Christmas is only a week away and along with celebrating the birth of my Lord, it also means that it&#8217;s time to get all misty-eyed as we are treated to reruns of Frank Capra&#8217;s iconic 1946 holiday film It&#8217;s A Wonderful Life.
I&#8217;ve watched this movie more times than I can count on both hands and feet and like many of us, I adore this bit of Americana. And I will take on all comers in arguing that Jimmy Stewart (in his first role after returning from World War II) as the multi-faceted George Bailey does some of the finest acting in any film in any genre.
But one character in this film has always bothered me. In fact, I believe that the more appropriate title of Capra&#8217;s project should have been It&#8217;s A Wonderful Life – If You&#8217;re Harry Bailey!
Think about it. George Bailey&#8217;s kid brother makes out like a bandit in this flick. And why is that? Because throughout this film, the vulpine Harry, played by Todd Karns, is a steam-roller of self-centeredness. I will even go so far as to say that Harry Bailey, though never intended to be a bad guy, is one of the most despicable characters in movies. In scriptwriting it&#8217;s formulaic that two villains be created to inject multiple layers of conflict. Obviously, Lionel Barrymore’s wealthy but bitter and twisted Mr. Potter is the uber-villain. But who is the other antagonist? That would be Harry Bailey, who plays his older brother George for a sucker throughout the film. In fact, one can even argue with merit that Harry is either directly or indirectly the root cause of all George Bailey&#8217;s miseries.
From a young age Harry seems to conspire to keep George pinned down in Bedford Falls. Meanwhile, Harry is free to pursue his own dreams while leaving a smoldering trail of his older brother&#8217;s shattered aspirations in his wake. As a child he falls through the ice, compelling George to jump into the freezing water to save him and lose hearing in one ear for his heroics.
Later, after their father dies suddenly, a deal is struck whereby George surrenders his college money to Harry. The idea is that when Harry graduates he&#8217;ll come back and take over the family business, freeing George to once and for all leave Bedford Falls behind. For four years George stays shackled to their father&#8217;s Bailey Building &amp; Loan, a small and wholly unfulfilling nickel-and-dime enterprise he despises, all the while counting down the days until Harry&#8217;s return while he plans his future travels abroad.
But when the big day comes what does slippery Harry do? After letting his brother sacrifice four years to honor the deal, Harry comes home and announces out of the blue: &#8220;Meet the wife!&#8221; Whuuuh? No wedding? No family&#8211;including a widowed mother&#8211;at the ceremony? Not even a pre-nuptials meet-and-greet? Nothing, save an enigmatic telegram beforehand announcing Harry is returning home with &#8220;big news?&#8221;
We very quickly see that there&#8217;s a reason for Harry&#8217;s secrecy of course. George learns through Harry&#8217;s bride, Ruth, that her new hubby&#8217;s (being a “genius at research” whatever that means) has already set himself up with a sweet job at her father&#8217;s glass company in Buffalo. In a brazen demonstration of insincerity, Harry pulls George aside and says all faux guilt-ridden: &#8220;Uh, Goerge, about that job. Ruth spoke out of turn. I never said I’d take it. You&#8217;ve been holding the bag here for four years… and, well, I won&#8217;t let you down, George.  But I would like to talk–&#8221; Whammo! The older Bailey&#8217;s face reveals a man whose hopes and dreams have just been ripped out and splattered onto the floor like a rotted pumpkin. Great brother, huh? He springs a heretofore unknown wife on an unsuspecting George and then uses her as leverage to renege on their deal after four years of expectations that his purgatory was at an end.
So, George takes another bullet for Harry and reluctantly stays on at the Bailey B &amp; L. Young Harry, with his new wife, a great job and degree in hand (the diploma originally intended for George remember) is free to move onward and upward to live his own wonderful life.
One would think the advent of World War II finally gives George a chance to see the world. Even if in uniform and with all the risks going to war entails at least adventure calls, right? Bzzzz! Sorry. He&#8217;s got a bum ear thanks to Harry falling through the ice, remember? Thus George is 4-F and ineligible for military service. America is mobilizing millions of her citizens and shipping them off to all parts of a globe George so desperately wants to explore, but because his good ol&#8217; kid brother was careless enough to slip through the ice, he&#8217;s outta luck, left behind to fight the battle of Bedford Falls. To add insult to injury, many of the less impressive and ambitious men of Bedford Falls like Bert the cop (who is wounded in North Africa, earning a Silver Star), Ernie the cab driver (who parachutes into France), friend Marty (who helps capture the Remagen Bridge) and the other band of misfits and screwballs that inhabit George&#8217;s small world return home as heroes.
Not to be outdone, Harry Bailey, both ears very much intact, goes off to do battle in the most exciting of fashions as a Navy fighter pilot. Naturally at war&#8217;s end he&#8217;s awarded the Medal Of Honor for his heroics (did we expect less?) and on Christmas Eve finds himself in the White House meeting with the President; at the same time a frantic brother George is desperately avoiding probing bank examiners as he stumbles about the snow-covered streets of Bedford Falls in a forlorn search for the eight grand in cash that his dimwitted Uncle Billy – who was supposed to be working for Harry at this point remember – allowed to be stolen right out from under him by the conniving Potter. It happened because the absent-minded Billy is so distracted from bragging to Potter about the exploits of, you guessed it, Harry Bailey, that he moronically leaves the money quite literally in the old man&#8217;s lap and struts off. Harry strikes again.
In the end, after his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, does his job and everything works out okay—meaning George doesn&#8217;t either kill himself or do time for embezzlement—a uniformed Harry Bailey, having been flown up from Washington D.C., muscles his way to the front and center of a crowd of supportive townsfolk gathered at the Bailey home to help pay off George&#8217;s debt, and offers a toast: &#8220;To my big brother George, the richest man in town.&#8221; For now anyway. One wonders how long that will last before Harry pulls another self-centered stunt that will certainly benefit him at that same big brother&#8217;s expense. (Come to think of it, I didn&#8217;t see Harry reach into his pocket when the hat was passed around, did you?)
Don&#8217;t let that smile fool you, Georgie boy. Harry probably just wants something from you.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

A Wonderful Job

It’s A Wonderful Life — If You’re Harry Bailey

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It's a wonderful life

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The coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc not just on physical but economic health across the world.  Yet for one country this has actually been a golden opportunity. Suspiciously so in fact. It is becoming increasingly clear that the advent of this global catastrophe is yielding positive outcomes for the very country that unleashed it in the first place: Communist China.
A while back on these pages I brought the readers’ <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-watch-out-for-china-and-what-theyre-doing-in-africa">attention</a> to China’s maneuvers designed to address perhaps its most glaring Achilles’ heel in its drive to make the 21st Century the Chinese century.  That is its lack of energy independence. Unlike its rival/enemy (as they see us at any rate) the United States, China is very much dependent on foreign sources of oil and natural gas to power its growing economy. It is, in fact, the world’s largest importer of fossil fuels, at roughly 10.04 million barrels per day; its energy usage due to its 1.4 billion population accounts for 25% of global energy consumption.
While Americans from Congress to academic circles call for the eradication of fossil fuels, including the promotions of a budget-obliterating so-called “Green New Deal,” Beijing is well aware that oil and natural gas will be with us for decades to come…even as they take parallel steps to be the world’s premier renewable energy producer.
Since 2013 China’s oil production — what there is of it — has fallen 15% while its consumption has risen 30% to 13.8 million barrels per day, meaning 75% of China’s oil usage comes from imports. This places them in a very vulnerable position. And it explains why they have been so aggressive in heavily oil and gas-resourced Africa, South America, Canada, and the Middle East. In many ways, they are in the same position as was Japan in 1941 when its drive for world power status was threatened by a lack of energy independence. The U.S. oil embargo was certainly the main catalyst for Pearl Harbor and the horrors of the Pacific War that followed. Nazi Germany was in the same quest for oil when it launched its operation into southern Russia in 1942 which ended at the mass-graveyard of Stalingrad. But China is too smart to make those mistakes. Nor is there a need for overt military action when far more peaceful and advantageous opportunities in the aftermath of their exported pandemic abound.
Indeed, the coronavirus, and the low oil prices it has caused, have provided China with a target-rich environment. Here is the most recent, and in many ways most disconcerting, example. While the U.S. media and politicians in D.C. look elsewhere, China ZhenHua Oil Co., a state-owned enterprise formed in 2003, has just inked a lucrative supply deal with Iraq. Iraq is a true petrostate, wherein almost all of the government’s revenue comes from oil sales. As such its economy has shrunk 12% this year, due to the plummet in oil prices in the wake of the severe global recession courtesy of the Chinese pathogen. Says <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-08/iraq-picks-china-s-zhenhua-for-pre-payment-oil-supply-deal">Bloomberg News</a>: “The deal is the latest example of China, via state-controlled trading companies and banks, lending to struggling oil producers such as Angola, Venezuela and Ecuador, with repayment in the form of oil barrels rather than cash.”
It&#8217;s a great move by the Chinese. Unleash a virus (either on purpose or at least not stopping it once it gets out accidentally) on the world. Watch the global economy collapse, and with it, oil prices. Then, swoop into a place like Iraq that has been so cash-strapped it cannot pay its civil servants, and bail them out. In this case, the five-year deal ZhenHua struck included a prepayment for one year’s supply which would infuse $2 billion in desperately needed cash into Baghdad’s coffers in exchange for 130,000 barrels a day in crude oil. Basically, Beijing has acted as a lender with oil as collateral and payback, currency. Also, what is unique about this deal is that China may then ship the oil to wherever they wish as opposed to agreeing to the standard regional restrictions on re-sale. In return China will waive the usual yield for the upfront cash. In effect, for Baghdad it is an interest-free loan, paid back in oil.
The deal means China will be far less reliant on powerful exporters, mainly the U.S., to secure its energy needs. Such a beneficial agreement could only have been possible with a collapse in the price of oil. And that free-fall was a direct result of the imploding global economy, again courtesy of the virus that China-originated virus. It’s almost as if there was a method to Beijing’s coronavirus madness? Oh stop!
One must wonder if Saddam Hussein was still in power, would Iraq have been so amenable. Who knows? And I am certainly not pining for the Butcher of Baghdad. But what we do know is that, as with so much of our botched and criminally negligent foreign policy involving the Middle East and the neocons’ delusional obsessions with “nation-building,” we shed a lot of our own troops’ blood and taxpayer treasure just so that enemies like China — far too clever to get their hands dirty and noses bloodied in the Middle East quagmire when their US patsies were willing to do the fighting and dying for them — could reap the benefits.
The simple fact is that for decades now we have been outplayed by Beijing. Often with the willing complicity of U.S. power elites on Wall Street, Capitol Hill and, coming soon, the White House, again.  And like him or hate him, Donald Trump was the one president who intuitively understood this — even if we may legitimately debate the efficacy of his approaches. But he will soon be gone. Instead, the American people, in their manic obsession with ridding themselves of an unpleasant personality, have put in the Oval Office a career politician and Sinophile. Had the Chinese Politburo themselves been charged with nominating the Democrat candidate for president, they couldn’t have picked a man more suited to serve Beijing’s interests.
So while great swaths of the U.S. economy are decimated by the on-going arbitrary and ill-conceived lockdowns on the orders of incompetent and power-mad leaders in a futile effort to stop the spread of China’s most damaging export of all, Beijing continues to methodically use the virus’ disastrous aftermath to solidify its position of global dominance, while further securing its energy independence from its target rival, and isolate the very nation whose sacrifice over the past decade made its latest deal with the nation we liberated possible.
ZhenHua means “Revitalize China” in Mandarin. The coronavirus, and the opportunities it has presented Beijing, have gone a long way towards fulfilling that aspiration. More the fools us.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

