Enjoy Watching the Race Game Collapse

By Derek Hunter | Townhall.com

AP Photo/Colin E. Braley

Catchphrases used to be a big thing, the pathway to success in 1970s television, actually. “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis” and “Dyn-O-Mite!” still echo across reruns to this day. They have no meaning to audiences now, but the studio audiences at the time went absolutely crazy every time they were spoken, and antique shops and eBay are littered with Fonzie merchandise with “Aaayyyy!” written all over it. It’s nearly impossible to explain to my 6- and 5-year-olds why any of these phrases so excited people back then, I barely understand it myself. But the days of catchphrases are long gone, and each burned themselves out even while the concept was still hot because that’s what happens to things that are overused. It’s the lesson of “The boy who cried wolf,” and it’s finally happening with the left’s screaming “RACISM” about literally everything. 

Racism still exists, of course – Democrats, who defended slavery, fought a war to protect it, then created segregation and Jim Crow laws to keep as much of the mindset of slavery in place as possible, then shifted to segregation as a good thing and cultural appropriation (my God, they’re awful people), are still around and still benefit from it. Democrats never changed their objective, they only changed their tactics.

And those tactics involved screaming racism every time someone disagreed with them and their policy objectives. 

That screaming used to matter, it really did. People would pay attention when someone was accused of racism and the accused would vigorously defend themselves. Now, not so much.

It’s not a day that ends in “y” if some leftist isn’t crying about how something or other is racist. Working out, eating healthy, merit, sports, you name it and it’s been accused of being part of some weird, powerful white conspiracy to control everyone who isn’t white. 

Of course, this is the fantasy world the left lives in and it is now being seen as such by the average person. The only people who care about cries of racism now are other people inclined to see racism everywhere; in other words, other leftists. 

Outside of that insulated circle is the very definition of deaf ears. 

This won’t change how the left operates, it’s all they have. But that circle will continue to shrink until it collapses on itself like a dying star. 

Nowhere is this coming collapse more obvious than in the world of print. People will always watch TV news, so MSNBC will go on for a while – and the entire industry has managed to adjust to shrinking audiences by claiming that, while they’re dwindling, they are still better educated and have more money. Ad buyers pay more of MSNBC and CNN because they’re leftists too and declared their audiences to be more valuable. In print, that doesn’t apply.

Book publishers are overpaying for left-wing garbage because they reflect what’s happening on Twitter, but Twitter isn’t real life. Millions of dollars set on fire for lesbian fiction and biographies of people celebrated online who generate zero interest in real life. It couldn’t happen to better people.

News outlets are killing themselves in an attempt to be relevant to a shrinking audience. “Douchebagging harder” is not going to endear you to an audience leaving you because you’re a douchebag. Yet, that seems like the business model of so many outlets now.

Deadspin, which is supposed to be a sports blog, seems to have instructed their bloggers to find things to complain about politically. At some point, sports media was overrun by people who hate sports, who are now seeking to destroy it. Attacking a kid for supporting his favorite NFL team is now acceptable. How many editors had to sign off on that piece about Holden Armenta before it was published? Did none of them think to look for more pictures? Did none of them think it might not be a good idea to attack a kid? Did they entertain the idea that the only jackasses in this equation were them? 

Nope. Nor did they consider that he could be Native American. They just saw an opportunity to cry racism. I hope the kid sues and ruins the website the way Gawker was killed. 

The left is made up with people who bring a bag of chips to a potluck meal and won’t stop bitching about the food everyone else actually made. It can’t last forever, they will stop being invited.

No one is paying attention to these cries anymore because they’ve beaten the catchphrase into the ground. Soon, the whole thing will collapse on itself. But be ready, because before it finally dies, its death throes are going to be epic and violent. Get your popcorn ready. 

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RELATED ARTICLE

Shock And Awe Becomes Shrug And Yawn

By Kurt Schlichter | Townhall.com

AP Photo/Robin Rayne

Have you noticed that the stupid things leftists do today just aren’t quite resonating as hard as they used to? We’ve got a lot of stupid things going on. Right now, society is a giant festival of stupidity, and yet the kind of indignant extreme stupidity by professional pinkos in culture, government, and academia that used to drive us to distraction lately just inspires yawns. The nonsense is not changing us. It’s not altering us. It’s just identifying its purveyors as freaking weirdos. 

This means we are winning.

