majorities of its electoral votes and Congressional seats to the Democrats through 1964” (“History of the United States Republican Party,” Wikipedia).
“The timing of the agreement was prompted by the presidential election of 1876 between Democrat Samuel B. Tilden, governor of New York, and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio. When the votes were counted, Tilden led Hayes by one vote in the Electoral College. But the Republicans accused the Democrats of voter fraud, saying they intimidated African-American voters in three Southern states, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, and prevented them from voting, thus fraudulently handing the election to Tilden.
“Congress set up a bipartisan commission made up of five U.S. representatives, five senators and five Supreme Court justices, with a balance of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. They struck a deal: The Democrats agreed to allow Hayes to become president and to respect the political and civil rights of African-Americans if the Republicans would remove all remaining federal troops from Southern states. This effectively ended the era of Reconstruction in the South and consolidated Democratic control, which lasted until the mid-1960s, nearly a century.
“Hayes kept his side of the bargain and removed all federal troops from Southern states within two months of his inauguration. But Southern Democrats reneged on their part of the deal.
“With the federal presence gone, disenfranchisement of African-American voters in the South became widespread and Southern states passed segregationist laws governing virtually all aspects of society--called Jim Crow--that remained intact until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed during the administration of President Lyndon B.Johnson. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed a year later, finally codifying into law the promises made by Southern Democrats in the Compromise of 1877” (“The Compromise of 1877 Set the Stage for the Jim Crow Era,” ThoughtCo.com). __________
The following is excerpted a speech by Dinesh D’Souza, Stanford University, March 2019 [web reference]
The fascists [in Europe], for their part, were deriving and drawing ideas from the United States. This is not known, and I want to give a single example which I have dramatized in my movie The Death of a Nation. ...
Leading members of Nazi Germany, 1935, are in a room and they are drafting the so-called Nuremberg laws. These are the laws that make Jews into second class citizens, and they do three things: they segregate Jews into ghettos, they forbid intermarriage between Jews and other Germans, and they condone confiscation of Jewish property. In other words, state-sponsored discrimination against Jews. The Nazis are sitting there, and basically they are saying, ‘We want to make these laws, but there is no international precedent for them. Nobody has done this type of thing.’ Then one of the Nazis who had studied in the United States said, ‘Actually, gentlemen, you are wrong. Somebody has beaten us to the punch. The Democratic party in the United States has laws that do all of the three things that we want. The Jim Crow laws of the American south have segregation, anti-miscegenation laws outlawing intermarriage, and they condone state-sponsored discrimination. All we have to do is take the laws of the Democratic party, cross out the word Black, write in the word Jew, and we are home free.’ What am I saying here? I’m not saying that the Nazis got a parallel idea. I’m saying that actual Nazis had in their hands the blueprints of the Democratic laws and they used it to create the Nuremberg laws, and this fact has been completely suppressed in progressing historiography in the United States.
Now I said the Nazis were talking about the Democratic laws, and you might be thinking, ‘Democratic laws? Aren’t you talking about the southern laws?’ See, the Nazis actually knew something that we don’t know, namely, every segregation law in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1950s was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a Democratic governor, enforced by Democratic officials, and there is not a single exception to this rule. ... I want to pull back and say just a word about slavery. When I speak on campuses, it is not atypical to tell students that the Democratic party was the party of slavery, and I say it so matter of factly that the students are a little puzzled because they have always heard that slavery was done by the white man, or by America. And I say, Look, America didn’t do anything. Some Americans did it, and other Americans stopped them. We need to distinguish who did it, and who did it was the Democratic party in the north and the south. That’s the key. The whole idea of knocking Confederate monuments is essentially a strategic stage tactic to fool you into thinking that the slavery debate was north-south. But Abraham Lincoln knew better. When he identified the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the four bad guys of slavery, he mentioned Roger Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision. He was a southerner [Democrat] from Maryland. Then Lincoln mentions Franklin Pierce, the former President from New Hampshire, northern Democrat; James Buchanan from Pennsylvania, northern Democrat; and Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s supreme antagonist, from Illinois, northern Democrat. So three of the four pro-slavery champions are northerners.
Inevitably when I tell students this, the following happens. Some professor ... stands up and says, ‘Mr. D’Souza, you are misleading the audience by pointing a finger of blame solely at one party, whereas we all know that there was plenty of blame to go around.’ Very interesting statement. First of all it retreats from the position that the Republicans are the bad guys. It now tries, sort of with a squid-like cloud of obfuscation, to spread the blame so broadly so that no one really knows what’s going on. So it is really important at this time to unfurl what I call ‘the crushing fact.’ It is the fact that settles the argument at one blow. This is the time for me to point out that in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave. Think about this for a moment. I’m not saying that no Republican leader owned a slave. I’m saying no Republican in the United States owned a slave. ... All you have to do is name one Republican who owned a slave, and I would have to take this back. And yet from the time I made this statement well over two years ago not a single valid counter-example has surfaced. Several months ago I got an email from a demographer at the University of Michigan who said, “Dinesh, I’ve been working this. I’ve got you. Ulysses S. Grant inherited a slave on his wife’s side.’ I said, Well, that is an impressive riposte. I need to point out to you that at the time this occurred, Ulysses S. Grant was a Democrat. He became a Republican later.
What am I getting at? We have a really strange phenomenon. If you look at what’s going on now, you have Democrats, on the left, pointing the finger of racism at the very people who fought racism from the beginning of this country’s history, while suppressing the fact that the actual racism came from their party. This is not just about slavery. The Democrats were the party of slavery, of segregation, of founding the Ku Klux Klan, of reviving the Ku Klux Klan, of racial terrorism, and of opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The opposition to the civil rights act of 1964, the voting rights act of 1965, the fair housing bill of 1968 came mainly from the Democratic party, and that’s a fact.
Faced with this crushing history, we have a puzzle. First of all, the very guys who have poisoned the waters are now showing up pretending to be the water commissioner. They did it! They have never admitted it. They have never apologized for it. They haven’t paid one penny of restitution for it. And yet they presume to lecture the rest of us who are completely innocent on this score of being the real culprits. This is really funny. My wife, Debby, is Latina. Her father is Venezuelan, her mother Mexican, and we were at Dartmouth: an east Indian and Latina. And a bunch of white guys were screaming at us, ‘Racist!’ What is this, Saturday Night Live! And this is an Ivy League college.
I want to address one final point. This is a very important point for the Left. It is the idea that the two parties switched sides. ... The main thrust of the argument is that racist Dixiecrats (those who voted against the civil rights acts) all became Republicans. If true, this would vindicate the idea that the Democrats may have once been the bad guys but now the bad guys have sort of moved over. The beauty of this kind of statement is the fact that it is empirical. It’s not one of those, ‘Who’s to say what’s true?’ No, all you have to do is do a web search for ‘Dixiecrat’ and then you count how many of the racist Dixiecrats became Republican. The correct answer, which I will tell you now, is two. In the House, one guy Albert Watson, and in the Senate, one guy Strom Thurmond, and all the other racist Dixiecrats lived and died in the Democratic party. They are lionized to this day. There are buildings in Washington D.C. named after them. So this notion of a party switch is a big lie.
The racists stayed in the Democratic party. Their tactics shifted over the years. Where does this leave us today? Very sadly, some of these terrible things from history--bigotry, a fascist streak--we still have it in America. But where is it coming from? People say, ‘Trump’s the fascist. He hates democracy. He won’t tolerate dissent.’ I’m thinking, ‘If Trump is a fascist and he won’t tolerate dissent, how come you are dissenting? Trump is bashed on every platform every minute of the day. He is bashed on the Emmys. Broadway shows are interrupted to bash Trump. If this was Mussolini he would send a bunch of goons and beat those guys up and that would be the end of that. That’s how dictators actually behave. I saw Cher complaining that Trump beat her up on Twitter. on Twitter! That being said, there is a streak of bullying and intimidation and intolerance. I would argue that simple empirical evidence shows that it is coming from the Left.
The previous is excerpted a speech by Dinesh D’Souza, Stanford University, March 2019 [web reference]
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Yardley Borough is a small river town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania located on the Delaware river across from Trenton, the capital of New Jersey. The town has a total area of one square mile and according to the last census has a population of 2,434 of which 2,224 are white. It is known for its beautiful historical district that includes 18th and 19th century buildings that contain homes, shops, restaurants, and offices on Main Street. It is the site of the second oldest Quaker meeting house in Pennsylvania. Quakers were significantly active in the abolition movement against slavery and Yardley was an essential station for the Underground Railroad. In the past few weeks, it has become the unlikely scene of Black Lives Matter protests.
On June 19th in the guise of a Juneteenth celebration a Black Lives Matter anti-police hate fest descended upon Main Street surrounding people at outdoor restaurants and blocking traffic. Protesters were chanting “No Justice No Peace, No Racist Police” in front of local officers whom many have known their whole lives. The protesters were predominantly high school and college students and self-loathing affluent white middle-aged women attempting to show how woke they are. Many brought their children and grandchildren who held handmade signs with popular BLM and anti-police slogans.
A previous rally was held on June 4, 2020 and over a thousand people showed up. At that protest Black Lives Matter activists led a humiliation ritual in which the white townsfolk bowed down to BLM organizers in a solemn prayer like vigil. They somberly repeated the names of black men who were described as killed by the police. They also engaged in gestures and slogans such as “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” and “Say His Name”. Thoughts of Jonestown and other cults were running through my mind as I watched men and women willingly debase themselves. Many of the white women genuinely feel guilty about their privilege because they never worked a day in their life. Kneeling in submission while reverently repeating anti-police affirmations and apologizing for being white was a form of expiation, an atonement ritual. For these spoiled hypocritical women, the BLM protest was a method for them to assuage their guilt for having black women clean their toilets and take care of their elderly parents. The largest part of the crowd were high school and college students who have been taught to hate their country, schooled in revisionist history, made to feel shame for being white and conditioned to disrespect the police.
These men, women and students are the result of years of indoctrination by academia, the media, radical Marxist and black nationalist organizations whose primary strategy is to make white people, corporations and the entire next generation feel guilty for their ‘white privilege’. BLM’s goal is power, money and a totalitarian revolution. It may be one of the biggest shake downs in American history.
The BLM organizers stood in front of the small Yardley Borough Municipal Hall that houses the towns offices, post office, police department and public meeting room. Although the protests were along the entire length of Main Street, they chose to make their stand in front of the town Hall to symbolically challenge local government. It was there that BLM organizers led the humiliation ritual where white townsfolk kneeled before them. They seemed to take pleasure in degrading the white residents of Yardley. Who is oppressing whom? The submissive town folk bowing to them had the blissful look that all brainwashed useful idiots have right up until they realize they have been conned.
Although Yardley was a longtime Republican town it now has a largely Democrat town council with one independent. The new Council President is an activist with no roots in the community and ambitions to fundamentally transform the town that was founded in 1682. In his short time on council he introduced and passed a gun control resolution, an LGBT ordinance, took a moment of silence against police violence and recently made Juneteenth a recognized holiday. The Vice President of Council is a young millennial mom whose primary accomplishment is virtue signaling. She often publicly apologizes for her white privilege, but it is just a pretense for her political ambitions. She posted after the protest that “I weep with my black brothers and sisters for the systemic and institutional racism that has infiltrated and consumed our communities, our governments, our police forces and our very souls. Yesterday was a day of mourning in Yardley Boro for all the lives gone too soon because of racism. It was a day to reflect, as an elected official, how I can do better to be fair and compassionate, balanced and inclusive.”…… “To use the platform and privilege of our affluent town to elevate the voices of the oppressed."
After the first BLM demonstration the town council complimented each other on how the peaceful protest went, they neglected to disclose that a 12 year old girl wearing a Trump t-shirt was harassed and a small group of counter protesters were spit on. While the town council sugarcoats the anti-police hatred and racist rhetoric that occurred at the protests, they have gone out of their way to cover up anti-Semitic hate crimes in Yardley even though the only school in the small town is a private Hebrew Academy.
While the council embraced the Black Lives Matter protests Covid-19 was used as an excuse to cancel the three biggest annual events in the small community. They canceled the Memorial Day Parade, a long tradition that honors local veterans where neighbors make floats, veterans are honored, and kids ride their bikes at the end of the procession. The same day they voted to make Juneteenth a recognized Yardley Holiday the annual longtime September tradition of Harvest Day was canceled. The October 2020 Yardley Beer and Wine Fest was also canceled. The symbolism was clear we are canceling your culture, your history and your traditions and replacing them with the holidays that Black Lives Matter dictate. If the message of BLM fascism wasn’t clear enough, in front of the Memorial Plaque on the Municipal Hall that lists the names of the towns fallen soldiers someone wrote in large letters BLM and Blacks killed by Cops then wrote names including George Floyd, Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin and many more. This was an obvious mockery of the memorial to the towns fallen heroes who died in WWI and WWII. Soon these plaques will either be vandalized or just removed by the town council who will declare them symbols of racism.
Knowing that residents were not happy after the first protest, the town council deliberately did not officially inform any of the businesses or residents of the second protest. However, the Chief of Police who understands how thin the blue line is that separates chaos and order, put into effect crowd control protocols. Almost every officer in town and over a dozen from nearby communities and a Major Incident Response Team (MIRT) were on duty for the “Juneteenth Peaceful Protest For Justice”. Fortunately, Yardley has a Chief of Police who understands how a protest can turn violent with just one brick. Unfortunately, when the Chief of Police was asked at a council meeting if any tickets were given when the BLM protesters blocked Main Street, a major State road, he said “No violations were issued, you cannot ticket a thousand people”. Not surprising since Yardley Borough Council votes on his contract which expires the end of next year.
Business owners who just reopened after the Covid 19 lock downs closed their shops and stood in front of their stores guarding them from potential looters. One restaurant owner had to cordon off his sidewalk tables with caution tape to protect his customers from the crowds. A long-time Yardley friendly couple that regularly sit on their front porch on Main Street were visibly armed as the protesters marched in front of their home. There are a lot of residents who are not happy about having an anti-police hate fest walking down Main Street blocking a state road and forcing businesses to close.
