The courage to educate

 

Resisting however you can

 

Never mind rewriting history - erase history

 

Donald J Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda

The president went on a social media tirade last month deriding the Smithsonian museums as places where “everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

The argument, as the White House makes it, is that Trump simply wants art to promote patriotic American values. But what the administration is really engaging in is censorship. And increasingly, the target is a familiar one: immigrants.

After the president’s rant, the White House website proudly proclaimed that “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian.” Among the evidence cited was “a [sic] exhibit at the American History Museum” that “depicts migrants watching Independence Day fireworks ‘through an opening in the U.S.-Mexico border wall.”’

Oh, the horror.

  The Bulwark

America has fallen

 

Will they destroy all the past records?

UPDATE 10:57 am:

"The base" will believe anything

Last week, the staggeringly unqualified toady serving as Trump’s director of the FBI, Kash Patel, breathlessly announced that his team had “uncovered” long-ignored proof “buried in a back room at the FBI.” It is a smoking gun: “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”

Hot damn! It’s like a real-life re-enactment of Patel’s children’s book, The Plot Against the King, in which Wizard Kash thwarts a plot by the evil Hillary Queenton to unseat good King Donald by accusing him of “working with the Russionians” to steal the throne. (I am not making that up.)

  The Bulwark

There is room for infinite numbers of ridiculous, assinine, and insane shit in our current alternate universe. It's an absurd place.

But wait: As Patel notes, this evidence had already been included as a classified “annex” to the 2023 report by special counsel John Durham, who had been hired as a special prosecutor in 2020 by Trump and his then-attorney general, Bill Barr. If this evidence is as potent as Patel says, then why would Durham—who was hired to blow the lid off the supposed “Russiagate hoax”—have relegated it to a mere annex?

Because, it turns out, Wizard Kash’s “smoking gun” is not only ridiculously fake (as Durham concluded), it actually blows a massive hole in the Trump/Patel “Russia hoax” theory.

Continue reading.

Erasing history

 UPDATE 08/03/2025:

Tulsa, Slocum, ...

 This wasn't in my educational curriculum either...

UPDATE 07/30/2025:

Ignorant white racists are the scourge of the planet and are nowhere more prevalent than in the US.

Oh

 

He remembers the first day vividly. Work started before dawn, the better to avoid the unforgiving desert sun to come. "The wind is in your hair, and you don't think it's bad," Carter says. "Then you go out in the field, and the first ray of sun comes over the horizon. The first ray. Everyone looked at each other, and said, 'What did we do?' The thermometer went up like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. By 9 a.m., it was 110 degrees."

Garden gloves that the farmers gave the students to help them harvest lasted only four hours, because the cantaloupe's fine hairs made grabbing them feel like "picking up sandpaper." They got paid minimum wage — $1.40 an hour back then — plus 5 cents for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 fruits. Breakfast was "out of the Navy," Carter says — beans and eggs and bologna sandwiches that literally toasted in the heat, even in the shade.

The University High crew worked six days a week, with Sundays off, and they were not allowed to return home during their stint. The farmers sheltered them in "any kind of defunct housing," according to Carter — old Army barracks, rooms made from discarded wood, and even buildings used to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

  NPR

Forced labor?

 

Where is she getting her information?  Or does she just have "concepts"?  These people are bonafide idiots.  Most people on Medicaid have jobs or are physically unable to work. 

Also, have you seen immigrant farmworkers at work?  I have.  There's no way random Americans can replace that efficiency and speed.  Good luck trying to convince the farmers this could be a quick fix.  

And, here's another great idea...

In a popular online video, a Democratic congresswoman, among others, claimed the U.S. House Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" lowers the age of a dependent from 18 to 7.

The budget bill does lower the age of a dependent from under 18 to under 7, but only in the context of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, not across the board.

  Snopes

Only! Because 8-year-olds don't need to eat? This disgusting Snopes article was written before the bill passed. Here's the ugly shit that made it through...

  Snap Screener

Also, in that link, we're informed that the Orange Grinch is also cutting into help with heating and cooling expenses.

Poor people: Starve to death or freeze. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

UPDATE 07/15/2025:

Today in history: Mississippi burning

 

Maybe we should call it alternate facts

 

Who's going to do the "correcting"?

June 14, Flag Day

 

Yes, that's the way Americans used to salute the flag.  Until Hitler came on the scene.

And, speaking of the flag...

