Tag: American History

The ‘Bum Blockade’

After Little Donny made his speech about the homeless in DC and ordered the Nat Guard, FBI and who knows who else into DC to curb crime and round-up the homeless….all that silliness made me think back into American history, the Depression to be exact and the policy in and around LA.

The year is 1936….

Beginning on February 3, 1936, the LAPD sent 136 officers to patrol 16 points along California’s 700-mile border with Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. “Veritable Army Corps Formed,” read the February 4 front page of the Los Angeles Times. Working with railroad executives and county sheriffs, these officers stopped trains, vehicles and hitchhikers, turning away those they deemed suspicious. Though Davis claimed the blockade refused entry to around 11,000 people by March 31, historians have since cast doubt on this figure, suggesting the actual total was much lower.

The patrol’s criteria for determining whether someone “belonged in California” was vague and largely up to individual officers’ discretion, writes Lascher in The Golden Fortress. He explains:

Most detainees exhibited some subjective characteristics of poverty, such as piles of weather-beaten luggage teetering atop a rickety jalopy or bindles sagging behind weary men hiking into the state. … Officers tended to wave shiny new Packards through their checkpoints but halted sputtering early-model Fords pulling makeshift trailers and caked with half a continent’s dust.

During the initial stop, officers fingerprinted the potential detainees to check if they had criminal records. Some who didn’t have warrants out for their arrest received the option of turning around and leaving California. Others were sent to “jails that might be little more than makeshift cells in rooms rented at off-season hotels in communities near the checkpoints,” according to Lascher’s book. Before long, the stream of migrants flooding into California had slowed significantly.

“The ‘California, Here I Come’ marching song of penniless wanderers faded away to a faint whisper in Arizona today,” United Press observed on February 6. The previous night, the news agency reported, officers stopped three trains in Yuma, Arizona, detaining 14 “transients.” That same evening, just 20 or so people lingered at a hobo “jungle” in Phoenix that usually hosted nearly 100 overnight guests.

As the Bum Blockade policed California’s border, Davis simultaneously continued to enforce harsh vagrancy laws in Los Angeles itself, searching for “indigents who can be prosecuted as vagabonds,” according to the Los Angeles Times.On February 8, the LAPD arrested 122 people deemed to fit these parameters, many of whom Davis claimed had criminal records.

https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/los-angeles-1936-bum-blockade-targeted-american-migrants-fleeing-hardship-during-the-depression

To learn more about this policy

View at Medium.com

Profiling has been with our law enforcement for a very long time.

Just a little something to think about.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

History Revisionism

We know that Donny and his merry band of idiots have their own version of American history…..and now Donny wants to make sure that history fits his vision of events from our past.

He has ordered the Smithsonian to fall in lie with his perverted vision…..

The Trump administration informed the Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday that it will check its current and planned exhibitions’ displayed wording, websites, and social media “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.” A letter from the White House said the museums will have 120 days to make any changes the administration wants, the New York Times reports. The changes could include “replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions,” the letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch says.

The letter provides the first details of the administration’s plan to scrutinize the Smithsonian, per the Washington Post, to ensure adherence to Trump’s goals of removing what he called its “improper ideology” in favor of “truth and sanity.” The Smithsonian released a statement later Tuesday pledging cooperation with the administration and saying its work “is grounded in a deep commitment to scholarly excellence, rigorous research, and the accurate, factual presentation of history.”

A historian called the Trump administration plan an affront to the professionals trained to ensure historically accurate presentations, per the Wall Street Journal. “If those things are taken out of the hands of historians, the public stands to lose a great deal in having reliable and engaging content that tells a whole and complex story of the American past,” said Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association.

This is, as I have said making history fit into the warped ideals of Donny and the mental midgets behind him….

The Wall Street Journal reports on Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House is keeping an eye on the Smithsonian Museum to ensure that its exhibits on display for the United States’ 250th anniversary “align with” the president’s personal “interpretation of American history.”

According to the Journal, the administration this week sent a letter to the Smithsonian announcing it was seeking what the paper describes as a “far-reaching review” of its “museum exhibitions, materials and operations” that will include everything from “public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.”

The goal of the review is to ensure the materials comply with an executive order Trump signed earlier this year that called for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

(commondreams.org)

Truth and sanity?  Nothing in the Donny led government is about truth and sanity.