One of the saddest sights were the faces of the young people who are ashamed of their country and have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into believing that police are racist. Ironically, Washington’s Crossing is just four miles up the road from Yardley and although they were raised here, they have no concept of their own country’s history or how men younger than them fought and died for their freedom. Their teachers, parents and community leaders have failed them by filling their hearts with hatred and lies. BLM exploits the anger they inculcated and now have an army of deluded young white activists who they are using to destroy their own futures. The few bright students that see through the lies are bullied and ridiculed into silence.
Soon after the protests residents started taking down their American flags and putting up Black Lives Matter signs on their lawns. This is either the result of fear of being ostracized, a deterrence against looting or just virtue signaling in actual support. This is what a cultural revolution looks like, a small towns history is eradicated, town leaders sell out, useful idiots bow down, cowards acquiesce and the few patriots that are left load their weapons. In the spirit of Yardley’s original brave abolitionists local officers continue to protect our freedoms even when they are being called racists and killers.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Omar said: “As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality. We cannot stop at criminal justice
system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
Here is the oath Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar took when she became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives: “I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
It has likely been since just before the Civil War that we had two openly treasonous members of the House of Representatives.
“Rashida Tlaib Echoes Ilhan Omar’s Call for ‘Dismantling the Whole System,’” by Joshua Caplan, Breitbart, July 8, 2020:
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Wednesday seemingly endorsed fellow “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) radical call for “dismantling the whole system of oppression” in the United States.
“My sister @IlhanMN said it best: We must begin with dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it,” Tlaib wrote on Twitter. “Pass it on.”
During a Tuesday press conference addressing “systemic racism,” Omar called for dismantling economic and political institutions beyond just law enforcement.
“The mortality rate for black Minnesotans to COVID is twice as high as it is with other races. And for me, this is very personal because I lost my own father to the coronavirus,” Omar began. “I see the pain and the havoc it is wreaking on the black community in Minneapolis.”
“We must recognize that these systems of oppression are linked,” the Minnesota Democrat continued. “As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequity. So we cannot stop at the criminal justice system.”
“We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it,” she concluded….
America’s EXURBS are PREPARING for CIVIL WAR! In this video, we’re going look at the number of ways our rural areas are getting armed and ready for the very real possibility of civil violence spilling out into our suburbs, and we’re also going to take a look at what such a civil war may actually look like; you’re not going to want to miss this.
Supreme Court BALKANIZES America by giving half of Oklahoma over to a sovereign Native American nation! In this video, we’re going to look at the latest insane ruling coming from our de fact tyrants in black robes, how it represents nothing less than the balkanization of our nation, and we’re going to explore the larger dynamics that account for why this is happening in the first place; you’re not going to want to miss this!
NEW POLLS After weeks of Black Lives Matter Riots and Trump’s SOARING Mount Rushmore Speech Show nothing less than a COMING TRUMP LANDSLIDE! In this video, we’re going to look at the latest results showing Americans’ opinions about the race riots, the destruction of our monuments, and the defunding of police, and how their sentiments are shifting clearly in the direction of Trump and a coming landslide victory that promises to be disastrous for the Democrats; you’re not going to want to miss this!
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Before President Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore last week, the Left decided that it was a monument to “white supremacy,” conveniently forgetting that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have all been there in recent years and spoken favorably of the place. Now, amid a clamor from Leftist savages to blow up Rushmore, hard-Left “journalist” Don Lemon of CNN has a more temperate idea: just put Barack Obama up there with Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln. Lemon actually has a good idea: Rushmore needs a fifth face. But it should not be that of Obama, but of Donald Trump.
Lemon said Tuesday: “Even though a rich diversity of people helped build the country, and many of us, meaning ancestors, for free — did not get paid for it, could not get an education, could not build wealth, are not on statues, Confederate or otherwise, are not on Mount Rushmore. I think, listen … if they are going to put someone on Mount Rushmore, considering the history of the country, the first black president should be front and center.”
Lemon’s sidekick Chris Cuomo agreed, saying: “Add to Mount Rushmore. I think that’s first of all, it’s a more salable idea than the idea of taking away Founding Fathers.”
Quite right, Fredo. But as Mount Rushmore is supposed to celebrate American heroes, Barack Obama is not the best choice for the honor. The forthcoming Rating America's Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster evaluates the presidents on the only basis upon which they ever should be evaluated: were they good for America and Americans? On that scale, Obama left the United States weaker, and Americans poorer and in a more precarious position, than they were before he took office. This is true despite the fact that he received more uncritical adulation than any president in recent memory.
The fact has been secured amid today’s race hysteria, but the current rage makes it all the more important to remember that throughout his tenure, Obama stoked racial tensions rather than calming them. When he took office, the Justice Department was pursuing a case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, abruptly dropped the case in May 2009 and refused to cooperate with further investigations, giving the impression that the Black Panthers were getting away with voter intimidation because of their race.
Obama’s response to several widely publicized incidents exacerbated racial tensions. On July 16, 2009, black intellectual Henry Louis Gates found himself locked out of his Massachusetts home and began trying to force his way in. An officer arrived to investigate a possible break-in; Gates began berating him and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Obama claimed that the police “acted stupidly” and noted the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by police disproportionately,” although there was no indication of racial bias in this case. He invited Gates and the police officer to the White House for a “beer summit,” which the media hailed as a manifestation of his determination to heal racial divisions, when in fact it was just the opposite: he was taking a case of misunderstanding and disorderly conduct and portraying it as a racial incident requiring presidential reconciliation.
Obama made a similar rush to judgment in the case of Ahmed Mohamed, a Muslim high school student who was arrested in September 2015 after bringing what appeared to be a suitcase bomb to his Texas high school. Mohamed claimed it was a homemade clock and that he was a victim of “Islamophobic” bigotry. Obama invited him to the White House, making the boy a symbol of the nation’s “Islamophobia” and the need to overcome it. Mohamed’s father filed a lawsuit against the school district, which was dismissed when he failed to establish that the school had engaged in any prejudice or discrimination.
Obama oversaw the rapid politicization of the supposedly apolitical civil service, including targeted Internal Revenue Service harassment of groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, as the director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, admitted in 2013.
Throughout the Obama administration, meanwhile, illegal immigrants crossed more or less freely into the United States across the border from Mexico. Epitomizing the failure of the Obama administration’s immigration policies was the killing of a young woman named Kate Steinle on July 1, 2015, in San Francisco. The killer was an illegal immigrant, José Inez García Zárate, who had seven felony convictions and had been deported five times.
The Obama foreign policy was no better. Shortly after taking office, he embarked upon two world tours that critics quickly dubbed the “apology tours,” as at every stop Obama had some negative words for the U.S. He had little to say about America being the most generous, and most free, nation on earth.
Obama was enthusiastic about the “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2011. The establishment media backed him up by claiming that they were democratic revolutions. Reality was, as always, different: the “rebels” were generally Sharia supremacists and often outright jihadis. The U.S. backed the Muslim Brotherhood regime that came to power in Egypt in 2012, despite the Brotherhood’s dedication to jihad for the implementation of Sharia. The Brotherhood regime was overthrown in 2013, as protesters held signs in Cairo denouncing Obama for supporting terrorism.
On September 11, 2012, Islamic jihadis stormed the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and murdered the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans. The Obama State Department had done nothing when Stevens repeatedly requested additional security, and administration figures claimed that the massacre was a spontaneous reaction to a YouTube video – a strong implication that America’s freedom of speech was at fault.
There is much more, including the disastrous Iran nuclear deal and his showering billions upon the Islamic Republic as the Iranian mullahs chanted “Death to America.” Yet when Obama left the White House, he was hailed and lionized as much as he had been when he took office. Yet he had done nothing but weaken the United States on virtually all fronts. Only a courageous leader with a strong capacity for independent thought could even begin to undo the havoc Obama wrought.
That man was Donald Trump. In his inaugural address, Trump announced that “today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another—but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People. For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered— but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.... That all changes—starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.”
But the guardians and beneficiaries of the old order were not going to give way easily. Most Americans assumed that when Trump became president, he would be able to implement his own agenda insofar as he could secure the cooperation of Congress, as other presidents had done. But Trump encountered an entrenched coterie of bureaucrats at all levels who were determined to thwart his every move. While the media dismissed talk of a “deep state” as a conspiracy theory, the New York Times admitted its existence on September 5, 2018, when it published an anonymous op-ed that proclaimed, “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
If Trump had not been elected, the deep state still would have been operating, but its existence would not be known. Now it is out in the open, and the battle for America is on. Trump’s supposedly “worst inclinations” involved defending America and putting it back on its feet. In June 2016, Obama ridiculed Trump’s pledge to attract U.S. companies that had moved out of the country back to the United States, sneering, “What magic wand do you have?” Trump’s magic wand was an unprecedented initiative to cut regulations on businesses and drastically lower taxes. It began to work immediately. In 2019, unemployment was at 3.5 percent, the lowest it had been since 1968. The Trump administration also set record lows for unemployment among blacks and Hispanics and record highs for the stock market.
The Trump-era economy boomed until the coronavirus pandemic wiped out the gains that had been made; it began rebounding quickly, however, and there was no doubt that it would have been even weaker still had the steps Trump took to get it going again not been taken in the first place.
The coronavirus crisis was in many ways a vindication of points Trump had been making for years, including his repeated assertion that China (where the virus originated) was no friend of the United States, and constituted an economic threat—not an ally. Trump and George Washington were proven correct about avoiding foreign entanglements: the nation was unwise to outsource so much of its manufacturing to the People’s Republic or to any other foreign country. The crisis showed that Trump was also correct that strong border controls were essential for national security, as one of his earliest responses to the crisis was to restrict travel from China to the United States, for which the Democrats, predictably focused on destroying his presidency and not on what was best for Americans, charged him with “racism.”
The coronavirus crisis demonstrated anew why Trump is a great president: because he puts America first. After a long line of internationalists occupied the White House since 1933, with the sole and partial exception of Ronald Reagan, Trump unashamedly made America first, a principle that had been discredited as “isolationist” since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, not just a slogan, but the cornerstone of his administration. This should have been taken for granted: putting America first is actually the central duty of the president, as encapsulated in his oath of office, in which he solemnly swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
In line with that oath, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal that weakened the country internationally. His multitude of critics responded with claims that the deal was working, that Iran was more peaceful than it had been, and that it was rejoining the family of nations. This was not true and never had been true. The deal had just been concluded when the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reaffirmed his nation’s hostility toward the U.S.: “Even after this deal our policy towards the arrogant U.S. will not change.” Two days later, Khamenei said in a speech, “According to Qur’anic principles, fighting against arrogance and global imperialism is never-ending and today, America is the very epitome of arrogance.”
Trump placed new sanctions on Iran that immediately began to have an effect: as the Iranian economy suffered, the Iranian people increasingly turned against the regime, and there were demonstrations all over the country.
Rating America's Presidents details a great deal more that Trump has accomplished. He became president when the nation had lost its way. He made herculean efforts to bring it back to what the Founding Fathers had intended it to be: a bastion of freedom.
As Trump said: “I never forget, that I am not President of the world, I am President of the United States of America. We reject globalism and we embrace patriotism. We believe that every American citizen, no matter their background, deserves a government that is loyal to them. The Democrat Party and the extreme radical left are trying to abolish the distinction between citizens and non-citizens.”
Indeed. But it is, or ought to be, simple common sense: every head of government the world over should make his or her top priority the protection and strengthening of his or her own nation, not the interests of some other nation or group of nations.
Trump is not a great president solely for restoring this principle. He also inherited from Obama an economy that was worse off than it had been since the Great Depression, with spiraling unemployment, rapidly expanding welfare rolls, and job growth at record lows. Trump immediately began to turn the economy around, overseeing an unprecedented rise in the stock market, record growth in wages, and decreases in unemployment to levels not seen in nearly fifty years.
Trump also did all he could to protect American citizens from a tidal wave of illegal, unvetted immigrants that threatened the American economy and the safety of American citizens. In this, however, he encountered fierce resistance from a cadre of bureaucrats and judges appointed by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who challenged his attempts to put America first at every turn.
Trump vowed during his campaign to Make America Great Again—a slogan that the Democrats tried to portray as racist and hateful. Even as he faced vociferous and relentless opposition from a supposedly objective mass media and unremitting hostility from the allegedly loyal opposition, Donald Trump made good on that promise.
He became president when internationalism and the steady decline of America was taken for granted. In three years, Donald J. Trump, against extraordinary odds, turned that around, and in doing so, became nothing less than one of the greatest presidents in American history. After a long string of internationalist mediocrities, the presidency was once again occupied by a man who put America first.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Here is the oath Ilhan Omar took when she became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives:“I, Ilhan Omar, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
Calling for the “dismantling” of the “political system” is the direct opposite of supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In a sane Congress, she would be impeached and removed from office. She will not be. In fact, nothing whatsoever will be done. With today’s dominance of identity politics, as a black woman and a hijab-wearing Muslim Omar has an absolutely free pass to do anything she wants. We have already seen that with the fact that she has suffered no consequences, nor even been investigated, despite strong evidence that she has broken immigration and other laws.
“Ilhan Omar Calls For The ‘Dismantling’ Of US Economy, Political System,” by William Davis, Daily Caller, July 7, 2020:
Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar called for the “dismantling” of the U.S. economy and political system Tuesday.
“As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality,” Omar said. “We cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
Omar held an event Tuesday in her home state of Minnesota with members of the Minnesota People of Color and Indigenous Caucus. Omar tweeted earlier Tuesday that the purpose of the event was to address “racism in policing” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death….
It is, or ought to be, clear to everyone by now that Black Lives Matter is not a genuine movement for racial justice and a more equitable society, but a Marxist organization using real, exaggerated, and imagined racial injustice to try to destroy the United States. Anyone who is still in doubt about this should consider the fact that some blacks are still enslaved today, and Black Lives Matter never has and never will say a word about it, because that organization doesn’t really care about black lives.