For instance, Vice, which is apparently still a thing despite bankruptcy, just put out an article titled “100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating For People of Color” This screed is one of those provocative things woke people say that we’re supposed to care about, but we can’t even start caring about it anymore. This stuff has gone from unexpected and edgy to merely tiresome. I am speaking as someone who continually frustrates people of color – just ask my Latinx wife – and there actually probably about 1000 things I could do to make life less frustrating for people of the whole rainbow of colors. But I’m not going to do any of them. And I’m not going to get outraged that a bunch of weirdo race hustlers demand that I do. The point is not even that Vice contends that the job of every person of power pallor is to somehow cater to the whims of sophomore malcontents. It’s that no one cares if there’s an article about it anymore. You can’t provoke someone you have put to sleep.

We’ve been there. We’ve done that. And it’s boring.

Another example is the current idiocy in Britain over Elagabalus. Elagabalus was a weirdo Roman emperor who tried to pretend he was a girl and also a boy and who pretty much had sex with anything that moved, so he was generally a pretty moderate San Francisco Democrat in a toga. Now some museum in Britain is insisting that Elagabalus, who has been dead even longer than Joe Biden has been alive, if that’s possible, should be referred to as trans and with female pronouns. At the threshold, I think it’s good that we’re referring to Roman emperors at all because thinking about Rome is cool, and it’s the mark of a normal male. But the idea that we should somehow refer to a dead dude as a chick a couple thousand years later is pretty transparently stupid and once would have spun us up into a tizzy. But instead, this would-be imbroglio is just stupid and we’re just going to ignore it, and literally no one other than a few weirdo pseudo-historians and some bad teeth backwater of England are going to lose sleep over his pronouns.

Speaking of Britain, which we shouldn’t bother doing because it’s becoming a completely ridiculous little fascist state, another historian just came out with the notion that the black plague primarily affected women of color. Of course, the color palette in Britain a few centuries ago ranged from butt-white to Romney Family Reunion. Whatever. This is another idiocy designed to spark our outrage, but it doesn’t work anymore. It only reaffirms our convictions regarding the absolute stupidity of the left.

Welcome to Yawnsville. Population: Them.

Look at other things are going on. The bizarre campaign to mutilate vulnerable children in the name of gender identity is losing support. We’re not shocked anymore that some dude pretends to be a lady and conquers. We’re fed up with it. The same is true of the book banning nonsense of the left. No one’s outraged that the left is lying about us wanting to ban books because we all know they are just distracting from their desire to serve pornography to kids. Instead, we are going to school board meetings, which makes us worse than Hamas.

We have gotten used to this kind of crap and instead of being wrapped up in outrage we’re taking steps to fight back. We are beyond being shocked. We are beyond being scandalized. We are tired of this, and that fact deprives them of one of their greatest weapons – the ability to rile us up. It is essential for them to be transgressive, to forcefully blast through our social conventions and blow our bourgeois minds. That’s what the edgy left has been trying to do for centuries. But it can’t anymore. We have outrage fatigue.

We’re not going to argue with them. We are not going to rend our garments about society going to hell – it’s already there. We’re just going to stop them. And we’re going to stop them at the ballot box. That’s one of the great things that’s happening now. Normal people of all races and genders and religions and ethnicities are coming together with a common realization that these Marxist nimrods are a bunch of freaks, and that we need to quit getting fixated on their antics and start fixating on breaking them so we can take back our country. And take it back we will. Give us time. We’re going to win, in large part, because these people are stupid and boring.

Palestinian Mob Surrounds, Jeers at Hostages on Day Six of Release

By Katie Pavlich | Townhall.com

AP Photo/Khalil Hamra

UPDATE: These are the hostages who were released Wednesday, including one Israeli-American woman. 

____________

Posts on X

Prime Minister of Israel @IsraeliPM

The Government of Israel embraces the 14 hostages – ten of our citizens and four foreign nationals – who returned to Israeli territory today. Their families have been updated by the responsible officials that they have returned to the country.

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Aviva Klompas @AvivaKlompas

Welcome home Raz, Yarden, Liat, Moran, Liam, Itay, Ofir, Amit, Gali, Raaya, Yelena, and Irena. 

A whole nation has been waiting for you 💙🇮🇱

_______________

***Original post***

On day six of an extended ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, Palestinian mobs in the Gaza Strip surrounded Red Cross vehicles transporting hostages to Egyptian authorities for release. The mobs have shown up everyday to harass hostages being taken to freedom after being held for more than 50 days.

