Tag: American History

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”

 

This Is How We Erase History

The GOP is trying desperately to rewrite history and they put the best person to do that in the WH….

Remember those pricks on 6 January that tore up the Capital?

It appears that reference to them is being purged…..

Attorneys for a group of news organizations, including NPR, said in a legal filing on Tuesday that evidence used at the sentencing of a rioter charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol had “disappeared” from an online government platform.

In response to the press coalition’s legal motion, the chief judge for the District of the District of Columbia, James Boasberg, ordered the government to halt the removal of any video or court records related to Jan. 6 from its platform. Boasberg also ordered the government to identify any other videos removed from the database and provide an explanation for their removal by Feb. 26.

The missing evidence consists of nine video exhibits from the Justice Department’s case against Glen Simon, who pleaded guilty to a charge of “Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds.” Simon said as part of his plea that he pushed against police officers with a metal bike rack, stormed the U.S. Capitol and recorded himself saying “this is what a revolution looks like,” and, “we gotta show these f****** we ain’t f****** around. It’s the only way to get it done. Fear!”

So far, the absence of video files appears to only have affected Simon’s case. It is unclear whether the Department of Justice intentionally removed the files. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which handled all of the Jan. 6 criminal cases, declined to comment citing the ongoing litigation.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5293447/jan-6-evidence-captiol-riot-donald-trump

And do not forgot the purging by NASA of women in leadership rolls.

The step to remove pronouns is the latest by the space agency to comply with the White House’s desire to restrict certain kinds of content within government systems. The outlet 404 media, an independent journalist-founded media website, has reported that NASA employees were required to “drop everything” and remove a list of words from public facing websites including “Indigenous people” and “Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.).”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289319/nasa-instructs-employees-to-remove-pronouns-from-all-work-communications

And the purge continues…..

References to transgender people were removed Thursday from a National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument, a park and visitor center in New York that commemorates a 1969 riot that became a pivotal moment for the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The changes were made in the wake of an executive order President Trump signed on his first day in office calling for the federal government to define sex as only male or female, the AP reports. The National Park Service told the Washington Post it was implementing the order.

Let the purge continue…..what more will be hit by the delete button?

Trying to keep any knowledge of what actually happened and why to a bare minimum.

Please take us back to the 1950s….I so miss those days of ignorance and prejudice.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Return Of The ‘Robber Barons’?

It pains me as someone who values knowledge that I probably have to explain the term ‘Robber Baron’.

What is a ‘Robber Baron’?

“Robber baron” is term used to describe America’s most successful industrialists. This derogative term was primarily used during the era of the late 19th century often known as the Gilded Age. 

The term robber baron is also sometimes used to describe any successful businessperson whose practices are considered unethical or unscrupulous. This behavior can include employee or environmental abuse, stock market manipulation, or deliberately restricting output to charge higher prices.

The original “robber barons” were feudal lords who robbed travelers and ships passing through their territory. During the 1800s, the term was applied to successful capitalists like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John Rockefeller, who used monopolistic business practices to corner entire industries and extract great wealth from workers and consumers.

These ‘people’ were brought into line in this country by regulations that prevented them from raping the nation and its people.

I resurrect the term here because of something Elmo the Parasite stated recently….

Even before Donald Trump took office, his major bankroller Elon Musk was publicly pledging to use his new power in the federal government to gut its existing efforts to regulate private industry.

Weeks into the Trump administration, Musk has mostly made headlines for an assault on federal workers and payments. But regulation may not be far behind: during a late-night public chat this week, the world’s richest man said it’s time to get rid of all existing regulations.

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” the head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency said on the call, as spotted by HuffPost. “Not default there, default gone.”

“If it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in,” he suggested. “These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done.”

It’s unclear what Musk thinks will happen if regulations are rolled back, especially considering the intensity of the shockwaves after all the drama at USAID and beyond. (Many acts of deregulation would also benefit him personally at his business ventures, ranging from Tesla to SpaceX.)

Regulations, after all, provide Americans with an incredible number of protections — from workplace safety to rules against companies polluting to making it so manufacturers can’t sell goods that are poisonous or dangerous.

Musk’s counterpoint: muh freedoms, essentially.

“If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom,” Musk said during the call. “We’ve got to restore freedom.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-eliminate-regulations

Apparently this beast longs for the days when the rich could do everything they want and have no control devices in place.

