July 4, 2010: Rededicate Ourselves To The Declaration

-By Thomas E. Brewton
The events triggered by the Declaration of Independence were not a revolution. They were a struggle to gain independence from arbitrary exercise of government power.

Few people ever read beyond the stirring opening sentences of the Declaration. The meat of the document is in the bottom part of the second paragraph:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.

This to a considerable extent the situation we the voters have fashioned for ourselves since Franklin Roosevelt’s imposition of welfare-state socialism in the 1930s. The Obama administration openly and proudly proclaims its intention to impose a New New Deal, the final socialist nails our coffin.
Continue reading


July 4, 2010: Rededicate Ourselves To The Declaration”


A New Declaration of Independence for a New Revolution

-By Warner Todd Huston

America is fast coming to a crossroads from which there will be no return if we take the wrong path. Do we take the road that leads away from America and toward a Euro-esque way of governing? Do we cast aside our American character and bury our great nation in a grave of socialist-styled authority? Do we damn our progeny to a failed superstate that violate every tenet of our original ideals?

I say we do not. I say we reject the democrat’s Euro-esque ideas and refocus ourselves on American exceptionalism. Our federal system has strayed far from our founding ideals and we may soon find that its time for a new Declaration of Independence from a tyrannical government that has usurped power from proper authority.

Since it is Independence Day this weekend, I offer this new Declaration as a rallying cry to all those willing to return to our true American character…
Continue reading


A New Declaration of Independence for a New Revolution”


2-Inch-Tall Army Soldiers Gets School Kid Reprimanded

-By Warner Todd Huston

A policy of no tolerance for weapons got an 8-year-old boy in trouble at his Rhode Island grade school this week. The boy brought in nearly a dozen M-14 Army rifles to his Tiogue School in Coventry, R.I. grade school and was chastised by the principal for the outrage.

How did he get all those assault rifles into the school you might ask? Why he did it by gluing seven or so of his 2-inch-tall green army soldier toys to his camo colored ball cap for “make a crazy hat” day at school. That’s right, a few green army man toys were enough to trip the poor child up in this foolish school’s “no weapons” policy. (Photo credit, WPRI.com)

Seriously. No weapons includes 2-inch-tall army soldier toys holding teeny, tiny representations of army rifles. 2-inch-tall army soldier toys are enough to get a kid sent in shame to the principal’s office and threatened with sterner action.
Continue reading


2-Inch-Tall Army Soldiers Gets School Kid Reprimanded”


Calif. School Bans American Flag Clothing For Non-Existent Mexican Holiday?

-By Warner Todd Huston

California schools really do hate America. In California apparently you are a bad little boy if you wear to school clothing adorned with the good ol’ Red, White and Blue. You get thrown out, in fact. At least that is what happened to several patriotic American boys that attend Comunidad Educativa Vivo Roble in California… oh, wait, that is the Live Oak High School in California. With all the dissing of America going on in California I thought the school had changed its name. Sorry.

For the Gilroy Dispatch Lindsay Bryant reports that five young students of Live Oak High School in Gillroy, California were kicked out of school on Cinco de Mayo because they dared to wear the venerable American colors while all the Mexican students were wearing the Green, White and Red colors of the Mexican flag. According to Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez these evil American children were “starting a fight.”


The New America: Physically fit boys in American Themed Clothes = Baaaad

Yeah, in American schools you are “starting a fight” when you wear America themed clothing but innocent as the driven snow when you are sporting the colors of foreign nations. Braynt reports that over 100 students were seen in the Mexican colors. One rather corpulent girl-child even pained her face and various overly exposed body part with the celebratory colors.

One Mexican-American student, freshman Laura Ponce, had a Mexican flag painted on her face and chest, peaking out of her low-cut shirt. She did it because, “it’s our day, the only day we can show our spirit.” A school administrator took away the Mexican flag she was carrying as she was waiting to go home. Ponce said: “not cool.”

Even the morbidly obese can celebrate Cinco de Mayo, hold the lettuce. But don’t go wearing any of those evil, evil Red, White and Blue clothes!


The New America: Morbidly Obese Girls in Mexican Themed Clothes = Gooood

I am sure that Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez only speaks Spanish, I mean I can’t imagine him sullying his delicate mouth with the guttural sound of English, so let me help him out with what these fine young boys were exhibiting. It’s called patriotism, Mr. Rodriguez…. oh, yeah, sorry… I mean patriotismo Estados Unidos de América. Forgot your hatred of things American/English there for a second, Mr. Rodriguez. My most fulsome apologies.
Continue reading


Calif. School Bans American Flag Clothing For Non-Existent Mexican Holiday?”


