January 16, 2019 - Commenting on John Fund's brain-light opinings

John Fund: An 'informed patriotism?'

Ronald Reagan had only one warning in his 1989 farewell address

Beware of John Fund, Disinformation Minion for the likes of Dick Cheney.  See NeoCons

Is is his usual sappy habit John Fund uses  someone else's words without injecting any thoughts of his own (Likely because he has never had any).  

Ronnie was, without doubt, one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet.  But as governor of California he took up further toward the unholy alliance of government and corporations, central control of everything, than anyone on the Left could have hoped for.  

I quote myself, 

From Ronald Reagan, an Ugly Truth -  "United Republicans of California ("UROC") was founded on April 22, 1963, by then State Senator Joe Shell (see footnote) and Assemblyman Bruce Reagan to promote the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater for President of the United States. Many Republicans were disgusted with the corporate agenda adopted by the Rockefeller, big-money brokers who had controlled the Republican Party for so long. UROC's agenda was a real grass-roots campaign that took the ideas of Barry Goldwater directly into the homes and minds of Americans.

The method they adopted was shoe-leather activism. In San Marino alone, 15 groups of UROC members committed to going door to door for a registration drive that changed the make-up of the Republican Party. They went armed with Goldwater literature, two books: "None Dare Call It Conspiracy" by John Stormer and "A Choice Not An Echo" by Phyllis Schafly, and were prepared to talk about ideas. By this means, something like 2 million copies of “None Dare Call It Treason" were sold or given away by Goldwater activists.

UROC did not spend piles of money to enact change. Their activism, however, successfully changed the demographics of the Republican Party, awakening Americans to the ideas Americans had hungered for and encountered through several difference sources.

One of these sources,“Conscience of a Conservative,” by Barry Goldwater, was published in 1960. At that time, the then-rapidly-growing freedom – conservative movement was also fired with enthusiasm for the works of Ayn Rand and science-fiction master Robert Heinlein as well as the works of Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Patterson.

Other organizations, such as the LA-based Foundation for Economic Education, established in 1946 by Leonard E. Read, and the John Birch Society, founded by "Taft Republican" Robert Welch in1958, promoted the benefits of free-markets and less government. These organizations continue to promote the same ideas today based on the foundations of freedom outlined in America's Founding documents.

Those ideas found fertile ground in the 60s, evoking a shift that continues today."  MORE

Now, about patriotism and our founding documents, posted on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette

It is absolutely true students and the public need to understand civil discourse and the founding documents which laid our our rights as individuals, members of proactive communities. Today our understanding of 'Patriotism' cedes our power to the State, just as the Bellamys intended. 

Unfortunately, it has been a long time since public schools taught directly from those documents, the Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation (1781), The Constitution, The Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights. When we understand we are, ourselves, the government, then we also accept our responsibility to act when we see the principles of individual rights violated. 

Protest is just one of these obligations. Americans' conception of these began to change when Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 and with his cousin, Edward Bellamy, began their campaign to move to National Socialism in the U.S. This launched the government takeover of education intended to produce an "industrial army" for the authoritarian vision portrayed in his cousin Edward Bellamy's book "Looking Backward." 

The Bellamy cousins promoted National Socialism worldwide for decades. Their plans resulted in racist and segregated government schools that lasted into the 1960's. Studying the founding documents grounds us in individual rights and an economic system which was still largely based on the a Percentage as you earn approach to long term purchases. This made foreclosure on homes extremely rare and brought communities together in hard times.