At a recent gathering, the topic of conversation shifted to how divided Americans are today between the political right and the political left. A suggestion was made that someone needs to take the first step.
On the surface, this sounds like a good, even honorable suggestion. After all, when two sides (be they two individuals or two groups) have a dispute, one side or the other usually takes the first step towards reconciling their differences.
At the risk of going all Hatfield and McCoy, let’s take a look at America’s history of division.
Because The King of England was part owner of the Royal African Company, Thomas Jefferson’s original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a line condemning slavery: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself … in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither… suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold.”
Regrettably, delegates from southern states objected to this line.
Since the British were invading New York and there was a sense that the Declaration needed to pass unanimously, that line in Jefferson’s original draft condemning slavery was removed.
During the first Constitutional Convention, the framers of the document agreed the House of Representatives would be populated by elected reps, with the number representing each state determined by the size of the state’s population.
At this point, southern states insisted their slaves be counted as part of the official population. Northern, non-slave states objected. Northerners, disapproving of and desiring to end slavery, felt that counting slaves to determine a state’s representation in the House would make southern states more powerful politically, thus allowing slavery to remain or even expand.
But England remained a threat. To solidify the security of the new nation, unity was paramount.
Hence, the three-fifths compromise was reached, where southern slave states were allowed to apply sixty percent of their slave populations to determine the number of representatives that would promote their states’ interests in the House of Representatives.
Academia misrepresents this history to today’s students, pushing the anti-American lie that the intent of the three-fifths compromise was to say that the United States federal government officially saw slaves as three-fifths of a human. This is in keeping with their Critical Race Theory, 1619 Project, America has never been great, tear it all down propaganda…however, I digress.
Anti-slavery sentiment within the U.S. continued to grow. The Republican Party was born as an anti-slavery Party. Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected President. Elected members of the House and Senate from southern slave states boycotted Lincoln’s inauguration. Southern states decided that rather than give up slavery as a financial institution, they would secede from the union. War broke out; 214,938 Americans died. A total exceeded only by the toll of WWII.
The political side which forced Thomas Jefferson to remove his anti-slavery line from the Declaration of Independence fought to keep slavery in their thoughts, words, and deeds.
They assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
The ones who fought for slavery opposed Reconstruction. The fact that the first thirty black men elected to the House of Representatives were Republicans spurred them on to form the KKK, lynch people, write Jim Crow laws and impose forced segregation.
They were the ones who, after WWII, filibustered a Civil Rights bill in the Senate and stood in schoolhouse doorways to prevent school integration.
After President John Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson took his place, with major help from Republicans, Congressional Democrats finally passed the Civil Rights bill originally promoted by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and Johnson, purely for political gain, signed it into law.
Almost immediately, the people who fought for slavery passed the “Great Society” legislation, which used eminent domain to seize decrepit city buildings in run-down areas. Those buildings were razed, and the Democrat controlled federal government spent tax dollars to build tenement housing, use welfare to pay women to have children out of wedlock and raise fatherless children in areas devoid of economic opportunity.
The destruction of American academia began when Frankfurt School Communists, who fled Nazi Germany because they knew Adolf Hitler would kill them for being Communists, were allowed into the U.S. by Franklin Roosevelt and took up residence at Columbia University.
The European born poison of anti-American Marxist thought took root and spread from Columbia to other colleges and universities throughout the U.S. educational system. For decades, American students were indoctrinated into rebelling against America when they went to college. Today, Critical Race Theory and sexual identity politics are being propagandized in K-12 schools. If parents object, the Department of Justice views those parents as domestic terrorists.
In the early 1980s, Republican Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to five million illegals in exchange for promises to secure the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico. Those promises remain unfulfilled. Today the number of illegals coming across that border is so great the U.N. has declared it to be the most dangerous land path for immigration on the planet.
Republican George H.W. Bush abandoned his “Read my lips, no new taxes” campaign pledge in exchange for promised cuts in federal spending. Those promises were never fulfilled.
Anti-American thought has become so prevalent that you’re a pariah if you’re on a professional sports team and you don’t kneel during the national anthem.
If you are openly pro-life, believe Americans have the right to keep and bear arms, pray, or oppose forced injections on religious grounds you’re “an extremist.”
If you resist the forces who fought for slavery on any grounds, your thoughts, words and actions are five hundred trillion times worse than the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, Watergate, and 9-11 combined. You instantaneously qualify for an investigation by “woke” big-government socialists using propaganda techniques reminiscent of the Bolshevik revolution. Saddam Hussein would applaud the proceedings.
If you support the forces who fought for slavery, you can launder money into your own pocket through China, Russia, the Ukraine, Haiti…you can leave four Americans to die in Benghazi, be married to someone who racked up frequent flier miles on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, or have a son who records himself sitting naked in a tub smoking crack cocaine while living at a “recovery center”. None of this is worthy of any investigation whatsoever.
If anyone needs to take a step towards reconciling the differences in America today, that step must be taken by the political side that has been openly hostile towards American unity since the nation was founded.
In the highly unlikely event those who fought for slavery do take that first step, do not be surprised if the other side doubts their sincerity.