 Meanwhile, negotiations to extend the ceasefire again are currently underway between Israel, Egypt and Qatar. Qatar is a representative for Hamas and harbors their leaders in six star Doha hotels.

"International mediators on Wednesday worked to extend the truce in Gaza, encouraging Hamas militants to keep freeing hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners and further relief from Israel's air and ground offensive. The cease-fire will otherwise end within a day," the Associated Press reports. "Hamas freed two Russian-Israeli women, who exited Gaza Wednesday evening, Israel said. The release was expected to be followed by the swap of 10 more hostages in Gaza for 30 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Israel has welcomed the release of dozens of hostages in recent days and says it will maintain the truce if Hamas keeps freeing captives."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Israel's objectives as negotiations continue.

The Fight for New College

BY CHRISTOPHER F. RUFO

CLICK HERE TO VIEW A short documentary on the counterrevolution in higher education. 

The hard Left has dominated the universities for generations. It has captured the academic disciplines, established ideologically driven bureaucracies, and put activism, rather than scholarship, at the center of academic life. The Left has long considered the university campus its own private domain, untouchable by political leaders—until now.

In a new short documentary, I tell the story of a small public college in Florida that’s become the opening move in a conservative counterrevolution. Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a new board majority, including me, to New College of Florida and tasked us with a simple, but audacious, mission: take over the failing school, bring in new leadership, and transform the institution into a liberal arts college in the classical tradition.

The move caused a firestorm. Conservatives cheered it on as an essential step in recapturing democratic institutions. Progressives denounced it as a violation of some principle or another. But, whatever your opinion, one thing is certain: the takeover of New College has changed the dynamics of America’s culture war and, if successful, will provide a model for conservatives across the nation.

Existential Threat

By Judd Garrett 

I watched the movie, Oppenheimer, the biographical story of Dr. J Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the Manhattan Project which built the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end World War 2. The director, Christopher Nolan made some interesting choices in the movie, as he spent more time on Oppenheimer’s communist leanings and affiliations, then on his work to create a history altering weapon. The movie presented so much of Oppenheimer’s communist past that at times, I felt like I was re-watching the 1981 Warren Beatty film, Reds.

 As Oppenheimer worked on the project, he wrestled with the moral dilemma of creating a weapon that promised to end World War 2, but was so powerful that it could kill hundreds of thousands of people. He  feared what would happen if the weapon fell into the hands of the wrong people. That’s why the United States military was in such a rush to build the bomb. They were trying to beat the Nazis who were working on one themselves and they knew the existential threat it posed if Hitler got his hands on the bomb first. The horror of his creation became real to Oppenheimer after the United States dropped two on Japan, killing over 100 thousand innocent lives.

Ever since, we have been plagued with the question, should we have dropped the bomb on Japan or not? It is hard to justify the killing of 100,000 civilians, but it was believed at the time, that the only way Japan would have surrendered was if we invaded and took over their country. It was estimated that over 500,000 allied soldiers would have been killed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens would have died in a total land war. So, it can be argued that the weapon which killed over 100,000 Japanese actually saved many more lives.  

Oppenheimer was haunted for the rest of his life with the knowledge that the device he created had killed so many innocent lives. The question I had that the movie never addressed was, did Oppenheimer ever have the same type of reckoning about his communist beliefs as he did with the creation of the atomic bomb? The record of the history of the 20th century is crystal clear, communism was the deadliest force in the world, even deadlier than the atomic bomb. While the A-bomb tragically killed over 100,000 people, communism killed over 100 million people. And people like Oppenheimer who supported communism throughout the 20th century cannot escape responsibility for those atrocities.

Oppenheimer understood and feared the concentration of so much power in one bomb, but failed to recognize how deadly the concentration of political power in one place can also be. Like the atomic bomb, communism in the hands of the wrong people, in the hands of someone evil, someone without regard for life, someone who wants to rule the world, is an existential threat, as we saw with Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot. That is the genius of the United States system of government, the decentralization of power. But sadly, too many of our leaders continue to work against the very principle of government that has brought so much stability, peace and prosperity to America.