The Dregs of American Society Meet at Another Anti-War Rally

Imagine the body odor at this thing!

Flag burners, hypocrites, hippie wannabes, terror supporters, Taqiyya-pushing, Islamic terror loving, anti-American cretins, and the average and generally uninformed, hate-filled leftists… you know, the kind that fills the Democrat Party… the kind we’ve all met that lean to the anti-American left? You know, those kind that are just like every Democrat? Yeah, here they are for your viewing enjoyment…

Notice that communists and socialists proudly display their signs among these sort of human debris? This video is in stark contrast to anything you’d find at a Tea Party protest. There you’ll find true patriots. Sure they are mad at what is going on in the U.S. today but they don’t despise their country like these creeps in this video do.

From the good folks at Accuracy In Media.


What is a ‘Religious Extremist’? This Lefty Weekly Sure Doesn’t Know

-By Warner Todd Huston

For the Independent Weekly of Durham, North Carolina, writer Sam Wardle proves that he hasn’t a clue how the phrase “religious extremist” is properly defined. But, I’d suggest that his confusion is endemic in the far left and proves to show why so many in the west don’t understand how to face and defeat the real religious extremism of radical Islam.

In a story about Representative Sue Myrick (R, NC) and her association with The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools as juxtaposed with her condemnation of radical Islam, Wardle sees no difference between a radical Islamist that might blow himself up with a suicide vest or cut off the head of a helpless captive and a Christian American that wants to use properly constituted law to have the Holy Bible used in the classroom.

Certainly you can disagree with having the Bible used as a text in the classroom, but to say that a person that does want the Bible in the classroom is no better than a terrorist is, well, just plain stupid. It is also intellectually vapid. Unfortunately, Mr. Wardle is all too representative of the vapidity of the left that so often comes to this intellectually dishonest conclusion.
Continue reading


What is a ‘Religious Extremist’? This Lefty Weekly Sure Doesn’t Know”


The Mount Vernon Statement, A Poor Man’s Manifesto… VERY Poor

-By Warner Todd Huston

A group made up of some of the biggest names in contemporary conservatism got together a few days ago and crafted what they are calling the “Mount Vernon Statement,” a manifesto of sorts meant to give direction to today’s conservative movement. Put succinctly, it fails to fill the bill.

Taken as a whole this statement is fine as a short history lesson. It explains pretty clearly what the founders had wrought when their basic work was done with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But as a statement of principles that might guide today’s discussion I do not think the letter works.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that this effort is harmful. In fact, I think every young person should read it for its explication of our historically conservative American principles. The problem is that this thing doesn’t seem to speak directly to what we are facing today like a statement that perhaps aims to become boilerplate should.
Continue reading


The Mount Vernon Statement, A Poor Man’s Manifesto… VERY Poor”


Hear Me on Brian Hancock’s Captain America Show Podcast

-By Warner Todd Huston

Well, this little issue with Captain America is still rolling inexorably onward. Last week I got another several thousand hits on my article about the Tea Party movement being attacked in Captain America issue #602.

On Friday last I was a guest on the Captain America Show Podcast, hosted by Brian Hancock. He tells me I was his very first guest ever on the show.

Mr. Hancock was a gracious host, asked some good questions and allowed me to actually answer unlike some show that like to ask questions that immediately start to badger people as they try to answer.

Go on over to the Captain America Show Podcast and take a listen. We are episode number 23 in the archives.


Where Have you Gone George Washington?

-By Warner Todd Huston

I don’t celebrate “President’s Day.” I celebrate the presidents individually, not the whole gaggle of them at once. But I most certainly don’t celebrate George Washington, the father of our country, as just another president. These days, George Washington has been relegated to that “truth telling guy” to be seen on the one dollar bill and on TV commercials at the end of February or that guy lumped in with Lincoln on “President’s Day.” And that is a shame, indeed, for, without George Washington, our presidency and nation might have had a far different attitude.

But, what made Washington such a giant for our times as well as his? For one thing, he knew how to act in public.

Back in the 1700’s

In the year 1759 a man named William Robertson wrote a book called The History of Emperor Charles V, a book some claim was the standard after which modern historical study and writing has come to be patterned. Mr. Robertson, who became Principle of the University of Edinburgh in later years, introduced a salient point into the era of the Scottish Enlightenment. That idea was that “Politeness” in society would result in becoming a civilized nation. And it was a politeness perpetuated and spread through capitalism that was the best avenue to achieving that civilized level.

