Category Archives: History

Bill O’Reilly’s Best Joke Ever

America, History, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-history

Bill O’Reilly is definitely funny. He’s funnier than his sidekick, Dennis Miller, whose humor hasn’t aged well.

O’Reilly was especially hilarious, the other day, when attempting to illustrate the historically unprecedented venom toward Donald Trump and his presidency. Said Mr. O’Reilly, “As a historian … “

LOL.

Bill O’Reilly is no historian. I suppose O’Reilly is an historian in the same way court historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is. If you treat O’Reilly’s books as works of history, you’re in deep intellectual trouble. (Join the nation.)

Recommended, in the context of O’Reilly’s “scholarship,” is Thomas DiLorenzo’s review of Killing Lincoln, O’Reilly’s “big, boring bag of nothingness” about the assassination”:

Over 100 books are already in print on the subject, and all O’Reilly and his coauthor do is cut and paste what others have written on the subject, but without including a single footnote! The authors also have the annoying habit of writing things like, “in his mind, he was thinking that . . ., ” as though they could know what Lincoln was thinking when he did this or that 150 years ago. This is a standard practice of the “Lincoln scholars,” who also constantly claim to know what was “in his heart” (nothing but love and kindness, of course) in their writings.
There is nothing at all in O’Reilly’s book about Lincoln’s policies and behavior in office. There is nothing about his statist economic policies, his trashing of the Constitution by illegally suspending Habeas Corpus and mass arresting thousands of Northern political dissenters, his intentionally waging war on Southern civilians in violation of all moral and legal codes regarding warfare, his lifelong obsession with deporting all black people, free or slave, from America, etc. In addition, it is apparently so full of historical errors that it has been banned from the bookstore at Ford’s Theater, the famous site of the assassination.

If you want to understand The Idea of America, read foundational books on American republican virtues (not least the title linked). Begin with the book The Power in The People by Felix Morley, and you’ll be able to watch or read Bill O’Reilly’s folderol, and such stuff, and assess it for the shallow nothingness that it is.

Truth is not about the penny plan, or the red line in Syria, or whether to beat up on Russia or not. It’s about grasping the foundational principles of liberty and the limits of government—the principles Jefferson, Madison, Mason, John Roanoke, John Calhoun held dear; grasping those core issues and applying them to the issues of the day.

The other exquisite text by Morley is Freedom and Federalism.

For starters, let’s see these texts on your coffee tables.

Support Steve King. America Is A Western Civilization

America, Britain, History, Nationhood, Political Correctness, The West

It was not the monarchy of Buganda or tsarists Russia that inspired and sired America’s Founding Fathers, to create the freest, most prosperous country on earth. It was England, home of the Magna Carta, John Locke and the British Enlightenment. The American Founders were equipped with a particular faith, Christianity, and a specific set of ideas concerning the nature of human beings, their natural rights, in particular, their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and, yes, PRIVATE PROPERTY. These ideas were unique to Western Europe.

For suggesting as much, Steve King is being labeled and maligned (which Trump Nation should not tolerate). Via Time:

Geert Wilders “understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

In an interview Monday on CNN, King said he stood by his remarks. King said, “I meant exactly what I said,” and noted that he delivers the same message to countries in Europe.

“We need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed within a half a century or a little more,” King said.

Paul Ryan:

The Lesson of Thanksgiving: Private Property Rights

Colonialism, History, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Private Property, Socialism

John Stossel has a lesson in history and political economy for the nation’s brainless Bernieacs:

… before that first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims nearly starved to death because they didn’t respect private property.

When they first arrived in Massachusetts, they acted like Bernie Sanders wants us to act. They farmed “collectively.” Pilgrims said, “We’ll grow food together and divide the harvest equally.”

Bad idea. Economists call this the “tragedy of the commons.” When everyone works “together,” some people don’t work very hard.

Likewise, when the crops were ready to eat, some grabbed extra food — sometimes picking corn at night, before it was fully ready. Teenagers were especially lazy and likely to steal the commune’s crops.

Pilgrims almost starved. Governor Bradford wrote in his diary, “So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could … that they might not still thus languish in misery.”

His answer: He divided the commune into parcels and assigned each Pilgrim his own property, or as Bradford put it, “set corn every man for his own particular. … Assigned every family a parcel of land.”

That simple change brought the Pilgrims so much plenty that they could share food with Indians.

… It’s a myth that the Native Americans had no property rules. They had property — and European settlers should have treated those rules with respect. … The U.S. government, after killing thousands of Native Americans and restricting others to reservations, gave tribal governments control over Indians’ lives, in collaboration with the government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Since then, no group in America has been more “helped” and “managed” by the federal government than Indians. Because of that, no group has done worse. …

Deprogram your kids with “Thanksgiving Tragedy.”

A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God

America, Britain, Donald Trump, Elections, History

“A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is the current column, now on The Unz Review. An excerpt:

Did Donald Trump unite the American Silent Marjory behind things true and shared?

These are economic prosperity, national pride and unity, recognizable neighborhoods—a yen that demands an end to the transformation of neighborhoods through centrally planned, mass immigration—and an end to gratuitous wars.

Those were the questions asked in “The Trump Revolution The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June 29, 2016), and answered in the affirmative.

Unlike America’s self-anointed cognoscenti, some of us saw this coming. The former recognize truth only once card-carrying members arrive at it independently, grasp and broadcast it, sometimes years too late. Not so America’s marginalized writers. Not in 2012, but in 2002 did we pinpoint the wrongness of the Iraq War. And not in 2016, but in July of 2015 did some of us, not fortuitously, finger Trump as “a candidate to ‘kick the crap out of all the politicians’” and “send the system’s sycophants scattering” (August 14, 2015). His appeal, as this writer has contended since late in 2015, transcended left and right.

Conversely, vaunted statistician Nate Silver “calculated, last November, that Trump’s support was ‘about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.’” (Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University properly downgraded wonder boy Silver’s intellectual prowess. His prose, wrote the good teacher, was a sprawl that “evinces a greater affiliation to rigor with data analysis than to rigor with philosophy of science or, for that matter, rigor with rhetoric.”)

Given the disparate groups that rooted for Mr. Trump’s candidacy, it would appear that he did in fact awaken a historic majority. You could say Mr. Trump was an “omnibus candidate,” a concept floated by historian David Hackett Fischer …

… Read the rest. “A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is now on The Unz Review.

UPDATE: An interesting perspective on “The Trump Revolution” from a betting man: “I thought this was an interesting read last summer,” writes David Taggart at Amazon.com, “now I realize it was a work of genius. Wish I’d paid closer attention and bet when the bookies were offering 7-2.”