And here we are, not too far removed from the atrocities that communism inflicted on the world in the 20th century and many Americans are once again embracing communism. The deadliest political ideology in the history of the world, never gets cancelled and rarely gets exposed for what it really is. Why don’t we ever have an honest conversation about communism? Why are the atrocities of communism rarely addressed? Why is communism never put in the same category as Nazism or fascism? Why are the communist mass murders ignored? Why didn’t Oppenheimer’s communist affiliation stain him like Nazi affiliation would have? The far left in America has taken over all of our major institutions – the public schools, higher education, Hollywood, the music industry, the media. They control the narratives. They control the people. And they are pushing communism, as a way to lead to one world order.

Communism is always brought to America in a Trojan horse, whether it is class warfare, environmentalism,  Critical Race Theory or Radical Gender Ideology – they are all rooted in communism. Communism requires total conformity. There is no true freedom or real autonomy in communism. The state runs everything and tries to indoctrinate everyone.

That is why so many young people on college campuses are pro-Palestinian. They don’t care about the Palestinians. They have been taught to hate the state of Israel because Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. And for the Marxist totalitarians to take over the world, they have to destroy all the democracies in the world. They tolerate the Arab nations for now because the Arab nations are all dictatorships, and they will be much easier for communist totalitarians to take over because their people are already subjugated. They simply have to shift the ideology.

That’s why the Marxists are supporting the mass migration of Third World people into Western countries, like Europe and the United States. They don’t care about the illegal immigrants. They are pawns in their greater plan. They are actively trying to destroy Western democracy. They know that when immigrants from the Third World become the majority in these Western countries, their democracies will be destroyed and they will be that much easier to take control over.  And we are witnessing this right in front of our eyes, every day with every illegal immigrant who crosses the border and every pro-Palestinian protest. They are not liberating a people; they are subjugating a world. The greatest existential threat to the world is not nuclear weapons, but a totalitarian one world order that the communists are leading us to, and we are letting it happen.

 __________________________________________________________

 

Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.

A Radical Democrat Proposal: Treat Black Voters Like They Matter

BY STEPHEN GREEN | P J MEDIA

AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

Here's a radical idea I never thought I'd see one Democrat suggest to another: Why not treat black voters like swing voters who vote you actually have to earn? Surveying the wreckage that decades of Democrat policies have caused, if I were a Democrat running for office, my message to black voters would be, "I am so sorry," but today's warning from Blueprint isn't quite that radical.

"Black and swing voters share similar economic priorities," the Democrat consulting firm concluded, and found that "three of the five policies that are most popular with both Black and swing voters are about reducing costs for everyday people."

Blueprint published its messaging memo to Democrats on Monday, based on the firm's own polling and with this warning for the White House: "The age-old maxim that Democrats must 'mobilize the base' could be resolved simply by acknowledging that our base of Black voters is decidedly moderate on many key issues that appeal to middle-of-the-road swing voters."

Message: the radical stuff isn't resonating with your most dependable voters.

But the real issue is that black voters are drifting to Donald Trump, as the New York Times reported earlier this month after "polling painted a worrisome picture of the president’s standing with a crucial constituency."

Put them both together and you get two things: a red flag for Democrats and a green light for Republicans. The red flag is that Joe "You Ain't Black If You Don't Vote for Me" Biden even has to woo black voters. The green light is for Republicans to start wooing black voters themselves, at long last — and if they dare.

Why is the issue of wooing black voters even an issue, anyway? The old message — Dems good, Republicans will put y'all back in chains — has worked so well for so long. Well, thanks to two men, that message isn't working as well as it once did. 

The first man is Presidentish Joe Biden. His policies both at home and abroad are such trainwrecks that they have Democrats arguing over how best to spin, not how loudest to crow. The other is former president Donald Trump, who in 2016 was the first GOP candidate in ages to actively court black voters — and win them in numbers big enough to frighten the Left.

Before you get too excited about seeming common sense coming from a Democrat-affiliated consulting firm, Blueprint's blueprint for winning black voters is more of the "Bidenomics is working" messaging that voters of all races have already tuned out and that even Democrats say the White House needs to change. 

Claiming, as Blueprint does, that "voters haven’t heard much about [Biden's] accomplishments" is pure nonsense. The Left dominates social media, big business, education, and entertainment. Unless you're a regular reader of alternative sources like PJ Media, the Democrat message is almost all you get. 

Voters — again, of all races — aren't buying the "Bidenomics Is Working" message because we have to buy groceries at inflated prices, take out home loans at unaffordable rates, or have been priced out of buying a new car for the first time.