If they did actually care about the lives of black people, Black Lives Matter would today be drawing international attention to statements made recently by the Mauritanian anti-slavery activist Maryam Bint Al-Sheikh of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA). According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Maryam Bint Al-Sheikh stated in a June 18 interview: “Unfortunately, there is still slavery in Mauritania. More than 20% of people in Mauritania suffer from slavery – a situation where a person owns another person and does whatever he wants with him at any given moment. This situation exists here in Mauritania, unfortunately.”
Al-Sheikh further explained that slaves are often even “bequeathed from father to son. A person can own a slave and when that person dies, his children inherit the slave, who is later bequeathed to the grandchildren. This thing exists in Mauritania, unfortunately.” Even worse, “anyone who speaks out is considered a criminal whose natural place in in jail. Until not so long ago, [whoever spoke up] would have been killed.”
As an anti-slavery activist, Al-Sheikh has experienced this herself: “I was arrested and tortured multiple times. I was tortured both mentally and physically. The last time I was arrested, I had a 1.5-year-old baby. They separated us by force. And they weaned him. The Mauritanian state weaned my baby – a 1.5-year-old baby. He was weaned. And they prevented me from seeing him, and they wouldn’t let my husband or relatives visit me.”
Maryam Bint Al-Sheikh’s story is just one of innumerable such accounts. Why does Mauritania continually drag its feet about eradicating slavery, and persecute anti-slavery activists? The dirty little secret here is that it is because slavery is sanctioned in Islam.
Folks, it looks like we are seeing nothing less than the COLLAPSE of CANCEL CULTURE as Even leftwing LIBERALS are DENOUNCING far left CENSORSHIP! In this video, we’re going to look at an open letter signed by over 150 liberals decrying the left’s propensity towards cancel culture, and how it represents nothing less than a free speech revolt, an uprising that promises to completely and totally overwhelm and finally defeat the forces of far left cancel culture for good! You’re not going to want to miss this!
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
As the federal government faces yet another potential fiscal shutdown on September 30, House Democrats released spending bills on Monday that would put them clearly at odds with the Senate and President Trump. Among the unreasonable demands in the Democrats’ plan is a requirement that certain statues of Southern politicians and any Confederate statue remaining in the Capitol be removed and returned to the states that donated them.
Since passing budgets is, apparently, now a thing of the past in Washington, the federal government relies on a series of continuing resolutions (CR) — appropriations bills that set aside money for government agencies, departments, and programs. The current CR is scheduled to expire on September 30 when the U.S. government’s fiscal year ends.
With the general election on November 3, less than five weeks away from that deadline, Democrats are poised to create yet more disorder and confusion in a year that has already seen its share of chaos.
In a letter to the Joint Committee on the Library dated June 10, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) argued that the 11 statues in question are “plainly racist ... and are a grotesque affront” to American ideals.
“While I believe that it is imperative that we never forget our history, lest we repeat it, I also believe there is no room for celebrating the violent bigotry of the men of the Confederacy in the hallowed halls of the United States Capitol or in places of honor across the country,” Pelosi wrote.
Pelosi may have a point (though whether she is sincere is another issue), but is this truly the hill the Democrats want to die on? Considering what’s already happened in 2020, a government shutdown only a little over a month from the general election doesn’t look good for anybody. And if the American public senses that the Speaker is ready to shut down the government over something as meaningless as statues that can’t do anything to anybody and will likely be replaced by the states over time, then she is completely misreading the 2020 electorate.
The statues in question are on display at the National Statuary Hall Collection at the Capitol (shown). Each state can contribute two statues to the collection and each state is allowed to replace those statues if the state’s legislature and governor approve of the change. Currently, there are 11 statues in the collection that the Democrats consider persona non grata — all of them contributed by Southern states. Their new appropriations bill would require the immediate removal of those statues.
But the states are the ones who donated the statues, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argues that the fate of those monuments should be left up to those states. “Every state is allowed two statues. They can trade them out at any time,” McConnell said in June. “A number of states are trading them out now, but I think that’s the appropriate way to deal with the statue issue. The states make that decision.”
The Democrats’ demand for the removal of the statues — in defiance of the current rules of the Capitol — is certain to be a sticking point in negotiations of the next continuing resolution to fund the government.
The statues include depictions of:
• Joseph Wheeler of Alabama, a Democrat who would later fight for America in the Spanish-American War;
• Uriah Milton Rose of Arkansas, who founded the Rose Law Firm, which infamously hired a lawyer named Hillary Rodham Clinton;
• Edmund Kirby Smith of Florida, whose statue is already on the way out after former Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, signed legislation to replace the Smith statue with a statue of civil rights activist Mary Mcleod Bethune;
• Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia, who served as the vice president of the Confederate States of America;
• Edward Douglas White of Louisiana, a Democrat who served as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court until his death in 1921;
• Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who served as the president of the Confederate States of America;
• James Zachariah George of Mississippi, a Democrat who was a member of the Mississippi Secession Convention;
• Zebulon Baird Vance of North Carolina, a Whig who later became a Democrat, who served in the Confederate Army’s Rough and Ready guards;
• Wade Hampton, III of South Carolina, a Democrat who served as a general in the Confederate army and later became the governor of the state;
• Robert E. Lee of Virginia, who was the general in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s largest army; and
• John Kenna of West Virginia, a Democrat and a Confederate soldier who would later represent West Virginia in the House of Representatives.
Democrats are also set for the House to vote later this month on the removal of a bust of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who authored the notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857, which ruled that black people “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” That awful decision was finally overturned, once and for all, with the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868.
But the Democrat Party leaders aren’t interested in true and meaningful action on race relations. They’re interested in symbolism — style over substance. They’re interested in a distraction from the real issues that they can point to and say, “See! We’re not racists!” And Democrats are again looking to paint President Trump and the Republicans as racists, even though history and common sense plainly disagree with them.
If they were actually interested in removing offensive images from the past, they would start with the Senate portrait of Robert Byrd, the Democrat from West Virginia who actually recruited 150 associates to start a new Klu Klux Klan chapter in his home state.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
I think my cartoon is pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll just add that all of the “reasons” that the Left gives for why it does what it does are lies, particularly the lie they’re peddling about “systemic racism”.
BLM and Antifa claim that they’re “fighting to stop systemic racism” in America, when in reality, they’re counting on the fact that America is not a “systemically racist” country so they can get away with murder. If America were as bad as these vicious malcontents claim, their attacks would have led to their utter destruction in short order.
And here’s why I think that the Left (as well as the Islamic enemy) wants nothing short of the destruction of America: the only way that bad guys who fancy themselves as “good guys” can have their evil recognized as the undisputed “good” in the world is if they obliterate any and all moral standards, and then dispatch the objectively good people who oppose them, so that “the good” ends up being whatever they say it is.
And that’s really why the scum of the earth across the world wants America defeated, because America makes them look as bad as they actually are, despite the Left’s propaganda. And they can’t let that stand, and so the comparative stand must be obliterated.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
150 of the world’s top intellectuals, authors and activists have signed an open letter decrying leftist cancel culture, censorship and the totalitarian march of “ideological conformity.”
Signatories include liberal icon Noam Chomsky and ‘Satanic Verses’ author Salman Rushdie.
The letter, which was published by Harpers Magazine, is also signed by J.K. Rowling, Fareed Zakaria, Garry Kasparov, and, perhaps surprisingly, feminist activist Gloria Steinem.
“The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides,” states the letter, highlighting how “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted” as a result of “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes,” states the letter.
This is creating a climate of risk aversion that is preventing anyone from dissenting from the monolithic consensus of social justice rhetoric, creating a “stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time,” according to the letter.
The letter highlights the fact that there are still some genuine “liberals” left in society who are willing to stand behind the increasingly endangered species of free speech.
However, some would ask where they’ve been hiding for the past three years since mass censorship, particularly by monopolistic social media giants, has been significantly ramped up.
The idea that an open letter will do much to stop the rampaging virus of cancel culture is also up for debate. Why don’t these intellectuals organize a major conference or a massive protest march to showcase their principles?
The irony of course is that if this letter gains any traction at all, its signatories will immediately become targets for cancellation from the unhinged, woke far-left.
The full letter is reprinted below.
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Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
August 1, 2019
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
Slavery has been practiced since the fall of man. It is not a a product of “racism”; it is not an issue of skin color; it is a product of man’s sinful heart because of which he practices far more hatred toward his fellow man than love of neighbor. Jesus described man’s condition with perfect accuracy:
“All these evil things come from within, and defile the man”
“And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man” (Mark 7:20-23).
Slavery has been practiced by the white man, the black man, the red man, and the yellow man, and every other kind of man.
That is a fact of history.
Slavery was practiced by the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Persians, the native Brits, the Dans, the Romans, the African kingdoms, the South American kingdoms, the Chinese, Indians, Nepalese, Burmese, Native Americans, the Muslim kingdoms.
That is a fact of man’s wretched history, and it is a reflection of man’s fallen condition.
It is also a fact of history as to who was at the forefront of the war against slavery. It wasn’t the Muslims. It wasn’t the Hindus or the Buddhists or the Animists or the Atheists or the Humanists. It wasn’t Roman Catholics. It wasn’t the black African nations or the Asian nations or the South American nations or the Eskimos. It was (mostly) white Protestant and Baptist Christians in England and America.
This is a fact of history.
America’s role in the destruction of slavery in modern times is a fascinating study.
Timeline of the American Abolitionist Movement
There was widespread opposition to slavery from the time of the founding of the American colonies, and many of the Founding Fathers were opponents, but abolition became a groundswell movement during the Second Great Awakening, both in America and England. The culmination in America was the Civil War of 1860-65, after which slavery was officially abolished. Following are some of the important events: 1794 - The U.S. government passes a law prohibiting slavery in new American territories ------- The American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery is founded 1803 - The Pennsylvania Abolition Society is founded; Benjamin Rush, an American Founding Father, is elected the first president 1807 - The British government abolishes the slave trade, though the owning of slaves in British colonies is still legal 1808 - The British forms the West Africa Squadron to capture slave ships. Between 1808-1860, the Squadron captures 1,600 slave ships and frees 150,000 slaves ------- The U.S. government outlaws American participation in the African slave trade 1821 - The first American anti-slavery newspaper is founded (The Genius of Universal Emancipation) 1822 - Denmark Vessey unsuccessfully tries to lead a slave revolt in South Carolina 1830s - The Underground Railway is established to help runaway slaves escape to the northern states and Canada 1831 - Nate Turner leads a slave revolt in Virginia, resulting in stricter slave laws 1833 - Great Britain abolishes slavery 1833 - The American Antislavery Society is organized and within five years it has more than 1,350 chapters and 250,000 members 1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is influential in stirring abolitionist sentiment 1856 - The Republican Party is formed in America as a coalition of various political groups opposing slavery 1859 - John Brown unsuccessfully tries to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to launch a slave revolt 1860 - Abraham Lincoln is elected U.S. President, the first Republican party president 1861 - Eleven Southern states secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln 1862 - “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe is published 1863 - Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the Confederate States 1865 - The Civil War ends and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishes slavery in all states 1868 - The Fourteenth Amendment gave citizenship rights to native-born blacks and equal protection under the law 1870 - The Fifteenth Amendment gave voting rights to black men 1948 - President Harry Truman ended segregation in the U.S. military by an executive order
AMERICA AND SLAVERY
From its founding, America has been a mixed multitude of people of varying principles, including religious principles.
Early America was strongly influenced by the Bible and most of its citizens were professing Christians of some sort, but there were all sorts of Christians, some born again and some “nominal,” trusting in baptism and good works rather than in a personal relationship with Christ, and there were also many non-Christians.
Even in the Plymouth Colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower in 1620, there were nominal Christians and some non-Christians.
As on many issues, early America was divided on the issue of slavery.
On one side were those who believed in slavery and kept slaves.
On the other side, there were many in America who were opposed to slavery, even during the Colonial era. These understood that it was wrong and hypocritical to proclaim liberty for all men while keeping some men in bondage to slavery.
For example, Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island sent a pamphlet to the Continental Congress “asking how they and Americans, so adverse to enslavement by British Parliament, could overlook the slavery of African-Americans ‘who have as good a claim to liberty as themselves’” (Angela Kamrath, The Miracle of America).
In 1772, Baptist pastor John Allen of Boston preached that slavery violates the laws of God and the natural rights of men. He stated this in An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, or The Essential Right of the Americans.
In 1791, Jonathan Edwards, famous Great Awakening preacher, published “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade.” He cited Christ’s “Golden Rule” as evidence that slavery is not God’s will.
Hopkins, Allen, and Edwards represented the thinking of large numbers of Americans in that day.
American Quakers opposed slavery beginning in the 1670s. William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania in 1682, owned slaves for a few years, but he treated them well and eventually freed them. In 1737, Quaker Benjamin Lay published a paper against “All Slave Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage.” He called slavery “a notorious sin.” In 1774, the Quakers ended slavery among themselves, and those who persisted in owning slaves were expelled. Famous Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier was a strong voice against slavery. He edited the Pennsylvania Freeman and promoted freedom for all men. Quakers had a prominent role in the Underground Railroad that helped southern slaves escape their masters. Quakers boycotted slave-produced goods in an attempt to put financial pressure on slaveholders. Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania, was the home of the first black denomination in America, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Pennsylvania was the first American state to pass a slavery abolition act. This was in 1780, even before the end of the War of Independence. In Britain, Quakers were at the forefront of the movement that abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1838.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833 under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison, and within seven years there were 2,000 auxiliary societies with a total membership of 150,000 to 200,000. This shows that anti-slavery sentiment was widespread in America.
Slavery in the 18th Century
It is important to understand the historical context. Slavery was widely accepted the world over at the time of America’s founding in the 18th century.
It is an institution nearly as old as man. Man’s “inhumanity” is the product of his sin nature. Jesus said, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Mt. 15:19). The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia practiced slavery, as did the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman empires. Slavery was practiced in China and India and the Americas; it was practiced by the Mongols and Huns and Vikings and North American Indians.
