Speech to Carroll County New Hampshire Republicans Monday, 3-15-21

Only seven at this point

Way back in the 20th century I was born into a family of Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrats, the fourth of eight children. We were taught that Protestants and Republicans were different from us and not to be trusted. My parents were politically active at the town level and some of my earliest memories are of our mother driving us kids around town to deliver fliers door-to-door encouraging people to vote for either my father running for local office, or a family friend. Politics of all kinds were discussed most nights around our supper table beginning at 5:45 pm. If I showed up late because I was fishing, playing baseball, or finishing my paper route, there would be consequences.

My mother and father

After supper I would sit in front of the television while my father watched the news. John F. Kennedy was our hero and my father proudly displayed a photo of him and Congressman JFK standing next to each other at a meeting to organize a public-employee union called NAGE — the National Association of Government Employees. That union later morphed into today’s SEIU, which functions as an army of Democrat poll workers and thugs. On weekends my father watched 30-minute episodes of “World at War” or “Victory at Sea” When a flotilla was crossing the English Channel on D-Day he would say, “I was there.” When the Battle of Okinawa was depicted with kamikazes crashing in to US ships he would say, “I was there.” 

Okinawa

But then most other fathers on our street were WWII veterans. That’s how it was in suburban Massachusetts in the 1950s and 60s. Every kid was proud of his father and that shaped our world view. In the late sixties and early seventies, however, things changed. Baby boomers grew up, went to college. Many challenged the values of the Greatest Generation. They used drugs. They ignored sexual norms, and opposed the Vietnam War. Heroes like JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King were assassinated. Cities burned in riots. Protests divided the country. President Johnson chose not to run again. Nixon resigned. My older brother started using drugs and left home. Those previously edifying conversations around our supper table became acrimonious.

Similar things were happening up and down my street and across the country. American culture was fraying. Respect for the Greatest Generation was replaced by: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” 

That unraveling of American pride then paused during eight years of the Reagan Administration, but began anew under the Obama Administration. Last summer cities were again burning in the riots following the George Floyd’s death. America has started shaking again. Today, after only two months of the Biden Administration, political polarization in America is worse than at anytime since the Civil War.

And racism is back in the form of Critical Race Theory. Although banned by President Trump, it has become dominant in public school classrooms just since the November election. If you look at sample curricula virtually anywhere in our country now you’ll see students being taught to categorize themselves by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. White people are born “privileged.” They’re inherently racist against all other people. White people perpetuate “institutional racism” the theory claims, consciously or unconsciously. 

Such BS

Curricula like “The 1619 Project” which purports the United States was built on slavery — and not on notions of liberty and freedom spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The 1619 Project is being adopted in public schools across several states and a new acronym has emerged: “BIPOC.” If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. It stands for: Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Our country is divided in two now: whites and BIPOCs. This is not good and it’s gaining momentum. Ask your children and grandchildren if they’re hearing it.

And it’s not just in schools. Coca Cola and many other mainstream corporations today train their employees to first acknowledge, then renounce their alleged “White Privilege” and learn to “Be Less White.” The training is mandatory and they must admit being racists.

My teaching career began in the 1970s after I was influenced by the craziness of the 60s and 70s. The first US History textbook I used was one of the most widely-used at the time. Today, however, it would banned. In the chapters leading up the Civil War, it summarized debates between between members of Congress from northern and southern states on slavery. Here’s what it says on page 274 of American History:

Southerners justified slavery as a good thing because:

1. The African slave was an inferior human being. As an inferior, he was suited only to special kinds of work. This work was best done under a system of slavery.

2. Slavery was approved by the Bible. Many southerners pointed out that slavery had existed in Biblical times. The Bible did not condemn slavery. Therefore, they added, it could not be bad or sinful.

3. The slave was treated better than many white factory workers in the north … who worked 12 snd 14 hours a day often in poorly-lighted and unhealthy factories. The slave did most of his work in outdoor in an area that was much warmer and healthier than a northern city.

