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#this post is brought to you by an article i read “debunking” the claim that israel is an apartheid and their “evidence”

traegorn · 2 months

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you never read the lilith question from the first edition of lilith magazine you twisted presumptuous fraud and antisemite

So I'm probably giving you more attention than you deserve, but I also hate leaving someone who keeps repeatedly shouting something at me that's so wrong uncorrected.

You brought this up back in September (yes, this has been going on for that long), and at the time I hadn't read it so I assumed it supported your argument. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and trusted that it said what you said.

But here's the thing, I've since read it.

And it doesn't support what you're saying at all.

(Putting the rest under a cut since this gets long...)

So going to the actual piece we have to remember what "Lilith Magazine" is. It's a Jewish Feminist magazine writing primarily for a Jewish audience. Cantor-Zuckoff is talking about how Jewish women may want to look at her story differently. I don't find anything in there arguing for Lilith to be some pan-feminist icon for non-Jewish people. In fact, in the article Cantor-Zuckoff says:

What we have to explore are the uniquely Jewish aspects of the Lilith story, and how they relate to the Jewish experience, to Jewish history. After all, Jews lived among many different peoples and were subject to a bombardment of cultural and religious concepts and myths from all sides. What they accepted is important because it shows us what Jews perceived as necessary and appropriate to Jewish life and its continuity. How they transmuted what they accepted is also significant for this reason. The account of Lilith’s revolt in the Alphabet is, to the best of my knowledge, intrinsically Jewish; no non-Jewish source tells of a female struggle for equality or gives it as a reason for the vengeful behavior of a female demon. This is especially important to us in exploring how the Lilith myth connects with our unique history.

The only comments about universality in the piece are when Cantor-Zuckoff says that there are stories with some similarities in other cultures just prior to those last two paragraphs:

These legends of Lilith-as-demon, the vengeful female witch, are, of course, not unique to Jewish culture and tradition. Many scholars theorize that vengeful female deities or demons, like the Greek hecatae, represent the vestiges of the dying Matriarchy or are an attempt by men to discredit the Matriarchy.

What Cantor-Zuckoff is arguing here is that there are myths in other cultures that have been influenced by patriarchy and serve some similar functions. This is not an argument for other people using Lilith, only that there are elements she shares. To claim they're the same though is bizarre, as you wouldn't claim that, say, Kinich Ahau and Helios are the same god just because they're both associated with the sun.

I think this really goes back to the fact that you've started with a conclusion and just reject anything that contradicts it. You really want it to be true. What I have said from the start is that Lilith is a figure who is unique to Jewish folklore. I backed this up with with the evidence we find in the historical record. I debunked the supposed "non-Jewish Lilith" sources.

And I said listen to Jewish people about what's okay or not okay to use from their culture, as they are a closed ethnoreligion, and not listening to them would make someone an asshole. You've been having a bizarre tantrum at me for like half a year now, and it's getting sad.

I don't know why you seem to care that I, a random person you will never meet, thinks you're being an asshole, but this has to stop.

(Context Note: For anyone who is seeing this post first in this ongoing "conversation" -- this anon has been harassing me for months because I dared say in my podcast that Lilith is a figure who comes exclusively from Jewish folklore, and that members of the Modern Witchcraft Movement should listen to Jewish people when they ask us not to appropriate her. That's right -- my saying "listen to Jewish people" is apparently an antisemitic act.)

#witchblr #witch #witchcraft #lilith

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otmaaromanovas · 11 months

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@melthehoneyjar posted an excerpt from this article saying that on the way to Yekaterinburg, OTMA got sexually molested. Is this true because i do not think it’s true and @melthehoneyjar is also unsure.

TRIGGER WARNING - sexual assault and rape

This is a very sensitive topic so please don't read it if you will be triggered! It's difficult to talk about this and I want to stick to what the sources say. I've added a cut so you can skip this post easily if this is upsetting and/or triggering for you

The article linked is by Simon Sebag Montefiore, who is most well known for writing the huge book 'The Romanovs'. Like Helen Rappaport, there are a lot of mistakes in it, and he doesn't provide references in the actual book itself. The references are instead buried online somewhere on his website.

I'm going to reference only primary sources (writings made at the time by the Romanovs, or by the people who knew them, so are directly from the time period and not a historian's interpretation). Some people believe that OTMA were raped on board the steam ship Rus, which took them to Tobolsk, then to Ekaterinburg. Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia all shared one room on the ship.