From ancient times, Africans enslaved Africans. In many parts of Africa, a third of the population were enslaved by their fellow blacks beginning in AD 1300 and earlier, and in some parts of Africa the percentage was even higher. For the most part, it was black Africans who captured African slaves in the interior of the continent and brought them to the coasts for sale. Black tribal leaders, such as the kings of Dohomey, would raid and capture blacks from neighboring tribes and sell them. In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey said, “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth ... the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery” (Ibn Warraq, Why the West Is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, 2011, p. 114). What a wretched lullaby!
Islam practiced slavery from its inception in the seventh century AD and was at the heart of the slave trade on the Barbary Coast of Africa for hundreds of years. We have documented this in The Bible andIslam, which is available as a free eBook from www.wayoflife.org.
England had a major role in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. So did the Portuguese, Dutch, and French.
America’s Founding Fathers and Slavery
Like the early American population as a whole, the American Founders represented many beliefs.
Some were Bible-believing Christians who had personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Following are a few examples:
Samuel Adams (1722-1803), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Massachusetts. In his last will and testament he wrote “I ... [rely] upon the merits of Jesus Christ for a pardon of all my sins” (Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, edited by William Wells, 1865, Vol. III, p. 379).
Charles Carroll (1737-1822), signer of the Declaration of Independence, framer of the Bill of Rights. “On the mercy of my Redeemer I rely for salvation and on His merits, not on the works I have done in obedience to His precepts” (Letter from Carroll to Charles Wharton, Sep. 27, 1825).
Robert Treat Paine (1731-1814), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Attorney General of Massachusetts. “I am constrained to express my adoration of the Supreme Being, the Author of my existence, in full belief of His Providential goodness and His forgiving mercy revealed to the world through Jesus Christ, through whom I hope for never ending happiness in a future state” (Last Will and Testament, attested May 11, 1814).
Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence and “Father of American Medicine.” “My only hope of salvation is in the infinite transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the Cross. Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins. I rely exclusively upon it” (The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush).
Roger Sherman (1721-1793), signer of the Declaration of Independence, framer of the Bill of Rights. “I believe that God ... did send His own Son to become man, die in the room and stead of sinners, and thus to lay a foundation for the offer of pardon and salvation to all mankind, so as all may be saved who are willing to accept the Gospel offer.” (The Life of Roger Sherman by Lewis Boutell, 1896, pp. 271-273).
John Witherspoon (1723-1794), signer of the Declaration of Independence. “... no man, whatever be his character or whatever be his hope, shall enter into rest unless he be reconciled to God though Jesus Christ” (The Works of John Witherspoon, 1815, Vol. V, pp. 245, 267).
On the other hand, some of America’s founders were skeptics who did not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and did not believe the Bible to be God’s infallible Word. The most prominent examples are Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State under George Washington, and the third President of the United States. Jefferson made his own “Bible” by cutting out of the Gospels everything pertaining to the divine and miraculous in Jesus’ life. Jefferson’s “Bible” left out references to angels, prophecy, Christ’s deity, the virgin birth, the miracles, and the resurrection.
Franklin, who has been called “the first American,” was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Constitutional Convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution. Like Jefferson, he wanted to maintain the moral code of Christianity as a rule for society, but he did not believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Franklin was a great fan of the blasphemous French skeptic Voltaire. Instead of bringing his grandson Benny Bache to the feet of Jesus, Franklin sought Voltaire’s blessing on the boy (H.W. Brands, The First American, p. 563). Franklin participated enthusiastically in a eulogy following Voltaire’s death. It was held in a hall dressed in black and lit by candles. Franklin took his Masonic crown and laid it at the foot of a large painting of Voltaire (The First American, p. 565). At the end of his life, Franklin said “I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to [Christ’s] divinity.”
This being said, most of America’s Founding Fathers were opposed to slavery.
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States and son of John Adams, second President of the U.S., was called the “Hell Hound of Abolition” for his persistent efforts to end slavery. In 1837, he said that the nation’s founders were opposed to slavery. “The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself [Jefferson]. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country [Great Britain] and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery--in common with every other mode of oppression--was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth” (An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their request, on the Sixty-first Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1837).
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and America’s third president, inherited slaves from his father beginning at age 14 and owned slaves all his life, but he introduced legislation throughout his career to abolish slavery.
“How could the man who wrote that ‘All men are created equal’ own slaves? This, in essence, is the question most persistently asked of those who write about Thomas Jefferson, and by all indications it is the thing that contemporary Americans find most vexing about him. ... The question carries a silent assumption that because he practiced slave holding, Jefferson must have somehow believed in it, and must therefore have been a hypocrite. My belief is that this way of asking the question ... is essentially backward, and reflects the pervasive presentism of our time. Consider, for example, how different the question appears when inverted and framed in more historical terms: How did a man who was born into a slave holding society, whose family and admired friends owned slaves, who inherited a fortune that was dependent on slaves and slave labor, decide at an early age that slavery was morally wrong and forcefully declare that it ought to be abolished? Though stating the same case, these are obviously different questions, focusing on different things, but one is framed in a historical context and the other ignores historical circumstances. The rephrased question reveals that what is truly remarkable is that Jefferson went against his society and his own self-interest to denounce slavery and urge its abolition” (Douglas Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1992).
In 1778, he was instrumental in having the importation of slaves to Virginia banned. He introduced legislation in the Continental Congress to ban slavery, and it failed to pass by only one vote. He called slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” (“Thomas Jefferson and Slavery,” Monticello.org). He feared that America would be destroyed by slavery and that it would lead to a civil war, which it did in 1861. As U.S. President, he continued to fight against slavery, but many American slave owners opposed him. He could not free his slaves upon his death, because he owed a large amount of money and his estate, including his slaves, had to be sold to pay the debt. In his Memoir, written at age 77, Jefferson said, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free.” Black American leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., praised Jefferson for his efforts to abolish slavery.
Recent scholarship claims that Jefferson fathered at least one child by one of his slaves named Sally Hemings, and this is possible, though it has not been absolutely proven.
We would note that Jefferson, as previously mentioned, was not a professing Christian or a believer in the Bible. Jefferson believed that Jesus was a good man and a great moral teacher, but he did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. As we have seen, Jefferson made his own “Bible” by cutting out everything from the Gospels pertaining to Christ’s virgin birth, miracles, atoning death, and resurrection.
George Washington
George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and America’s first President, inherited slaves and owned slaves until his death but his thinking about slavery gradually evolved toward an abolitionist position.
At great personal cost to his estate, he vowed that he would not sell his slaves even though he could have benefited financially from doing so. After the Revolutionary War, when he was deeply in debt, the sale of just one slave would have brought him enough income to pay his estate taxes for two years. He also refused to hire out his slaves, because he did not want to break up their families. He said, “To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. To hire them out is almost as bad because they could not be disposed of in families to any advantage, and to disperse [break up] the families I have an aversion” (Washington letter to Robert Lewis, Aug. 18, 1799, Washington’sWritings, 1980, Vol. 37, p. 338).
Washington was instrumental in having a federal law passed in the first year of his presidency (1789) prohibiting slavery in the new American territories. As a result, the new states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all prohibited slavery (“George Washington and the Washington Monument,” www.abschools.k12.wi.us, June 23, 2016).
In 1845, Daniel Webster described Washington’s efforts to abolish slavery in America:
“Soon after the adoption of the Constitution, it was declared by George Washington to be ‘among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery might be abolished by law;’ and in various forms in public and private communications, he avowed his anxious desire that ‘a spirit of humanity,’ prompting to ‘the emancipation of the slaves,’ ‘might diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people;’ and he gave the assurance, that ‘so far as his own suffrage would go,’ his influence should not be wanting to accomplish this result” (Webster, “Address to the People of the United States, ... to Lift Our Public Sentiment to a New Platform of Anti-slavery,” Jan. 29, 1845).
In 1793, Washington wrote to his secretary Tobias Lear and “expressed his repugnance at owning slaves and declared the principle reason for selling the land [his western lands] was to raise the finances that would allow him to liberate them” (“George Washington and Slavery,” Wikipedia, citing Dorothy Twohig, “That Species of Property: Washington’s Role in the Controversy over Slavery,” in George Washington Reconsidered by Don Higginbotham; and Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America). “In November the same year [1793], Washington demonstrated in a letter to his friend and neighbor Alexander Spotswood that the reluctance to sell slaves at a public venue, first seen in his letter to Lund Washington in 1778, had become an emphatic principle against ‘selling Negroes, as you would Cattle in the market...’” (Ibid., citing Twohig). “In 1795 and 1796, Washington devised a complicated plan that involved renting out his western lands to tenant farmers to whom he would lease his own slaves, and a similar scheme to lease the dower slaves he controlled to Dr. David Stuart for work on Stuart's Eastern Shore plantation. This plan would have involved breaking up slave families, but it was designed with an end goal of raising enough finances to fund their eventual emancipation (a detail Washington kept secret) and prevent the Custis heirs from permanently splitting up families by sale. None of these schemes could be realized because of his failure to sell or rent land at the right prices, the refusal of the Custis heirs to agree to them and his own reluctance to separate families” (“George Washington and Slavery,” Wikipedia).
Washington’s will called for the liberation of his slaves upon his wife’s death, and he required that young ones be educated to read and write and taught a useful occupation.
Many accounts were told by black men and women about Washington’s humility and lack of racial prejudice. My favorite was told by Primus Hall, the servant of Col. Timothy Pickering, one of General Washington’s favorite officers during the War of Independence. One evening Washington and Pickering talked late into the evening, and Washington asked Hall if there were straw and blankets enough for him to sleep there that night. Hall replied in the affirmative, and when it was time for him to retire, Washington was shown an extra bed in Pickering’s tent made of straw and blankets and laid down to sleep, not knowing that Hall had given him his own humble bed. When Washington woke up in the night and saw Hall sleeping at the Colonel’s desk, he realized what had happened and demanded that Hall share his bed. When Hall expressed surprise and told him not to trouble himself, Washington ordered him in an authoritative voice, “Primus, I say, come and lie down here! There is room for both, and I insist upon it.” Washington moved to one side of the straw bed, and the shocked black man did as he was told. “Primus professes to have been exceedingly shocked at the idea of lying under the same covering with the commander-in-chief, but his tone was so resolute and determined that he could not hesitate. He prepared himself, therefore, and laid himself down by Washington; and on the same straw, and under the same blanket, the General and the Negro servant slept until morning” (Henry Harrington, “Anecdotes of Washington,” Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, June 1849).
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, but he became an abolitionist later in life and liberated his slaves. He was the president of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. He promoted the idea of educating former slaves and to help them find employment so they could fend for themselves.
John Dickinson
John Dickinson was a member of the First and Second Continental Congress and worked with Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence. He was an officer during the War of Independence. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and was elected President of Delaware and President of Pennsylvania. Dickinson is the author of “The Liberty Song” (1768). The original chorus said, “Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all, By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall; In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed, For heaven approves of each generous deed.”
Dickinson became an abolitionist and freed his slaves in 1776. He devoted his final years to the cause of abolition and donated a considerable amount of his wealth “to the relief of the unhappy.”
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, denounced slavery in his tract On Slave Keeping (1773). He called it a “vice which degrades human nature.” He called on Americans to oppose it. “Remember the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.”
John Jay
John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1789-95), author of five of the Federalist Papers, and Governor of New York, was a leading opponent of slavery. “His first two attempts to end slavery in New York in 1777 and 1785 failed, but a third in 1799 succeeded.” All slaves in New York were emancipated before his death in 1829.
Noah Webster
Noah Webster, who had a major influence on the U.S. Constitution through his 1787 essay An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, called for slavery to be abolished in the United States. He founded an antislavery group called the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom. His influential Blue-Back Speller included an essay by Thomas Day calling for the abolition of slavery. Day argued that this was in accordance with the nation’s Declaration of Independence. He warned Americans that consistency required that they either acknowledge the rights of the Negroes or surrender their own rights.
The Constitutional Convention
During the Constitutional Convention (1787), when the U.S. Constitution was written and the American nation was formed at the federal level, there was a strong effort to abolish slavery. The opponents of slavery found, though, that it was impossible to form the nation on that basis, since the southern colonies refused to agree with that principle.
America’s Civil War
Those who criticize America on the slavery issue must acknowledge that the nation fought its most terrible and bloody war on that issue. The Civil War was fought between 1861-1865 after southern states seceded from the Union. A majority of Americans were so strongly opposed to slavery that they were willing to go to war against their fellow Americans to settle the matter. The southern states were called the Confederacy, and the northern states, the Union. About 750,000 died in the war.
There were other great issues involved in the American Civil War, particularly the issue of states rights. But slavery was definitely a fundamental issue in the conflict. This was stated plainly by the Confederate leaders.
Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, made the following statement on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia:
“The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions--African slavery as it exists among us--the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [opposite from ‘all men are created equal’]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” (Stephens, Cornerstone Speech).
In May 1845, Baptists in southern states separated from their Baptist brethren in the northern states and formed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The founding meeting was held at First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, and delegates voiced their approval of the institution of slavery. (In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention formally apologized for its former stance on slavery, and in 2012 the SBC elected a black pastor as president.)
On January 27, 1861, Ebenezer Warren, pastor of First Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia, a prominent congregation in the SBC, preached a sermon entitled “Scriptural Vindication of Slavery.” This expressed the thinking of a large number of Southern whites in that day. He said:
“Slavery forms a vital element of the Divine Revelation to man. Its institution, regulation, and perpetuity, constitute a part of many of the books of the Bible. ... The public mind needs enlightening from the sacred teachings of inspiration on this subject. ... Both Christianity and Slavery are from heaven; both are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of time. ... Because Slavery is right; and because the condition of the slaves affords them all those privileges which would prove substantial blessings to them; and, too, because their Maker has decreed their bondage, and has given them, as a race, capacities and aspirations suited alone to this condition of life.”
The January 1864 issue of the Religious Herald, the official paper of the Virginia Baptists, went so far as to call abolition “the final Antichrist.”