China’s National People’s Congress – Opening Ceremony

China Quietly Inks Billion Dollar Oil Deal With Iraq

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Readers Pass

Trade War

The coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc not just on physical but economic health across the world.  Yet for one country this has actually been a

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Have you ever had a discussion with someone and you come to realize that they are not just unwilling to but are utterly incapable of even understanding your position?  I don’t mean agreeing with it.  I mean having the capacity to comprehend it at all.  Do you feel as if you and this person are living in two very different versions of the Matrix? I’ve had this experience with several otherwise very bright individuals as of late. Politics will do that, and I have my theories as to why it seems to be more so these days than it used to.   I think it illustrates why the calls for “unity” from the ostensible 2020 Election winner will fall on deaf ears for some 71 million Americans, and, more to the point, why the other 72 million will be baffled as to why.
Division is nothing new in this country.  One only need pull up video of Chicago’s Grant Park in 1968 to see that the left/right schism has been with us for decades.  And some similarities exist.  As with today, the forces of leftist social and political change needed a rallying point.  Their Donald Trump was Vietnam.
The difference between the 1960s and today, however, is that both sides at least had a common understanding of their nation.  Recall the song What Is America To Me?  The odds were whether you were pro-Nixon or pro-McGovern, you had a similar answer.  But for the fringe radical groups who waved North Vietnamese flags or burned crosses, most Americans left or right believed in the intrinsic goodness and promise of this nation.  Those on the right sought to preserve it, fearing the advent of the social dysfunction we see today.  Those on the left sought not to burn it down, but prod it to more closely align with its founding principles.  And the vast majority believed in a nation predicated upon civil rights, fighting just wars when necessary, equality before the law.  These were common bedrock understandings.  “God bless and preserve America” and “Very true, but we can do better” could still sit at the table together and, if not always agree, at least comprehend the other side’s rationale.  Both sides, for example, wanted to alleviate poverty.  They each had the same aspiration.  The argument wasn’t about the goal, but rather the most effective policies—reliance on free markets versus government activism, say—to achieve that goal.
Alas, I do not see such underpinning commonality today.  Because what has been forming for many years is not just a political rift, but a psychological one.  And this makes the divisions much more pronounced and, perhaps, insurmountable as in order to make common cause with another, it is essential to believe in the same reality.  But we do not.  Turn on CNN and then Fox, read The New York Times and then The New York Post and you will feel like you are on two different planets. All is political.  News is filtered through this lens.  And since the vast majority of the media aligns with one narrative, balance is gone.
Donald Trump, for all his faults, brazenly exposed this imbalance; “fake news” is now in the journalistic lexicon.  And he was right to do so.  The greatest lie perpetrated by the legacy media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) has been that the epicenter of the division and “hate” in this country has been Donald Trump himself.  He is like Satan in the center of Dante’s hell who blasts out his cold winds of hatred, bigotry, and division into the world.  For the left-leaning masses this narrative is an easily digestible morsel that allows them to do what seems to be their forte these days: distill the most complex, deep, historically grounded and multi-faceted issues of politics and culture down to a simple bumper sticker or obnoxiously self-righteous lawn sign.  But what is happening to America cannot be encapsulated in bromides like “Hate Has No Place Here” or “Black Lives Matter”.
The divisions are deeper than many wish to admit.  Social media has done its bit for sure by both coarsening the dialogue and hardening the barriers.   The documentary The Social Dilemma reveals how the algorithms of platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to feed us what we like to see and hear to get more interaction, and thus will a Trump supporter find him/herself interacting more with MAGA people and a Biden supporter more with BLM.  It is an insidious feedback loop that corrals us into separate camps, fences us off from other ideas, and then reinforces our own viewpoints with like-minded content.  (I have over 400 Facebook friends and yet I seem to only interact with the same 25 or so, most of whom just echo my own thoughts.  This is how learning becomes indoctrination).
And yet, the various medias are just amplifiers and accelerators, not the root causes, of the core division that has been gelling in this nation literally for generations.   They could not be so effective without a pre-existing schism to exploit.  The simple fact is that today there is a good chunk of this country’s inhabitants who do not believe in America as an idea.  They topple the statues of our Founders.  They talk of effectively tearing up the Constitution by purging it of the very checks and balances that make it work.  They embrace the very Marxist ideology that several generations proved to be a failed idea, and one the USA opposed for half a century.  How do you engage with people who do not even understand, let alone believe in, their own country?  So how did such a shift in attitude from “God Bless America” to “God Damn America” take place?  How could it?
The real culprit is the generations of leftist indoctrination in our public schools and universities.  Take the founding and history of America itself.  In my lifetime, for example, Columbus has gone from hero to villain.   Every Founding Father who was not a hard-core abolitionist is now remembered not as a far-sighted, brilliant, if flawed, man who laid the foundations for the greatest nation in the history of mankind, but rather a slave owner, or one who certainly was okay with the institution, and, most damning of all, a white heterosexual male.  Our story is now relayed as one continuous dirge of conquest, betrayal, infestation and genocide on the part of the European white man against, well, everyone else.  School children are led to believe that the indigenous people the European interlopers encountered were docile fawns in Arcady, living in utopian harmony with nature.  As the native records of mass human sacrifice, tribal war, enslavement, and torture tell us, the scenes of primitive horror actually taking place in the New World pre-white man weren’t quite so rosy.
And so we have been cleaved into two competing realities.  Somewhere along the way the term “THE truth” became “YOUR truth.”  That’s not the way it works.  As many soon-to-be-disillusioned unity seekers will find out in due time.
No better example of competing realities exists than in any discussion over who is to blame for the divisions we now face.  I tried to have a conversation with someone who was a hardcore anti-Trumpite who cannot fathom why every American isn’t eager to “unite” around Joe Biden.  As if in his world all that was needed was Joe the Jedi Master to toss the Bad Orange Emperor down the reactor shaft and balance would be restored to the galaxy.  To mix movie metaphors, it’s as if the Men in Black held the laser to his eyes and erased any memory of not just the past four years but far longer than that.  He has no recollection of the vitriol heaped upon Reagan (the media’s go-to line was he was an “affable fool”) or George W. Bush, who for eight years was a “war criminal” and “Hitler” if memory serves.  He has no recollection of uniter Joe Biden speaking before a Black audience in 2012 and warning them that the GOP was “gonna put y’all back in chains!”
And of course, it is as if, in his mind, the past four years never happened.  He cannot conceive why tens of millions of Americans are answering a sincere call for unity with “Talk to the hand.”  It’s as if his side did not throw a mass temper tantrum for four years, denying that the duly elected president was even that.  #Notmypresident and #Resist never happened.  The pink pussy hats never marched on D.C.  Nancy Pelosi didn’t call the President the “imposter in chief”, a traitor even, or tear up his State of the Union Address on live TV.  He has no recollection of left-wing zealots  burning our cities, looting our businesses, harassing our police, or proffering false narratives to sow racial strife for political gain.  In his truth diners weren’t accosted by screaming mobs.  Campus thugs didn’t shout down conservative speakers, dox and drive out professors who didn’t toe the left wing line.  Far left activists didn’t bully Christian businesses.  The good names of decent and respected jurists weren’t intentionally destroyed.  All while the Democrat Party looked on in silent approval, even as they preached “silence is violence.”
Nor in his mind did a rabid Democrat establishment  try for four years to overturn the 2016 election by hurling anything they could at the president’s wall hoping something would stick.  It’s as if the term Nazi wasn’t bandied about so frequently as to lose its “Nazi-ness”.  As if radicals like Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashid Tlaib (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) haven’t been calling for Trump supporters to be held accountable for their crimes in language any student of Soviet history would recognize.  It’s as if the Democrat Party did not exploit a tragic and destructive pandemic that has killed tens of thousands and put millions out of work with shattered dreams and uncertain futures for political advantage; nor did they cynically use the crisis as a faux pretext for revamping the entire electoral process in their favor.
As Michelle Obama aptly demonstrated in a recent tweet that is about as divisive as it gets, there was certainly half of the country on the side of “lies, hate, division and chaos” this election cycle.  What amazes me is that my leftist friend cannot see where it comes from.  I pointed out to him that they were boarding up windows not in fear of Trump supporters but Biden supporters.  What does that say about which side seeks disunity and chaos?
No matter.  I may as well have been talking to a blind water snake.  He is not just politically committed to one narrative, but psychologically and emotionally invested.  “Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams.  But he never confronted the denial power of Trump Derangement before.   For the left, a group that has rejected God in favor of the self, politics is not just a way of viewing the world and affecting outcomes we all want, but rather it is their new religion.  Have you tried to have a rational, fact-based discussion with a religious fanatic lately?  (See blind water snake reference above).  So there will be no “unity”.  Because unity first and foremost requires a common reality. Good luck with that.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Pro-Trump Right Wing Groups Hold “Million MAGA March” To Protest Election Results