4. Slavery was important in helping the South develop its leaders… The use of slaves made it possible for southern leaders to devote themselves to law, politics, and government service.

There were commensurate northern arguments against slavery with which you would already be familiar. My students would study, then role-play as ante-bellum northern and southern senators and members of Congress and debate just as Congress did in those years leading up to the Civil War. If a teacher were to try that today he’d be suspended immediately. On end-of-the-year evaluations, though, my students cited that debate as the lesson they learned the most from.

They learned also that slavery was practiced in every other civilization throughout human history — including in black Africa from which American slaves either purchased or captured. Many of our students today, however, believe slavery was unique to America.

The Allegedly Reverend Al Sharpton

Those southern senators and congressmen my students role-played were all Democrats. After WWII they were called Dixiecrats. Today’s Democrats, however, like to put on historical blinders when viewing their party's racist history. They claim that racist southern Democrats all became Republicans when Richard Nixon implemented his “Southern Strategy.” It’s classic projection. Trouble is, there’s little evidence for it.

Nixon said nothing remotely racist over a very long career from 1940s to the 1970s, but Democrats claim he used “racist dog whistles” like “law and order” and “states rights.” Really? Like a secret code? Only one senator — Strom Thurmond — became Republican and only one congressman — Albert Watson of South Carolina. Nearly all Dixiecrats supported Alabama Governor George Wallace, a Democrat, not Nixon. Though John Tower, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott joined the Republicans too, they hadn’t been Dixiecrats. The South became Republican in the 1980s and 90s because of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, not because of Nixon.

Few people know that a greater percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights bill than Democrats and Nixon was one of them. He also supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote: “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”

Nixon is the president who actually got Affirmative Action going which discriminated against whites in favor of blacks and women. The south became Republican not because of any strategy of Richard Nixon’s. The south became Republican because the south became conservative. It had little to do with racism.

Republicans all

So here we are in 2021. The Democrats run the country again and they just enacted a $1.9 trillion “Covid Relief” bill which has very little to do with COVID. Rather, it has everything to do with Democrat agendas, like $350 billion for bailing out cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and states like Illinois, California, New York and others. Decades of Democrat mayors and governors have brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. They did this by negotiating overly-generous pension and benefit packages they knew they couldn’t afford for public employee unions like the above mentioned SEIU, AFS/CME, and others.

Democrat leaders knew these contracts were unsustainable. They also knew they’d be out of office when the bill came due. The so-called COVID Relief Bill also gives Democrat teachers’ unions tens of billions more to open the schools they’ve kept closed. Money isn’t the problem. They still have billions they haven’t spent from the last relief bill. Maybe some of you are old enough to remember Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen’s remark from earlier times in that state: “A million here, a million there — pretty soon you’re talking real money.” If only it were still a million here and a million there. Now it’s a trillion here and a trillion there — and that’s still not enough for the Democrats!

Next will come still another multi-trillion-dollar piece of legislation — ostensibly for rebuilding infrastructure. Remember President Obama’s $800 billion in “shovel ready projects”? I challenge any of you to point to one of those shovel-ready projects we spent hundreds of billions on. I can’t point to any.

It was different with Republican public works projects over the years. We can point to the Hoover Dam in the twenties. Hoover was a Republican. We can point to Eisenhower’s interstate highways in the fifties. Eisenhower was a Republican. Where are Obama’s shovel ready projects from the 2000s? I give up.

We Republicans have our work cut out for us, don’t we? And so it goes…

INDOCTRINATING OUR TEACHERS

There’s a movement in public schools across the country from Maine to California which purports to improve race relations. To this retired teacher, however, it’s more likely to make them worse.

A week ago the Washington Free Beacon reported: “The San Diego Unified School District required teachers to attend a ‘white privilege’ training session in which they had to say they were racist and ‘confront' their privilege.” And it’s not just in California that teachers are being instructed like this. Similar things are happening right here in Maine. “Diversity Trainers” from several places across the country are becoming millionaires as they collect enormous fees for telling teachers they’re racists and “You [teachers] are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.”