Elmo wants to stab the people of this country in back and make financial rape of their lives all the more easy.

The very people that fell for the lame promises are going to be the ones that are humped the hardest and watch their families suffer at the hands of these despicable pricks.

Your vote did this….enjoy!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

How Did It Come To This?

In recent years the question has been asked and there have been many answers….how did our two party system become so toxic?

I have said that I believe it became hard toxic with the election of Reagan and his policies of culture war top define politics and let the country go to crap in return.

But the truth of the matter is the party politics started way back with the 8th president, Martin Van Buren….(that is right time for a little history that few have the knowledge of in this day and time)

When Martin Van Buren arrived in Washington to be sworn in as a senator in 1821, he told a friend he planned to “build up a party” for himself. It was an odd time to be party-mongering, and Van Buren an unlikely party-monger. Republican James Monroe had run unopposed in the 1820 presidential election, and “every politician in Washington, with varying degrees of enthusiasm … was calling himself a Republican,” writes James M. Bradley in Martin Van Buren: America’s First Politician, a lively and illuminating new biography of our eighth president—the first to be born a U.S. citizen. Absent a strong opposition party, Van Buren lamented that politicians were appealing less to ideals and more to personalities, and wished, as he put it in an 1827 letter, to unite citizens through “party principle,” rather than “personal preference.”

Born in 1782 to a tavern-keeping family in Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren had little schooling but made himself a lawyer, rising to the heights of power despite his lack of military experience or strong family ties to ensure patronage. At 5-foot-6, he was considered notably short, and friends and foes called him the “little magician” for his outsize political talents. He proceeded swiftly from senator to secretary of state, vice president and president. And though he failed to win a second term, Bradley says, “He built and designed the party system that defined how politics was practiced and power wielded in the United States.” We are living in the world Van Buren created.

In the first decades of the Republic, leaders had generally called themselves Federalists or Republicans, but “few imagined that parties would be a permanent feature of the nation’s political life,” Bradley writes. “They expected parties to disband once the Republic was more secure and its great issues settled.” Van Buren plowed ahead, with the thoroughly modern view that parties were not a regrettable necessity but a revolutionary means of achieving and using power. With Andrew Jackson, he co-founded the Democratic Party in 1828, cannily banking on Jackson’s personal appeal to win that year’s election; Van Buren became Jackson’s vice president, and the Democrats dominated politics until 1860. “He didn’t think that politics should be a hobby for gentlemen to practice in their spare time,” Bradley says. “A party had to have an organization, a structure, a personality, and it should be run by professionals.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/martin-van-buren-created-americas-partisan-political-system-were-still-recovering-180985643/

So you see this whole party politics is not some new concept but rather it has been building slowly and steady until we have the crappy system of today.

Just thought you might like to know

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Big Immigration Crackdown

According to the promise of our new fearless leader there will be a massive crackdown on immigration….farmers are trying to head this off at the pass….but this ‘promise’ is nothing new…..it happened back in the mid to late 19th century and it was the Chinese that was the anger of the people.

That’s right yet another opportunity for me to drop some history and maybe some knowledge of things to come.

This is a detail look at what transpired around what became known as the “Chinese Exclusion Act”…..

This 1882 law is now popularly known as “the Chinese Exclusion Act.” It banned both skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US for ten years. Symbolically and politically, this bill was a big deal: it was the first significant crackdown on immigration in American history, a message that the federal government opposed Chinese immigration, and a reaffirmation that Chinese immigrants already in America could never become citizens.

However, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was just one in a series of federal laws against Chinese immigrants — and, as Beth Lew-Williams makes clear in The Chinese Must Go, this 1882 law was actually quite ineffective. Basically, President Arthur and Congress threw a bone to the insurgent anti-Chinese movement, but they provided few resources for federal enforcement against Chinese immigration and introduced a bunch of loopholes that allowed Chinese immigrants to continue coming in.

In the years after the Act’s passage, West Coast newspapers and populist agitators grew angry that Chinese immigrants were still entering the country and demanded that the government do more. This was the beginning of what you might call the national fight against “illegal immigration” — because before this virtually all immigration to the United States was legal.

Historians have found that the economies of towns suffered after they kicked out their Chinese residents.