This will do more damage than good….denying history or trying to transform into some unrecognizable POS is NOT the way to instill ‘truth and sanity’ into the subject.

A white nationalist vision of American history is one that centers the role of white Americans above all others and, in fact, typically treats the history of the nation and the race as one and the same. For white nationalists, the United States is a nation created and founded by white people, and American history necessarily spurns the contributions of all other groups. The sins of slavery, segregation, and violence are excused as minor blemishes made along a path toward greatness. It was the accomplishments of America’s great white men, we are led to believe, that brought us the prosperity for which we should all be so thankful. To question them—even if they enslaved, raped, and killed for power, expansion, or wealth—would be to question America itself.

Various versions of this story exist. For decades, the most pervasive version of this mythology lived in the American South. From practically the day after the Civil War, white Southerners crafted a white nationalist morality tale—in popular culture, veterans’ organizations, and the Lost Cause ideology—of lazy Black slaves with generous white masters who in the 1860s did their best to fight off a war of “Northern Aggression” that threatened white Southern freedom. For most of the twentieth century, this story was advanced by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC—activists who dedicated much of their lives to celebrating white Confederate heritage. They published textbooks, erected monuments, and led public ceremonies honoring the legacy of the Southern white men who tried to destroy the United States.

https://newrepublic.com/article/198384/trump-white-nationalist-vision-future-history

Remake history in HIS image will do nothing to save the nation from imminent destruction.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Operation Wetback

With all the problems in LA with Trump’s immigration so-called round-up….I thought I would do some research and found that it is nothing new.

But in case you are oblivious to the situation in LA….

The tensions in Los Angeles over the city’s protests of immigration raids may play out in the courts as well as on the streets. California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted Sunday night that he will sue President Trump over the president’s decision to deploy the National Guard. The governor essentially accused the president of manufacturing a crisis.

  • “Donald Trump is putting fuel on this fire,” wrote Newsom. “Commandeering a state’s National Guard without consulting the Governor of that state is illegal and immoral.” Regarding Homeland Security Director Tom Homan’s threat to arrest the governor, Newsom responded, “That kind of bloviating is exhausting. So, Tom, arrest me. Let’s go,” per NBC News.
  • Trump on Sunday rebuffed Newsom’s request in a phone call to withdraw the National Guard and promised to have “troops everywhere.” The president and his team cast the confrontation in stark terms, with aide Stephen Miller writing that “this is a fight to save civilization.”
  • The war of words played out amid the third straight day of protests Sunday in Los Angeles over the White House’s immigration raids. Police declared all of downtown Los Angeles an unlawful assembly area, a precursor to possible arrests, per CNN. Officers used flash-bangs, rubber bullets, and tear gas to break up protests at various locations, and many dispersed as evening fell.
  • While most protesters were peaceful, some who were blocking the southbound lane of Freeway 101 threw objects at responding police, including chunks of concrete, rocks, and even electric scooters, per the AP, while others set self-driving cars on fire. Officers had to take cover beneath an overpass. The AP reports several dozen arrests were made through the weekend.

That was just a short recap and not the meat of this post….

As much as Donny would have you believe that he is doping something that has been done never in the US…..as usual nothing about the orange man is original.

The year is 1954…..Ike is the president (another Republican)…..that’s right time for the old professor to drop some of his favorite subject history.

Operation Wetback was a U.S. immigration law enforcement program conducted during 1954 that resulted in the mass deportation to Mexico of as many as 1.3 million Mexicans who had entered the country illegally. Even though the deportation was originally requested by the government of Mexico to prevent much-needed Mexican farm laborers from working in the United States, Operation Wetback evolved into an issue that strained diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Mexico.

At the time, Mexican laborers were permitted to legally enter the U.S. temporarily for seasonal farm work under the Bracero program, a World War II agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. Operation Wetback was launched partly in response to problems caused by abuses of the Bracero program and the American public’s anger over the inability of the U.S. Border Patrol to reduce the number of seasonal Mexican farm workers illegally living permanently in the United States.