Southern Baptists justified slavery on the basis of the law of Moses. Following are some of the Mosaic principles on slavery:
- A Jewish slave was to be given his liberty after six years (Exodus 21:2), and the liberated servant was to be furnished liberally with goods (De. 15:12-15). - If a master injured a slave so that he died, the master was to be punished (Ex. 21:20). - If a slave was injured by his master, he was to be given his liberty (Ex. 21:26). - Slaves were not to be “ruled with rigour” (Le. 25:53). - If a slave escaped from his master, he was to be protected (De. 23:15-16).
But a reading of the Bible as a whole actually supports the abolition of slavery, because both the law of Moses and the Lord Jesus Christ taught that the heart and soul of God’s law is to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Lev. 19:18; Mat. 22:39). It is impossible to obey this divine command while enslaving another individual.
And any concept of racial superiority has zero biblical support. All men are children of Adam. All nations are “made of one blood” (Acts 17:26).
Why, then, did the law of Moses allow for slavery? Jesus explained this in Matthew 19. Like divorce, slavery was allowed because of the hardness of man’s heart and his weak fallen condition (Mat. 19:7-8).
The Baptists in the north recognized that slavery was the chief cause of the war. The Illinois Baptists issued the following statement in June 1863: “We recognize human slavery now, as we have heretofore done, to be the cause of the war and its kindred evils, and we reiterate our convictions that there can be no peace and prosperity in the nation until it is destroyed” B.F. Morris, Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, 1864, p. 754).
The outcome of the American Civil War was the complete abolishment of slavery. In December 1865, the 13th amendment of the Constitution was ratified, which abolished slavery in the United States. It came at great cost in American money and blood.
The Abolition Movement and Theological Liberalism
Many aspects of the Christian abolitionist movement were deeply influenced by theological liberalism and its social gospel.
For example, there was support for slaves rebelling against their masters. David Walker of Boston issued a fiery call for rebellion in his Appeal in Four Articles in 1829. This radical side of the abolitionist movement ignored Bible commands such as 1 Corinthians 7:21-22; Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-25; 1 Peter 2:18-21.
The liberal social gospel allegorized Scripture to justify rebellion and even murder. For example, Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” interpreted the Union armies of the North as the coming of Christ. The “watch-fires” of the Union army camps are the altar of God, and “the burnish’d rows of steel” bayonets are the gospel. Howe was a Unitarian universalist who rejected Jesus Christ as the Son of God and denied the divine inspiration of Scripture. She delivered a pantheistic, universalistic message at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893 entitled “What Is Religion?” (womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_1893_pwr_howe.htm). Howe’s husband, Samuel, funded John Brown’s murderous insurrection attempt.
Harriet Beecher Stowe is known as “the little woman who started the big war,” as her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin provoked hotheads on both sides of the issue. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was the liberal pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. During Beecher’s career there, he opened his pulpit to Unitarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley and even to agnostics such as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Beecher “once argued that a Sharps rifle held a better argument than a Bible for persuading slaveholders--hence these rifles were nicknamed ‘Beecher’s Bibles’ when used to combat the spread of slavery in the Kansas Territory before the American Civil War” (www.embassy.org.nz/encycl/u1encyc.htm). The Beechers were related to Julia Ward Howe.
1794 - The U.S. government passes a law prohibiting slavery in new American territories ------- The American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery is founded 1803 - The Pennsylvania Abolition Society is founded; Benjamin Rush, an American Founding Father, is elected the first president 1807 - The British government abolishes the slave trade, though the owning of slaves in British colonies is still legal 1808 - The British forms the West Africa Squadron to capture slave ships. Between 1808-1860, the Squadron captures 1,600 slave ships and frees 150,000 slaves ------- The U.S. government outlaws American participation in the African slave trade 1821 - The first American anti-slavery newspaper is founded (The Genius of Universal Emancipation) 1822 - Denmark Vessey unsuccessfully tries to lead a slave revolt in South Carolina 1830s - The Underground Railway is established to help runaway slaves escape to the northern states and Canada 1831 - Nate Turner leads a slave revolt in Virginia, resulting in stricter slave laws 1833 - Great Britain abolishes slavery 1833 - The American Antislavery Society is organized and within five years it has more than 1,350 chapters and 250,000 members 1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is influential in stirring abolitionist sentiment 1856 - The Republican Party is formed in America as a coalition of various political groups opposing slavery 1859 - John Brown unsuccessfully tries to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to launch a slave revolt 1860 - Abraham Lincoln is elected U.S. President, the first Republican party president 1861 - Eleven Southern states secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln 1862 - “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe is published 1863 - Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the Confederate States 1865 - The Civil War ends and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishes slavery in all states
AMERICA AND SLAVERY
From its founding, America has been a mixed multitude of people of varying principles, including religious principles.
Early America was strongly influenced by the Bible and most of its citizens were professing Christians of some sort, but there were all sorts of Christians, some born again and some “nominal,” trusting in baptism and good works rather than in a personal relationship with Christ, and there were also many non-Christians.
Even in the Plymouth Colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower in 1620, there were nominal Christians and some non-Christians.
As on many issues, early America was divided on the issue of slavery.
On one side were those who believed in slavery and kept slaves.
On the other side, there were many in America who were opposed to slavery, even during the Colonial era. These understood that it was wrong and hypocritical to proclaim liberty for all men while keeping some men in bondage to slavery.
For example, Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island sent a pamphlet to the Continental Congress “asking how they and Americans, so adverse to enslavement by British Parliament, could overlook the slavery of African-Americans ‘who have as good a claim to liberty as themselves’” (Angela Kamrath, The Miracle of America).
In 1772, Baptist pastor John Allen of Boston preached that slavery violates the laws of God and the natural rights of men. He stated this in An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, or The Essential Right of the Americans.
In 1791, Jonathan Edwards, famous Great Awakening preacher, published “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade.” He cited Christ’s “Golden Rule” as evidence that slavery is not God’s will.
Hopkins, Allen, and Edwards represented the thinking of large numbers of Americans in that day.
American Quakers opposed slavery beginning in the 1670s. William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania in 1682, owned slaves for a few years, but he treated them well and eventually freed them. In 1737, Quaker Benjamin Lay published a paper against “All Slave Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage.” He called slavery “a notorious sin.” In 1774, the Quakers ended slavery among themselves, and those who persisted in owning slaves were expelled. Famous Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier was a strong voice against slavery. He edited the Pennsylvania Freeman and promoted freedom for all men. Quakers had a prominent role in the Underground Railroad that helped southern slaves escape their masters. Quakers boycotted slave-produced goods in an attempt to put financial pressure on slaveholders. Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania, was the home of the first black denomination in America, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Pennsylvania was the first American state to pass a slavery abolition act. This was in 1780, even before the end of the War of Independence. In Britain, Quakers were at the forefront of the movement that abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1838.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833 under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison, and within seven years there were 2,000 auxiliary societies with a total membership of 150,000 to 200,000. This shows that anti-slavery sentiment was widespread in America.
Slavery in the 18th Century
It is important to understand the historical context. Slavery was widely accepted the world over at the time of America’s founding in the 18th century.
It is an institution nearly as old as man. Man’s “inhumanity” is the product of his sin nature. Jesus said, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Mt. 15:19). The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia practiced slavery, as did the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman empires. Slavery was practiced in China and India and the Americas; it was practiced by the Mongols and Huns and Vikings and North American Indians.
From ancient times, Africans enslaved Africans. In many parts of Africa, a third of the population were enslaved by their fellow blacks beginning in AD 1300 and earlier, and in some parts of Africa the percentage was even higher. For the most part, it was black Africans who captured African slaves in the interior of the continent and brought them to the coasts for sale. Black tribal leaders, such as the kings of Dohomey, would raid and capture blacks from neighboring tribes and sell them. In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey said, “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth ... the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery” (Ibn Warraq, Why the West Is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, 2011, p. 114). What a wretched lullaby!
Islam practiced slavery from its inception in the seventh century AD and was at the heart of the slave trade on the Barbary Coast of Africa for hundreds of years. We have documented this in The Bible andIslam, which is available as a free eBook from www.wayoflife.org.
England had a major role in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. So did the Portuguese, Dutch, and French.
America’s Founding Fathers and Slavery
Like the early American population as a whole, the American Founders represented many beliefs.
Some were Bible-believing Christians who had personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Following are a few examples:
Samuel Adams (1722-1803), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Massachusetts. In his last will and testament he wrote “I ... [rely] upon the merits of Jesus Christ for a pardon of all my sins” (Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, edited by William Wells, 1865, Vol. III, p. 379).
Charles Carroll (1737-1822), signer of the Declaration of Independence, framer of the Bill of Rights. “On the mercy of my Redeemer I rely for salvation and on His merits, not on the works I have done in obedience to His precepts” (Letter from Carroll to Charles Wharton, Sep. 27, 1825).
Robert Treat Paine (1731-1814), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Attorney General of Massachusetts. “I am constrained to express my adoration of the Supreme Being, the Author of my existence, in full belief of His Providential goodness and His forgiving mercy revealed to the world through Jesus Christ, through whom I hope for never ending happiness in a future state” (Last Will and Testament, attested May 11, 1814).
Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence and “Father of American Medicine.” “My only hope of salvation is in the infinite transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the Cross. Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins. I rely exclusively upon it” (The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush).
Roger Sherman (1721-1793), signer of the Declaration of Independence, framer of the Bill of Rights. “I believe that God ... did send His own Son to become man, die in the room and stead of sinners, and thus to lay a foundation for the offer of pardon and salvation to all mankind, so as all may be saved who are willing to accept the Gospel offer.” (The Life of Roger Sherman by Lewis Boutell, 1896, pp. 271-273).
John Witherspoon (1723-1794), signer of the Declaration of Independence. “... no man, whatever be his character or whatever be his hope, shall enter into rest unless he be reconciled to God though Jesus Christ” (The Works of John Witherspoon, 1815, Vol. V, pp. 245, 267).
On the other hand, some of America’s founders were skeptics who did not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and did not believe the Bible to be God’s infallible Word. The most prominent examples are Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State under George Washington, and the third President of the United States. Jefferson made his own “Bible” by cutting out of the Gospels everything pertaining to the divine and miraculous in Jesus’ life. Jefferson’s “Bible” left out references to angels, prophecy, Christ’s deity, the virgin birth, the miracles, and the resurrection.
Franklin, who has been called “the first American,” was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Constitutional Convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution. Like Jefferson, he wanted to maintain the moral code of Christianity as a rule for society, but he did not believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Franklin was a great fan of the blasphemous French skeptic Voltaire. Instead of bringing his grandson Benny Bache to the feet of Jesus, Franklin sought Voltaire’s blessing on the boy (H.W. Brands, The First American, p. 563). Franklin participated enthusiastically in a eulogy following Voltaire’s death. It was held in a hall dressed in black and lit by candles. Franklin took his Masonic crown and laid it at the foot of a large painting of Voltaire (The First American, p. 565). At the end of his life, Franklin said “I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to [Christ’s] divinity.”
This being said, most of America’s Founding Fathers were opposed to slavery.
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States and son of John Adams, second President of the U.S., was called the “Hell Hound of Abolition” for his persistent efforts to end slavery. In 1837, he said that the nation’s founders were opposed to slavery. “The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself [Jefferson]. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country [Great Britain] and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery--in common with every other mode of oppression--was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth” (An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their request, on the Sixty-first Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1837).
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and America’s third president, inherited slaves from his father beginning at age 14 and owned slaves all his life, but he introduced legislation throughout his career to abolish slavery.
“How could the man who wrote that ‘All men are created equal’ own slaves? This, in essence, is the question most persistently asked of those who write about Thomas Jefferson, and by all indications it is the thing that contemporary Americans find most vexing about him. ... The question carries a silent assumption that because he practiced slave holding, Jefferson must have somehow believed in it, and must therefore have been a hypocrite. My belief is that this way of asking the question ... is essentially backward, and reflects the pervasive presentism of our time. Consider, for example, how different the question appears when inverted and framed in more historical terms: How did a man who was born into a slave holding society, whose family and admired friends owned slaves, who inherited a fortune that was dependent on slaves and slave labor, decide at an early age that slavery was morally wrong and forcefully declare that it ought to be abolished? Though stating the same case, these are obviously different questions, focusing on different things, but one is framed in a historical context and the other ignores historical circumstances. The rephrased question reveals that what is truly remarkable is that Jefferson went against his society and his own self-interest to denounce slavery and urge its abolition” (Douglas Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1992).
In 1778, he was instrumental in having the importation of slaves to Virginia banned. He introduced legislation in the Continental Congress to ban slavery, and it failed to pass by only one vote. He called slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” (“Thomas Jefferson and Slavery,” Monticello.org). He feared that America would be destroyed by slavery and that it would lead to a civil war, which it did in 1861. As U.S. President, he continued to fight against slavery, but many American slave owners opposed him. He could not free his slaves upon his death, because he owed a large amount of money and his estate, including his slaves, had to be sold to pay the debt. In his Memoir, written at age 77, Jefferson said, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free.” Black American leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., praised Jefferson for his efforts to abolish slavery.
Recent scholarship claims that Jefferson fathered at least one child by one of his slaves named Sally Hemings, and this is possible, though it has not been absolutely proven.
We would note that Jefferson, as previously mentioned, was not a professing Christian or a believer in the Bible. Jefferson believed that Jesus was a good man and a great moral teacher, but he did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. As we have seen, Jefferson made his own “Bible” by cutting out everything from the Gospels pertaining to Christ’s virgin birth, miracles, atoning death, and resurrection.
George Washington
George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and America’s first President, inherited slaves and owned slaves until his death but his thinking about slavery gradually evolved toward an abolitionist position.
At great personal cost to his estate, he vowed that he would not sell his slaves even though he could have benefited financially from doing so. After the Revolutionary War, when he was deeply in debt, the sale of just one slave would have brought him enough income to pay his estate taxes for two years. He also refused to hire out his slaves, because he did not want to break up their families. He said, “To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. To hire them out is almost as bad because they could not be disposed of in families to any advantage, and to disperse [break up] the families I have an aversion” (Washington letter to Robert Lewis, Aug. 18, 1799, Washington’sWritings, 1980, Vol. 37, p. 338).