There is no evidence in any of OTMA's, or the other Romanov's written work, including letters, diaries, and postcards that have survived, to suggest that they were sexually assaulted

Sidney Gibbes, the English Tutor, says that he heard the girls screaming in their cabins whilst they were on board the Rus. However, this source came from Greg King and Penny Wilson's book 'The Fate of the Romanovs', which popularised the lie that Maria had a relationship with a guard. They also relied on a lot of unreliable material, such as Tatiana Botkina's memoirs and Yakov Yurovsky's 'unpublished memoirs'. They also allege that Sophie Buxhoeveden betrayed the Romanovs, which is categorically untrue. This lie has sadly tarnished Sophie's reputation in history. I plan on making a post debunking the lies in that book.

Their research was not thorough, and the book aimed to sensationalise. Furthermore, the book I have that is comprised entirely of Gibbes recollections, writings, and diary entries make no mention of this. King and Wilson claim that they heard this information from George Gibbes, Sidney Gibbes' adopted son. The only reference for this is simply "George Gibbes to King, May 1989".

This book is the only book, and the only place where this rumour, originates from. Nothing in OTMA's personal writings suggested that they were assaulted. It must be considered, however, that they might have been and didn't put it into writing. But the lack of reference to this by other writers such as Pierre Gilliard, who sought to emphasise the villainy of the Bolsheviks, could suggest otherwise.

I am going to include information regarding the Rus steam ship journey from primary sources:

Gilliard about the journey on the Rus steam ship, from his diary: "Monday, May 20th. At half-past eleven we left the house and went on board the Rouss. She is the boat which brought us here with the Czar and Czarina eight months ago. Baroness Buxhoeveden has been granted permission to rejoin us. We left Tobolsk at five o'clock. Commissary Rodionof has shut Alexis Nicolaievitch in his cabin with Nagorny. We protested: the child is ill and the doctor ought to have access to him at any time."

Nicholas' diary, 4-5 August 1917: "4th August. ...There, the train arrived almost next to the wharf, so we only had to walk down to the ship. Ours is called Rus . They started to load our things, which continued through the night. Poor Aleksei went to bed God knows when again! Banging and pounding lasted all night and did not let me sleep. Departed from Tyumen around 6 o'cl.

5th August. Cruising down the river Tur. Alix, Aleksei and I each have a cabin with no facilities, all the daughters are a five-bed [cabin], the suite is close by in the hallway; farther towards the bow cafeteria and a small cabin with a piano..."

Nicholas' diary, 10/23 May 1918: "In the morning we were told within the space of an hour: that the children were a few hours from the town, then that they had reached the station, and finally that they had arrived at the house, although their train had been in the station since 2 o’clock at night. It was an immense joy to see them again and to embrace them after four weeks of separation and uncertainty. There was no end to the mutual questions and answers. Very few letters had got through either way. The poor things had suffered a lot of anguish, both in Tobolsk and during their three day journey. Of those who accompanied them, only the cook Kharitonov and Sednev’s nephew were allowed into the house."

To conclude, although we don't know for sure, the lack of first hand writings from OTMA and the Imperial Family make me unsure to conclude that they were assaulted. The only source for this being from a flimsy-researched book and from word-of-mouth rather than a concrete piece of writing also makes this questionable.

I just hope and pray they weren't.

Sources:

A Lifelong Passion - Maylunas and Mirenko

The Fate of the Romanovs - King and Wilson

Thirteen Years at the Russian Court - Pierre Gilliard

Diary of Olga Romanov - Helen Azar

#trigger warning #tw sa #tw abuse #tw r@pe #otma #q #ask #answered #1917 #1918 #Romanovs #sources