Mexico’s longstanding policy of discouraging its citizens from migrating to the United States turned around in the early 1900s when Mexican President Porfirio Díaz along with other Mexican government officials realized that the country’s abundant and cheap labor force was its greatest asset and the key to stimulating its struggling economy. Conveniently for Díaz, the United States and its booming agricultural industry created a ready and eager market for Mexican labor.

During the 1920s, over 60,000 Mexican farm workers would temporarily enter the U.S. legally every year. Over the same period, however, more than 100,000 Mexican farm workers per-year entered the U.S. illegally, with many not returning to Mexico. As its own agribusiness started to suffer due to the growing shortage of field labor, Mexico began pressuring the United States to enforce its immigration laws and return its workers. At the same time, America’s large-scale farms and agribusinesses were recruiting ever-more illegal Mexican workers to meet their growing need for year-round labor. From the 1920s until the onset of World War II, the majority of field workers on American farms, especially in the Southwestern states, were Mexican nationals—most of whom had crossed the border illegally.

…

During these immigration enforcement “sweeps,” many Mexican Americans—often based solely on their physical appearance—were detained by INS agents and forced to prove their American citizenship. INS agents would only accept birth certificates, which few people carry with them, as proof of citizenship. Over the course of Operation Wetback, an undetermined number of Mexican Americas who were unable to produce birth certificates quickly enough were wrongly deported.

(read the entire article and learn something for god’s sake)

https://www.thoughtco.com/operation-wetback-4174984

You see there is very little going on right now that is something new….

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

Class Dismissed!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Two Hundred And Fifty Years Of History

We are about the experience a year long celebration of our history from the DoI to situations of today and as a political historian I think it is essential that we look at that history and see where stuff went wrong and how we could avoid any further degradation of the system we have working today.

WE will look at our history by decade….it will be quicker and more simply understood for those that have a hard time keeping up….

Dividing history into decades is an arbitrary but sometimes very useful way of trying to understand the arcs and significance of events. Trying to identify any single event as crucial to the understanding of a given decade may be even more arbitrary. It is certainly subjective. Nevertheless, that attempt can at the very least be a catalyst for discussion. What follows is an attempt to identify decade-defining moments in the history of the United States since the country’s inception.

1770s: Declaration of Independence (1776)

The centrality of the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the developments of the 1770s is self-evident. From the Boston Tea Party to the “shot heard round the world,” Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River, and the Valley Forge winter, the American Revolution’s pursuit of liberty was made meaningful by the founding document of the great American experiment in democracy.

1780s: Constitution of the United States of America (1787)

With the war won, independence secured, and the Articles of Confederation proving inadequate, the Founding Fathers laid down the law by which the new country would be governed in the elegantly crafted Constitution, which, depending on one’s perspective, was meant either to evolve to meet changing circumstances or to be strictly interpreted to adhere to the Founders’ “original intent.”

1790s: Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

As the new country began finding its feet, U.S. President George Washington sent troops to western Pennsylvania in 1794 to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, an uprising by citizens who refused to pay a liquor tax that had been imposed by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton to raise money for the national debt and to assert the power of the national government. Federalists cheered the triumph of national authority, while members of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican (later Democratic-Republican) Party were appalled by what they saw as government overreach. More than two centuries later, the names and faces have changed, but the story is ongoing.

Learn on!

https://www.britannica.com/story/25-decade-defining-events-in-us-history

That should give readers a working knowledge of our history and the difficulties we faced by decade….

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

As we enter into the holiday weekend I hope everyone will rejoice with care and as always…..Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Mississippi Reinvents Slavery

Another trip down memory lane, history to be exact, for my state of Mississippi.

A state that still tries to deny the effects of slavery.

There is a common myth that Mississippi fought in the Civil War over taxation…….but in their statement of session tells a different story (and the true reason why)….in their own words….

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

But do not take my word for it….read the actual document for yourself….

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp

Here when I was in school you could not graduate if you had not taken Mississippi history….but that course left a whole lot out of the class….like the Republic of West Florida, Free State of Jones, and the ‘Black Codes’…..

“Black Codes?  Yep it was Mississippi’s way of trying to reinvent slavery….

On November 25, 1865, Mississippi created the first of the Black Codes. Designed to re-create slavery in all but name, this signified the white South’s massive resistance to the freeing of their labor force and the lengths to which it would go to tie workers to a place under white control.