The Free Beacon article didn’t say whether any teachers objected. Nowhere could I find reports that any San Diego teachers spoke up in opposition to this “training.” I certainly would have spoken up. When I was subjected to previous politically-correct “in-service training” regimens and the presenter asked: “Are there any comments or questions?” I always had some — and I was always the only one. Public school teachers are not what anyone would call courageous. Never was a I forced to say I was racist though, because the “training” hadn’t regressed to that point ten years ago. It has now.

A typical response to today’s inservice indoctrination would be this one from North Carolina teacher Laurie Calvert who said: “I was a racist teacher and I didn’t even know it.” I did multiple searches looking for “teachers object to anti-racist training,” and all I got were hits from teachers who endorsed the brainwashing and self-flagellated the way Laurie Calvert did in 2017.

Ever since the George Floyd video went viral, however, this brand of “diversity training” has become a big money-maker for “Diversity Trainers.” According to a November report in Realclearinvestigations:

“The nation's K-12 schools have been incrementally adopting multiculturalism and ethnic studies for decades, but such courses have been the exception rather than the rule. This summer’s Black Lives Matter protests have sparked new level of commitment, a newfound urgency, and a new trend: anti-racist pedagogy.”

Here in Maine, SAD 51 Superintendent Jeff Porter attended a diversity session run by Boston-based Community Change, Inc. which is another money-making “diversity training” institution where Maine resident Shay Stewart-Bouley works as executive director. Superintendent Porter had attended one of her workshops, was troubled by the rhetoric at first, but then thought it was wonderful and wanted all his teachers to take it He budgeted $30,000 to pay Steward-Bouley’s organization, until there was a community backlash last June.

The fallout began when the Cumberland/North Yarmouth district’s “Equity Committee” sent out a statement to the community last June. It read, in part:

“As a majority white school district, we stand in solidarity with Black Movement leaders… In a culture that continually reinforces white supremacy, justice can only be achieved when we confront and repair the anti-Blackness woven through every aspect of society—in our homes, schools, workplaces, communities, places of worship, and government… We cannot move forward until we reconcile the intentional barriers white people have built to harm black people… Black people experience violence every single day because of our white supremacist society….We will work to assess our curriculum, educate our community within and outside of our school campus, dismantle the anti-Blackness all of us have internalized by living in a society built on white supremacy, and provide tools to interrupt anti-Black racism.”

On her Facebook page called: “Black Girl In Maine,” Steward-Bouley declares: “Racism is not just about personal feelings; it is woven into the fabric of this nation,” and “White women benefit from the status quo… Change would require burning down that system and building a new one — one where [white women] and their children might lose the shared superiority and protection they get by being attached to powerful White men.” Steward Bouley claims her movement is world wide and “Wherever there are Black people, there is a fight.”

She capitalizes White and Black and that’s clearly how she sees the human race: Whites are racists and Blacks are victims. That’s quite different from Martin Luther King’s dream of not judging people by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. It’s also pretty clear why some SAD 51 taxpayers objected to paying Steward-Bouley tens of thousands to “train” their teachers. They don’t want students trained to believe themselves racist if they were born white.

According to a November 23rd Portland Press Herald article, the SAD 51 School Board has decided to drop Steward-Bouley’s organization, Community Change, Inc. and will instead hire the University of Southern Maine for its “equity work.” To that, Steward-Bouley said: “I am entitled to my own opinions that I can share on my personal social media.”

True enough, Ms. Steward-Bouley, but you shouldn’t be “training” teachers.

LEFT & RIGHT WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17 2020

Civil War historian and newspaper columnist Bill Marvel again sits in the left chair. He doesn’t fit neatly into any political category, but agreed to appear on the show again to discuss political polarization in the America today and compare it to polarization in 1860.

Bill says he doesn’t fit anymore on the left, not because his views have changed, but because the Democrat Party has shifted dramatically to the left, making him appear center-right. We discuss specific examples of that.

Speaking of the tentative subject for Bill’s 20th book on the Civil War, he says that today’s political conflict and the one in 1860 both “started with an election that no one would accept.”