Unity Can’t Happen Because The Left Lives In A Different Reality

2020 Election

Donald Trump

Joe Biden

Michelle Obama

Unity

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Unity Can&#039;t Happen Because The Left Lives In A Different Reality

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Plato warned us 2,500 years ago that “only the dead have seen the end of war.”  We Americans like to think we are a peace-loving people.  But the philosopher could have been speaking of our dead as much as any other.  We have, in fact, sent our young men and women into the crucible of ten significant wars, and countless smaller engagements, in a mere 244 years.  Today we honor those among us who wore the uniform and took the fight to the enemy in World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, the horn of Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central America, and many other lesser known theaters of war.  Veterans Day is not just a square on a calendar with a little American flag in the corner.  It is a reminder to those of us who have never worn the uniform of the debt we owe those who walked the wall on our behalf.
It is up to us, then, to make sure that when these brave souls do return home to us, hang up the uniform, and get on with their lives that we look after them.  And so today is a day for the nation to ask a question.  Are we being true to our veterans?
I do not mean this in terms of the VHA scandal.  We know the issues facing us there and, hopefully, are making moves to correct it.  And as with apparently everything under the sun now, politics shapes our views on how serious the scandal was to begin with, and how well it has been addressed since it first came to light.  One’s opinions on this matter will in large measure be a reflection of one’s news source.
We Americans are tasked with honoring a sublime commitment to our veterans beyond reducing waiting time for hospital admittance, clean linen, competent medical care and the like, all of which go without saying.  I am talking about our obligation to maintain the very nation these brave men and women gave so much of themselves to protect.
I think of my own father, a 2nd Lieutenant in the Marines who was wounded by a Chinese mortar while fighting in Korea.  His division was called “The Old Breed” and the name implies a continuum that transcends generations.  Veterans of Chateau-Thierry and Meuse-Argonne passed the chalice to the veterans of Guadalcanal, Peleliu and Okinawa, who passed it to the men of Inchon and Chosin, who again handed it to the men at Khe Sanh and Hue, and then to the care of the troops in the sands of Beirut and Iraq.  The history of the American fighting man goes further back in time to our very beginning as a nation.  Today, if we need a reminder of the sacrifices of her fighting children we can walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Monmouth, Saratoga, Cowpens.  In 1982 I walked the Antietam battlefield with my father; he was separated by three decades from his own service and 120 years from those who fought in this Civil War battle.  And still he teared up as he walked the ground on which so many fought and suffered and died.  He still felt a kinship with those who’d struggled here.  Veterans are like that.  They are a fraternity of self-sacrifice.  They will never fail this country, or shrink from the challenges of defender against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  They know their duty.  And they have kept the faith.
But what about the rest of us in this land for which they are willing to give their lives?  Are we doing our part?  In the mind’s eye, one imagines one of those famous Marines who planted the flag atop Mount Suribachi on bloody Iwo Jima pondering a line of wealthy, entitled, athletes, to whom this country has given so much, kneeling in protest of that same flag.   Would they feel a sense of bewilderment?  We see them asking what has happened?  And why has this happened?  Should they flip on the evening news they’d probably be stunned by the images of violence, bloodshed, rampant looting, and the other symptoms of the lesser nations from whom these veterans protected us taking place on American streets in American cities.   They might be befuddled as to why they cannot tell the difference between Portland in 2020 and Munich in 1933.  What, exactly, they might ask, did we risk our necks for at all?
It raises a salient question: for all that veterans have fulfilled their obligations to us, what are our obligations to them?  I think the answer is simple.  To preserve the nation they fought for.  To do this we must ask questions.  I’d like to know what they believed they were fighting for.  Did they fight so that a few billionaire tech lords could dictate who says what and when and where in the public space?  Did they fight so that 93% of the media would be effectively the propaganda arm of one political party?  Did they fight so that those in Congress whose mediocrity is matched only by their manic ambition would bog the nation down in one faux scandal after another, a sham impeachment, the destruction of good jurists’ reputations, a House Speaker tearing up a State of the Union Speech behind the duly elected President’s back?  Did they fight so that for four years large swaths of the nation would refuse to accept the outcome of a fair and free election, only to cast aspersions on those who now question the results of an election rife with fraud, and simply seek validation one way or the other?
Again, why did they leave home and hearth and lay their lives of the line?  Did they fight for a nation wherein people are now balkanized by race?  Skin color? Sexual preference?  Ethnicity?  Did they fight so that Marxist organizations like Black Lives Matter could be welcomed into the Mainstream while 70 million Americans are decried even by former first ladies as being on the side of “lies, hate, chaos, and division”?  Did they fight so that those who traffic primarily in money and influence, who never built anything of enduring value, could betray our working heartland by shutting down our factories and delivering the manufacturing base that made it possible for these veterans to wage war with more than sharpened sticks in the first place into the hands of our enemies?
With every shuttered factory.  With every small town that dies.  With every person who succumbs to Fentanyl courtesy of those with whom our political leaders and their sons make sordid deals.  With every window shattered.   Every store looted.  Every building burned.  Every business ruined.  Every statue and monument honoring our past defaced and torn down.  With every false press report declaring rampaging mobs “mostly peaceful.”  With every independent thinking professor or journalist black-listed for not toeing the far left line.  With every speaker shouted down in the lecture hall. Every judge falsely accused of heinous acts for political gain.  Every call to tear up our Constitution.  With every child born into a fatherless home.  And with very American student who leaves our public school system functionally illiterate, we are failing in our side of the deal.   Our veterans deserve better.
When I was a little boy, I used to play a game.  Or at least what I thought was a game at the time.  Only now do I understand what it really meant.  I would sneak into my father’s bedroom at night, and see how close I could get to him before he woke up with a start.  I was always amazed at how he’d open his eyes and jack knife up in the sheets and look around before I set more than one foot into the room.  He learned that in combat, when the enemy would attack during the night.  Sleeping with a hair trigger in a foxhole kept him alive.  It was a habit that, like so much else he brought home from the war, stayed with him long after the fighting was over.  When I got older, and would sit up with him while he had a drink to calm his nerves, he would tell me his war stories.  They were disturbing, fascinating, heartbreaking, terrifying.  I think now of the sacrifice he and countless other veterans have made so that his son seated across the table could live in a better world.  And I sometimes ask myself, is this a better world?  Are we a better people?  A better nation?  Is this even the America our veterans fought to preserve?  After everything we have seen in 2020, I don’t know.  I really don’t.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Veterans Day Wreath Ceremony in NYC

Our Vets Have Kept The Faith. Have We?

Military

Veterans Day

Plato warned us 2,500 years ago that “only the dead have seen the end of war.”  We Americans like to think we are a peace-loving people.  But the

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/our-vets-have-kept-the-faith-have-we/

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Soon, one of the wildest rides in the history of this nation will likely come to a close. But the real struggle for the true soul of the Republic, indeed the legacy bequeathed to us by the men of 1787 is before us.
The Georgia Senate races are going to a runoff. Anyone who cares about this country — and I mean really cares — should be far more concerned about the Senate turning blue than a feckless houseplant seated at the Resolute Desk easily reined in by Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, et. al.
What would losing control of every branch of the government look like? Well, here is the agenda of the party of Kamala Harris and her sidekick Joe.
1.) Pack the Supreme Court. This will forever turn the most independent body in government into nothing more than a super-legislature of lawmakers for life who will act as a rubber stamp to any left-wing laws or policies that come across its desk. The age of “judicial review” will be no more. And loose interpretation of the &#8220;living&#8221; Constitution could mean upholding laws that seek to restrict gun rights, religious freedom, and other bulwarks of that pesky Bill of Rights.
2) Grant amnesty and citizenship to realistically 20 million illegals within our borders. They will be almost all new Democrat voters. Forever tipping the balance in favor of one party.
3) Puerto Rico and D.C. could be granted statehood for one reason only: to give the Democrat Party four more Senate seats, again sealing one-party rule in the USA for the foreseeable future.
4) The Electoral College — the most crucial instrument to the decentralization of power — will be under attack. If we go one-man-one-vote, no Republican will ever win national office again and every state not in view of an ocean will be effectively reduced to mere flotsam and jetsam pushed about at the whim of the currents of the coastal elites.
5) Ending the Senate filibuster, which would further consolidate power in the ruling party.
If any, not even all, of these declared goals (or nod-and-wink goals) are achieved, you will not recognize this country. Anyone with a history book — a rarity in the US thanks to a criminally negligent public school system that has left 50% of Detroit’s adult males functionally illiterate — can see this is the path to banana republicanism. The great fear of the Framers, the &#8220;tyranny of the majority&#8221; will be upon us.
For those who are unconcerned about this state of affairs, or are so focused on the fortunes of team Trump to see what really matters, I ask you to show me one instance in history where one-party rule – other than the tiniest of nations – has not either led to a dystopian hellscape wherein a tiny batch of cloistered, wealthy and connected elites rule over vast swaths of marginalized and poor, or, conversely, an authoritarian structure does not rise to keep things running where civil liberties are a dim memory in favor of the trains being on time.
Either way, for all the Trump-haters, who ignorantly called the man who did more to try and decentralize power away from DC and back to the statehouse and town hall than any president in my lifetime, a ‘fascist,” just you wait. Try to imagine Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and whoever will be Biden’s handlers full power. You won’t need a history book to see what living under a one-party jackboot was like. You’ll be living it.
There’s a reason the “racist, anti-Hispanic” Trump got the majority of the Cuban vote. They’ve seen this movie before. If only the same could be said for the rest of the electorate.
I would be saying the same thing about total control ad infinitum were it potentially in Republican hands too. Neither GOP nor Democrat lawmakers are immune from the adage that &#8220;power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.&#8221;  The Framers gave us a divided government for a reason. &#8220;Gridlock&#8221; is not a failure in governance&#8230;it is an achievement.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Chuck Schumer