Remember, the point of slavery was labor. If anything, we don’t talk about this enough. Yes of course it was racist, but the whole reason was to have a permanent labor force. Whites would do anything to create that labor force. And they did, engaging in crimes against humanity for hundreds of years. They had no intention of letting the end of technical slavery get in the way of labor control.

The impact of slavery’s end is hard to overestimate. But the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves immediately, and the ratification of the 13th Amendment did not take place until well after the war’s end. The federal government was woefully unprepared, both in manpower and ideas, for ensuring that the rights of ex-slaves were respected after the war. Sure, slavery might be technically dead as of April 14, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, but was the US military there to enforce freedom on the plantations? Largely, no.

…

The Black Codes thus intended to trap Black labor in place. The plantation elite’s top goal immediately upon emancipation was to corral Black labor, whose core goal was to avoid the plantation labor system, preferably replacing it with small farms they owned. The Black Codes intended to prevent this. Building upon the slave codes regulating Black behavior, and especially Black movement, before the war, the Black Codes were the South’s statement to the North that the end of the war did not mean the end of white supremacy. Black people would have to show a written contract of employment at the start of each year, ensuring they were laboring for a white employer. At the core of the Mississippi code and copied around the South was the vagrancy provision. “Vagrancy” was a term long used in the United States to crack down on workers not doing what employers or the police wanted them to do. In this case, it meant not working for a white person. Decades later, a vagrancy charge was a great way for authorities to imprison union organizers.

Mississippi did not allow Black people to rent land for themselves. Rather, all Black people in rural areas were required to labor for a white under one-year contracts. They did not have the option to quit working for that white person. If a Black person in the countryside was found not working for a white person, the state would contract that worker out to a private landowner and receive a portion of their wages. If a Black person could not pay high taxes levied on them by the state, they would be charged with vagrancy and the same process would result. As during slavery, any white person could legally arrest any Black person.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/that-time-mississippi-reinvented

You see the Emancipation Proclamation may have freed the slaves in word but not so much in deed.

Some of these ‘Black Codes’ hung around until the 1980s and there are still some that refuse to believe that slavery was all that bad to this day.

Few are taught these parts of the state’s history and that is truly sad.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The ‘Exclusion’ Of Immigrants

This is right time for the Old Professor to drop a bit of history on you that tries to enlighten the reader to the history that is all too forgotten.

Little Donny is deporting people at an alarming right all in an effort to keep the loyal in line with his brand of ignorance…..so far this year…Within the span of 100 days, the results of this sweeping and sustained set of actions, touching nearly every corner of the U.S. immigration system, have yielded some quick results. U.S. Border Patrol encounters of irregularly arriving migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border plunged to 7,000 in March—the fewest since at least 2000, when the government started publishing monthly apprehension numbers—after the administration declared an “invasion,” sent 10,000 troops to the border, and effectively barred access to asylum there.

All these deportations is a first for a president, right?

Not even close.

Just another misguided attempt to appear as if he truly cares about this country.

Before I go on maybe it would be a good spot to drop some history about the ‘law’ that the Trumpites are using to justify these deportation….even though the justification for these deportations is the ancient act from the 18th century….about here would be a good time to explain the “Act” for the history impaired….

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation. The law permits the president to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship. Although the law was enacted to prevent foreign espionage and sabotage in wartime, it can be — and has been — wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty, and are lawfully present in the United States. It is an overbroad authority that may violate constitutional rights in wartime and is subject to abuse in peacetime.

… but the mass deportations occurred in the beginning of the middle 19th century and the Chinese immigrants.

The United States’ current deportation process traces its roots to the late 19th century as the nation moved to exercise federal control of immigration.

The impetus for this shift was anti-Chinese racism, which reached a fever pitch during this period, culminating in the passage of laws that restricted Chinese immigration.

The influx of Chinese immigrants to the West Coast during the mid-to-late 19th century, initially fueled by the California Gold Rush, spurred the rise of an influential nativist movement that accused Chinese immigrants of stealing jobs. It also claimed that they posed a cultural threat to American society due to their racial otherness.

The Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese living in the U.S to register with the federal government or face deportation.

The Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of these statutes in 1893 in the case of Fong Yue Ting v. United States. Three plaintiffs claimed that anti-Chinese legislation was discriminatory, violated constitutional protections prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, and contravened due process and equal protection guarantees.