I should note that Blueprint is funded by angel investor and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and The American Prospect calls it a "centrist" organization. But this is TAP we're talking about, so "centrist" could mean anything to the left of Barack Obama and the right of Leon Trotsky. Although now that I've written that sentence, I'm not entirely convinced there's enough room between Obama and Trotsky to let any daylight through — but I digress.

I'll finish by reminding you — and Blueprint and the White House — that sometimes the dogs just don't like the dog food and that no amount of spin or revamped messaging can turn thin rations of kibble into beef stew.

Trump poll lead grows with Biden losing black, Hispanic backing

By Steven Nelson | New York Post

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump’s polling lead over President Biden is growing — with a new survey finding the Republican on top by 4% nationally, boosted by a dramatic one-year swing in black and Hispanic support.

The latest poll by Emerson College, released Wednesday, finds Trump leading 47% to 43% — with Biden’s edge among historically Democrat-supporting minority groups dropping significantly in just one year.

The 81-year-old incumbent’s lead among Hispanic voters narrowed to 3%, down from 14% in an Emerson poll last November — an 11 percentage-point shift.

Biden’s lead among African Americans was a still-substantial 47%, but down 15 percentage points from this time last year.

Other recent national polls have found Biden slipping badly among minority groups — including a New York Times poll of six swing states earlier this month that found the 77-year-old ex-president leading in five of them, propelled by Biden’s support among nonwhites falling 33% from exit polls in 2020.

Trump’s support among black voters, meanwhile, had grown 22% since 2020, the Times poll found.

It’s unclear what’s behind the dramatic swing in support among minorities, though polls have consistently shown that economic concerns — including inflation and high interest rates — are the leading issue for voters.

In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by 4.5% in the popular vote, though he won by much narrower margins in the swing states that secured him victory in the Electoral College.

Trump earned 8% support from blacks and 38% from Hispanics in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of exit polls.

Trump’s black support remained relatively stable over the past two elections, but his Hispanic support grew about 12 points from 2016 to 2020.

In his first run for office, one of Trump’s top issues was building a US-Mexico border wall. In his re-election bid, his boost in Hispanic support was attributed in part to his tough approach to left-wing governments in Latin America.

The Emerson College poll is one of a series that show Trump with a lead over Biden despite facing four criminal trials beginning next year related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, conceal 2016 hush-money payments and his alleged mishandling of classified national security documents.

Trump leads Biden in 11 of 13 recent polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics, which has Trump in front of the president by an average spread of 47.2% to 44.9%.

The former president has sought to turn his criminal indictments to his political benefit by arguing that he’s being persecuted by partisan prosecutors. Black supporters have protested outside his court appearances and told reporters that they too are familiar with a biased legal system.

Trump also has campaigned on mass-deporting illegal immigrants, cracking down on violent crime and pivoting on foreign policy to take a tougher approach toward China and negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

In the Emerson poll, Trump also narrowed Biden’s lead among women to 1 percentage point — down from seven last year — and among four-year college graduates. Biden holds a 2% edge among that demographic, down from 18% last November..

At the same point four years ago, Biden had a 9.6% edge over Trump, while Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton led Trump by 4.4% in the RealClearPolitics average eight years ago.

The Origin of Thanksgiving Day as A National Holiday

COMPLIED BY THE OKGOP

Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday that is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. Giving thanks has long been a tradition of our Judeo-Christian heritage. “Unto Thee, O God, do we give thanks”, the Psalmist sang, praising God not only for the “wonderous works” of His creation, but for loving guidance and deliverance from dangers.

In accordance with this tradition of thanks, a group of settlers arrived in Maine in 1607 and held a service of thanks for their safe journey, and twelve years later set aside a day of Thanksgiving for their survival. The most well-known Thanksgiving occurred just a couple of years later in Plymouth Colony in 1621.

In September 1620, a ship named Mayflower left from Plymouth, England carrying over one-hundred passengers. These brave and resilient individuals were risking their lives in pursuit of religious freedom and prosperity in the New World. The trip was long and treacherous, it took over two months before they made landfall near the tip of Cape Cod. Despite the challenging journey, these settlers pushed onward and eventually crossed the Massachusetts Bay and began working to establish what is now recognized as Plymouth Colony.