Why The Senate Fight Is Far More Vital To The Republic

Kamala Harris

U.S. Senate

Soon, one of the wildest rides in the history of this nation will likely come to a close. But the real struggle for the true soul of the Republic, indeed

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/why-the-senate-fight-is-far-more-vital-to-the-republic/

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The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was established in 1839 as one of the nation’s premier military colleges. It has, in fact, been called “The West Point of the South.” For more than 180 years, VMI has served as incubator of some of America’s most storied military careers.  Famous alumni include men who have so well served their country in wartime: George Patton, Chesty Puller, George Marshall, and Walton Walker, among others.
This week, another fine product of the institute, Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, resigned as superintendent. Peay, a respected and highly decorated four-star Army general has been in his position for 17 years.  But he has apparently lost the confidence of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. (He of the famous Black-face/Klan-robe” photoshoot).
One cannot help but suspect that part of the reason for Peay’s sudden ouster had to do with this decision back in July not to remove any of the school’s Confederate statues or rename any buildings. Wrote Gen. Peay then:
<blockquote>We do not currently intend to remove any VMI statues or rename any VMI buildings. Rather, in the future we will emphasize recognition of leaders from the Institute’s second century. We will place unvarnished context on the value and lessons to be learned from the Institute’s rich heritage, while being mindful of the nation’s challenges and sensitivities to being fair and inclusive to all.</blockquote>
This is all moot now as this decision was immediately overruled by the Board of Visitors while the ink on the former super’s resignation letter was still drying.
There are, at present, two statues of Confederates on the campus and one honoring the young members of the VMI who fought at the Battle of New Market—for the South, of course, as this is Virginia we’re talking about.
One of the generals, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, was even an instructor at the VMI before fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. His statue has been targeted for removal first. In an obnoxiously self-congratulatory announcement, the VMI Board of Visitors called this a “bold and unanimous action.” Bold? Hardly. Bold would have been resisting the pressure of nihilistic activists, as Gen. Peay did. Sacrificing nothing to curry favor with a vocal P.C. mob is the opposite of bold. It is another trait that I sure hope isn’t taught to VMI cadets as they are supposedly being prepared for battle.
This action is incongruous for a school that calls itself a military institute that happens to be in Virginia, as the Virginian Jackson was one of the greatest generals this nation has ever produced. His campaign in the Shenandoah Valley and fluid operations in northern Virginia during the spring and summer of 1862, not to mention his brilliant flank attack against a superior Union army at Chancellorsville in May 1863 (where he was accidentally shot by his own men and later died) are legendary; they are analyzed by students of the military arts to this day. One would assume that goes for the cadets of the VMI, as well. The irony of removing his statue, “bold” or not, from this place, is plain to see.
There are legitimate arguments for eradicating Confederate statues from the public square, and I have come down on the side of these views…as I have said, I cannot understand how degrading and infuriating it might be for African-Americans to have to walk the streets of their own city where they pay taxes and see the homages to the men who fought to enslave them. It is an understandable objection. And so compromises have been discussed, including moving them to museums, or places where they have meaning, such as the battlefields on which they fought, where their stories are integral to understanding the historical events that took place there.
One must also think that a military college would fall under the category of just such context. Jackson, as I said, was a great general. And he also has a connection to VMI. Yes, like many in Virginia at that time, Jackson did own slaves. But he was also, by accounts of his former slaves, a kind master. Of course, this does not excuse the practice, or his part in it, but it should be noted Jackson was a fervent Christian who, according to The Washington Times, “struggled with the morality of a system that enslaved men and women with whom he shared a brotherhood as children of a loving God. Yet those same Scriptures that taught salvation also recorded centuries of slaveholding all over the world, which provided Jackson with the simplistic rationale that if it was condoned by the Bible, it must be acceptable.&#8221;
However, Jackson also defied Virginia law by founding and financially supporting, even from the front, a Sunday school for slave children. Teaching slaves to read and write was anathema in the antebellum South. Yet Jackson, believing that all God’s children should be taught the Bible and Christ’s ways, ignored the law, placing himself at risk of arrest.
Again, do not think this is in any way a Lost Cause justification for so wicked a system. It does, however, show us that often good men are the unwitting and inescapable products of their times…and this includes being born and raised in Virginia at a time that perfectly intersected with slavery and secession. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, were also Virginians who practiced slavery, but in an earlier age where they were placed in a position to create, rather than try to tear asunder, a great republic. They have monuments in our capital. But who is to say that, had Washington been born in 1832 rather than 1732, he would not have joined his beloved state of Virginia, as Jackson and Lee had, and lead a Southern army in her defense? Or, for that matter, what if Patton had been born in a previous era?
Is the accident of the timing of one’s birth the reason for whether or not they deserve remembrance…especially a military icon on the campus of a military institution? So one may study Jackson’s tactics apparently, but never be confronted with his image to and from the classroom in which the general’s lessons are taught? Is this not excess, as always is the case with social justice warriors? For them it is about the next struggle. There is no finish line because inoffensive utopia is unattainable in this world. The fact is there are no purely good people. Everyone, from the saints to the sinners, has flaws. At what point do we put them in context and stop this mad purification that will leave us with nothing but statues of Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa?
It should be noted that, in 1906, long after Jackson’s death, Rev. L. L. Downing, whose parents had been among the slaves in Jackson’s Sunday school, raised money to have a memorial window dedicated to him in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church of Roanoke, Virginia. If an African-American church can look past the sins to the decency of the inner man, cannot a military establishment give the same courtesy to one of their own?
One can understand, even if they do not agree with, removing Jackson’s statue from a public park or thoroughfare. But for the morality police, American history and the statues and monuments to those who made it happen are ripe for the picking. Do not be surprised if Leland Stanford, California’s viciously anti-Asian governor whose name is on a certain other institution, is targeted next. Woodrow Wilson certainly must be wiped clean of the collective conscience. Should Ford Motor Co. change its name to Schindler? Are we to go down the list of every American who, by accident of their births, lived their lives before the March on Selma? When does this end? It doesn’t, of course. It is the act of revolution that is the end in and of itself. To remove this most celebrated of military geniuses from the grounds of a most revered military college—one in which he was a faculty member no less—is the classic case of what another military man, Gen. Mark Clark, said of his soldiers’ lot, although in this case it is the social justice warrior. “Behind every hill is another river; and behind every river is another hill.”
Perhaps in places like the VMI, men like Stonewall Jackson should remain visible as reminders of what they have to teach those who are preparing to engage in another brutal practice: doing violence on our behalf. I’d rather know the man or woman walking the wall knows more about how Jackson stood his ground at Antietam, than whether or not in another time, in a different age, he did something immoral…something that person walking the wall may very well have also done had he/she lived when and where Stonewall did. There is a difference between taking an honest account of men’s lives, including their sins, and willy-nilly banishing them from collective memory. Maybe this is something Gen. Peay instinctively understood. And now he is gone. And I cannot help but think that, in a small way, this diminishes the prowess of the VMI.  I guess we will find out when the bullets start flying. By then it may be too late.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Of Another Time And Place</a>. 
More from Brad Schaeffer: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-kamala-harris-makes-historically-illiterate-reference-to-lincoln-in-debate">Kamala Harris Makes Historically Illiterate Reference To Lincoln In Debate</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia

Virginia Military Institute Superintendent Resigns, And Stonewall Jackson Is Canceled

American History

The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was established in 1839 as one of the nation’s premier military colleges. It has, in fact, been called “The West

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/virginia-military-institute-superintendent-resigns-and-stonewall-jackson-is-canceled/