The Supreme Court affirmed the Geary Act’s deportation procedures, formulating a novel legal precept known as the plenary power doctrine that remains a key tenet of U.S. immigration law today.

https://theconversation.com/from-the-chinese-exclusion-act-to-pro-palestinian-activists-the-evolution-of-politically-motivated-deportations-254683

Is Donny’s use of ‘Act’ legal by Executive Order?  Damn good question!

… no court has expressly interpreted “invasion” in the context of the AEA, the definition of “invasion” in the constitutional sense has received recent judicial and scholarly attention. Early last year, Texas tried to make the immigration-as-invasion argument in two cases, United States v. Texas and United States v. Abbott, the former of which dealt most directly with the claim. There, a district court—after providing one of the most comprehensive analyses of “invasion” in the State War Clause—enjoined the enforcement of Texas law that established state criminal liability for immigration law violations. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ultimately stayed the injunction, it was “not persuaded” by Texas’s immigration-as-invasion argument. The case is still pending. In light of interpretative uncertainty, recourse might also be had to interpretations of the president’s unilateral authority to use force to repel attacks or invasions.

(there is more legal wrangling going on)

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-trump-invoke-the-alien-enemies-act

This will be a sticky situation for only recently a Trump appointed judge rules against Donny’s move on Venezuelans.

A federal judge on Thursday barred the Trump administration from deporting any Venezuelans from South Texas under an 18th-century wartime law and said President Trump’s invocation of it was “unlawful.” US District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. is the first judge to rule that the Alien Enemies Act cannot be used against people the administration claims are gang members invading the United States, the AP reports.

  • “Neither the Court nor the parties question that the Executive Branch can direct the detention and removal of aliens who engage in criminal activity in the United States,” wrote Rodriguez, who was nominated by Trump in 2018. But, the judge said, “the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation … is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
  • Rodriguez’s ruling is significant because it is the first formal permanent injunction against the administration using the AEA and contends the president is misusing the law, the AP reports. “Congress never meant for this law to be used in this manner,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer who argued the case, in response to the ruling.
  • If the administration appeals, it would go first to the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts. The Supreme Court has already weighed in once on the issue of deportations under the AEA. The justices held that migrants alleged to be gang members must be given “reasonable time” to contest their removal from the country. The court has not specified the length of time

This whole debacle will be interesting to watch….and I will watch.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Not Much Change Since Jefferson

I have heard some call the election of 2024 a sea change in American history…..it was very interesting election but nothing was a sea change….not much was different than any other election in our history.

Let’s step back 200 years to the election of 1800….Jefferson vs Adams….

The most extreme accusations Democrats and Republicans hurl at one another today would be familiar to the Founding Fathers.

In fact, the election of 1800 alone featured almost everything that’s made Donald Trump’s three presidential contests a wild ride.

Accusations of foreign interference?

Check—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the candidates in 1800, each thought the other was subservient to a foreign power.

The French Revolution divided Americans as bitterly as any foreign-policy crisis today.

Jefferson’s Republican Party, which is actually the ancestor of today’s Democratic Party, thought Adams and his Federalist Party were monarchists and traitors to the American Revolution because they were pro-British and anti-French.

The Federalists thought Jefferson’s pro-French party was as radical as France’s own revolutionaries: The phrase “godless communists” didn’t exist yet, but Federalists perceived Jeffersonians as atheists who would abolish private property if they got the chance.

Federalists were anti-democratic, said Republicans.

Republicans were against the Constitution, Federalists shot back.

Each side fervently believed the other was “illiberal” and in league with foreign regimes antithetical to America’s principles.

Immigration was a red-hot issue then as well and tied to fears of anti-American influences from abroad.

Under President Adams, Congress raised the number of years a foreigner would have to live in the United States before being naturalized as a citizen.

The Federalist-controlled Congress also gave the president broad powers to deport immigrants—or “aliens,” as they were then called.

How Politics Hasn’t Changed Since Jefferson

You see BS from both sides….same as today….

And the fact that the government is controlled by plutocrats has not change since day one of the republic.

Plutocracy?