The boy is Anthony Quin, aged 5. His mother, Mrs. Aylene Quin of McComb, Mississippi, and her children were trying to see Governor Paul Johnson. They wanted to protest against the election of five Congressmen from districts where African Americans were not allowed to vote. Refused admittance, they sat on the steps.

The policeman struggling with Anthony is Mississippi Highway Patrolman Hughie Kohler.

As Kohler attempted to confiscate the flag, Mrs. Quin said: “Anthony, don’t let that man take your flag.”

Kohler went berserk, yanking Anthony off his feet.

In the South during the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. flag was a potent symbol of support for racial integration (and support for federal law).

Southerners who believed in racial segregation displayed Confederate flags instead. People were pulled from their cars by policemen and beaten simply for displaying a U.S. flag on their license plates.

So the simple act of a small child carrying a U. S. flag represented defiance of Mississippi law and custom.

  Zinn Education Project

Another protest resignation

The chair of the Naval Academy History Department resigned after reportedly being ordered by the academy’s superintendent to remove a previously approved paper from the list of those to be presented at an upcoming symposium.

Tom McCarthy, in a letter dated June 3, cited the removal of a paper “for reasons having nothing to do with scholarship.” He resigned to avoid being involved in what he called a violation of trust and the possibility of harming the department’s reputation.

[...]

McCarthy did not respond to requests for comment. It is unclear what the paper he resigned over is about.

  Baltimore Sun

In light of the recent removal of "DEI" materials from the Naval Academy library, I think we can guess.

[...]

The elimination of the paper and McCarthy’s resignation adds to a dizzying six months at the Naval Academy as its curriculum, the literature available in its library and its admissions policy have been caught in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s diversity, equity and inclusion purge.

In April, the academy released a list of 381 books and literary works removed from its library as part of a review of DEI materials, following directives from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to evaluate and eliminate works focused on DEI.

Among the works that were removed were “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou. Copies of “Mein Kampf” remained available.

[...]

Last month — after an additional Pentagon-ordered review — most of the nearly 400 books that were removed from a Nimitz Library closet and held under lock and key were placed back on the shelves.

May 28, 1963

 The early days of Civil Rights Activism.

MAGA 

How long will this be allowed to be taught?

Fascism in America has existed for Blacks for centuries

 

April 25 in history: Mostly Mexico

April 25 marks the official beginning of the U.S.-Mexico War in 1846.

[...]

[Bill] Bigelow is the author of a free downloadable lesson called U.S. Mexico War: “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God”. The lesson features a reading by Howard Zinn and an activity with many voices on the war typically missing from textbooks such as: Cochise, Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Frederick Douglass, General Mariano Vallejo, Henry David Thoreau, María Josefa Martínez, Padre Antonio José Martínez, the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, and many more. A version of the lesson is also available in Spanish.

"Today’s border with Mexico is the product of invasion and war. Grasping some of the motives for that war and some of its immediate effects begins to provide students the kind of historical context that is crucial for thinking intelligently about the line that separates the United States and Mexico."

  Zinn Education Project

Frederick Douglass wrote in his Rochester newspaper the North Star, January 21, 1848, of “the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.” Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes):

No politician of any considerable distinction or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party . . . by an open and unqualified disapprobation of the war. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other.

The New York Herald wrote in August 1845: “The multitude cry aloud for war.” The New York Morning News said “young and ardent spirits that throng the cities . . . want but a direction to their restless energies, and their attention is already fixed on Mexico.”

It is impossible to know the extent of popular support of the war. But there is evidence that many organized workingmen opposed the war. There were demonstrations of Irish workers in New York, Boston, and Lowell against the annexation of Texas. In May, when the war against Mexico began, New York workingmen called a meeting to oppose the war, and many Irish workers came. The meeting called the war a plot by slave owners and asked for the withdrawal of American troops from disputed territory. That year, a convention of the New England Workingmen’s Association condemned the war and announced they would “not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholder in robbing one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor.

  Zinn Education Project

A simple list of cause and effect of the war.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is free to read here.  It should be required reading for all American citizens, who are woefully ignorant of our own history.  Alas, it is not.

You might want to purchase a copy from your local bookstore to have on hand.

If you're out of funds for books, you can download the pdf of it at this link.

MAGA

 

Pressure works

 

For now.

We may need an underground history organization

 

And while you're at it, I suggest taking a trip this spring/summer to all the National Parks you can, because they are going to be shut down.  Mark my words.