On July 4th, 2020, presumed Democrat Presidential nominee, Joe Biden, wrote and spoke these words: "Our country was founded on an idea, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,' We never lived up to it."
Who's "We," Joe? Americans across the board? Americans in particular? Americans exclusively?
The true we, meaning "we the people," should conclude "none of the above!"
None of us -- not a single solitary soul breathing in America today, has anything to do with the historical facts that Joe Biden cherry picked from to form his flawed historical narrative that followed that opening quote he uttered.
If we were to tell the full and accurate story, it would take a long time and lots of words -- national history is never an easy thing, either to understand nor to document. It's full of nuances, challenges, and details.
It should have all ended a long time ago. This party of tyranny has stood too long in the way of America better fulfilling its creed. Its list of lies and affronts are too numerous to mention in adequate detail. The destroyed property, broken dreams, grand lies, and dead Americans keep adding up to a pernicious influence that has weighed America down for hundreds of years up until here and now.
George Washington owned slaves, but he also freed them all. How many times have these Marxist radicals of today, calling themselves BLM, uttered only the first half of that truth, but conveniently ignored the second half? BLM is a daily fount of ignorance and half-truths, all designed to place specious shame upon people who have nothing to feel themselves ashamed of. Its words originate from a small collection of publicly avowed Marxists, who's core beliefs have little room for individual liberty and primacy of the individual above the state. What Biden said is only a self-serving ration of nonsense, designed for a transient political purpose, that even he doesn't really believe.
But the truth goes far beyond just one quick correction. And much of that truth is a very damming indictment of the one primary organized power in America who has done the most to fabricate the lies and gross distortions at work today. BLM is merely the latest collection of useful idiots. The real power center of what ails America is not BLM, but the Democrat party. The Democrat party in America earns the first finger pointed, and perhaps the lion's share of the only finger pointed.
In fact, Biden's quote is wrong. America lived up to its vision many times since the day the Declaration of Independence was authored, and it wasn't merely written by Thomas Jefferson. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin co-wrote the historical document. Jefferson was the original writer, but Adams and Franklin were the editors, who struck out much and rewrote a lot. Of the true three men who wrote that document, what seemingly critical truth is common among two of them?
John Adams' parents were Puritans from Massachusetts, the same group of Christians who formed the abolitionist movement that helped conquer slavery in America. Adams wrote the Constitution of Massachusetts, a document that outlawed slavery, stating firmly that, "all men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness." These words were written by Adams in 1779.
In 1781, a landmark case was heard in a Massachusetts court, where Elizabeth Freeman successfully sued to be emancipated from John Ashley, citing in her lawsuit this very statute that Adams wrote. The Massachusetts court ruled that slavery was unlawful inside the state. Two years later, Quock Walker was another black slave who also sued to be freed from his enslaved status. He too won his case. Moreover, the Massachusetts court also found the former slave owner was guilty of assault and battery.
John Adams was our nation's first Vice-President, and second President. Is Joe Biden simply ignorant of this well established history? Or, does his ignorance run deeper than mere blindness?
Benjamin Franklin was a publisher, who ran away from home at age 17, and was hired as an apprentice to a publishers shop in Philadelphia. He eventually studied and became the owner of his own publishing company. He self-educated himself with little formal schooling. In fact, Franklin was himself an indentured servant, to his older brother James Franklin. Franklin ran away from what he considered harsh treatment under his brother's bondage. The former slave -- that's right slave -- Benjamin Franklin then briefly owned a few slaves who worked as housekeepers, but he emancipated them soon after, and then in 1787 became President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Franklin's moral efforts ensured that years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Pennsylvania joined Massachusetts in formally outlawing slavery, and more importantly, actively using its courts to enforce that measure.
In 1758, Franklin founded the creation of schools to educate blacks in America, which he continued for the rest of his life. All of this work to educate and emancipate blacks in America culminated in a formal petition he delivered in 1790 to the US Congress, that sought to formally abolish slavery in America. Franklin's efforts failed. But, he persevered throughout the rest of his life to end slavery in the nation, a goal he successfully achieved in Pennsylvania before he died.