Shortly after this arrival, the settlers (now commonly referred to as pilgrims) were forced to endure a brutal winter. This weather came with such haste that most of the settlers had to live on their boat where they suffered from exposure, scurvy, and disease. This devastating winter killed nearly half of their population. 

When the snow started to melt in late March of 1621, the settlers moved back to the land where they were greeted by a member of the Abenaki tribe who spoke to them in English. A few days later, the Native man returned with another man named Squanto. Squanto showed the pilgrims how to cultivate crops (mainly corn), fish the rivers, extract maple sap from trees, and avoid poisonous plants.

In November of 1621, the first corn harvest proved bountiful, and Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast for the pilgrims and invited a group of their Native American allies. This feast is known as the “First Thanksgiving”.

Then President George Washington penned these words to issue a proclamation on October 3, 1789, designating Thursday, November 26 as a national day of thanks:

WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

G. Washington

Since that first feast in November of 1621, Thanksgiving has been an American tradition that continues its influence into our modern era. Every year, on the fourth Thursday in November, we take time to slow down and express gratitude for all that we have been bestowed. We bow our heads and thank God for our many blessings, friends, and families. We give thanks to our brave veterans that keep us safe, we give thanks to our fellow citizens of Oklahoma for helping make our communities strong, and we express our gratitude because we have the privilege of living in the greatest Nation in the history of mankind.

God Bless you all, and God Bless America.

For the People,

Nathan Dahm
OKGOP Chairman

In the words of President Abraham Lincoln - Thanksgiving Proclamation 1863

 

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

_______________

A THANKSGIVING MESSAGE 

FROM THE AMERICA FIRST POLICY INSITUTE

America was conceived in liberty. Remember that. 

Remember it because we hear the opposite these days — from our institutions, from our elites, from those entrusted with the stewardship of the nation. They say America was conceived in something else: in iniquity, in trespass, in a civic version of original sin. The invocation of the last is deliberate. After all, original sin corrupted Creation, and therefore American original sin corrupted our republic. 

 It is not so.

 We are a republic born in liberty, peopled at the first by men and women who brought with them across the seas the most fundamental and virtuous aspirations of mankind: to live rightly, to worship rightly, and if God granted it to them, to prosper. The Thanksgiving we celebrate today commemorates one group of them — a foundational group — in the Englishmen who landed at Plymouth, survived a killing winter, and laid a cornerstone of our republic on a cold and distant shore. They were not the only pioneers to forge a nation in the wilderness on American shores, nor even the first. But they were, in their martyrdom and redemption in turn, perhaps the most instructive. They earned their memory. 

 We remember them for two reasons. One reason is historical. America is blessed with many folkways and many peoples, but there is something singular about New England, the foundry of our republican ideals and the birthplace of our revolution. The countrymen who founded New England, the forefathers of the forefathers, deserve our remembrance. 

The other reason is their example, which we follow today. When Englishman and Wampanoag celebrated in brotherhood after the scouring passage of the first winter ashore, they gave thanks to the Author of their arrival and survival: not themselves, nor even one another, but to God. Every American Thanksgiving since, from that proclaimed by George Washington to that invoked by Abraham Lincoln to that of the present holiday, turns toward that same source of goodness and mercy. We are a blessed nation, and we always have been, in every time and season — whether we celebrate in a lonely settlement in a New World in 1621, or in our warm homes in 2023. 

We stay blessed so long as we remember, worship, and thank the Giver of the blessing. 

America was conceived in liberty. It was so conceived because — as the first Americans understood very well — it was ordained of Providence. God creates no thing that is not good: and no rhetoric of original sin or iniquity can change or obscure that enduring truth. This Thanksgiving, we remember in gratitude— and we give thanks. 

It is proper. And it is American.

REPORT: Car That Exploded at US/Canada Border Being Investigated by FBI as Terrorism

 By Nick Arama | RedState.com

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol

There are now reports that the vehicle that blew up at an inspection station at the Rainbow Bridge, border crossing between the U.S. and Canada was packed with "a lot of explosives," according to Fox's Alexis McAdams.

BREAKING: High level local police sources tell colleague @AlexisMcAdamsTV that the vehicle explosion at the Rainbow Bridge border crossing in NY was an attempted terror attack w/ a vehicle full of explosives. Two men in car dead. I’m awaiting a response from CBP re: any injuries…

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) November 22, 2023

McAdams also reports that the vehicle traveled toward the Customs and Border Patrol building near the toll kiosks then exploded, and that the FBI is now the lead agency on the ground. Sources have told McAdams that the event is being investigated as an attempted terror attack.