Washington was instrumental in having a federal law passed in the first year of his presidency (1789) prohibiting slavery in the new American territories. As a result, the new states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all prohibited slavery (“George Washington and the Washington Monument,” www.abschools.k12.wi.us, June 23, 2016).
In 1845, Daniel Webster described Washington’s efforts to abolish slavery in America:
“Soon after the adoption of the Constitution, it was declared by George Washington to be ‘among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery might be abolished by law;’ and in various forms in public and private communications, he avowed his anxious desire that ‘a spirit of humanity,’ prompting to ‘the emancipation of the slaves,’ ‘might diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people;’ and he gave the assurance, that ‘so far as his own suffrage would go,’ his influence should not be wanting to accomplish this result” (Webster, “Address to the People of the United States, ... to Lift Our Public Sentiment to a New Platform of Anti-slavery,” Jan. 29, 1845).
In 1793, Washington wrote to his secretary Tobias Lear and “expressed his repugnance at owning slaves and declared the principle reason for selling the land [his western lands] was to raise the finances that would allow him to liberate them” (“George Washington and Slavery,” Wikipedia, citing Dorothy Twohig, “That Species of Property: Washington’s Role in the Controversy over Slavery,” in George Washington Reconsidered by Don Higginbotham; and Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America). “In November the same year [1793], Washington demonstrated in a letter to his friend and neighbor Alexander Spotswood that the reluctance to sell slaves at a public venue, first seen in his letter to Lund Washington in 1778, had become an emphatic principle against ‘selling Negroes, as you would Cattle in the market...’” (Ibid., citing Twohig). “In 1795 and 1796, Washington devised a complicated plan that involved renting out his western lands to tenant farmers to whom he would lease his own slaves, and a similar scheme to lease the dower slaves he controlled to Dr. David Stuart for work on Stuart's Eastern Shore plantation. This plan would have involved breaking up slave families, but it was designed with an end goal of raising enough finances to fund their eventual emancipation (a detail Washington kept secret) and prevent the Custis heirs from permanently splitting up families by sale. None of these schemes could be realized because of his failure to sell or rent land at the right prices, the refusal of the Custis heirs to agree to them and his own reluctance to separate families” (“George Washington and Slavery,” Wikipedia).
Washington’s will called for the liberation of his slaves upon his wife’s death, and he required that young ones be educated to read and write and taught a useful occupation.
Many accounts were told by black men and women about Washington’s humility and lack of racial prejudice. My favorite was told by Primus Hall, the servant of Col. Timothy Pickering, one of General Washington’s favorite officers during the War of Independence. One evening Washington and Pickering talked late into the evening, and Washington asked Hall if there were straw and blankets enough for him to sleep there that night. Hall replied in the affirmative, and when it was time for him to retire, Washington was shown an extra bed in Pickering’s tent made of straw and blankets and laid down to sleep, not knowing that Hall had given him his own humble bed. When Washington woke up in the night and saw Hall sleeping at the Colonel’s desk, he realized what had happened and demanded that Hall share his bed. When Hall expressed surprise and told him not to trouble himself, Washington ordered him in an authoritative voice, “Primus, I say, come and lie down here! There is room for both, and I insist upon it.” Washington moved to one side of the straw bed, and the shocked black man did as he was told. “Primus professes to have been exceedingly shocked at the idea of lying under the same covering with the commander-in-chief, but his tone was so resolute and determined that he could not hesitate. He prepared himself, therefore, and laid himself down by Washington; and on the same straw, and under the same blanket, the General and the Negro servant slept until morning” (Henry Harrington, “Anecdotes of Washington,” Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, June 1849).
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, but he became an abolitionist later in life and liberated his slaves. He was the president of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. He promoted the idea of educating former slaves and to help them find employment so they could fend for themselves.
John Dickinson
John Dickinson was a member of the First and Second Continental Congress and worked with Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence. He was an officer during the War of Independence. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and was elected President of Delaware and President of Pennsylvania. Dickinson is the author of “The Liberty Song” (1768). The original chorus said, “Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all, By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall; In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed, For heaven approves of each generous deed.”
Dickinson became an abolitionist and freed his slaves in 1776. He devoted his final years to the cause of abolition and donated a considerable amount of his wealth “to the relief of the unhappy.”
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, denounced slavery in his tract On Slave Keeping (1773). He called it a “vice which degrades human nature.” He called on Americans to oppose it. “Remember the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.”
John Jay
John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1789-95), author of five of the Federalist Papers, and Governor of New York, was a leading opponent of slavery. “His first two attempts to end slavery in New York in 1777 and 1785 failed, but a third in 1799 succeeded.” All slaves in New York were emancipated before his death in 1829.
Noah Webster
Noah Webster, who had a major influence on the U.S. Constitution through his 1787 essay An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, called for slavery to be abolished in the United States. He founded an antislavery group called the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom. His influential Blue-Back Speller included an essay by Thomas Day calling for the abolition of slavery. Day argued that this was in accordance with the nation’s Declaration of Independence. He warned Americans that consistency required that they either acknowledge the rights of the Negroes or surrender their own rights.
The Constitutional Convention
During the Constitutional Convention (1787), when the U.S. Constitution was written and the American nation was formed at the federal level, there was a strong effort to abolish slavery. The opponents of slavery found, though, that it was impossible to form the nation on that basis, since the southern colonies refused to agree with that principle.
America’s Civil War
Those who criticize America on the slavery issue must acknowledge that the nation fought its most terrible and bloody war on that issue. The Civil War was fought between 1861-1865 after southern states seceded from the Union. A majority of Americans were so strongly opposed to slavery that they were willing to go to war against their fellow Americans to settle the matter. The southern states were called the Confederacy, and the northern states, the Union. About 750,000 died in the war.
There were other great issues involved in the American Civil War, particularly the issue of states rights. But slavery was definitely a fundamental issue in the conflict. This was stated plainly by the Confederate leaders.
Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, made the following statement on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia:
“The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions--African slavery as it exists among us--the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [opposite from ‘all men are created equal’]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” (Stephens, Cornerstone Speech).
In May 1845, Baptists in southern states separated from their Baptist brethren in the northern states and formed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The founding meeting was held at First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, and delegates voiced their approval of the institution of slavery. (In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention formally apologized for its former stance on slavery, and in 2012 the SBC elected a black pastor as president.)
On January 27, 1861, Ebenezer Warren, pastor of First Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia, a prominent congregation in the SBC, preached a sermon entitled “Scriptural Vindication of Slavery.” This expressed the thinking of a large number of Southern whites in that day. He said:
“Slavery forms a vital element of the Divine Revelation to man. Its institution, regulation, and perpetuity, constitute a part of many of the books of the Bible. ... The public mind needs enlightening from the sacred teachings of inspiration on this subject. ... Both Christianity and Slavery are from heaven; both are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of time. ... Because Slavery is right; and because the condition of the slaves affords them all those privileges which would prove substantial blessings to them; and, too, because their Maker has decreed their bondage, and has given them, as a race, capacities and aspirations suited alone to this condition of life.”
The January 1864 issue of the Religious Herald, the official paper of the Virginia Baptists, went so far as to call abolition “the final Antichrist.”
Southern Baptists justified slavery on the basis of the law of Moses. Following are some of the Mosaic principles on slavery:
- A Jewish slave was to be given his liberty after six years (Exodus 21:2), and the liberated servant was to be furnished liberally with goods (De. 15:12-15). - If a master injured a slave so that he died, the master was to be punished (Ex. 21:20). - If a slave was injured by his master, he was to be given his liberty (Ex. 21:26). - Slaves were not to be “ruled with rigour” (Le. 25:53). - If a slave escaped from his master, he was to be protected (De. 23:15-16).
But a reading of the Bible as a whole actually supports the abolition of slavery, because both the law of Moses and the Lord Jesus Christ taught that the heart and soul of God’s law is to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Lev. 19:18; Mat. 22:39). It is impossible to obey this divine command while enslaving another individual.
And any concept of racial superiority has zero biblical support. All men are children of Adam. All nations are “made of one blood” (Acts 17:26).
Why, then, did the law of Moses allow for slavery? Jesus explained this in Matthew 19. Like divorce, slavery was allowed because of the hardness of man’s heart and his weak fallen condition (Mat. 19:7-8).
The Baptists in the north recognized that slavery was the chief cause of the war. The Illinois Baptists issued the following statement in June 1863: “We recognize human slavery now, as we have heretofore done, to be the cause of the war and its kindred evils, and we reiterate our convictions that there can be no peace and prosperity in the nation until it is destroyed” B.F. Morris, Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, 1864, p. 754).
The outcome of the American Civil War was the complete abolishment of slavery. In December 1865, the 13th amendment of the Constitution was ratified, which abolished slavery in the United States. It came at great cost in American money and blood.
The Abolition Movement and Theological Liberalism
Many aspects of the Christian abolitionist movement were deeply influenced by theological liberalism and its social gospel.
For example, there was support for slaves rebelling against their masters. David Walker of Boston issued a fiery call for rebellion in his Appeal in Four Articles in 1829. This radical side of the abolitionist movement ignored Bible commands such as 1 Corinthians 7:21-22; Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-25; 1 Peter 2:18-21.
The liberal social gospel allegorized Scripture to justify rebellion and even murder. For example, Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” interpreted the Union armies of the North as the coming of Christ. The “watch-fires” of the Union army camps are the altar of God, and “the burnish’d rows of steel” bayonets are the gospel. Howe was a Unitarian universalist who rejected Jesus Christ as the Son of God and denied the divine inspiration of Scripture. She delivered a pantheistic, universalistic message at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893 entitled “What Is Religion?” (womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_1893_pwr_howe.htm). Howe’s husband, Samuel, funded John Brown’s murderous insurrection attempt.
Harriet Beecher Stowe is known as “the little woman who started the big war,” as her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin provoked hotheads on both sides of the issue. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was the liberal pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. During Beecher’s career there, he opened his pulpit to Unitarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley and even to agnostics such as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Beecher “once argued that a Sharps rifle held a better argument than a Bible for persuading slaveholders--hence these rifles were nicknamed ‘Beecher’s Bibles’ when used to combat the spread of slavery in the Kansas Territory before the American Civil War” (www.embassy.org.nz/encycl/u1encyc.htm). The Beechers were related to Julia Ward Howe.
Slavery has been practiced since the fall of man. It is not a a product of “racism”; it is not an issue of skin color; it is a product of man’s sinful heart because of which he practices far more hatred toward his fellow man than love of neighbor. Jesus described man’s condition with perfect accuracy:
“And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man” (Mark 7:20-23).
Slavery has been practiced by the white man, the black man, the red man, and the yellow man, and every other kind of man.
That is a fact of history.
Slavery was practiced by the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Persians, the native Brits, the Dans, the Romans, the African kingdoms, the South American kingdoms, the Chinese, Indians, Nepalese, Burmese, Native Americans, the Muslim kingdoms.
That is a fact of man’s wretched history, and it is a reflection of man’s fallen condition.
It is also a fact of history as to who was at the forefront of the war against slavery. It wasn’t the Muslims. It wasn’t the Hindus or the Buddhists or the Anamists or the Atheists or the Humanists. It wasn’t Roman Catholics. It wasn’t the black African nations or the Asian nations or the South American nations or the Eskimos. It was (mostly) white Protestant and Baptist Christians in England and America.
This is a fact of history.
America’s role in the destruction of slavery in modern times is a fascinating study.
Timeline of the American Abolitionist Movement
There was widespread opposition to slavery from the time of the founding of the American colonies, and many of the Founding Fathers were opponents, but abolition became a groundswell movement during the Second Great Awakening, both in America and England. The culmination in America was the Civil War of 1860-65, after which slavery was officially abolished. Following are some of the important events: 1794 - The U.S. government passes a law prohibiting slavery in new American territories ------- The American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery is founded 1803 - The Pennsylvania Abolition Society is founded; Benjamin Rush, an American Founding Father, is elected the first president 1807 - The British government abolishes the slave trade, though the owning of slaves in British colonies is still legal 1808 - The British forms the West Africa Squadron to capture slave ships. Between 1808-1860, the Squadron captures 1,600 slave ships and frees 150,000 slaves ------- The U.S. government outlaws American participation in the African slave trade 1821 - The first American anti-slavery newspaper is founded (The Genius of Universal Emancipation) 1822 - Denmark Vessey unsuccessfully tries to lead a slave revolt in South Carolina 1830s - The Underground Railway is established to help runaway slaves escape to the northern states and Canada 1831 - Nate Turner leads a slave revolt in Virginia, resulting in stricter slave laws 1833 - Great Britain abolishes slavery 1833 - The American Antislavery Society is organized and within five years it has more than 1,350 chapters and 250,000 members 1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is influential in stirring abolitionist sentiment 1856 - The Republican Party is formed in America as a coalition of various political groups opposing slavery 1859 - John Brown unsuccessfully tries to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to launch a slave revolt 1860 - Abraham Lincoln is elected U.S. President, the first Republican party president 1861 - Eleven Southern states secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln 1862 - “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe is published 1863 - Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the Confederate States 1865 - The Civil War ends and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishes slavery in all states
AMERICA AND SLAVERY
From its founding, America has been a mixed multitude of people of varying principles, including religious principles.
Early America was strongly influenced by the Bible and most of its citizens were professing Christians of some sort, but there were all sorts of Christians, some born again and some “nominal,” trusting in baptism and good works rather than in a personal relationship with Christ, and there were also many non-Christians.
Even in the Plymouth Colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower in 1620, there were nominal Christians and some non-Christians.
As on many issues, early America was divided on the issue of slavery.
On one side were those who believed in slavery and kept slaves.
On the other side, there were many in America who were opposed to slavery, even during the Colonial era. These understood that it was wrong and hypocritical to proclaim liberty for all men while keeping some men in bondage to slavery.
For example, Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island sent a pamphlet to the Continental Congress “asking how they and Americans, so adverse to enslavement by British Parliament, could overlook the slavery of African-Americans ‘who have as good a claim to liberty as themselves’” (Angela Kamrath, The Miracle of America).
In 1772, Baptist pastor John Allen of Boston preached that slavery violates the laws of God and the natural rights of men. He stated this in An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, or The Essential Right of the Americans.