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I intercepted the procession of vehicles with flashing lights and blaring horns as it crawled eastward along Route 28, which is a main avenue that runs through the leafy New Jersey commuter towns of Scotch Plains, Fanwood, Westfield, Garwood, and Cranford. I’d heard about this event just an hour before and decided to check it out. I didn’t know what to expect. This is Union County after all, a place that gave Hillary Clinton 132,000 votes versus only 62,000 for Donald Trump in 2016. It’s solidly blue. In fact, my drive over to the event took me through residential streets lined with “Biden/Harris” signs, as if running a Democrat gauntlet.
And yet, when I arrived at the lively scene, a Trump 2020 Parade made up of all models of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, most adorned in Trump flags, American flags, Blue Line police support flags, etc. I was quite impressed by what I saw. I parked my car and for the good part of an hour I stood on the sidewalk and watched vehicle after vehicle pass by with horns roaring, passengers leaning out of their windows cheering and waving, with thumbs-up all around.  I also noticed people who were not a part of the parade itself, many driving west in the opposite direction, beeping their horns and flashing their lights in support. One woman was driving an un-adorned SUV and clearly had been caught in the parade. She looked very serious and so those of us on the side of the road naturally assumed, given the political demographics of this area, she was none too happy to be caught in a cavalcade of Trump supporters. Then she looked over to us, rolled down her window, and with a big smile said: “I’m caught in this!  But I’m happy I am!  I love Trump!”
Several cars waiting their turn to enter the queue were parked in the lot of a local catering hall just off the road. So I strolled over to the people sitting patiently in their cars or trucks, many with families, and identified myself as a Daily Wire contributor to assure them I was not there to ambush or “dox” them. I just wanted to talk about what brought them out here a 10am on a Saturday. I promised no pictures or names (image above from a different Trump rally in Augusta, New Jersey on Oct. 14). So you, dear reader, will just have to trust me on this.
The response was universal: these people love their country and they fear that the Democrats are trying to turn it into a one-party state.  They believe in the Constitution. And, for all his faults — which many freely admitted they didn’t like — Trump, they said, also believes in the institutions of this nation…and he loves the country.  They believe the Democrats, for reasons they cannot fathom, only focus on what is wrong with America and not what’s worked.
One woman spoke to me from her idling car’s window, a pink “Women For Trump” rooftop flag snapping in the breeze.  She feared what would happen to the courts and Congress if Democrats gained control. “I don’t think we’ll recognize this country any more if this happens. And you know what? If Republicans were trying to pack the Supreme Court and end the Electoral College, I’d be just as upset.”
Another woman agreed. She had a Spanish accent and so I dove further, as she was clearly an immigrant. It turns out she was from Cuba. “I am scared of what I see,” she confided in me. “In this country, if you work hard, you can make a good life for yourself. It was not that way in Cuba.  This is what the communists did. They took control of the media.  Made promises of all things for all the people. But they were lying.  Socialism doesn’t work. It destroyed my country. I came here to get away from all that!”
Yet another immigrant, this time from Italy, had a lot to say. I could have talked to him for hours. He lamented: “This is the greatest country in the world. I came here when I was 21. I love this country. I don’t want to see it destroyed.”  But why Trump? I asked. “Because he appreciates what a wonderful place this is. He loves it too. And I’ll tell you another thing,” he said, clearly passionate in his concerns. “I have a gun, okay?” (I told him my father was a combat veteran Marine and so he relaxed some. Clearly in New Jersey he’s been conditioned to hesitate before speaking about guns as they are a touchy subject.) “I love guns. It’s my right. I have all the papers. My license. I’ve never shot anybody. I am a law-abiding gun owner. But I go to the range and I see these people outside with signs saying they don’t like guns. So I tell them ‘okay fine, then don’t buy one.’ But they want it so that I can’t buy one. That’s not what this country is about. You do what you want.”
What struck me too was the jovial, upbeat mood of the parade and those who lined the street to watch it go by, many waving American flags, all smiling. Clearly there was a lot of enthusiasm. And yet there was also an undertone of concern. This was about more than just the economy, or even COVID, neither of which I heard mentioned in the entire time I was there. This, for them, is a more existential matter. They see Trump as the only man who can stand up to the forces of nihilism and radical change for the worse as represented by the Biden/Harris ticket. And none of them believe that Joe Biden will be president even if he wins. They were more concerned about a President Harris.
Not everyone was supportive, of course. A few people stood a block down from me defiantly holding up “Biden/Harris” signs. How did the parade-goers respond? Did they hurl epithets at them or flash obscene hand gestures? Did anyone in a MAGA hat sucker-punch them in the back of the head? Nope. Actually quite the opposite. Any recognition at all of their protest was met with a thumbs-up out the window. When the parade halted for a moment, I asked one driver why he gave the Biden-Harris sign-holders a wave and thumbs-up. “Because I respect their right to their views and admire that they’re putting them out there,” he said. “Obviously I don’t agree with them.”
One could almost hear the old line: “I may not agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it” …one that seems to be anathema to the modern left.
I asked another tolerant driver. “What if this was a Biden parade and you were standing out there with a Trump sign?”  The man just shook his head and laughed. “I wouldn’t.” His wife leaned over from the passenger side and added: “I don’t need him getting into a fistfight.”
Some of the signs and flags I saw drive by in this caravan that, if one figures a car every fifteen seconds, was over 200-strong, included: “Women for Trump,” “Blacks For Trump” (I saw several African-Americans among the participants), “Veterans For Trump,” “Hispanics For Trump,” also flags representing Portugal, Argentina, and Cuba.
I know people in Florida. One told me that on a recent drive from Melbourne to Vero Beach, about 45 miles or so, he stopped counting Trump signs after 30. He  didn’t see a single Biden sign. Not one. But, of course, this was a red section of a swing state. What struck me about Saturday in New Jersey was that this was deep blue territory. One person said, “I didn’t realize there were so many Trump voters in New Jersey.” But, being Debbie Downer, I offered that maybe this was all of them. Still, I don’t remember such public and strong showings of support in this staunch blue county four years ago.
I know that anecdotes are just that. And inductive reasoning, especially in national elections, can be misleading. There is the famous story of New Yorker theater critic Pauline Kael who, after Nixon’s 1972 landslide, said with puzzlement: “Gee, everyone I know voted for McGovern.” But then again, another part of me reflects on a curious phenomenon in nature around here, wherein once every 14 years, the dormant cicadas, until then unseen and undetected, emerge en masse to make their presence known; then they recede back into the soil, and there they remain until the time comes again. I wonder if that is a metaphor applicable to this country in this election. Certainly in this area, there are no Trump signs on lawns.  But how much of that is fear of vandalism and social backlash, as was a concern expressed by many I spoke to today. Is a house with no sign, or with a Tom Kean (for Congress) or Blue Lives Matter banner, or simply a displayed Stars and Stripes, a tacit endorsement of MAGA 2020?  Who knows.  Still, I wonder if the polls are neglecting to tell us what my own eyes saw in the most unlikely of places.  Are there more Trump cicadas out there than any outdated polling methodology in this digital age can possibly capture accurately?  Or perhaps am I just being Pauline Kael 2.0?
My gut tells me this parade meant something.  I guess we will know on election night…or will we?  Will we ever?  That was another common concern, but that’s an article all on its own.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Of Another Time And Place</a>. 
More from Brad Schaeffer: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-kamala-harris-makes-historically-illiterate-reference-to-lincoln-in-debate">Kamala Harris Makes Historically Illiterate Reference To Lincoln In Debate</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Trump Rally Held In New Jersey Stadium

What I Saw At The Trump Parade…In Deep Blue New Jersey?

New Jersey

I intercepted the procession of vehicles with flashing lights and blaring horns as it crawled eastward along Route 28, which is a main avenue that runs What I saw at a Trump rally in deep blue New Jersey surprised me. Is it representative of something larger nationally or just anecdotal? The Daily Wire

What I Saw At The Trump Parade...In Deep Blue New Jersey?

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/what-i-saw-at-the-trump-parade-in-deep-blue-new-jersey/

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This Friday on Tucker Carlson’s show his final guests were James Fox, Director/Producer of a new UFO investigative documentary called &#8220;The Phenomenon,&#8221; and Christopher Mellon, former senior intelligence official for the Department of Defense. While discussing the film, Mr. Fox reveals that several times, not only were UFOs being tracked over our (and Russia&#8217;s) nuclear facilities, but they were interfering with launch protocols to the point where had the President called for a missile launch, they couldn&#8217;t have done it as they&#8217;d somehow been deactivated. Mr. Mellon discusses that metallic materials supposedly taken from UFO crash/landing sites had been engineered at the atomic level and were not found on Earth in any natural form&#8230;and no nation to our knowledge is even close to having such engineering capabilities.
So what thoughts should such claims, if true, provoke? What concerns? If the assertions in the investigative documentary are factual, we should all find this deeply disquieting.
Here is something to chew on. If you had a time machine and traveled around periods in history, what would you find? Let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re a French knight in 732, and, after fighting at the Battle of Tours, you step into the device with all your chainmail, armor, shield, and sword.  You pop out in 1415 to fight again at Agincourt.  What you might notice is that in seven centuries weaponry really hasn&#8217;t changed very much.  In fact, technology overall hasn&#8217;t advanced far, certainly not in any revolutionary way. One key reason for this lack of advancement is that, despite the reputation for constant warfare, the Medieval period was not a particularly violent time on a large nation-against-nation scale, albeit quite miserable, filthy, and plague-infested by our standards.
You, our brave knight, climb back into the time machine and step out in France again&#8230;this time approximately 300 years later in 1712 at Denain.  Although a strange and noisy projectile-hurling device called a musket is now in use, it’s primitive, inaccurate, and cumbersome. The weapons of choice on this battlefield are still of the bladed variety…bayonet, sword, pike, halberd, spontoon. Horses are still the main shock force and they are defended against by hedges of spear points in the form of bayonets and pikes. So even after a thousand years have passed from Tours, you’re still in the game.
After helping your future countrymen defeat the Austrians and Dutch, you hop back into the time machine once again and move forward another two centuries to 1916, wherein you emerge onto the Somme battlefield of World War One. But now things have changed dramatically. In fact, to your bewilderment, you feel as if you’re on the surface of another planet. Now what do you see? A world utterly transformed. Your armor and weapons are not only completely useless, but a hindrance. You are in a world of warbling artillery shells, rattling machine guns, rifles, steel helmets, clouds of mustard gas, armed flying machines, rumbling tanks, etc.
Terrified, you race back into your machine and are propelled forward yet again&#8230;this time barely 30 years later to 1945 and into the cockpit of a massive B-29 bomber 30,000 feet over Japan. From here, after getting over the shock of flying, to your incomprehensible horror, you witness a single 128&#8243;x28&#8243; apparatus vaporize an entire city right before your eyes. Should you be so bold as to travel forward just 75 years later into 2020 you will see a world awash in nuclear-tipped ICBMs, enormous submarines that can stay submerged and silent for months, supercarriers with flying machines screaming through the air 100 times faster than your trusty warhorse, radar, sonar, satellites, Kevlar, even more powerful tanks of all shapes, RPGs, night vision, drones, stealth aircraft, smart weapons, supercomputers, etc. You get the idea.
What&#8217;s the point? It is this: technology grows at an exponential rate (think Moore&#8217;s Law). It just needs a catalyst. As Oskar Schindler said, he was always missing one thing: &#8220;War.&#8221; The reason we went from the flimsy Wright Flyer in 1903 to the Mach 3 Lockheed SR-71 less than 60 years later, to satellites, space stations, and reusable rocketry today, indeed the ability to destroy our planet many times over (let alone bioweapons), is because, nothing drives technological innovation like war. And the 20th Century was by far the bloodiest and most violent in human history&#8230;so far. And the better at war you are (and perhaps more aggressive) the faster you develop new and improved stuff. Measure begets counter-measure begets counter-counter-measure spiraling onward and upward at a sinisterly accelerating rate.
So what would this say about an alien race, if they&#8217;ve in fact been dropping in on us, that is so technologically advanced that they have overcome the limitations of light speed itself, possibly taking advantage of curves, folds and intersections in space-time that they can traverse the unfathomable distance to come here? The distances of space are so vast they are difficult to comprehend. We can illustrate it this way. The nearest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri; it’s 4.3 light years away. That’s around  25.25 trillion miles. Now, if we were to shrink the Sun all the way down to the size of a golf ball, Proxima Centauri would be roughly the diameter of a BB. To stay true to scale to match the space between them, if we stood in New York’s Central Park holding the golf ball, how far away would the person holding the Proxima Centauri BB have to stand to match the distance?  Green Bay, Wisconsin, or a little over 760 miles.
Furthermore, what would the aliens’ arrival here of all places say about their abilities to even locate us at all given our obscurity within the infinite expanse of the cosmos. A common illustration goes thusly: If our entire Solar System out to Neptune’s orbit, 5.6 billion miles diameter, was shrunk to the size of a quarter, the Milky Way galaxy would be the size of the contiguous United States…just to give you an idea of how hidden we truly are. And yet, somehow they have found us. So how advanced must they be?
In fact, the technology they would have to possess to get here would be so much farther ahead of our own that it is almost unfathomable. Maybe the best way to drive the point home is to compare us to a group of cave dwellers with clubs and primitive spear points being studied by a foreign power just over the horizon that fields F-22s, satellites, nuclear submarines, and ICBMs in its arsenal.
Call me a pessimist, but I have to think that a society so advanced, which implies a lot of experience at waging war if our own story is any guide, is a pretty hostile bunch. And yet we have sent our probes into the void with not only a &#8220;Hey there, we exist&#8221; message, but &#8220;Oh and here&#8217;s exactly how to find us.&#8221;  I guess the only consolation is that if they are so advanced, which implies civilizational longevity, and yet have survived without annihilating themselves, it&#8217;s a good sign. Maybe they got it out of their system already. After all, we&#8217;ve only had nukes for 75 years.  We&#8217;re just at the very beginning of the post-global-total-destruction-capability phase. Should we last, it may be because we&#8217;ve improved as a species, with our morality catching up to our technology.  Or, maybe, the aliens are merely the survivors (read: victors), in some planetary cage match. The Spartans of their system who, in the end, defeated their celestial Athenians and came out on top.
Either way, I&#8217;m thinking any serious close encounter with these guys would be more akin to Independence Day and War Of The Worlds than E.T. or Arrival.  With that in mind, perhaps inviting them over for a play date, like beckoning a sadistic child wearing Timberlands and carrying a magnifying glass to visit our little anthill, wasn&#8217;t such a good idea.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Of Another Time And Place</a>. 
More from Brad Schaeffer: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-kamala-harris-makes-historically-illiterate-reference-to-lincoln-in-debate">Kamala Harris Makes Historically Illiterate Reference To Lincoln In Debate</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