He wrote “In proportion as commerce made its way into the different countries of Europe they successively … adopted those manners, which occupy and distinguish polished nations.” So, as the theory goes, man by his very nature craves material possession and property. To get that property he must work for it with his best skills. To make use of these skills he must rely on neighbors to get supplies to employ such skills as well as to become customers for his skills. This leads man to act in a solicitous manner of his neighbors so that they will be disposed to employ him and his abilities. This “politeness” employed by the individual inculcates the action in society at large which, in turn, enlarges that field of involved persons to counties and then the country in general, neighboring countries and, ultimately, the world and the governments they create.
Continue reading


Where Have you Gone George Washington?”


The Lincoln We Need

-By Warner Todd Huston

For Lincoln’s birthday, I repost this from a year ago…

These last 20 or so years has seen a bifurcated treatment of Abraham Lincoln. There are the enthusiasts and hagiographers that still revere him as the best that America has to offer — the proverbial great emancipator, Father Abraham. Then there is a second stream, enthusiasts of another sort, viewing the Civil War president in the opposite manner. That second group are the Lincoln haters. Those such as Thomas DiLorenzo, the sort that calls Lincoln a criminal and despot, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the sort that castigates Honest Abe as an unremitting racist, have been joined by a small group of Lincoln detractors trying to convince America that Lincoln is to be discounted, even hated by history.

So, which Lincoln is the Lincoln? Is he the Lincoln of “the great emancipator” or the Lincoln of the “great despot” and which Lincoln is the one we as Americans should know?

In truth he is all and neither of the two views in current, popular memory. He is neither the vision of the Constitution destroying, negro hating man the detractors wish to foster, nor the spotless demi-god that the hagiographers want to claim as theirs. Yes he did single things that pulled out of context to the whole of the man are both racist and despotic. He was a man, flawed and imperfect to be sure, but he was also one so singularly radical and ahead of his time that I believe we should lean towards reverence as opposed to despising the 16th president.

Continue reading


The Lincoln We Need”


Left-Wing Prof Uses State Funded University To Launch Attack on U.S.

-By Warner Todd Huston

Every once in a while I like to blow off some steam and deliver a good rant. So get ready for my rant du jour…

It’s like a bad parody of the worst propensity of the American professoriate to be, well, as un-American as one can get. But here we have another prosaic example of yet another half-wit, left-wing professor — this one a prof of “international law” — using his perch in a state sponsored school, with his taxpayer’s supported (and obviously undeserved) salary to help foreigners launch an attack on his own county… if this particular pinko even bothers to claim he IS a U.S. citizen, that is. With these university pinheads it isn’t a safe bet to assume that they even consider themselves Americans.

Anyway, this particular pointy-headed geek is named Francis A. Boyle (no not boil, that is only what he is, not what he’s named) and he is a professor of International Law at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Mr. Boil… uh, I mean Boyle… has filed with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands, a “complaint” against George W. Bush and his whole administration. What is this little complaint whining about? Two guesses and the first one doesn’t count.

Yeah, you guessed correctly. This commie prof is trying to get Bush, et al, brought up on faux war crimes charges. Get a load of this child’s ranting.
Continue reading


Left-Wing Prof Uses State Funded University To Launch Attack on U.S.”


Be Part of This Online ‘Reviving the Constitution’ Event

-By Warner Todd Huston

Here is an interesting event being put on by that famous bastion of conservative thought Hillsdale College that you might find interesting to become a part of…

An Online Town Hall
January 30, 2010
9:00 AM – 3:00 PM – (online or in person)

The Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship of Hillsdale College cordially invites you to participate in an online town hall on Saturday, January 30, 2010.

There are two ways to participate in this event–in person or by viewing a live video stream (“webcast”). Advance registration is required for both forms of participation.

Please spread the word to friends and family about this day-long town hall, which will feature presentations and interactive Q&A sessions led by Kirby Center faculty and Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry P. Arnn. The event will run from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, and will be broadcast from the offices of TVWorldwide.com in Chantilly , VA.

More info – http://www.hillsdale.edu/KirbyCenter/programs/townhall/default.asp
Registration – http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/hillsdale/100130/
Continue reading


Be Part of This Online ‘Reviving the Constitution’ Event”


Unpatriotic Illinois Business Owner Flies Mexican Flag

-By Warner Todd Huston

An owner of an apartment complex in Rolling Meadows, Illinois has decided to fly the Mexican national flag side-by-side with the U.S. flag, both on 30-foot flag poles and both at the same height. Apartment owner Mike Sparks says he’s doing it as an advertisement of sorts to entice Mexican immigrant tenants to come live in his apartments.