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tetsunabouquet · 5 months

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Alright, I am nearly done with the final piece for Kinktober (you can see it as a early Christmas gift guys. It will be later up this week), and wanted to write but I couldn't think of anything for the few headcanons I have in my drafts folder to post. I decided to read articles to see if there was someone stupid enough to rant about, or better yet, actually inspire me. Per usual, I found no inspirations for my headcanons but someone stupid instead. The moment I read the title, I knew I had to click on it. A boy-mom whining about a research regarding children disguised as a parenting article. Thanks to my deadbeat father's wife, I know very much that the toxic boy-mom from TikTok is a real phenomenon and I couldn't resist looking at it. It was about the way different genders are treated in school. Girls were given more compliments about being well-behaved and studious then boys and it pissed her off. She said she was a child psychologist and came with all kinds of arguments that I, as an autistic woman who did had to research about children's psychology to pass children's literature could debunk every time- yes she did try to play the neurodivergent card as well as the race one. I'll get to that later. First, let's debunk her argument that girls and boys are developmentally about the same. That's false. Psychologically as well as physically, boys are about 2 years behind the female development. It's why girls hit their growth spurth about a year or two before boys do (ages 12 and 14 on average respectively). Girls really are naturally more mature then boys. The let's get to neurodivergent card, she tried to talk about how boys are more physically active (which they are) but then brought in ADHD and autism in correlation and how its tied to it.... BITCH NO. ADHD? Naturally is related to hyper-active behavior but what on earth does autism have to do with boys being more physically active? The fact she repeated the old boys club slogan, pissed me off. Women on the spectrum have different symptoms and a lot have been misdiagnosed over the years because of how male-centric the diagnostic system for the spectrum is. There is no actual confirmation boys really do have autism on way higher levels then girls when the diagnostic system fails to look for female specific symptoms. Lady, you have no right to make claims about our community, especially when it's used to justify your own internalized misogyny! Which brings me to, lets debunk how this sympathy card is supposed to distract you from the fact she gives no evidence to debunk that girls are more studious and do better at school. Because they do. Like my textbook said, 'Girls read more then boys do,' and there were already articles published about girls performing better back when I was a kid. My days of reading newspaper articles started when I was about 11 or 12 and back then I remember reading an article that actually highlighted the phenomenon. Nice try. The one thing she does seem to understand though, is that whilst interracial relationships are surely a thing, someone's taste in partners is often developped when young with the people around you shaping what you like. A blonde mom with all her fair skinned sons is likely going to have them grow up chasing white girls, which is why she brought in an entirely different research about POC kids and tried to frame it in a way like it was all apart of the same research and that white girls are the most priviliged at school. When, again, the research was unrelated, and even that one has a valid hypothesis resting on misogyny and how a part of the muslim community likes to keep their women and daughters as dumb as possible (remember my aforementioned Turkish childhood best friend and how her mom barely spoke a word of the Dutch language after decades of being here? Her father kept his wife as helpless as he possibly could.) What a vile woman you are, I see what you are doing.

#tetsutalk #boy moms #childrens psychology #girls #boys #girls study harder #perhaps its the maturity or its the sexism we had/have to overcome to show we are worthy of education as well #ever thought of that Karen?

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thatlittledandere · 3 years

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You know, I have a bit of a problem with certain ways some well-meaning people try to preemptively encourage others with problems they might not even have, and I'm gonna go on a bit of a rant as to why. Personal anecdote to follow.

I went to a small elementary school. With less than 60 kids and 3 teachers it was a given that gym class wasn't gender segregated and even though we naturally had some "girls should prefer girls as friends over boys and vice versa" going on, gender wasn't much of a factor in friendships or recess activities. Football was one of the most popular games, with more than half the school on the field from time to time when the ground was free of snow.

This one time when I was around ten, a magazine I used to read had an article on hobbies. They interviewed kids aged roughly 7-12. One of them was a girl who played football. And, for a reason I couldn't comprehend at the time, it made a really big deal about how girls can play football too. How it's not just for boys. That was the main giveaway of the segment.

And it made no sense to me. Like, yes, obviously girls can play football. This girl was in a team, she was playing. We had football at school in gym. Everyone who liked it played at recess. I didn't, but that was because the ball hit me square in the face once and I was a bit traumatized by it. Everyone understood I was upset because I was small and unathletic and maybe a little too sensitive; nobody brought up the fact that I was a girl. It wasn't relevant.

So this article making a big deal out of it felt as bizarre as somebody coming up to you and angrily informing you that boys have fingers too, you dipshit, don't try to deny it. Like, uh, you weren't going to? Why are they bringing it up like it's a debatable subject? Is someone out there saying boys don't have fingers?? Baffling and concerning.

Now obviously I know now that there ARE indeed people claiming football, and maybe sports in general, are a "boys thing". That even if girls technically CAN play, they're not going to be as good as boys. But at 10 years old I had yet to be exposed to this concept. Sports weren't gendered outside competitions, where we were divided into boys and girls, but everyone was still free to participate. Everyone played at recess and teams were formed at random or by age. This one girl was notorious for mercilessly going for the legs and indiscriminately feared and respected by everyone.

I know this is far from a universal experience, and I know I'm privileged for growing up like this, but it was my experience. Of course it would be presumptuous to claim perfect gender equality - that wasn't the case - but football, of all things, was an Everyone's Thing without question.

So, to the topic... I keep seeing posts debunking claims I haven't seen anyone make. A person comes out, and get twenty asks saying they're valid before anyone says otherwise. They get told to not believe it when they're called [negative stereotype of said identity] before anyone calls them that. I found out about the "asexuals are broken" narrative from ace positivity posts! I still haven't seen anyone actually call asexuals broken! Many of us have and I know it's an idea that exists but that's not how I was supposed to find out!