The common theme of two of the three authors of the Declaration of Independence is that Franklin and Adams dedicated their lives to the abolition of slavery. Only Jefferson failed to live up to the creed he helped to write. Jefferson wrote of his profound sense of shame in himself for this failure. We should assign a degree of forgiveness to the man, having lived in an era that ultimately trapped him. Too bad we cannot say the same of the Democrat Party that Joe Biden now carries the national banner for. Let's examine why.
America did enjoy a far too brief period of time, over a century ago, when emancipation for blacks reached essentially an equivalent level of success as it did for whites. This was in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, where the Republican party saw several blacks elected as US Senators and Congressmen. What was the force that ended this too brief experience of freedom? It was a Democrat Party that organized an effort to prevent Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche Kelso Brush from being seated in the US Senate as the duly elected Senators from Mississippi. It was the Republican party that stood against those efforts and ensured both men were properly seated.
Far worse, it was the Democrat Party that helped organize the Ku Klux Klan, and who also organized riots in South Carolina and Louisiana, to prevent black men from voting. It was the Democrat party in Mississippi that tried to put slavery back into its state's Constitution, and it was the administration of Republican President Ulysses Grant that ensured that effort failed! It was President Grant who crushed the Klan in 1872, only to see the Democrat Party reclaim the KKK and ultimately, when Woodrow Wilson ended decades of Republican dominance of the White House, establish the Klan to its highest level of political influence between 1915 to 1963. About the only thing the "Cancel Culture" has gotten right is their efforts to finally shine a spotlight on how racist Wilson was. All the Jim Crow laws established in America were the work of the Democrat Party.
So, when Joe Biden claims, "We never lived up to it," he's only half right. If he had the guts to tell the full truth, he would have instead said this, "We Democrats never lived up to it!"
This contest of two Americas, one that believes in individual liberty, and one that believes in state control over people, rages on to today. Whether historical efforts to enslave people, or today's efforts to destroy history and sponsor a cancel culture, and ally itself with socialism, the Democrat Party has steadfastly stood with forces to vanquish liberty and self-determination, and make people dependent upon government, and establish government as the tool of primacy over the individual.
At his speech in front of Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump wrote and said this, and much more:
"We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for citizens of every race, background, religion and creed. Every child of every color, born and unborn, is made in the Holy image of God. We want free and open debate, not speech codes and cancel culture. We embrace tolerance, not prejudice. We support the courageous men and women of law enforcement. We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment which gives us the right to keep and bear arms. We believe that our children should be taught to love their country, honor their history and respect our great American flag. We stand tall, we stand proud, and we only kneel to Almighty God. This is who we are. This is what we believe, and these are the values that will guide us as we strive to build an even better and greater future."
The mainstream media called that racist language, and hate speech! That's the same media that's spent the last several months telling us that large mobs that looted, burned, and murdered in our cities were merely engaging in "peaceful protest."
The Republican party has been woefully far from perfect, but at least it has tried to build an America that rose up to meet its creed, that all men are created equal, and that government must be "of the people, by the people and for the people." That's a far measure from the Democrat party that has gone from one endorsement of public bondage to another, throughout its sordid history. America does not need lectures of morality from the Democrat party. What it really needs is for the Democrat party to finally summon up the courage to confess of its multiple sins against America. To finally own up to its sad affiliation with slavery, big government, cancel culture, usurpation of liberty, and affinity for centralized government control of the people.
And regardless of how many statues the useful idiots of the Democrat party tear down, no matter how many well meaning people they smear and ruin and drive out of their jobs and positions, and no matter how much private and public property they destroy, the inescapable truth is that the Democrat party has never placed the individual supreme in its values and aims. The Democrat party is about centralized government power.
Whether promoting socialism, placing Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, ushering in policies that destroyed the black family unit, tied black children to failing schools, created ineffective police protection, generated a wave of social stigma and censorship, advanced and protected slavery, wrested emancipation from black Americans after the Civil War, legalized government racism, and allied with the Klan in its effort to murder people to protect systematic racism, the Democrat party has much to answer for.
It should have all ended a long time ago. This party of tyranny, too briefly interrupted by principled leadership such as under Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, has stood too long in the way of America better fulfilling its creed. Its list of lies and affronts are too numerous to mention in adequate detail. The destroyed property, broken dreams, grand lies, and dead Americans keep adding up to a pernicious influence that has weighed America down for hundreds of years up until here and now.
We need the truth boldly uttered, not more pretentious and self-serving lies.
-- Ken Stallings
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