Local residents, however, are not as enticed by Sparks’ anti-American advertising campaign and say that he should follow flag codes which often state that the U.S. flag should always be higher than a flag of any other nation.

This flag argument comes up a lot. The problem here is that the so-called flag codes are not enforceable by authorities. In essence, they are customs and suggestions, not legal requirements. The simple fact is the U.S. flag codes are not laws and carry no penalty for violation. It may be a case of there-outta-be-a-law, but the fact is there are none.

The fact that the apartment owner didn’t really violate an actual laws, though, does not detract from his un-American attitude. It is patently obvious that Mr. Sparks does not see any reason to revere the U.S. flag enough to bow to tradition and place the foreign flag at a lower staff. And that isn’t the only problem with this situation.
Continue reading


Unpatriotic Illinois Business Owner Flies Mexican Flag”


New Hampshire Makes to Outlaw Federal Agents?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Imagine a state law that says that any federal agent that comes into said state and runs afoul of a new state law should be considered a felon! Well, that is what New Hampshire is about to do if HB1285 passes during the coming 2010 legislative session.

HB1285 is another one of those laws that exempts all firearms and firearms accessories that are made in a state from certain federal restrictions if they remain in that state. Several states have made attempts to implement these 10th Amendment laws and New Hampshire intends to be one of the next to do so.

Thus far Montana and Tennessee have passed their own firearms freedom acts and thirteen or so other states have introduced or are introducing laws that exempts local firearms industries and accessories as well as in-state firearms owners from overweening federal gun banning laws.
Continue reading


New Hampshire Makes to Outlaw Federal Agents?”


What One Russian Was Worth and His Thank You for the Purchase

-By Warner Todd Huston

On a previous episode of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Conservatism, Babe and I interviews the delightful Leon Weinstein, Russian immigrant and capitalist booster.

Leon has made a few YouTube videos that are well worth the time to watch as they teach a good lesson on why the socialist/communist direction that Barack Obama is trying to drag this country toward is NOT the right way to go.

Here is a sample video:
Continue reading


What One Russian Was Worth and His Thank You for the Purchase”


An Abridgement of Constitutional Rights

-By Nancy Salvato

The objectives for the United States Constitution are outlined in its preamble. Read it putting emphasis on the action verbs.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…”

All the objectives for the Constitution were chosen carefully and reflect the concerns which surfaced around The Articles of Confederation, this country’s first Constitution.

Read this again, but with a renewed emphasis on certain elements.
Continue reading


An Abridgement of Constitutional Rights”


Where is THIS Republican Party?

-By Warner Todd Huston

An excerpt of the 1924 Republican Party Platform:

The prosperity of the American nation rests on the vigor of private initiative which has bred a spirit of independence and self-reliance. The republican party stands now, as always, against all attempts to put the government into business.

American industry should not be compelled to struggle against government competition. The right of the government to regulate, supervise and control public utilities and public interests, we believe, should be strengthened, but we are firmly opposed to the nationalization or government ownership of public utilities.

In 1924 the GOP ran Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge for president. And he won on this platform.

Even then Democrats were trying to tun this country into a less powerful version of Europe by emulating its socialist systems. A proud Republican Party repudiated these socialist tendencies and reiterated its pride in the American way. These principles appealed to the true American spirit and also won elections.

Unfortunately, the very next president, himself a Republican, turned toward socialist, collectivist concepts and set the stage for what later became Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal destruction of the American economic system that compounded a market correction and turned it into “The Great Depression.” And save for a brief time under Ronald Reagan, it appears that the GOP has never recovered its principles as espoused in its 1924 platform.
Continue reading


Where is THIS Republican Party?”


ISI Conference Part Three: More British Than the British!

-By Warner Todd Huston

This is the final installment my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Click for parts one and two)

After a break for lunch, Mark C. Henrie took up America’s Britishness. Henrie wrote the ISI’s A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum that explains the value of a traditional core of studies in Western civilization and his session reflected that study.

Capitalizing on Birzer’s citation of Edmund Burke who praised the colonist’s essential Britishness, Henrie made the point that America is best understood not as a break from tradition but as the culmination of a long series of continuous ideals that range back through Western history, specifically through England.

Henrie says that we get four essentials from England.

  • The English language and literature
  • The common law and a respect for the rule of law
  • A desire for self government
  • Manners and a social order

One of the questions that researchers have often wondered is why American English and British English are essentially the same? Why didn’t America reinvent English for its own purposes in the same way the Dutch altered German, for instance? Henrie says that the reason is that the focal point of language in the colonies was contained in the King James Bible and that pervasive reliance on a single source of language arrested any development of a widely diverging American version of English. We Americans inherited the English language through the Bible.
Continue reading


ISI Conference Part Three: More British Than the British!”