SCHAEFFER: ‘The Truth Is Out There,’ And, If Actually True, It Scares The Hell Out Of Me!

This Friday on Tucker Carlson’s show his final guests were James Fox, Director/Producer of a new UFO investigative documentary called &quot;The Phenomenon,&quot;

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-the-truth-is-out-there-and-if-actually-true-it-scares-the-hell-out-of-me/

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Kamala Harris, history professor, held class tonight and gave V.P. Pence a lecture on how even a GOP icon like Lincoln would have been opposed to filling a Supreme Court vacancy in an election season. She said: &#8220;In 1864 a seat became open on the Supreme Court. Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s party was in charge of not only the White House but the Senate. But honest Abe said it&#8217;s not the right thing to do. The American people deserve to make the decision about who will be the next President of the United States, and then that person can select who will serve [on the Court].&#8221;
Well, what she was referring to was the October 12, 1864 death of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Taney was a vehemently pro-slavery jurist — his Court decided in Dredd Scott that Blacks were not people and thus had no right to sue — whom Lincoln no doubt disdained. Contrary to Sen. Harris&#8217; version of history (that a junior staffer must have hastily Google searched, scribbled onto a sheaf of paper, and then placed in front of her under the label &#8220;zinger&#8221;), if anything, Lincoln was chomping at the bit to fill this Jacksonian Democrat&#8217;s seat with a Republican&#8230;especially with emancipation amendments to the Constitution on the horizon.
So why didn&#8217;t Honest Abe fill the seat before the November 1864 election? Simple. THE SENATE WASN&#8217;T IN SESSION.
The Senate wouldn&#8217;t be back until December 5, 27 days after Election Day. The very next day, December 6, 1864, a re-elected Lincoln submitted his nomination for Supreme Court Chief Justice to the lame-duck Republican Senate (which had maintained its majority)&#8230;his former Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Chase was confirmed the very same day. That was just 56 days after Taney&#8217;s death. Pretty much in line with the Amy Coney Barrett timeline. Huh, go figure. Not a good example.
So no, Sen. Harris. It wasn&#8217;t principle which prevented honest Abe from jumping at the chance to erase the Taney Court&#8217;s tainted legacy, but rather the calendar. Unreal.
Also, to my knowledge, neither Lincoln nor his opponent, George McClellan, ever refused to answer again and again if they intended to pack the Court. They both respected the separation of powers too much, I guess. That a candidate from any party would refuse to answer such a question is positively terrifying to me. In a country in which proper U.S. History and even just basic civics were still taught, it would be enough to scare anyone. This is how banana republics are formed.
More from Brad Schaeffer: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-why-we-must-teach-the-holocaust">Why We MUST Teach The Holocaust</a>
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Of Another Time And Place</a>. 
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Portrait Of President Lincoln

SCHAEFFER: Kamala Harris Makes Historically Illiterate Reference To Lincoln In Debate

Abraham Lincoln

Mike Pence

Kamala Harris, history professor, held class tonight and gave V.P. Pence a lecture on how even a GOP icon like Lincoln would have been opposed to filling

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-kamala-harris-makes-historically-illiterate-reference-to-lincoln-in-debate/

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A 50-state survey has revealed some disturbing results as it relates to Millennials’  and Generation Z’s knowledge of the Holocaust. Gideon Taylor, President of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), announced the release of the U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey. It is the first-ever 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge among our nation’s youngest adult demographics. Among the survey’s findings, 63 percent of all national respondents do not know that six million Jews were murdered and 36 percent of those who were aware of the genocide thought the number was closer to “two million or fewer Jews” who perished. There were more than 40,000 camps and ghettos scattered across Europe during the Holocaust, and yet 48 percent of national survey respondents could not name a single one.
An even more disquieting survey response showed that even in heavily Jewish New York, nearly 20 percent of respondents believe that Jews actually caused the Holocaust.
“The results are both shocking and saddening and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” says Taylor. “We need to understand why we aren’t doing better in educating a younger generation about the Holocaust and the lessons of the past. This needs to serve as a wake-up call to us all, and as a road map of where government officials need to act.”
Taylor’s sentiments ring true. But anyone following the decay of the teaching of history in our public schools as well as the daily political discourse should not really be shocked by these findings. After all, people only know what they have been taught. And what they are being taught in this nation is that only certain groups have a right to grievance. Jews, due to their success, social cohesion, and out-sized contribution to all aspects of American life, in business, science, education, the arts, technology, etc. simply do not qualify.  In a way, the incredible resilience of the world’s Jewish population — a group that numbers barely 15 million, roughly the population of Istanbul, and saw six million slaughtered in barely four years — has disqualified them from entry into the club of the aggrieved. And so why teach their history?
In the United States, there is a grievance hierarchy if you will. And, it seems, the worse off the group, the more right to claim oppression they have.  As the popularity and attention of the Black Lives Matter group shows, at the apex of this grievance pyramid are African-Americans. No one denies that racism in the United States was pervasive, cruel, unjust, and an impediment to economic success. 250 years of slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow imposed enormous barriers to success for African-Americans.
Throughout the 19th Century and even through the 1940s Asians too were on the receiving end of harsh racism and discrimination. And Americans didn’t even try to hide their disdain for “the yellow horde” as was a common racist phrase back in the day. We even imposed immigration restrictions with the not-so-subtly titled Chinese Exclusion Act. During World War II, over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up on the West Coast and shipped off to camps, solely for the crime of their racial background. They were removed from their homes, saw their businesses shuttered, and lived in Spartan conditions under armed guards…even as their sons were actually fighting, many with note-worthy courage and spirit, for the same country that imprisoned their loved-ones. This at the same time some of our top generals had German surnames like Eisenhower, Spaatz, and Krueger.
If Asians have suffered any victimology, however, it is that of their own success.  Along with Jews, they are the most prosperous and successful sub-group in the United States. So much so that Harvard University, a supposed bastion of left-wing “tolerance” and proponent of “diversity” has been caught red-handed discriminating against Asians in its admissions process.
But Jews and Asians, lacking any aggrieved entitlement, have been cast down the well into those whose dark histories of oppression do not matter.  Since they are successful, their past sufferings cannot be used as a crutch to explain any present underachievement.
This paradox of success might be one reason why our youngsters know so little about the Holocaust, yet so much about slavery. Once again, the culprit is public education. I recently spoke out against a “race-relations” class to be included in my town’s high school curriculum. I did so not because I am some sort of racist (duh!) but rather that the course was built upon the structure of Critical Race Theory. This is a fashionable new school of academic thought whose core assumption is that the United States is innately, systemically racist. From this we learn of the never-ending series of hurtles that face African-Americans. And yes, there are many. Anyone who watches the documentary Age Seven In America can see that from the outset many minority children trapped in impoverished, drug-addled and gang-banger neighborhoods have little chance. And this is a tragedy. But it is a tragedy brought about in large measure by the introduction of the pathogen of the Welfare State into the body of minority neighborhoods, effectively replacing a father in the home as provider and mentor with the government. An explosion of out-of-wedlock African-American births starting in the late 1960s followed; the economic and cultural debilitating pathologies of such a social upheaval are so well-documented as to be declared “settled science” to borrow a phrase.
And yet, the relationship between government assistance and enervated communities is not part of the new race relations class syllabus. And the role of personal responsibility and proper behavior is never mentioned in the lesson plans that only present reading material from far-left activist/authors (no Thomas Sowell or Larry Elder to be found). The driving thesis of the course is that, basically, everything is someone else’s fault….victimhood. Primarily at the hands of the white heterosexual male.
There is no mention of the fact that a black child today has a 72 percent chance of being born to a single mother, whereas an Asian has an 18 percent chance.  No mention of the fact that two-parent black households are less likely to live below the poverty line than single-parent white households. Add to this the 1619 Project, which is not history but a re-written far-left narrative that would make Orwell blush, and one can see why there is no time for less consequential matters like the industrialized mass murder of six million men, women, and children and brutal physical and emotional abuse of millions more, solely based on their ethnicity/religion. Not when they are doing just fine now.
The disconcerting numbers in the Holocaust survey serve as an indictment of the entire American education system. I will go further and say they represent a crime against our youth. Lying by omission is just as insidious — albeit politically effective — as outright fabrication.
The simple fact is this: The Holocaust happened. The mind-boggling breadth and scope of mass murder is matched only by its unimaginable cruelty. It was, quite simply, one of the most important events to ever happen in the entire story of mankind. I mean ever. Places like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, Sobobor, Dachau, and tens of thousands of others are not just names, or historical asterisks. They are dark mirrors held up to ourselves…and they demonstrate our inherent capacity to inflict unimaginable cruelty upon others when the additive of industrial ingenuity is mixed with the base alloy of hatred and prejudice.
The Holocaust must be remembered.  How else can we honor those millions of innocent lives snuffed out, those millions of potentials wasted, if we do not learn from their suffering? And how can we learn that which is never taught to us.
The frightening thing about history is how easily it can be erased. As the sadistic SS commandant in the film Schindler’s List so glibly said of the 600 year-old thriving Jewish community in Krakow, “By this evening those six centuries are a rumor. They never happened. Today is history.”
Teaching our children so little about the Holocaust is educational malpractice writ large. But what can be done?  It seems that if classes on slavery, necessary and proper as they certainly are, should be part of any history curriculum, so too should the Holocaust. We have no choice. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat the very crimes too few today even know happened.
One only need to recall the 1942 Wannsee Conference (something I have no doubt few know even occurred) wherein the “Final Solution,” the euphemism for the industrialized mass-murder of Europe’s Jews was hashed out in chillingly antiseptic detail, to understand what he meant when C.S. Lewis observed: “The greatest evil…is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.”
This is why we must teach the Holocaust. Not because it is important to a small segment of the world’s population. We teach the Holocaust because it is the story of us. It serves as a warning of what we are capable of when hatred, superstition, and cold ambivalence are given free rein in the hearts of men. That entire generations are going through life not even aware such a monstrous crime occurred, just three-quarters of a century ago, is frightening in its implications. (That any U.S. president today can be compared to Adolf Hitler shows just how corrosive this ignorance of the past can be.)  Our education system has failed a generation. It is time to teach history again. The classroom is not a venue to force grievance and a disdain for their own great nation upon captive and impressionable minds.  In telling such an important and shameful chapter as the Holocaust, we remind the next generation that no people are immune from its evil machinations.  Fore-warned is fore-armed. Otherwise why study the past at all?
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Of Another Time And Place</a>. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Holocaust Memorial