So, if there’s a lesson from Qian’s study, it’s that, yes, maybe immigration restrictions and expulsions or deportations can actually help some native workers. But, really, the cost is tremendous — not just for the immigrants themselves but also for almost everyone else.

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2024/11/26/g-s1-35805/chinese-expulsion-act-railroads-immigration-crackdown

Please read the entire article…..there was a huge cost to this crackdown as there will be if another one takes place.

If you worry about the economy then maybe Trump’s big idea will not play well as it did in the 19th century.

Class dismissed!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Historical Ignorance

This is a re-post from my other site, Gulf South Free Press, I include for those individuals that may not be aware of my other writings.

I am astonished by the historical ignorance that many show in this country….this by a people that are supposedly proud of our history but yet will do anything to see that it is never written about accurately.

Historical Ignorance Is Staggering

If we keep going down this path of ignorance the damage will be irreversible.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Can Harris Defy History?

We have a VP that is seeking the highest office in the land….nothing unusual there but if she is elected she will break a curse from our past.

Yep, more history from the junkie in the room.

Did you know if Harris wins the election she will be the first in many years?

As Vice President Kamala Harris begins her fall campaign for the White House, she can look to history and hope for better luck than others in her position who have tried the same.

Since 1836, only one sitting vice president, George H.W. Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Among those who tried and failed were Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. All three lost in narrow elections shaped by issues ranging from war and scandal to crime and the subtleties of televised debates. But two other factors proved crucial for each vice president: whether the incumbent president was well-liked and whether the president and vice president enjoyed a productive relationship.

“You really do want those elements to come together,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “If the person the vice president is working for is popular, that means people like what he’s doing and you can gain from that. And you need to have the two principals working together.”

In 1988, Bush easily defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor whom Republicans labeled as ineffectual and out of touch. Bush was otherwise helped by a solid economy, the easing of Cold War tensions and some rare luck for a vice president. President Ronald Reagan’s approval ratings rose through much of the year after falling sharply in the wake of the 1986-87 Iran-Contra scandal, and Reagan and Bush worked well together during the campaign. Reagan openly backed his vice president, who had run against him in the 1980 primaries. He praised Bush at the Republican convention as an engaged and invaluable partner, appeared with him at a California rally and spoke at gatherings in Michigan, New Jersey and Missouri.

https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-incumbent-vice-president-election-defc726ac5a8db8ef0ba9a756fd8eec5

The question is….will she succeed where so many others have failed?

Her popularity is growing but it is early in the campaigns and so much can happen and quickly.

Will she buck history?

Any amazing thoughts to share?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

2024–The Worse Election Ever

Lots of crap being spread through social media about this upcoming election….some on how violent it could be and some that it could be the worse election ever for the US.

Will it be the worse?

Of course, these political sparring matches leave many voters dissatisfied, as any Gore, Trump, or Sanders supporter will certainly tell you, but their pain is surely less than those felt in 1876. The bloody election lead to sweeping reforms and the secretive Compromise of 1877.

…

Grant served two terms in office before declining to run for a third. With so much bad blood brewing between the Republicans and the Democrats, the North and the South, the election was incredibly bitter. Rutherford B. Hayes (R) and Samuel J. Tilden (D) were the primary candidates, though Hayes was a compromise candidate after the frontrunner was unable to secure enough support at the Republican National Convention.

The election was fraught with allegations of electoral fraud, election violence, and disenfranchisement of Black Republicans. The Democrats relied on the White League and Red Shirts, para-military groups that violently disrupted rallies and suppressed both white and Black voters. In South Carolina, 101% of all eligible voters had cast their votes in a clear case of election fraud and an estimated 150 Black Republicans were murdered. Democrat ballots deceived illiterate voters by using the Republican symbol of Abraham Lincoln to steal votes. During the inevitable recounts, these votes were discarded.

(any of that sound familiar?)

https://wegotthiscovered.com/fyi/if-you-think-2024-will-be-the-worst-election-of-all-time-its-time-to-revisit-your-history/

This was not the first ugly election….think back to 1804….

I could write about this but since most people cannot concentrate to read I shall let a video do the deed.

So you see that Trump is not the only person to turn a vote into something ugly and contentious.

This election saw a Electoral College debacle that the House of Representatives had to sort out.

We are still paying for that POS today.

There is your short but sweet history lesson and since this is my special day I will bow out and see what gifts have come my way.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”