Photos show what looks like the twisted wreckage at the inspection station at the bridge.

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Post on X (formerly known as Twitter) @TheInsiderPaper

BREAKING: Photo after reports of incident involving vehicle coming into the US on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, NY Gov. Hochul says being briefed on incident. All 4 international border crossings between the US-Canada in Western New York closed https://cutt.ly/3wIi6yHa/

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All government buildings in the areas have been evacuated. The two in the car are dead, and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has confirmed that one of their officers was injured.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

As we prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday, let us take time to celebrate our freedoms with our families and friends and reflect on the humble beginnings of our great nation.  America remains the greatest country on earth and there is so much for which to be thankful. The National Black Republican Association wishes everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and season. Frances Presley Rice Chairman

Biden Turns 81 — Say, How’s That ‘Bridge’ Coming?

BY JIM GERAGHTY | NATIONAL REVIEW

President Joe Biden holds a press conference about his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping before the start of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Woodside, Calif., November 15, 2023. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

On the menu: Don’t expect the White House to make a big deal of it and remind everyone about one of Joe Biden’s biggest campaign liabilities, but yesterday was the president’s 81st birthday. NBC News greeted the president with a new poll showing him trailing Trump nationally and his approval rating hitting the lowest number ever recorded in its survey. Even young voters, traditionally a demographic that Democrats win handily, appear surprisingly split about their options in a Biden–Trump rematch. Finally, former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod warns that Biden’s odds in a matchup with Trump are less than 50–50, and that, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Biden is relying on Trump’s odiousness to put him over the top — an unsafe bet. And if Axelrod is saying that publicly, how likely is it that former president Obama concurs privately?

Over the past few weeks, when referring to Biden I’ve often written, “The president, who turns 81 in November, is . . .” Particularly over at that other publication, there are readers who grumble in the comments that mentioning his age is a not-so-subtle shot at Biden. But it’s just a fact. Whether you like hearing it or not, Biden is now past the big eight-oh.

And that insistence that it is somehow inherently unfair or out of line to mention the president’s age sums up the impasse the Democrats are facing. The president will face the voters within a few weeks of turning 82. Making this true statement is thought to be somehow mean or out of bounds — even though we know that Biden’s age and ability to perform his duties are front and center in the public’s mind. Just 34 percent of Americans think Biden will actually finish his second term if reelected.

Nor is this a reflection of the power of Fox News or “the right-wing spin machine” or any other bogeyman that Democrats prefer to scapegoat. A national poll conducted by Monmouth last month found that 76 percent of Americans, including 56 percent of Democrats, think Biden is too old to serve another term. That is about as close to a broad, bipartisan consensus as you can find these days.

The electorate’s wariness about Biden’s aging is likely rooted in people’s real-life experiences. Almost every American has seen a grandparent or parent succumb to the ravages of age. We know that some people age well and retain their health and mental sharpness as they get older, while some don’t; and sometimes those who lose their acuity decline rapidly. In Biden, lots of Americans see lots of reasons to worry — the light schedule; the rarity of sit-down interviews; the sudden angry outbursts; the odd, confused, and erratic behavior at public events; the shuffling feet and occasional falls; the meandering stories, with his voice trailing off; and the frequent off-the-cuff declarations that his own staff won’t allow him to answer questions. He’s not the same man he was when he was vice president or senator, and we can all see it.

Very few of us are at the top of our game at age 81. You have to live as long as Henry Kissinger to think of your eighties as “the good old days.”

Back in June, the New York Times reported that the president’s “staff schedules most of his public appearances between noon and 4 p.m. and leaves him alone on weekends as much as possible.” From this it is reasonable to surmise that Biden probably has 20, maybe 30 good hours in him each week. Anything beyond that is an open question. Maybe Biden will be sharp, maybe he won’t. Maybe an overseas trip will tire him out for three days, as his Ireland trip did.

We’ve all just sort of accepted that Biden can’t be a full-time president, and that it’s normal for a president to operate in public only in the middle of the day, with the occasional foreign trip or State of the Union address. This is how it’s possible, as Charlie Cooke observed, for Politico’s Jonathan Martin to casually declare that “Biden will not be able to govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents,” that “he simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try,” and then write about how Biden can maximize his odds for reelection.