Plutocracy is a government controlled exclusively by the wealthy, either directly or indirectly. A plutocracy effectively allows only the wealthy to rule. This can then result in policies exclusively designed to assist the wealthy.

Plutocracy doesn’t have to be a purposeful, overt format for government. Instead, it can be created through the allowance of access to certain programs and educational resources only to the wealthy, thereby making it so that the wealthy hold more sway. The concern of inadvertently creating a plutocracy is that the regulatory focus will be narrow and concentrated on the goals of the wealthy, creating even more income and asset-based inequality.

In a plutocracy, access to political power is limited and requires one either to possess wealth or to have the support of the wealthy by being willing to serve their interests. This may be a matter of official rules and restrictions that explicitly require that a person have some specified level of economic affluence in order to exercise political authority, such as voting or holding public office. However, plutocracy more often arises informally and is implicitly embodied in constitutional, legal, or regulatory measures that create barriers to participation in politics and political life that can be met only through the possession or expenditure of significant wealth.

And this incoming administration will be the most plutocratic of all….and that is saying something….considering all our presidents have had wealth on their side….

Somethings never change….history can teach us that.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Is US Running Out Of White People?

I recently read a fascinating article about the population changes coming….this story could send shivers up the spines of all those that hate diversity…..plus my favorite subject, a little history, thrown in….

Demographers project that whites will become a minority in the U.S. around 2045, dropping below 50% of the population. Between 2010 and 2018, the number of white children fell by 2.8 million, or 7.1%. In contrast, nonwhite children grew by 6.1%.

In 2018, the last year for which data are currently available, the proportion of people in the U.S. under 18 years of age was just barely more white than nonwhite. However, children under 11 were more nonwhite than white.

In almost one-third of U.S. states, nonwhite children outnumber all white children under 18 in 14 states — including Nevada, Hawaii, Georgia and Maryland — plus the District of Columbia. The link I tried to provide to document this led to factfinder.census.gov, which is currently unreachable. Is it too much of a conspiracy theory to think it’s among the thousands of government sites Elon Musk and DOGE don’t want you to see?

Not enough white people isn’t a new problem in America. When Europeans supposedly discovered America, there were already more people of color than Europeans. In 1526, a group of enslaved Black people escaped their Spanish captors during the San Miguel de Gualdape Slave Rebellion. They mixed with Native Americans in what is now South Carolina and Georgia. In 1565, Spaniards (not exactly white) brought slaves to Saint Augustine. In 1619, a British ship landed in Jamestown with enslaved people.

Though the indigenous population took a hit from the diseases carried by Europeans, including smallpox, they easily outnumbered white people when America was founded. The Black population drastically increased, not only from the Transatlantic Slave Trade but by a systemic pattern of forced breeding to meet the demand for labor. When the international slave trade was ended in 1808, it was because a sufficient number of Black babies were being born to meet the needs. The means to the end often involved rape and forced pairings. Thomas Jefferson didn’t need to explain that to George Washington when he wrote to tell him that if each enslaved woman had a child every two years, he would see profits increase by 4% annually.

By the time America achieved independence from the British in 1776, several areas including some states like South Carolina had a majority Black population, mainly enslaved people. Before there were police forces, there were slave patrols to capture runaways and protect plantation owners from revolts. There was a fear of rebellion throughout American history, before and after slavery. Jefferson talked about having a “wolf by the ears.” Lincoln wished to deport the freed slaves to Liberia and Central America. Heexperimented with deportation on Cow Island near Haiti, which had disastrous results.

https://www.levelman.com/america-is-running-out-of-white-people/

Is news like this driving the GOP and especially Little Donny in its push to re-write history?

I think diversity is what makes this country great, well great before the magic Sharpie.

Trying to change the outcome of history is a fool’s errand…..but look who we voted into office….one of America’s biggest fools.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

More Assassination Files Released

Recently the government has released otherwise classified files about the death of JFK…so this controversy can continue (seems like a misdirection to me)….

Previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy were released Tuesday following an order by President Trump shortly after he took office. The 1,123 files were posted on the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration. The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released, the AP reports.