SCHAEFFER: Why We MUST Teach The Holocaust

Education

Holocaust

Nazi Germany

World War II

A 50-state survey has revealed some disturbing results as it relates to Millennials’  and Generation Z’s knowledge of the Holocaust. Gideon Taylor,

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-why-we-must-teach-the-holocaust/

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I find myself drawn to this date, September 17, for many reasons.  Most Americans — at least those who were taught that our history did not begin in 1963 — know the dates July 4, December 7, and, of course September 11.  One great day, one infamous day, and one stunning day.  But what of today?  September 17?  Ring a bell with anyone?  Probably not.
And yet it is one of the most significant dates in U.S. history, not just for the events that occurred on this square in the calendar, but also for what it means and could teach us about our country.  It is a reminder of our greatness, and our flaws, and the lengths we, as no other so powerful and influential nation in history, are willing to go to correct those flaws.
On September 17, 1787, the most consequential document since Magna Carta was adopted by a hastily organized group of civic leaders in the fledgling United States whose aim was to rectify the inherent flaws in the Articles of Confederation…a governmental system that was too weak to serve as a workable model for a nation on the cusp of expansion as were the newly freed former British Colonies. Behind closed doors, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and others less well-known but brilliant and successful in their own lives, did something dramatic. Indeed revolutionary. They tossed the entire Articles into the trash bin, rolled up their sleeves, and created a new form of government that has served us well, albeit imperfectly, for 233 years.
The new U.S. Constitution, adopted on this day, was an astounding political achievement.  And it represented a shift to accepting the role of a centralized power in a workable model of federalism that has seen a constant give-and-take between the power of the states and the federal government.  Some saw the Constitution as too authoritarian. Thomas Jefferson, who was abroad during the Convention, was dissatisfied with its dearth of enumerated protections for civil liberties. Hence a Bill of Rights, proposed by the Virginian George Mason and Massachusetts man Elbridge Gerry, and later drafted by Madison, was to be a stipulation for ratifying the document. The glossing over of the essential rights Jefferson has so eloquently laid before a different Congress eleven years earlier in his Declaration of Independence was the first of what some historians call a blunder in the convention process that would be rectified through compromise.
But on one issue there would be no such resolution, only delay and passing on the problem to the next generation…slavery. Codified in the Constitution as the infamous 3/5 Compromise, wherein an enslaved human being was to be considered 3/5 of a person for electoral counting purposes, human chattel would have a devastating effect on the nation and lead it, ultimately, to civil war.
Which brings us to the second great event to take place on this date, this time in 1862 near an unassuming creek in western Maryland called the Antietam. September 17, 1862 would turn out to be, in fact, the bloodiest single day in our history…it remains so to this day. In one of those eerie coincidences of history, the great battle would take place 75 years to the day of the flawed Constitution’s adoption. Indeed, the men in Union blue and Confederate gray who stood in line facing each other with rifles leveled at the breasts of their fellow countrymen were on this battlefield precisely to decide the issue left unresolved in the Constitutional Convention, which many of their grandparents and even parents remembered.
Antietam was a battle unlike any other in our history. A twelve-hour buzz saw of death, destruction, horrific wounds, shattered bodies, and ruined lives.  When the hot September sun finally set upon the devastated battlefield, more than 23,000 Americans had fallen…twice as many casualties suffered by the Allies on D-Day and the equivalent of Iwo Jima, only in one day rather than 36.
But from the suffering and misery of that terrible day, President Lincoln, who had been watching closely the progress of the Union army in their quest to defeat the rebels for reasons more than just military expediency, found hope. All summer he had wanted to announce his Emancipation Proclamation that would declare all slaves in rebellious territories “henceforth and forever free.”  (Those slaves in loyal border states would have to wait to be freed by Constitutional amendment as Lincoln did not believe he had the power to make such a unilateral and, in his mind, unconstitutional declaration, despite its obvious moral clarity. The Confederate states, however, having willingly rejected the Constitution when they seceded, were under no such protection.) Lincoln was ready to announce the Emancipation Proclamation as early as June 1862, but his Secretary of State William Seward dissuaded him, arguing that the timing was not right.  In early summer, the Union armies were being pummeled in the field by the army of the gifted rebel general, and son of a celebrated Revolutionary, Robert E. Lee. To announce emancipation now, Seward argued, might be perceived as an act of desperation, or as the secretary so bluntly put it, “the last shriek on the retreat.” So Lincoln patiently shelved his proclamation and waited for a Union victory to give it teeth. That date came on September 17, 1862.
Though a tactical draw (and some argue a day that should have ended the Civil War but for the bungling of the Union Army commander Gen. McClellan) Antietam did serve to bloody Lee’s army enough to drive the invading rebels out of Maryland and end their string of victories.  Just a week later, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was announced on September 22; it would go into effect on January 1, 1863. The proclamation was the most important document since the Constitution itself, and it showed that Americans were willing to shed oceans of blood to free their fellow countrymen and women of color and right the wrong inflicted upon the latter at the nation’s founding.
So what can we as Americans learn from these two dates, 75 years apart?  First, that, like all nations, the United States is imperfect. Anything built by mere mortals is, despite even the loftiest of reputations, the purest of motives, and the most powerful of intellects. (Jefferson sardonically referred to the Framers as “demigods.”) But the Constitutional Convention is not something to be scorned and ridiculed, but rather studied, as fair-minded individuals viewing the people of the past through the lens of the more enlightened (in some respects) present should do.
Second, it shows that we are a nation that accepts our historical failings and speak openly and honestly about them. This is in stark contrast to many nations who to this day refuse to come to grips with troubling aspects of their past. (See Japanese World War II textbooks, or consider the Turks’ amnesia with respect to Armenia. Not to mention the British who seem to be too busy casting moral aspersions on their American cousins to ponder their own atrocities during the Sepoy Rebellion, the Zulu and Boer Wars, just to name a few.)
Most importantly though, September 17 represents that fabled “arc of the moral universe” being bent, by force if necessary, in the direction of justice. The Constitution was drafted by 55 white men, yes. We are pejoratively reminded of this non-stop in our daily discourse. And, indeed, women and people of color were excluded from the process, and this is never right, albeit the sign of the times across the globe, not just in Philadelphia. But if this is to be criticized, then those same critics must also embrace those 12,500 white boys who fought for the Union at Antietam. We must then celebrate those brave soldiers who either gave their lives or fell with horrible, agonizing and life-changing wounds to address the imperfections of their predecessors, right the wrongs of their founding document, and, through their blood and pain and sorrow,  remake our nation in a way that was more in line with its founding principles.
In the end over 2 million men — among them over 100,000 free black men — fought to end the stain of slavery in this country; 350,000 of them died in the process. A century later their descendants would march again, together, this time not on the field of battle but rather peacefully filing down a country road on the way to Montgomery, or congregating en masse in the shadow of the memorial to the man who restored to over 3 million Americans their God-given rights as intrinsically free people. They were the worthy successors to those brave men who gave their lives on the fields of Antietam that marked the way.
Those who disparage the Framers are ignorant. If you want to know what America really means at its core, seek out the counsel of the one million legal immigrants from across the globe who line up to enter our nation every year seeking a better life — who know our true goodness and decency as a nation, and a free people. Perhaps they are capable of looking past the obvious flaws of our founding, and the moral dubiousness of the views of those mortal men who crafted our governmental framework, and they see the rows upon rows of tombstones of young men who fell at such places as Antietam on that same day 75 years later to change that reality.
To these two camps, September 17 represents different visions of our nation. I think I’ll go with the immigrants’ view.  The men who died on our bloodiest day made their new lives here possible. They took a fundamentally workable government and made it more inclusive. And they did so by sacrificing far more than planting a fashionable virtue-signaling sign or joining a hashtag campaign. They put their lives on the line to make this a better nation. And they succeeded.
More from Brad Schaeffer: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-united-states-exceptional-ask-japanese-brad-schaeffer">The United States IS Exceptional. Ask The Japanese.</a>
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Of Another Time And Place</a>. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Lincoln Memorial.