I'm not saying discrimination doesn't happen. I'm not saying reassurance and encouragement aren't needed. I know people still encounter these narratives before coming out. I'm not saying these are problems that don't exist. But I mean... If someone irl came out to you as bisexual, would your response be "Great! I want you to know I don't think you're a confused slut!" Yes, those are things your friend might have heard, but is this the time to bring it up? You're just reinforcing the idea that some people DO think bisexuals are promiscuous and the sexuality is just a stepping stone to something else.

This is 100% a me problem, but I've become almost allergic to the word "valid". If I give you my chosen term of identification I already know it's a real thing. I already know my experience is "valid". I know I'm not lying, I know I'm not making things up, I know I'm not trying to derail an imaginary argument. I don't need your approval. What I hear is "you're a girl who just said she plays football in a team, and I'm here to give you my permission to keep doing that."

TL;DR: Bringing up negative stereotypes, misconceptions and bigoted rhetoric when nobody asked goes against normalization and makes you sound like you're giving people permission to be who they are and do what they want. I guess. Not sure if I actually succeeded in saying that. If I was eloquent this post would be 1/4 of its length.

#venlapost #god i can think of SO many ways someone could read ill will to this post or wilfully misinterpret it #let's hope at least someone sees where I'm coming from and i can live #;;;#it's just every time someone tells me I'm 'valid' all i can think of is 'yes. i know. '#'i said i'm identity x and you confirmed that i am. i didn't come here to ask for permission'#reblogging allowed and encouraged

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hearts-kingdom · 4 years

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@didilydee I really appreciate you critically considering my discussion points and showing an interest in not spreading misinformation! OP blocked me so my post debunking their’s wouldn’t show up in their notes where other people could see it being criticized and to ensure I couldn’t respond to their reblog directly so it would look like I failed to offer a counter argument in order to give the illusion of them being in the right since it would apparently be too much of an effort for them to engage in an actual discussion where their claims could potentially be debunked. In any case, since their response involved you I felt as though you might be interested in considering giving it a look :)

Start Photos

End Photos

I used this particular article because it was a convenient compilation of facts from various certified legal sources that’s geared towards relaying those facts— not unsourced gossip. It contains links and references to the court documents and other certified sources within the article and the judge is not the sole source within each point that relays facts— not opinions. Therefore, it’s not clickbait unless you consider summaries of legal documents and testimonies clickbait. If you see something specific that’s not a fact outside of the closing statement that includes the author’s opinion, you’re more than welcome to say so.

I didn’t spam every single person who reblogged it with tags— I only brought this to the attention of those who had posted their own comments implying they were open to a discussion given their willingness to reconsider things when presented with facts. Even then, I didn’t tag everyone who commented— only a handful of people. You act like I was making a callout post towards them when I said, “This isn’t a callout post of course I just wanted to bring this information to the attention of individuals I noticed were reblogging with comments. Dylan Farrow and Soon-Yi are often mixed up with each other so I can see how this might be confusing in that sense. You’re not obligated to reblog my fact-checks of course but please consider at least deleting OPs misleading post from your dash to prevent spreading misleading information”, which can be found in my reblog. If they want to say something, let them say it— you don’t have to put words in their mouth akin to how you’re putting words in mine given the unwarranted accusations you attempted to make throughout your post.

It’s very telling of you to claim people who make an effort to be informative when encountering misleading information are “loony” while also acting as though my request for others to consider information you refrained from relaying was a callout rather than a request. I generally refrain from making unwarranted accusations towards people I discuss things with, but given your reaction it’s evident I’m not the one with issues here, so don’t try to project your own problems onto people who consider things critically just because you expect them to believe you with ease and without question on a public platform given how that would be rather loony. Everyone else I’ve had a discussion with on this matter thus far have at least been receptive regardless of where they stand agenda-wise. However, your decision to block me so that my post debunking your own wouldn’t show up in the replies along with your decision to attack my rhetoric without giving me a chance to defend it or criticize your own is another story entirely.

Again, you clearly care more about pushing an agenda here through being selective about the facts you choose to relay rather than addressing the fact that you purposefully left out legal information that didn’t align with your own. Your comments about the #MeToo movement make that evident given how you didn’t address the fact that I said, “Both Woody Allen and Mia Farrow were horrible people and the abuse they committed should not be politicized for the sake of pushing a feminist nor anti-feminist agenda.” You’ve become so obsessed with spewing misleading information to push your own agenda that you’d rather jump through obstacles than acknowledge that your cherry-picking argument is based off of that very agenda rather than the facts that overshadow your personal bias.