In 1791, Jonathan Edwards, famous Great Awakening preacher, published “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade.” He cited Christ’s “Golden Rule” as evidence that slavery is not God’s will.
Hopkins, Allen, and Edwards represented the thinking of large numbers of Americans in that day.
American Quakers opposed slavery beginning in the 1670s. William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania in 1682, owned slaves for a few years, but he treated them well and eventually freed them. In 1737, Quaker Benjamin Lay published a paper against “All Slave Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage.” He called slavery “a notorious sin.” In 1774, the Quakers ended slavery among themselves, and those who persisted in owning slaves were expelled. Famous Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier was a strong voice against slavery. He edited the Pennsylvania Freeman and promoted freedom for all men. Quakers had a prominent role in the Underground Railroad that helped southern slaves escape their masters. Quakers boycotted slave-produced goods in an attempt to put financial pressure on slaveholders. Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania, was the home of the first black denomination in America, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Pennsylvania was the first American state to pass a slavery abolition act. This was in 1780, even before the end of the War of Independence. In Britain, Quakers were at the forefront of the movement that abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1838.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833 under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison, and within seven years there were 2,000 auxiliary societies with a total membership of 150,000 to 200,000. This shows that anti-slavery sentiment was widespread in America.
Slavery in the 18th Century
It is important to understand the historical context. Slavery was widely accepted the world over at the time of America’s founding in the 18th century.
It is an institution nearly as old as man. Man’s “inhumanity” is the product of his sin nature. Jesus said, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Mt. 15:19). The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia practiced slavery, as did the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman empires. Slavery was practiced in China and India and the Americas; it was practiced by the Mongols and Huns and Vikings and North American Indians.
From ancient times, Africans enslaved Africans. In many parts of Africa, a third of the population were enslaved by their fellow blacks beginning in AD 1300 and earlier, and in some parts of Africa the percentage was even higher. For the most part, it was black Africans who captured African slaves in the interior of the continent and brought them to the coasts for sale. Black tribal leaders, such as the kings of Dohomey, would raid and capture blacks from neighboring tribes and sell them. In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey said, “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth ... the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery” (Ibn Warraq, Why the West Is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, 2011, p. 114). What a wretched lullaby!
Islam practiced slavery from its inception in the seventh century AD and was at the heart of the slave trade on the Barbary Coast of Africa for hundreds of years. We have documented this in The Bible andIslam, which is available as a free eBook from www.wayoflife.org.
England had a major role in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. So did the Portuguese, Dutch, and French.
America’s Founding Fathers and Slavery
Like the early American population as a whole, the American Founders represented many beliefs.
Some were Bible-believing Christians who had personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Following are a few examples:
Samuel Adams (1722-1803), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Massachusetts. In his last will and testament he wrote “I ... [rely] upon the merits of Jesus Christ for a pardon of all my sins” (Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, edited by William Wells, 1865, Vol. III, p. 379).
Charles Carroll (1737-1822), signer of the Declaration of Independence, framer of the Bill of Rights. “On the mercy of my Redeemer I rely for salvation and on His merits, not on the works I have done in obedience to His precepts” (Letter from Carroll to Charles Wharton, Sep. 27, 1825).
Robert Treat Paine (1731-1814), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Attorney General of Massachusetts. “I am constrained to express my adoration of the Supreme Being, the Author of my existence, in full belief of His Providential goodness and His forgiving mercy revealed to the world through Jesus Christ, through whom I hope for never ending happiness in a future state” (Last Will and Testament, attested May 11, 1814).
Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence and “Father of American Medicine.” “My only hope of salvation is in the infinite transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the Cross. Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins. I rely exclusively upon it” (The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush).
Roger Sherman (1721-1793), signer of the Declaration of Independence, framer of the Bill of Rights. “I believe that God ... did send His own Son to become man, die in the room and stead of sinners, and thus to lay a foundation for the offer of pardon and salvation to all mankind, so as all may be saved who are willing to accept the Gospel offer.” (The Life of Roger Sherman by Lewis Boutell, 1896, pp. 271-273).
John Witherspoon (1723-1794), signer of the Declaration of Independence. “... no man, whatever be his character or whatever be his hope, shall enter into rest unless he be reconciled to God though Jesus Christ” (The Works of John Witherspoon, 1815, Vol. V, pp. 245, 267).
On the other hand, some of America’s founders were skeptics who did not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and did not believe the Bible to be God’s infallible Word. The most prominent examples are Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State under George Washington, and the third President of the United States. Jefferson made his own “Bible” by cutting out of the Gospels everything pertaining to the divine and miraculous in Jesus’ life. Jefferson’s “Bible” left out references to angels, prophecy, Christ’s deity, the virgin birth, the miracles, and the resurrection.
Franklin, who has been called “the first American,” was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Constitutional Convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution. Like Jefferson, he wanted to maintain the moral code of Christianity as a rule for society, but he did not believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Franklin was a great fan of the blasphemous French skeptic Voltaire. Instead of bringing his grandson Benny Bache to the feet of Jesus, Franklin sought Voltaire’s blessing on the boy (H.W. Brands, The First American, p. 563). Franklin participated enthusiastically in a eulogy following Voltaire’s death. It was held in a hall dressed in black and lit by candles. Franklin took his Masonic crown and laid it at the foot of a large painting of Voltaire (The First American, p. 565). At the end of his life, Franklin said “I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to [Christ’s] divinity.”
This being said, most of America’s Founding Fathers were opposed to slavery.
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States and son of John Adams, second President of the U.S., was called the “Hell Hound of Abolition” for his persistent efforts to end slavery. In 1837, he said that the nation’s founders were opposed to slavery. “The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself [Jefferson]. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country [Great Britain] and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery--in common with every other mode of oppression--was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth” (An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their request, on the Sixty-first Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1837).
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and America’s third president, inherited slaves from his father beginning at age 14 and owned slaves all his life, but he introduced legislation throughout his career to abolish slavery.
“How could the man who wrote that ‘All men are created equal’ own slaves? This, in essence, is the question most persistently asked of those who write about Thomas Jefferson, and by all indications it is the thing that contemporary Americans find most vexing about him. ... The question carries a silent assumption that because he practiced slave holding, Jefferson must have somehow believed in it, and must therefore have been a hypocrite. My belief is that this way of asking the question ... is essentially backward, and reflects the pervasive presentism of our time. Consider, for example, how different the question appears when inverted and framed in more historical terms: How did a man who was born into a slave holding society, whose family and admired friends owned slaves, who inherited a fortune that was dependent on slaves and slave labor, decide at an early age that slavery was morally wrong and forcefully declare that it ought to be abolished? Though stating the same case, these are obviously different questions, focusing on different things, but one is framed in a historical context and the other ignores historical circumstances. The rephrased question reveals that what is truly remarkable is that Jefferson went against his society and his own self-interest to denounce slavery and urge its abolition” (Douglas Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1992).
In 1778, he was instrumental in having the importation of slaves to Virginia banned. He introduced legislation in the Continental Congress to ban slavery, and it failed to pass by only one vote. He called slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” (“Thomas Jefferson and Slavery,” Monticello.org). He feared that America would be destroyed by slavery and that it would lead to a civil war, which it did in 1861. As U.S. President, he continued to fight against slavery, but many American slave owners opposed him. He could not free his slaves upon his death, because he owed a large amount of money and his estate, including his slaves, had to be sold to pay the debt. In his Memoir, written at age 77, Jefferson said, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free.” Black American leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., praised Jefferson for his efforts to abolish slavery.
Recent scholarship claims that Jefferson fathered at least one child by one of his slaves named Sally Hemings, and this is possible, though it has not been absolutely proven.
We would note that Jefferson, as previously mentioned, was not a professing Christian or a believer in the Bible. Jefferson believed that Jesus was a good man and a great moral teacher, but he did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. As we have seen, Jefferson made his own “Bible” by cutting out everything from the Gospels pertaining to Christ’s virgin birth, miracles, atoning death, and resurrection.
George Washington
George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and America’s first President, inherited slaves and owned slaves until his death but his thinking about slavery gradually evolved toward an abolitionist position.
At great personal cost to his estate, he vowed that he would not sell his slaves even though he could have benefited financially from doing so. After the Revolutionary War, when he was deeply in debt, the sale of just one slave would have brought him enough income to pay his estate taxes for two years. He also refused to hire out his slaves, because he did not want to break up their families. He said, “To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. To hire them out is almost as bad because they could not be disposed of in families to any advantage, and to disperse [break up] the families I have an aversion” (Washington letter to Robert Lewis, Aug. 18, 1799, Washington’sWritings, 1980, Vol. 37, p. 338).
Washington was instrumental in having a federal law passed in the first year of his presidency (1789) prohibiting slavery in the new American territories. As a result, the new states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all prohibited slavery (“George Washington and the Washington Monument,” www.abschools.k12.wi.us, June 23, 2016).
In 1845, Daniel Webster described Washington’s efforts to abolish slavery in America:
“Soon after the adoption of the Constitution, it was declared by George Washington to be ‘among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery might be abolished by law;’ and in various forms in public and private communications, he avowed his anxious desire that ‘a spirit of humanity,’ prompting to ‘the emancipation of the slaves,’ ‘might diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people;’ and he gave the assurance, that ‘so far as his own suffrage would go,’ his influence should not be wanting to accomplish this result” (Webster, “Address to the People of the United States, ... to Lift Our Public Sentiment to a New Platform of Anti-slavery,” Jan. 29, 1845).
In 1793, Washington wrote to his secretary Tobias Lear and “expressed his repugnance at owning slaves and declared the principle reason for selling the land [his western lands] was to raise the finances that would allow him to liberate them” (“George Washington and Slavery,” Wikipedia, citing Dorothy Twohig, “That Species of Property: Washington’s Role in the Controversy over Slavery,” in George Washington Reconsidered by Don Higginbotham; and Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America). “In November the same year [1793], Washington demonstrated in a letter to his friend and neighbor Alexander Spotswood that the reluctance to sell slaves at a public venue, first seen in his letter to Lund Washington in 1778, had become an emphatic principle against ‘selling Negroes, as you would Cattle in the market...’” (Ibid., citing Twohig). “In 1795 and 1796, Washington devised a complicated plan that involved renting out his western lands to tenant farmers to whom he would lease his own slaves, and a similar scheme to lease the dower slaves he controlled to Dr. David Stuart for work on Stuart's Eastern Shore plantation. This plan would have involved breaking up slave families, but it was designed with an end goal of raising enough finances to fund their eventual emancipation (a detail Washington kept secret) and prevent the Custis heirs from permanently splitting up families by sale. None of these schemes could be realized because of his failure to sell or rent land at the right prices, the refusal of the Custis heirs to agree to them and his own reluctance to separate families” (“George Washington and Slavery,” Wikipedia).
Washington’s will called for the liberation of his slaves upon his wife’s death, and he required that young ones be educated to read and write and taught a useful occupation.
Many accounts were told by black men and women about Washington’s humility and lack of racial prejudice. My favorite was told by Primus Hall, the servant of Col. Timothy Pickering, one of General Washington’s favorite officers during the War of Independence. One evening Washington and Pickering talked late into the evening, and Washington asked Hall if there were straw and blankets enough for him to sleep there that night. Hall replied in the affirmative, and when it was time for him to retire, Washington was shown an extra bed in Pickering’s tent made of straw and blankets and laid down to sleep, not knowing that Hall had given him his own humble bed. When Washington woke up in the night and saw Hall sleeping at the Colonel’s desk, he realized what had happened and demanded that Hall share his bed. When Hall expressed surprise and told him not to trouble himself, Washington ordered him in an authoritative voice, “Primus, I say, come and lie down here! There is room for both, and I insist upon it.” Washington moved to one side of the straw bed, and the shocked black man did as he was told. “Primus professes to have been exceedingly shocked at the idea of lying under the same covering with the commander-in-chief, but his tone was so resolute and determined that he could not hesitate. He prepared himself, therefore, and laid himself down by Washington; and on the same straw, and under the same blanket, the General and the Negro servant slept until morning” (Henry Harrington, “Anecdotes of Washington,” Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, June 1849).
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, but he became an abolitionist later in life and liberated his slaves. He was the president of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. He promoted the idea of educating former slaves and to help them find employment so they could fend for themselves.
John Dickinson
John Dickinson was a member of the First and Second Continental Congress and worked with Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence. He was an officer during the War of Independence. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and was elected President of Delaware and President of Pennsylvania. Dickinson is the author of “The Liberty Song” (1768). The original chorus said, “Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all, By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall; In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed, For heaven approves of each generous deed.”
Dickinson became an abolitionist and freed his slaves in 1776. He devoted his final years to the cause of abolition and donated a considerable amount of his wealth “to the relief of the unhappy.”
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, denounced slavery in his tract On Slave Keeping (1773). He called it a “vice which degrades human nature.” He called on Americans to oppose it. “Remember the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.”
John Jay
John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1789-95), author of five of the Federalist Papers, and Governor of New York, was a leading opponent of slavery. “His first two attempts to end slavery in New York in 1777 and 1785 failed, but a third in 1799 succeeded.” All slaves in New York were emancipated before his death in 1829.
Noah Webster
Noah Webster, who had a major influence on the U.S. Constitution through his 1787 essay An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, called for slavery to be abolished in the United States. He founded an antislavery group called the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom. His influential Blue-Back Speller included an essay by Thomas Day calling for the abolition of slavery. Day argued that this was in accordance with the nation’s Declaration of Independence. He warned Americans that consistency required that they either acknowledge the rights of the Negroes or surrender their own rights.
The Constitutional Convention
During the Constitutional Convention (1787), when the U.S. Constitution was written and the American nation was formed at the federal level, there was a strong effort to abolish slavery. The opponents of slavery found, though, that it was impossible to form the nation on that basis, since the southern colonies refused to agree with that principle.
America’s Civil War
Those who criticize America on the slavery issue must acknowledge that the nation fought its most terrible and bloody war on that issue. The Civil War was fought between 1861-1865 after southern states seceded from the Union. A majority of Americans were so strongly opposed to slavery that they were willing to go to war against their fellow Americans to settle the matter. The southern states were called the Confederacy, and the northern states, the Union. About 750,000 died in the war.