  • Trump told reporters Monday that has administration will be releasing 80,000 files, though it’s not clear how many of those are among the millions of pages of records that have already been made public. “We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Trump said while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
  • Researchers have estimated that 3,000 records or so hadn’t been released, either in whole or in part. And last month, the FBI said that it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.
  • Many who have studied what’s been released so far by the government say the public shouldn’t anticipate any earth-shattering revelations from the newly released documents, but there is still intense interest in details related to the assassination and the events surrounding it.
  • Trump’s January order directed the national intelligence director and attorney general to develop a plan to release the records. A year after the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
  • In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration. The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president. Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security.

This ought to keep the conspiracy theorists busy for awhile and not paying attention to the happening daily.

However I would like to add a little fire to this debate…..

If anything, the latest declassification of records in December 2022, coming after an inexplicable five-year delay, only sparked further debate. As one poll showed, over two-thirds of Americans were unhappy with Joe Biden for upholding the redaction of thousands of documents with the vague excuse of preventing ‘possible harm’.

The facts are these: on 22 November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was visiting Dallas, Texas, to shore up support in the south for his re-election. To connect with future voters, Kennedy sat in the back of a slow-moving limousine next to his glamorous wife, Jackie. As the motorcade turned onto Elm Street towards the Dealey Plaza, several shots were heard and Kennedy’s head jerked violently backwards. Abraham Zapruder, a spectator, captured the scene on his home-movie camera.

Within an hour of the president’s death, local police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, who worked at the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the parade route. The media soon circulated a picture of Oswald holding a Carcano bolt-action rifle resembling the one found on the sixth floor of the book depository. A former US Marine and self-declared Marxist, Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the US with a Russian wife in 1962. He fitted the profile of a communist agent. His mysterious visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico two months before the assassination only furthered suspicion.

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/what-killed-kennedy

Let the theories abound.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Trump And The Constitution

Yes my friends it is that time again….time for a short history lesson from our founding days.

Let’s go back to Trump’s speech on 04 March….

If there are any limits to a president’s power, it wasn’t evident from Donald Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025.

In that speech, the first before lawmakers of Trump’s second term, the president declared vast accomplishments during the brief six weeks of his presidency. He claimed to have “brought back free speech” to the country. He declared that there were only two sexes, “male and female.” He reminded the audience that he had unilaterally renamed an international body of water as well as the country’s tallest mountain.

“Our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed, and perhaps will never witness again,” Trump asserted.

The extravagant claims appear to match Trump’s view of the presidency – one virtually kinglike in its unilateral power.

It’s true that the U.S. Constitution’s crucial section about the executive branch, Article 2, does not grant the president unlimited power. But it does make this figure the sole “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States.”

This monopoly on the use of force is one way Trump could support his 2019 claim that he can do “whatever I want as President.”

…

When the Constitution was written, many people – from those who drafted the document to those who read it – believed that endowing the president with such powers was dangerous.

Ratified after a lot of huffing and puffing, on May 29, 1790, by rather nervous citizens, the text of the Constitution had stirred many controversies.

It wasn’t just the oftentimes vague language, which includes head-scratchers such as the very preamble, “We the People of the United States.” Nor was the discomfort due solely to the document’s jarring brevity – at 4,543 words, the U.S. Constitution is the shortest written Constitution of any major nation in the world.

No, what made that document especially problematic, to borrow from John Adams, was that it provided for “a monarchical Republick, or if you will a limited Monarchy.”

Trump is the kinglike president many feared when arguing over the US Constitution in 1789 — and his address to Congress showed it

In essence the Constitution was put together to avoid the US from having to answer to yet another king….the actions of our dearly clueless leader is trying to circumvent the Constitutional powers that the office has and make it all about what he wants.

Sorry I do not see any constitutional priority that allows Donny these unlimited powers.

If he wants this to be the law of the land then maybe it is time for constitutional upgrade.

There are, of course, opportunities to amend the constitution without completely scrapping it. Article V states that Congress itself can propose an amendment “whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary,” and once the amendment is “ratified by three-fourths of the several states” it becomes “Part of this Constitution.” This process (simpler than the other option, a convention of states) has been successfully used 27 previous times. The convention of states method, on the other hand, may not be restricted to a specific subject and could be used as a vehicle to overturn the entire Constitution.

This will not happen.

Today’s political climate makes it impossible to find an intellectual giant like the founders…there is no one to ‘lead’ the way to saving this country and its laws.

Any thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”