It’s interesting that you said, “the words of the person known to have abused and manipulated”, in regard to Moses given how this is known because of his and his siblings allegations that didn’t result in Mia being imprisoned yet you still obviously believe these allegations— as people should given the evidence despite Mia trying to dispute as much. However, you’re dismissing the allegations of Dylan, her mother, three witnesses, and Woody’s therapist who saw him for inappropriate behavior towards Dylan before Woody was even caught cheating. Bringing attention to your hypocrisy isn’t idiotic but nice try.

It’s also odd but not unsurprising that you’re saying Moses should be trusted in regard to denying Dylan’s trauma since that evidently aligns with the agenda you’re trying to push here in favor of dismissing all the other witnesses and legal officials that conflicts with your argument— such as Dylan, Mia, the three witnesses whose timelines aligns with Dylan’s story, the judge, the state prosecutor, Woody’s therapist, Dylan’s pediatrician, investigating officers, and even the state attorney.

I want to reiterate what I said before: “I don’t doubt Moses Farrow was abused by Mia in the least, but the source also brings attention to how Dylan’s story aligns with [four] other peoples [accounts]— not just Mia’s. Moses likely wasn’t present during the assault [itself], so he can’t say she wasn’t assaulted anymore than Dylan can say he wasn’t abused.”

As for the New-Haven Sexual Abuse Clinic, if you actually bothered reading through the article’s legal sources, accounts, and testimonies then you’d know that the doctor who signed off on the legal report you’re referring to never actually met Dylan personally to make an in-person assessment, no psychologists or psychiatrists were assigned to her panel, the notes regarding her evaluation were destroyed, her confidentiality wasn’t respected, this institution welcomingly invited Woody to profess his innocence when they should have remained professionally unbiased, and the judge and state prosecutor deemed this claim as unacceptable given that.

As for your defense of how Woody being a pedophile and assaulting Dylan would have been irrational... yes— you’re right. That’s the point and yet you still missed it somehow. Pedophiles aren’t rational in the risks they take as pedophiles. Your rhetorical questions usually don’t bode well for defending people accused of pedophilia given how it relies on defending their character and the characters of pedophiles don’t have much worth defending since their judgements are skewered, impulsive, and dangerous.

As for inconsistencies, you fail to address the inconsistencies about Woody’s story changing and you honestly just dug a deeper hole for yourself in regard to the attic thing given how Woody’s story pertained to a police report in which he told them he’d never been in the attic before changing his story and saying he had gone up there before.

Oh, an on another note... demeaningly claiming that an issue as complex as this one is something people should “obvious[ly]” be able to make sense of in attempt to make people feel foolish for not unquestioningly agreeing with you is not a very good look at all. It’s dangerous to suggest people shouldn’t be critical of the concepts you push onto them.

I can quote things, too, but from multiple sources instead of just cherry picking ones that align with pushing a specific agenda.

Judge Elliott Wilk, the presiding judge in Allen’s custody suit against Farrow, concluded that there is “no credible evidence to support Mr. Allen’s contention that Ms. Farrow coached Dylan or that Ms. Farrow acted upon a desire for revenge against him for seducing Soon-Yi.”

In his 33-page decision, Judge Wilk found that Mr. Allen’s behavior toward Dylan was “grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.”

“You look at her [Dylan] in a sexual way. You fondled her . . . You don’t give her any breathing room. You look at her when she’s naked.”

Another babysitter told police and also swore in court that on that same day, she saw Allen with his head on Dylan’s lap facing her body, while Dylan sat on a couch “staring vacantly in the direction of a television set.” A French tutor for the family told police and testified that that day she found Dylan was not wearing underpants under her sundress. The first babysitter also testified she did not tell Farrow that Allen and Dylan had gone missing until after Dylan made her statements.

The state attorney, Maco, said publicly he did have probable cause to press charges against Allen but declined, due to the fragility of the “child victim.”

#me too #metoo #feminism #anti feminism #woody Allen #Dylan farrow #Mia farrow #Moses farrow #feminismisahatemovement #anyways I’m blocking them back so they don’t unblock me to try to get a word in and then block me before I can reply again

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tlatollotl · 5 years

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In February, the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience referred to an idea made famous by some books and TV shows: that an image of the Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, carved onto the lid of his sarcophagus when he died in 683 C.E., shows him taking off in a spaceship. Host Rogan was skeptical of the notion, which has been used to argue that extraterrestrial visitors seeded sophisticated ancient societies like the Maya. He asked what mainstream archaeologists made of it.

For David Anderson, that request was a call to action. Anderson, an archaeologist at Radford University in Virginia, jumped on Twitter: “Dear @joerogan, speaking as a ‘mainstream’ archaeologist … it depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death.” The rocket-propelling “fire” below Pakal is a personification of the underworld, and the “spaceship” is a world tree, a common feature in Mayan art. Rogan retweeted Anderson’s thread, bringing him more than 1000 likes and many grateful comments—plus some angry ones.