Bill says ignorance of history today due to the poor state of our public schools, prevents the public from realizing how quickly a society can collapse.

Bill reflected on a recent spate of letters to the editor in the Conway Daily Sun which lump the two of us as ideological twins, and suggested it was an orchestrated effort. When I questioned him about that he said,  “Unlike the clairvoyant cognoscenti of the millennial mob, I don’t know."

I love that impromptu phrase.

Conversation then ranged from the Rodney King incident to the Michael Brown incident to the George Floyd incident comparing and contrasting the incidents themselves and media reaction to them.

The producer asks who Joe Biden may pick for a running mate and we discuss those possibilities at some length.

We also discuss gun control and the 2nd Amendment in the context of leftist threats to ban guns.

Left & Right Thursday, June 4, 2020

We start with a question from the producer: "Do you agree with the generals that moving the protesters [from Lafayette Park] was a violation of their constitutional rights? Mark said he would be.motivated to demonstrate against that action if he lived in Washington, DC. I don't agree with Mattis and other generals that deploying the military to suppress violence would be a violation of the Constitution as the generals state. I don't think it's necessary to do so yet, but we're' getting close. We discuss my column for the week which denies that "systemic racism" exists. I define racism, which is a belief that race is inherently superior or inferior to another. Mark would expand that to various manifestations of what I would call discrimination. He cited discomfort whites might experience encountering a group of blacks given the high crime rates among young black men. I don't see that as racism by a white person against blacks. I see it as logical caution given known crime statistics. We go into several other topics like Twitter and the First Amendment. Mark says social media uses "platforms" and is not subject to the same regulations as newspapers and TV stations.

What The Heck Is "Systemic Racism?"

Good news: After three months, the coronavirus has been knocked off the front page.

Bad news: It’s been replaced by riots in our cities.

On Monday of last week, a horrified world watched Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin kill a handcuffed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck while he pleaded for mercy. My first question is: why wasn’t Chauvin arrested for murder until Friday?

My second question is: how does anyone know racism made Chauvin do that? Because the cop is white and the victim was black? Could Chauvin be an equal opportunity brute? Looking for evidence that he’s racist, all I could find was a Mercury News interview with the owner of a nightclub at which, ironically, both Chauvin and Floyd worked, Floyd as a bouncer. The owner said Chauvin was overly aggressive with black patrons who were fighting compared to Hispanic patrons who were.

If, as reported in multiple venues, there were multiple previous complaints about Chauvin, how did he keep his job? The police commissioner is black. The state attorney general is black. The US Congresswoman for the district is black. Leftist Democrats have controlled the city and state for decades. All have more influence on local police behavior than some nebulous concept like “systemic racism.” 

Rather than look in the mirror, they blame others. Some blamed President Trump. Minnesota Governor Walz blamed drug cartels. Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner, John Harrington blamed white supremacists. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also blamed white supremacists, organized crime, and foreign elements, then he actually cried at a press conference.

Leftist Mainstream Media blame systemic racism. On leftist Joy Reid’s MSNBC show over the weekend, author Bakari Sellers said: “This is not just about George Floyd. This is about systemic racism and systemic injustice and systemic oppression.” Also appearing was Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MIN) in whose district the riots began. She and Joy Reid nodded solemnly while Sellers blamed systemic racism. On ABC’s “This Week last Sunday, Omar said: ”There really was also many people who chose to demonstrate and not abide by the curfew, who felt like they also were terrorized by the presence of tanks, by the presence of the National Guard, and a militarized police.”

The long-time, left-wing paper called; The Nation, ran the headline: “There’s Only One Possible Conclusion: White America Likes Its Killer Cops.” Writer Elie Mystal claims: “The police are never going to voluntarily stop killing black and brown people… until the majority of white people in this country make the killings stop.”