September 17: An Important Date That Shows Us Who We Really Are

American Civil War

Constitution

Slavery

I find myself drawn to this date, September 17, for many reasons.  Most Americans — at least those who were taught that our history did not begin in 1963

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/september-17-an-important-date-that-shows-us-who-we-really-are/

https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2019/11/57D7B56E-E6C8-4018-9A2C-1034522FDAF2-e1600294784129.jpeg

The New York Times, as part of their on-going effort to show that they have completely abandoned journalism for advocacy, ran the transcript of President Trump&#8217;s RNC Convention speech. But their in-house photographer Doug Mills  was allowed to add a little caption underneath his photo. &#8220;Giving a speech in turns self-congratulatory and alarmist, the president said that if given the chance, Joe Biden would be &#8216;the destroyer of American greatness.&#8217;” Interesting choice of words for a mere photo that should speak for itself.  “Self-congratulatory”? “Alarmist”? This is not a presentation of facts, rather this is opinion. And it is one of the many examples of how obsessively anti-Trump bias seeps into the non-editorial sections of once great and trustworthy newspapers.
Considering the source, one should not be surprised at Mills’ choice of words. The &#8220;self-congratulatory&#8221; label especially is in line with the media narrative that Trump is a &#8220;narcissist. I’ll save everyone the suspense: he is. The Donald would have admitted it himself years ago, when he was still the toast of the media/entertainment circles who so despise him now, well before being elevated to the loftiest office on the planet by doing it his way.
I’m not excusing his arrogance, but, at least knowing myself, I must say I’d be pretty hard-pressed to not like what I see in the mirror after my first run at public office resulted in being elected President of the United States while defeating the-well organized and over-capitalized Bush and Clinton family machines in the process, not to mention experienced and able Republican hopefuls.
So, yes. Donald Trump is a narcissist. But he is not the first narcissist to sit in the Oval Office. In fact, the man he replaced was perhaps even more so&#8230;although he kept it cloaked in a veil of cool and protected by a Praetorian Guard media.
To illustrate the point, here&#8217;s some contrasting analysis. You can draw your own conclusions. Let&#8217;s compare their two re-election bid convention speeches. Obama’s in 2012 vs. Trump’s just last week. If one does a deep dive into the transcripts some interesting and revealing findings emerge. Here is some data.
Obama’s 2012 acceptance speech ran around 4,600 words, whereas Trump’s was longer at roughly 6,700.
What is interesting is the number of times the first person singular, each President’s references to himself, was used. For example, even though Trump’s speech had 2,100 more words in the text, Obama used the word “I” 59 times, compared to Trump’s 46 times. And he used the word “me” nine times compared to Trump’s three. So Trump’s speech was 45 percent longer, yet it was Obama who seemed enamored with himself, deploying the first-person singular 68 times to Trump’s 49. I omit the word “my” as both men used this word in the context of “my wife,” “my children,” “my grandfather,” “my brother,” so that may be forgiven. But the prevalence of “I” and “me” is telling.
As I said, Trump is indeed a narcissist. After all, who would enter the rough-and-tumble arena of national politics for the first time, facing a viciously hostile media and skilled, well-organized and funded, and take-no-prisoners opponents, with an inferiority complex? Paul Begala once described politics as “show business for ugly people” and there is indeed an element of celebrity to being on the political stage as it has never existed before given this is such a media-driven pursuit. It tends to attract the egotistical. But just because one has a high opinion of himself doesn’t necessarily mean he is unaware or dismissive of his role as a public servant. And this is where I find the language of each man’s last signature speech particularly revealing.
Consider their usage of the first person plural, which is an inclusive reference to not just the self but the group. Looking again at the two speeches, Trump uses the term “we” 140 times to Obama’s 80. He uses “us” 11 times to Obama’s 15. So given the comparative lengths of each speech, they both try to be inclusive in their language, which one would expect from those seeking to be the President for all the people.
But what struck me was the ratio of self to group. Obama mentions the group only 27 more times than he refers to himself. Whereas Trump refers to the first person plural a whopping 102 more times than he does the singular. In short, Obama includes the people in his speech only 39 percent more than he does himself in the exclusive. Trump, on the other hand, refers to the people 208 percent more than he does himself.
I began taking note of these presidential first person references after the astute Stanford classical historian Victor Davis Hanson pointed out that one of Trump&#8217;s appealing characteristics (yes, he does have some) is that he is indeed inclusive in his language when speaking. Said Hanson: “He has a strange way that nobody detected, except the people who voted for him, of conveying empathy. He says ‘our’…‘Our vets’, ‘our workers’ ‘our farmers’.  I can’t imagine [this from] Mitt Romney or John McCain, who were supposed to be far more empathetic.” And Trump often phrases policy agendas as what &#8220;we&#8221; plan to do. And how it is up to &#8220;us.&#8221; Beyond empathy, it shows a respect for the fact that he sits in &#8220;the People&#8217;s House&#8221; (a phrase he also used in his speech) in a way I think can only come from his being an outsider and not a seasoned Beltway or machine party man.
I bring up Obama not because of any obsession with him. (Allowing politicians to rent space free-of-charge in one’s head is the hobby of the hard Left these days.) Rather, I do so because Barack Obama was, along with Trump, the most self-centered president in my lifetime. However, unlike Trump, his vanity was masked, protected, and even encouraged by a shamelessly fawning media class. But the data shows who is the narcissist&#8230;at least where these most important speeches are concerned.
Although a mere two speeches obviously do not represent their entire public record, they are the most similar in their occasion, their importance, their meaning, and ultimately their insight into the minds of the men delivering them. One man is an admitted egotist. The other a closeted one.  For Obama, such “self-congratulatory” language, to coin the NY Times photographer-turned-opinion columnist, is par for the course. During a ninety-minute town hall address in Germany in 2017, the Washington Times reported that, according to Grabien News analysis, the former-president Obama referenced himself an eye-popping 467 times. The story noted he “used just the word ‘I’ more than 300 times &#8220;with dozens more references to &#8216;me&#8217; and &#8216;my&#8217; among the myriad ways a person can refer to himself.&#8221;
Obama, the darling of a media that relentlessly accuses Trump of egotism, has never shrunk from making whatever occasion in which he participates ultimately about himself. Example: I have stood at the Berlin Wall just after its collapse. It was a surreal experience. At the time I was there it was still up in many places and the deleterious impact of communist oppression was evident in the contrast between the bright, vibrant streets of West Berlin, and the dark, gloomy world I entered when I passed under the Brandenburg Gate into the East. It really brought home to me the triumph of the ordinary Berliners, people leading difficult lives, under the jackboot of an authoritarian regime, who at a crucial moment in history said enough was enough and, at great personal risk, defied their Soviet-sponsored puppet overlords and tore the Wall down. That is what November 9, 1989 was all about.
And yet, in 2009, in a video address to the people of Berlin to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Wall’s collapse, Obama somehow managed to spin the occasion to make it also about his favorite subject. “Few would have seen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg, and their American ally led by a man of African descent.” Er, no, Mr. President, they wouldn’t have. Because they weren’t thinking of you or the pigment of any future American president. In fact, their story had nothing to do with you at all. They were more concerned about whether the ranks of East German troops with guns lowered at the crowd were going to open fire and massacre them or not. As Mark Steyn would ask: “Is all of human history just a colorful backdrop for the Barack Obama biopic?”
Trump, a Queens native, entered the White House with no such pretense other than his own inflated ego that was, at least, based on a tangible, demonstrable record of achievement — billionaire, real estate mogul, best-selling author, top-rated television producer and star. But in the end, as his speeches reveal, as do his actions, he views himself as one of many. Not The One. An elite, yes, but without being elitist. As such, one could never imagine a Donald Trump saying to the people of Berlin, “Who could have foreseen, when you were defying the Russian military machine and risking your lives and those of your family just to aspire to a life that the West took for granted, that a builder from Queens and reality show TV star would one day be the President of the United States.” Not even The Donald would view such a sublime anniversary as anything but a day that belonged to the people who made the history. Perhaps herein lies the difference, and the key to Obama’s many uses of “I” versus Trump’s affinity for “we.”
Such self-centeredness as displayed by Obama and others of his class is emblematic of a deep strain of elitism within the halls of power in the United States, on both sides of the aisle, albeit more brazenly arrogant and off-putting on the Left. Nancy Pelosi’s blatant flaunting of the very same Covid lockdown rules she has vociferously advocated, despite the damage being visited upon small businesses in her district, is a prime illustration of this insular mentality wherein the self matters first among all things.  It is the conceit of the hyper-educated, overly-credentialed, and fabulously wealthy. And as their power and influence grows hand-in-hand with the metastasizing expansion of the power of the federal government and coastal technocracy, such elitism will only fester and grow.
Obama, a Harvard man who, when you strip away the veneer of cool and smooth, really accomplished very little of any substance before being wafted upward by those assuring him he was the smartest man in the room until he came to believe it, is the epitome of this cult of the smarter-than-thou self.  And the contrast between their “I” mentality, and Trump’s “we” goes a long way to explaining the surprise results, at least to the “I” crowd of the 2016 election. But as is so often the case with the elitist Left, they are adept at accusing others of the very sins they routinely commit themselves, and without a shred of embarrassment over the irony, hypocrisy, and outright mendacity of their moral dissonance.
More from Brad Schaeffer: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-united-states-exceptional-ask-japanese-brad-schaeffer">The United States IS Exceptional. Ask The Japanese.</a>
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, columnist, and author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">Of Another Time And Place</a>. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

President Obama Meets With President-Elect Donald Trump In The Oval Office Of White House

SCHAEFFER: Donald Trump: The Second Most Arrogant President Since 2008

Barack Obama

The New York Times, as part of their on-going effort to show that they have completely abandoned journalism for advocacy, ran the transcript of President

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