Pakal’s supposed seat in a spaceship is just one example of what Anderson and others call “pseudoarchaeology,” which ignores the cultural context of ancient artifacts and uses them to support predetermined ideas, rather than test hypotheses, about the past. Common beliefs include that aliens helped build the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, that refugees escaping Atlantis brought technology to cultures around the world, and that European immigrants were the original inhabitants of North America.

These outlandish beliefs have been circulating for decades, but archaeologists like Anderson are now mobilizing to counter them. They are taking to Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and newspapers to debunk false claims and explain real archaeological methods, and they plan to compare notes this week during a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting here. “My profession … needs to do a better job of speaking out,” Anderson says.

He and others are alarmed by the rising popularity of pseudoarchaeological ideas. According to the annual Survey of American Fears by Chapman University in Orange, California, which catalogs paranormal beliefs, in 2018, 41% of Americans believed that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past, and 57% believed that Atlantis or other advanced ancient civilizations existed. Those numbers are up from 2016, when the survey found that 27% of Americans believed in ancient aliens and 40% believed in Atlantis.

“I look at these numbers and say … something has gone massively wrong,” Anderson says. He can’t say exactly what is driving the rise in such ideas, but cable TV shows like Ancient Aliens (which has run for 13 seasons) propagate them, as does the internet.

These beliefs may seem harmless or even amusing, says Jason Colavito, an author in Albany who covers pseudoarchaeology in books and on his blog. But they have “a dark side,” he says. Almost all such claims assume that ancient non-European societies weren’t capable of inventing sophisticated architecture, calendars, math, and sciences like astronomy on their own. “It’s racist at its core,” says Kenneth Feder, an archaeologist at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, who is slated to present at the SAA session and began to write about the dangers of these ideas long before most other scholars paid attention to them.

Adding to archaeologists’ sense of responsibility is that “many of these ideas started within mainstream archaeology,” says Jeb Card, an archaeologist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “We have to own these stories.”

For example, white settlers and early archaeologists in 19th century North America excavated elaborate pre-Columbian burial mounds—but ascribed them to a lost “moundbuilder race” that was killed by the ancestors of Native Americans. Former President Andrew Jackson used those ideas to justify displacing Native Americans from their lands.

Today, white nationalists make similar claims. To argue for Europeans’ deep roots in the Americas, they have latched onto Vinland, a short-lived medieval Viking settlement in eastern Canada, and the “Solutrean hypothesis,” which argues that the Americas were first peopled by arrivals from Western Europe. Neither claim started as pseudoarchaeology—Vinland was real, and the Solutrean hypothesis was proposed by mainstream archaeologists, then tested and ruled out—but they have been twisted for ideological ends. A white supremacist accused of murdering two people on a train in Portland, Oregon, in 2017 included the words “Hail Vinland!!!” in a Facebook post less than a month before the attack.

“It’s really a life-or-death issue,” says Stephennie Mulder, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Texas in Austin, who organized a 30 March symposium there called “Aliens, Atlantis, and Aryanism: ‘Fake News’ in Archaeology and Heritage,” at which Anderson was the keynote speaker.

Yet archaeologists have historically been hesitant to tackle pseudoarchaeology. As the field matured in the 20th century, archaeologists moved into the academy and abdicated the public sphere, says Sara Head, an independent cultural resources archaeologist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the author of the Archaeological Fantasies blog, who is co-organizing the SAA session. “We’ve created a vacuum” that pseudoarchaeology has filled.

Today, “Most archaeological research is unavailable to the public,” she says, obscured by jargon and locked behind paywalls. “But you want something from pseudoarchaeology? I can find you 15 references,” all easily accessible online and on TV.

Re-engaging with the public is an uphill battle, Head says. Debunking specific claims, as Anderson did with Pakal’s “spaceship,” is merely a first step. To make a lasting impact, she and others say, archaeologists must proactively share their work and, in particular, explain their methods step by step. That’s important to counter the common pseudoarchaeological claim that researchers are hiding evidence for aliens or Atlantis.

This isn’t easy work, especially online. All the women interviewed for this article have been harassed online after tackling pseudoarchaeological interpretations. Mulder recently fielded replies that included a knife emoji after she tweeted about research showing that people of diverse ancestries, rather than only Western Europeans, lived in Roman Britain. Colavito reports receiving death threats after a host of Ancient Aliens urged his fans to send Colavito hate mail.

Ironically, the popularity of pseudoarchaeology also reveals intense public interest in the past. Anderson understands: His own interest in archaeology was spurred at age 18 when he read a book about a now-vanished advanced civilization that supposedly helped develop the cultures of ancient Egypt and the Maya. He was inspired to take archaeology courses in college—and found that the reality was even more exciting than the myths. “Archaeology was even better than [the book] had presented it.”