A presidential campaign can spin a lot of things, but it’s extremely difficult to spin what’s right there in front of us — on the president’s face, in his walk, in his words — every time we see him or hear him. Minimizing the amount of time that the president is in front of the cameras or giving unscripted remarks is just a quiet confirmation that age is taking its toll. It is not a problem about the perception of reality, it is a problem of reality.

And the astonishing thing is, this is arguably the single most predictable problem that any president has ever faced. All you needed to see it coming was a calendar.

For several years now, on those rare occasions when Biden has taken questions and been asked about voters’ concerns about his age, he has usually responded with a grin, confidently daring the skeptics, “Watch me.” Well, the American people have watched him, and they’ve decided he’s too old to do the job for another four years. This doesn’t mean they’re automatically going to vote for the Republican alternative, but they’re really looking around for a better option. (Yesterday’s new NBC News poll indicated that any Republican but Trump beats Biden by eleven percentage points, and any Democrat but Biden beats Trump by eight percentage points. Both parties are bizarrely hell-bent on nominating the least-popular option they can offer.)

Back in 2019, Biden himself reportedly signaled to aides that he would serve only a single term. There was a lot of talk back then about Biden being a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leaders, and more than a little of that talk came from Biden himself. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said at a March 9, 2020, campaign rally with Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” (Looking back at historical events from early March 2020 feels like watching events from the first ten days of September 2001. The world’s about to suddenly change, and nobody on screen knows it.)

But Biden clearly hasn’t been a “bridge” to anyone or anything. If you wanted Biden to be a transitional president, then the work of preparing the American public for President Kamala Harris would’ve had to start much earlier.

Democrats seem to genuinely believe that democracy is at stake in 2024 — that if Donald Trump wins, the United States will cease to exist as we have known it and will turn into something meaner, darker, and irrevocably broken. (Reelecting Trump would, indeed, represent a de facto endorsement of his stolen-election claims; it would amount to saying to the world that Trump’s actions leading up to January 6 were not disqualifying for leadership of the free world.)

And yet Democrats are deliberately choosing to bet it all on the long-term health and mental acuity of an 81-year-old president and the popularity of Harris.

You can argue that Biden and his team were dealt a difficult hand, but almost every president gets one, and there’s considerable evidence that the Biden administration played it badly.

One detail in that NBC News poll offers a good lesson in the political limits of cynicism:

The erosion for Biden is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza, and among voters ages 18 to 34, with a whopping 70% of them disapproving of Biden’s handling of the war.

“I do not support his support of Israel,” said Meg Furey, 40, a Democrat from Austin, Texas.

“Failed promises, student loans, foreign policy in general,” said Democrat Zico Schell, 23, of San Diego, when asked why he disapproves of Biden’s job performance.

Biden unilaterally enacted his student-loan-forgiveness program and dared the Supreme Court to strike it down as an unconstitutional stretch of the president’s emergency powers. The president and his team believed that if the Court struck down the program, Chief Justice John Roberts and company would get the blame and young voters would appreciate Biden for trying. Hasn’t really worked out that way! In fact, in that survey released yesterday, “Trump holds a slight advantage within the margin of error in the survey among voters ages 18 to 34 (46 percent to 42 percent) — a reversal from past election results and past NBC News polls.”

Hey, fellas, maybe it’s better to not unrealistically raise hopes and expectations in the first place. Maybe it’s wiser in the long run to play it straight with voters about what is politically possible from the start.

This weekend, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about Axelrod and his public warnings to Democrats. In his bluntest assessment, he told her: “I think he has a 50–50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse. He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

Dowd added, “The president’s flash of anger indicates that he may be in denial, surrounded by enablers who are sugarcoating a grim political forecast.”

Axelrod is a canary in the Democratic Party’s coal mine, free to publicly express doubts that elected officials feel obligated not to mention. It is unlikely that Axelrod is deliberately communicating some sort of warning from Obama-world, but if the former president thought that Axelrod was harming Biden and the Democrats with his public skepticism about the incumbent president’s odds, he could always call up his old friend and former chief strategist and say, “Hey, knock it off, you’re kicking Biden when he’s down. We’re all behind Joe, and he’s going to be fine.”

It seems reasonable to conclude Obama hasn’t done that.