Leftist public schools are teaching lessons on “systemic racism,” but what, exactly, is that? If you look it up you won’t find a definition that doesn’t employ circular reasoning. Google it, for example, and among the first hits will be Ben & Jerry’s take, entitled: "7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real." The first way is: “Racism At Every Level of Society” and it goes on listing racial disparities in wealth distribution, education, housing, and health care. All are assumed to be caused by racism of whites against blacks — circular reasoning again.

During the Obama administration, the US Department of Education started offering lessons on "systemic racism" for public schools using the same circular reasoning: ”Implicit racial bias can help us to better understand how institutional [systemic] racism and other forms of bias affect educational experiences of students from marginalized communities.” They, too, list the disparities and blame racism.

Several of our big-city police chiefs blame Antifa for turning peaceful demonstrations into riots. So does Attorney General Barr and President Trump. Meanwhile, Democrat NYC Mayor DiBlasio’s daughter was arrested for throwing rocks at police. Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar’s daughter tweeted support for rioters. Minnesota Attorney General and former congressman Keith Ellison. So did his son. All are Democrats and Keith Ellison is a former DNC Chairman.

Look around at the cities in which people are rioting. All have been run by Democrats for decades. There’s definitely a pattern here but don’t expect Mainstream Media to report on it.

Left & Right July 31, 2019

Newspaper publisher Mark Guerringue sits in the left chair for this episode. The producer gives us two questions to start with: Are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren too far left to beat Trump? I answer that if the election were held today, Trump would win, but it's a long way off and anything could happen in the next fifteen months. The Democrat field is so far left that what we used to consider centrist has also shifted considerably to the left to the point where John Delaney is called moderate. Mark believes Delaney, Hickenlooper and Bullock to be moderate because they're capitalist and don't want to give free medical care to undocumented immigrants. Mark also contends that Mitch McConnell is blocking efforts to monitor/regulate social media, thus enabling Russians and others to continue influencing elections. I say all that is overblown and an issue manufactured by Democrats to harass the Trump Administration. Mark asked what I think of Meuller's appearance before Congress. I said Meuller appeared doddering, incompetent, showing signs of dementia. Mark emphasized that Meuller responded "Yes" to a Democrat congressman's question: "Would you have recommended indictment if Trump were not president?" Mark believes there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in spite of the Mueller report claim that there wasn't. I question whether Meuller wrote the report, that he appeared incompetent at the hearing and I believe the entire Russia collusion affair was invented by the Obama Administration intelligence apparatus, the Hillary Campaign, and the DNC, that they all spied on the Trump Campaign, the Trump Transition Team, and the Trump White House. I believe there will be indictments of several people associated with those organizations. A grand jury is right now investigating this under special prosecutor Durham. I contend there is little or no evidence for the ubiquitous charges that Trump is racist. All his "evidence" is circumstantial, that he questioned Obama's birthplace only because Obama was black -- that he criticized the Squad because only because they're brown and black. He [Trump] just is [racist], Mark claims. It's obvious, he says. Not to me it isn't. I claim Trump's criticism of the squad is because of the Squad's views, but the left, including Mark in this case, says it's only because of their skin color. I contend that cities around the country that Democrats have run for sixty years are hell-holes. Mark says they're thriving, that they're centers of entrepreneurship. He discounts that the murders in Chicago and Baltimore have anything to do with Democrat leadership.

Left & Right June 20, 2018

We discuss "family separation" on the southern border which dominates media lately. We agree on most points, but Gino suggests that Guatemala, Honduras, etc. are suffering because of too many MS-13 members deported back there from the US.

I contend Democrats want open borders but won't say it outright. The "asylum" scam is widening and accelerating. Awesome display of media/Democrat, pro-illegal-immigration propaganda.

What is in Trump's core? Gino says he lacks one, that he's completely opportunistic.

I describe anti-white-men bias at Harvard Medical School, and in undergraduate university admission procedures. Lawsuit by Asians who have been discriminated against is proceeding.

Tariffs past and present -- good or bad? Trade war? I say Calvin Coolidge hands-off policies more effective than Hoover's or Roosevelt's federal control policies.