#archaeology #atlantis #the joe rogan experience #ancient aliens #egypt #pakal #maya #mesoamerica #graham hancock #erich von daniken #chariot of the gods #history

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creepingsharia · 4 years

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Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce

Debunking revisionist history about Thanksgiving. Take the time to read it all, print it, and share it with your children no matter what age they are.

EDITORS NOTE: Due to the length of this article it has been presented here in three (3) parts. You may access the other pages by clicking the links at the bottom of this page or from the 'Related Links' section in the right column of the page.

http://www.sail1620.org/discover_feature_thanksgiving_on_the_net_roast_bull_with_cranberry_sauce_part_1.shtml

Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 1

by Jeremy D. Bangs

Jeremy Bangs (Ph.D., Leiden University), a Fellow of the Pilgrim Society, is Director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, having previously been Visiting Curator of Manuscripts at Pilgrim Hall Museum, Chief Curator at Plimoth Plantation, and Curator of the Leiden Pilgrim Documents Center. Among his books are "Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England's First International Diplomat" (2004); "Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691" (2002); and "The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts" (3 vols, 1997-1999-2001), all published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He has written many articles about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, and is currently completing the manuscript of a book about the Pilgrims and Leiden. He was awarded the Distinguished Mayflower Scholarship Award by the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the Commonwealth of PA in 2001. Bangs is among a small, select number of historians of the Pilgrims (those who have no family relation to them whatsoever!). He has also published articles and books on Dutch history and art history of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Setting people straight about Thanksgiving myths has become as much a part of the annual holiday as turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. But should historians bother? Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Brandeis, thinks not. She asks on the website "Common-Place" (in 2001) whether it's worth while "to plumb the bottom of it all - to determine, for example, [...] whether Plymouth's 'Pilgrims' were indeed the grave-robbing hypocrites that UAINE describes [i.e. United American Indians of New England]. [...] Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades? Combing period documents and archaeological evidence, we might peel away some of the myths [...] But to do so would be to miss a fundamental point of these holidays. [...] in this new millenium, these sacred secular rites are once again pressed into service - this time by new nations, with new visions of the present, to be reached through new versions of the past. In place of one origins myth, the inventors of Indigenous Peoples' Day [intended to replace Columbus Day] and the National Day of Mourning [intended to replace Thanksgiving Day] invoke another. One in which all Europeans were villains and all Natives, victims. One in which indigenous peoples knew neither strife nor war until the treachery of Columbus and his cultural heirs taught them to hate and fear. To ask whether this is true is to ask the wrong question. It's true to its purposes. Every bit as true, that is, as the stories some Americans in 1792 and 1863 told about the events of 1492 and 1621. And that's all it needs to be. For these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we want to be in an ever changing Now."

"And that's all it needs to be"? I disagree. I think that anyone who wants to approach the question of Thanksgiving Day as a historian in the "ever changing Now" will need to ask "the wrong question" - what of all this is true?

Surveying more than two hundred websites that "correct" our assumptions about Thanksgiving, it's possible to sort them into groups and themes, especially since internet sites often parrot each other. Very few present anything like the myths that most claim to combat. Almost all of the corrections are themselves incorrect or banal, and otherwise not germane to the topic of what happened in 1621. With heavy self-importance they demonstrate quite unsurprisingly that what was once commonly taught in grade school lacked scope, subtlety, and minority insight. The political posturing is pathetic.

Commonly the first point scored is that lots of people gave thanks before the Pilgrims did it in 1621. Local boosters in Virginia, Florida, and Texas promote their own colonists, who (like many people getting off a boat) gave thanks for setting foot again on dry land. Several sites claim that Indians had six thanksgivings every year; at least one says that every day, every act, every thought was carried out with thanksgiving by pre-contact Indians. (My thanksgiving is bigger than your thanksgiving?) Among many examples:

* http://www.new-life.net/thanks01.htm

* http://www.oyate.org/resources/shortthanks.html

The Text

Many sites point out in a rankly naive sort of way that only one brief documentary account records Plymouth Colony's 1621 harvest festivities, the specific descriptive words of Edward Winslow, while additional information can be derived from the seasonal comments of William Bradford, who mentioned that the Pilgrims ate turkey among other things. See, for example, Pilgrim Hall Museum's website, which is consistently informative and of high scholarly quality:

Reporting on the colonists' first year, Winslow wrote that wheat and Indian corn had grown well; the barley crop was "indifferently good"; but pease were "not worth the gathering." Winslow continues: "Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent foure men on fowling; so that we might after a more speciall manner rejoyce together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They foure in one day killed as much fowle as, with a little help besid, served the company almost a weeke. At which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Armes, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest King Massasoyt, with some nintie men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed five deere, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governour, and upon the Captaine and others. And although it be not alwayes so plentifull, as it was at this time, with us, yet by goodnesse of God, we are so farre from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plentie."[1]

Governor William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation, reported that fishing had been good all summer, and, in the fall, "begane to come in store of foule, as winter approached [...] And besides water foule, ther was great store of wild Turkies, of which they tooke many, besids venison, etc."[2]

Archaeologist James Deetz made much of the fact that Winslow did not name the turkeys Bradford mentioned.