ISI Conference Part Two: Christ in Our Soul

-By Warner Todd Huston

This is part two of my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Part one can be seen here)

The second speaker of the day was Brad Birzer who regaled us on America’s Judeo-Christian History.

Bizer began his session by noting that historian Donald Lutz discovered that the founders used Christian references in their pre-war writing far more than any other source. St. Paul was the most referenced New Testament figure with Micah 4:4 being the most referenced Old Testament verse.

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

On this Lutz quotation, though, I want to clarify something. Many have bandied about the claim that Donald Lutz said that 34 percent of the founder’s writing contain direct Biblical citations. This claim is not altogether true. On the other hand, it is not something to quickly dismiss as fans of the Enlightenment influence want to do, either.
Continue reading


ISI Conference Part Two: Christ in Our Soul”


Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Is the United States a grand experiment, a new covenant invented out of whole cloth by the fertile minds of the founders from never before seen ideas or is it a nation spawned from deeply rooted traditions of western thought? This was the question posited in a one-day-long conference on classicism in America’s founding sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and held in Skokie, Illinois, a near northern suburb of Chicago.

The short answer is that the liberal mindset that holds that we should invent the USA anew with each succeeding generation is an erroneous conception of what the United States was meant to be when it was founded. Sure America has some ideas never before seen by political man, but at heart, America is rationalism informed by tradition, not some amorphous mélange of constantly changing ideas.

The founders created a new nation based heavily on Western ideas through British tradition, not one based solely on rationalist thinking. As they struggled to set their new nation on its new Constitutional course, for instance, the words of Founder John Dickinson of Delaware served as their benchmark.

Let experience be our only guide. Reason may lead us astray.

An intimate crowd of 60 some participants enjoyed four separate addresses by lecturers associated with ISI. Appearing behind the lectern were Bruce Thornton, Professor of Classics at Fresno State University; Brad Birzer, Professor of History at Hillsdale College; Mark C. Henrie, Senior VP and Chief Academic Officer of ISI; and E. Christian Kopff, Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In these three installments, I will lay out what we talked about at this interesting one-day conference.

Part One: How it all Began
Continue reading


Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant?”


Do Not Blame Barack

-By Selwyn Duke

Contrary to what my title indicates, I probably judge Barack Obama more harshly than most reading this page. I don’t think he is just a misguided ideologue or merely a creature of expediency. I believe, practically speaking, that he is an evil man. That is to say, while he is largely ignorant like so many others, he has developed an affinity for evil. He mistakes it for good.

Yet, to be blunt, Obama doesn’t alarm me as much as the average American. To explain why, I’ll present something Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said 2000 years ago when lamenting Julius Caesar’s rise to dictator:

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions . . . . Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’ Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man.

Barack Obama is only one man. A bad man, yes, but he is a symptom more than a cause. Without millions of fawning Americans, he would just be a community agitator, vainly preaching Alinsky principles from a soapbox. Of course, he is a symptom that exacerbates the underlying problem, and symptomatic treatment — to ease immediate pain and hardship — is certainly in order. But it is only the worst of physicians who focuses only on symptoms while ignoring the cancer eating away at the patient’s midst.
Continue reading


Do Not Blame Barack”


The Dangerous Left-Wing Hatemongering from Media Matters

-By Warner Todd Huston

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters is the worst kind of American. In fact, it’s hard to count him as an American at all except by accident of birth. It is plain that this Boehlert fellow is against many aspects of the American tradition chief of which is freedom of political speech. Well, perhaps, he’s not entirely against that freedom. Instead he’s against that freedom for anyone that isn’t in wholesale agreement with him and his left-wing cronies.

One of his September postings on the extremist, anti-American website AlterNet.org stands as exhibit “A” in the proof of his anti-Americanism, his utter lack of historical knowledge, his uncivil attitude, and his desire to shut down those that disagree with him. It all goes to prove that Eric Boehlert seems to be little else than a fascist.

The left’s newest meme against anyone that disagrees with it is to say that all conservatives are “dangerous” to the county. It is said in leftist circles that anyone with a conservative viewpoint is only a hairsbreadth away from committing violence against the U.S.A., its government, and citizens. Because of this, the left claims, conservatives have somehow become dangerous.
Continue reading


The Dangerous Left-Wing Hatemongering from Media Matters”