Gino compares the Great Depression to the financial collapse in 2008.  I contend the feds should have done nothing in both cases and let businesses collapse. Let other private firms pick up pieces after bankruptcies. That's what Coolidge did and it worked very well. Government intervention prolongs recessions/the depression with central control.

Division Dynamics

Some call him the most divisive president ever. Some say he’s also the worst while others say he’s the best. He’s been in the White House a year now. Will he serve out the four-year term for which he was elected? Not if Trump-haters have their way. They’ve been looking to prevent that since before he was inaugurated.

Even his supporters acknowledge his numerous and obvious flaws, but will overlook them so long as he fulfills his campaign promises. Many expected his narcissism to subside but, alas, it has not, nor is it likely to. President Trump has suffered the most relentlessly negative media coverage in living memory, perhaps of all time, but it hasn’t diminished his opinion of himself. Even former President Carter remarked: “I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about. I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”

According to Justice Antonin Scalia's friend, Brian Garner, “Scalia thought it was most refreshing to have a candidate who was pretty much unfiltered and utterly frank.” That’s a summation of Trump upon which both his supporters and detractors will agree. Scalia may have liked him as a candidate, but whether he’d have liked Trump to be elected we’ll never know because he died ten months before election day. One of Trump’s first actions as president was to nominate a Supreme Court justice as much like Scalia as possible.

Hoping to cripple him or remove him, Trump-haters focused at first on alleged collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin to win the election. That comprised the bulk of media coverage ever since he defeated Hillary Clinton even though no evidence has emerged to support it after intense investigation by the FBI, several congressional committees, and a special prosecutor for over a year. The only evidence of Russian collusion found so far has involved the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign, but Trump-haters are not inclined to follow those threads.

Collusion allegations have thus faded. To get rid of Trump, detractors are searching for other means. The special prosecutor isn’t limited to Russian election collusion; he can investigate anything he chooses, and he is. The special prosecutor who went after President Clinton two decades ago was appointed to investigate a shady Arkansas real estate deal called Whitewater, but instead probed not only sexual harassment but consensual sexual escapades as well. When Clinton lied about those under oath, he was impeached. Something similar could happen to President Trump.

As President Carter pointed out, some detractors claim he’s deranged and would invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him. That’s never been attempted and would be a long shot at best. So now what? Mainstream media are currently in high dudgeon about allegations that Trump used the S-word to describe El Salvador, Haiti, and some African countries while negotiating immigration policy with Democrats. Accusing the president of saying sh** isn’t going to outrage many people so media are claiming the president is “racist.” Though not so in El Salvador, most people in Haiti and African countries are black. Therefore, calling them “sh**hole countries” is tantamount to racism, they insist. It’s a stretch, but mainstream media are riding it for as much mileage as it will bring them.

During a visit by the prime minister of Norway, Trump is said to have asked why we can’t have more immigrants from that country. Because most people in Norway are white, media continued piling up their “Trump is racist” coverage. Locally, Maine’s Portland Press Herald editorialized:

“This was the white nationalist vision of America that was promoted by Trump and his disgraced adviser Steve Bannon in the campaign. It is a view of America that was embraced by some large numbers of voters, who cheered Trump’s vision of a fortress America, where dark-skinned immigrants were kept out by a great wall.”

Really? Trump and Bannon “promoted a white nationalist vision of America”? Their slogan was “America First” and that’s certainly nationalist, but where and when did either of them ever say anything about skin color? Trump organized a lot of rallies and made a lot of speeches. Can the Press Herald cite anything he said to support its claim? The paper has promoted the “Russia/Trump collusion” story for a year without evidence. Now it has jumped to accusations of “white nationalism” without evidence as well. 

Is Trump dividing America, or did America’s divisions exist before he was elected? What might those divisions have been? Left vs right? Class divisions? Coastal elites vs heartland? College-educated vs non-college-indoctrinated? All of them? Was Trump elected because of those divisions? Whatever divisions there were, they’ve widened considerably since the election, but who is driving the wedge? Trump supporters or Trump haters?