There were other great issues involved in the American Civil War, particularly the issue of states rights. But slavery was definitely a fundamental issue in the conflict. This was stated plainly by the Confederate leaders.
Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, made the following statement on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia:
“The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions--African slavery as it exists among us--the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [opposite from ‘all men are created equal’]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” (Stephens, Cornerstone Speech).
In May 1845, Baptists in southern states separated from their Baptist brethren in the northern states and formed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The founding meeting was held at First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, and delegates voiced their approval of the institution of slavery. (In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention formally apologized for its former stance on slavery, and in 2012 the SBC elected a black pastor as president.)
On January 27, 1861, Ebenezer Warren, pastor of First Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia, a prominent congregation in the SBC, preached a sermon entitled “Scriptural Vindication of Slavery.” This expressed the thinking of a large number of Southern whites in that day. He said:
“Slavery forms a vital element of the Divine Revelation to man. Its institution, regulation, and perpetuity, constitute a part of many of the books of the Bible. ... The public mind needs enlightening from the sacred teachings of inspiration on this subject. ... Both Christianity and Slavery are from heaven; both are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of time. ... Because Slavery is right; and because the condition of the slaves affords them all those privileges which would prove substantial blessings to them; and, too, because their Maker has decreed their bondage, and has given them, as a race, capacities and aspirations suited alone to this condition of life.”
The January 1864 issue of the Religious Herald, the official paper of the Virginia Baptists, went so far as to call abolition “the final Antichrist.”
Southern Baptists justified slavery on the basis of the law of Moses. Following are some of the Mosaic principles on slavery:
- A Jewish slave was to be given his liberty after six years (Exodus 21:2), and the liberated servant was to be furnished liberally with goods (De. 15:12-15). - If a master injured a slave so that he died, the master was to be punished (Ex. 21:20). - If a slave was injured by his master, he was to be given his liberty (Ex. 21:26). - Slaves were not to be “ruled with rigour” (Le. 25:53). - If a slave escaped from his master, he was to be protected (De. 23:15-16).
But a reading of the Bible as a whole actually supports the abolition of slavery, because both the law of Moses and the Lord Jesus Christ taught that the heart and soul of God’s law is to “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Lev. 19:18; Mat. 22:39). It is impossible to obey this divine command while enslaving another individual.
And any concept of racial superiority has zero biblical support. All men are children of Adam. All nations are “made of one blood” (Acts 17:26).
Why, then, did the law of Moses allow for slavery? Jesus explained this in Matthew 19. Like divorce, slavery was allowed because of the hardness of man’s heart and his weak fallen condition (Mat. 19:7-8).
The Baptists in the north recognized that slavery was the chief cause of the war. The Illinois Baptists issued the following statement in June 1863: “We recognize human slavery now, as we have heretofore done, to be the cause of the war and its kindred evils, and we reiterate our convictions that there can be no peace and prosperity in the nation until it is destroyed” B.F. Morris, Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, 1864, p. 754).
The outcome of the American Civil War was the complete abolishment of slavery. In December 1865, the 13th amendment of the Constitution was ratified, which abolished slavery in the United States. It came at great cost in American money and blood.
The Abolition Movement and Theological Liberalism
Many aspects of the Christian abolitionist movement were deeply influenced by theological liberalism and its social gospel.
For example, there was support for slaves rebelling against their masters. David Walker of Boston issued a fiery call for rebellion in his Appeal in Four Articles in 1829. This radical side of the abolitionist movement ignored Bible commands such as 1 Corinthians 7:21-22; Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-25; 1 Peter 2:18-21.
The liberal social gospel allegorized Scripture to justify rebellion and even murder. For example, Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” interpreted the Union armies of the North as the coming of Christ. The “watch-fires” of the Union army camps are the altar of God, and “the burnish’d rows of steel” bayonets are the gospel. Howe was a Unitarian universalist who rejected Jesus Christ as the Son of God and denied the divine inspiration of Scripture. She delivered a pantheistic, universalistic message at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893 entitled “What Is Religion?” (womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_1893_pwr_howe.htm). Howe’s husband, Samuel, funded John Brown’s murderous insurrection attempt.
Harriet Beecher Stowe is known as “the little woman who started the big war,” as her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin provoked hotheads on both sides of the issue. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was the liberal pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. During Beecher’s career there, he opened his pulpit to Unitarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Greeley and even to agnostics such as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Beecher “once argued that a Sharps rifle held a better argument than a Bible for persuading slaveholders--hence these rifles were nicknamed ‘Beecher’s Bibles’ when used to combat the spread of slavery in the Kansas Territory before the American Civil War” (www.embassy.org.nz/encycl/u1encyc.htm). The Beechers were related to Julia Ward Howe.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Under 400,000 slaves were brought to America. Those enslaved African people represented only 3.6% of the transatlantic slave trade. By the Civil War, there were under 4 million black slaves in America.
Over 20 million people were imprisoned by Soviet leftists in the gulag system.
While the peak slave labor population in the leftist slave camps was less than the peak slave population in the South, the death rate ranged from 5 percent to 25 percent depending on the period.
Under 2 million people died as a result of the brutal leftist system of slave labor camps and that was a fraction of the full number of people killed through various means by the Socialist system.
Gulag labor was murderous with prisoners sent to work in uranium mines or to labor outdoors chopping trees and digging canals in subzero weather with little food and less protection. At one gulag, prisoners labored in uranium mines, breathing in radioactive dust, and dying within two years of cancer and leukemia. The sick were then used for medical experiments by Socialist medicine before they died.
These horrors were not some relic of the Stalin era, but were being carried out as recently as the 1970s.
The 1619 Project of the New York Times falsely claimed that America was built on slave labor, but before that revisionist history project, the paper had run a Red Century project defending Communism when Soviet Socialism was, from Moscow University to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built on slave labor.
At its peak, as many as 1 in 5 Soviet construction workers were convict laborers and massive slave labor projects like the White Sea-Baltic Canal, hailed as triumphs of socialism, killed tens of thousands.
When Senator Bernie Sanders visited the USSR, he gushed over its socialist achievements, such as the Moscow Metro. The massive system had been built by Stalin to showcase the achievements of socialism and the Putin regime restored the old plaque reading, “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation, inspired us to labor and great deeds”. But it wasn’t inspiration that built the Moscow Metro: it was slave labor.
"There's a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags," Kyle Jurek, a Bernie Sanders field organizer had argued, calling it a model for breaking Americans of their “privilege” by sending them to “go break rocks.”
Nobody would propose a return to the plantations, but forced labor is still popular with some socialists.
The Soviet Socialist system was built on forced labor, from the collective farms that peasants were not allowed to leave, to mandatory ‘volunteer’ brigades like those that helped build the Moscow Metro or harvested crops, to a massive slave trade in convict labor which built roads, tunnels, and canals, mined and did every form of dirty work, and was traded back and forth to Socialist civilian organizations.
The Soviet Socialist achievements that American leftists praised were the product of slavery.
While the Left demands that America make a reckoning for 19th century slavery, its leading figures, from Bernie Sanders to Noam Chomsky, were apologists for socialist slavery, and its leading institutions, from the New York Times to the Pulitzer Institute, both promoters of the 1619 Project, were complicit in covering up slavery and mass murder by their socialist allies in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Today’s ‘woke’ corporations, like Nike and Coca-Cola, benefit from slave labor in Communist China’s systems of labor camps, state-run and civilian factories, which encompass over 1 million people.
The brands telling Americans that they need a reckoning with slavery have their own reckoning.
Slavery has been a fundamental feature of the socialist regimes admired by American leftists expressed in murderous abbreviations from the Soviet GULAG to Cuba’s UMAP camps for Christians, to China’s RTL. The Khmer Rogue in Cambodia turned forced labor into genocide and this was not all that unusual.
Southern slave owners, especially once shipping in new slaves was banned, wanted to profit from selling slaves and this resulted in a high population growth among enslaved African people, while the Soviet Socialist gulags, like their National Socialist counterparts, extracted maximum labor from their prisoners with no interest in their physical survival. They knew where they could easily get more slaves.
The Nazis and the Communists operated unsustainable slave economies that always needed more bodies. National Socialist and Communist slave labor served a dual purpose, obtaining free labor for state industries (and in Germany, politically connected industries), and disposing of unwanted people.
The National Socialists used slave labor to clear away unwanted conquered populations, Jews, and others who were not official members of the Herrenvolk, while building up the industries of conquest. The Soviet Socialists also used the gulag system, along with mass starvation and executions, to clear away unwanted ethnic and national minorities, including again Jews, but also to purge their system.
The Soviet Socialists used slave labor to eliminate potential dissent and terrorize the population on a much larger scale because while the National Socialists had used mass murder to achieve racial homogeneity, they used it to obtain political homogeneity as the basis for their system.
Both the National Socialists and Soviet Socialists envisioned an endless supply of slave labor that could be obtained through conquest. The South had internalized slavery, while the Socialists externalized it.
Socialist slavery was not an aberration: it was the essential idea of Marxism and of Socialism.
Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution stated that, "in the USSR, work is a duty" and that the "principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."
That was a quote from Karl Marx.
In that same paragraph, Marx had described the ideal Communist society as a place where, "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want." The message echoed the one placed over the gates of National Socialist concentration camps, "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Work makes you free."
The Soviet Union, like other socialist regimes, had defined itself as a worker state. But the nature of work, where and how one worked, was defined by the institutions of the state. Slavery was the founding principle of socialism which defined life around labor, not for the self, but for the collective good.
“Socialism is the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism," Adolf Hitler had articulated in a Munich speech titled, Why We Are Anti-Semites.
Parasitism was the basis for forced labor in the Soviet Union and other Socialist regimes where the state defined who workers were and what legitimate work was. Citizenship in a workers’ state meant a willingness to labor on those terms. A failure to do so was parasitism which would be punished with redemption through labor. The “Arbeit Macht Frei” message of National Socialist concentration camps, derived from a 19th century novel about the moral redemption of forced labor, and the celebratory Soviet songs and poems of forced labor celebrated work as the true religion of a socialist state.
Southern slave owners justified the subjugation of human beings by asserting that forced labor gave meaning to inferior people, uplifting them from a degraded condition, and taking care of them.
Socialist slavery was based on the same premise and provided justification for Southern slavery.
"The dissociation of labor and disintegration of society, which liberty and free competition occasion, is especially injurious to the poorer class; for besides the labor necessary to support the family, the poor man is burdened with the care of finding a home, and procuring employment," George Fitzhugh, one of the most vocal advocates for the Southern plantation, had argued. "Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form of socialism."
Fitzhugh believed that not only black people, but that most people should be slaves to protect them from the fierce competition of a capitalist society.
"With negro slaves, their wages invariably increase with their wants. The master increases the provision for the family as the family increases in number and helplessness. It is a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants," he wrote.
The doctrines of Socialism helped inspire Southern slave owners to defend the plantation.
"Every plantation is an organized community," Rep. William Grayson had mused. "A phalanstery, as Fourier, would call it, where all work, where each member gets sustenance and a home."
Fitzhugh had also argued that, "a well-conducted farm in the South is a model of associated labor that Fourier might envy."
Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist who coined the term 'feminism', had wanted to wipe out the Jews by sending them to labor in his phalansteries, massive utopian communes, as his original vision of utopian socialist communes had given way to labor camps that would break the enemies of socialism.
Socialism is less efficient and produces less value, therefore it demands more cheap labor. Or slaves.
Socialist slavery begins with idealistic visions, but all the schemes based on willing cooperation fall through. The peasants cling to their land and have to be forced into communes. The workers don’t want to work and have to be compelled. The volunteers don’t show up and volunteering becomes mandatory.
The idealism turns into ossified academic jargon disguising the brutal reality of mass slavery.
America has spent centuries making a difficult and bloody reckoning with slavery. Its leftist enemies have rarely bothered to even make the effort, blaming crimes on individual leaders, on poor conditions, and on interference by America in hellholes like Cambodia that would otherwise have been utopias.
And, no matter how much we learn about the Socialist mass killings, rehabilitation is always waiting.
The Left has failed to make a reckoning with slavery. That’s why the media nods sympathetically at old Communists, and clucks over McCarthyism even as it cancels random people over minor missteps. Its preeminent revisionist historian, Howard Zinn, was a Stalinist, its preeminent thinker, Noam Chomsky, defended the Khmer Rouge, and Bernie Sanders, its presidential candidate, praised the products of Soviet slave labor. These are the crimes of apologists for a contemporary Confederacy: a slave empire that spread around the world, killing millions, and enslaving countless millions more in systems of labor camps that dwarf anything that any Southern plantation owner could have imagined.
Statues of Columbus and Jefferson are under attack, but a statue of the greatest socialist slave owner of modern times still stands in Seattle.
Vladimir Lenin had set up the system of gulags that eventually enslaved and killed millions. Lenin's plans had begun with "obligatory work duty" for class enemies, then evolved to the "most unpleasant forced labor" for members of the "propertied classes", and then to camps full of slaves laboring to build socialism who had been sent there for even the most minor of offenses.
As Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the architect of the Red Terror and the secret police put it, "Even now the labor of prisoners is far from being utilized on public works, and I propose to retain these concentration camps to use the labor of prisoners, gentlemen who live without occupation, those who cannot work without a certain compulsion, or, if we talk of Soviet institutions, then here one should apply this measure of punishment for unscrupulous attitude to work, for negligence, for lateness.”
The purpose of the concentration camp was no longer to punish class enemies, but to find slaves.
That Lenin’s statue still stands in Seattle is a testament to the reality that the Left has made no reckoning with its history of slavery. It has not repented of its crimes against millions of people.
The greatest slave empires of the modern era were not Southern, they were Socialist.
Conservatives have spent enough time defending the Founding Fathers. It is time to stop being on the defensive and attack the leftist proponents of modern slavery who propose to tear down their statues.
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives,” Sanger wrote in the aforementioned “Woman and the New Race”. “If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.”