This startling revelation (that in this case one should ignore Bradford's general comments and suppose that Winslow was providing a complete menu listing) recurs in various websites, such as the 2002 article posted by the Christian Science Monitor.

More frequently repeated is Deetz's emphatic reminder that Winslow did not use the word "thanksgiving" - drawing the conclusion that therefore the 1621 event was not a thanksgiving but some sort of traditional English harvest festival he characterized as "secular."

I've discussed this oversimplification previously in an previous article.

Further, see "Re-bunking the Pilgrims" [subscribers]

On the one hand, whatever their folk customs may have been, harvest festivals in England with which the Pilgrims had been familiar were not "secular." (The Elizabethan and Jacobean-period Anglican Book of Common Prayer included an obligatory harvest thanksgiving prayer among the prayers whose use was increasingly enforced in the early seventeenth century.) On the other, Winslow's description includes biblical phrases referring to texts whose completion includes thanksgiving (particularly John 4:36 and Psalm 33). Winslow's contemporaries, unlike modern archaeologists, caught the meaning of the full texts to which he alluded. They knew their Bible.

But Deetz's assertion that there was no thanksgiving in 1621 is repeated in numerous websites. Often authors explain that what took place was so unlike later Puritan thanksgivings that it couldn't have been a true thanksgiving (usually citing, for the definition of what that would have been, William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1895), a book whose title alone seems to have inspired the common web article notion that in New England people fasted as an _expression of thanksgiving). For example, in "Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving,' Rick Shenkman announces that Thanksgiving was not about religion.

Had it been, he says, "the Pilgrims never would have invited the Indians to join them. Besides, the Pilgrims would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event. Indeed, what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival. Actual 'Thanksgivings' were religious affairs; everybody spent the day praying. Incidentally, these Pilgrim Thanksgivings occurred at different times of the year, not just in November."

Responding to this in reverse order: (1) that Thanksgivings were not limited to November does not mean that the first one held by the colonists in Plymouth (which incidentally was presumably in September or early October) was not a thanksgiving. (2) The modern idea that in a religious thanksgiving "everyone spent the day praying" is inconsistent with the only description of the specific activities of a definitely identified thanksgiving day in early Plymouth Colony - the thanksgiving held in Scituate in 1636 when a religious service was followed by feasting. (See my book The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts (Boston: NEHGS, 2001), vol. 3, p. 513.) (3) That "what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival" (as if that meant it could not have been a thanksgiving) repeats Deetz's incorrect opinion that an English harvest festival was non-religious or even irreligious. (4) That the Pilgrims "would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event" presumes a narrow definition of what a true religious event was before arriving through circular argument at a denial that what the Pilgrims did was such an event, because it differed from the axiomatic definition. (Ever been to a midwestern church picnic? Did tossing horseshoes and playing softball make it non-religious?) (5) As is repeatedly demonstrated by the writings of the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson, the Pilgrims attempted to pattern their religious activities according to biblical precedent. The precedent for a harvest festival was the Old Testament Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkoth (Deut. 16: 13-14). This harvest festival (as described in the 1560 Geneva translation of the Bible, used by the Pilgrims) was established to last "seuen daies, when thou hast gathered in thy corne, and thy wine. And thou shalt reioyce in thy feast, thou, and they sonne, and thy daughter, and thy servant, and thy maid, and the Levite and the stranger, and the fatherles, and the widow, that are within thy gates." The biblical injunction to include the "stranger" probably accounts for the Pilgrims' inviting their Native neighbors to rejoice with them, although Winslow does not explicitly say anything about invitation. Besides Sukkoth, the Pilgrims' experience of a Reformed Protestant thanksgiving every year in Leiden probably contributed to what they considered appropriate. Leiden's October 3 festivities commemorated the lifting of the Siege of Leiden in 1574, when half the town had died (an obvious parallel with the experience of the Pilgrims in the winter of 1620-21). Lasting ten days, the first Leiden event was a religious service of thanksgiving and prayer, followed by festivities that included meals, military exercises, games, and a free fair. To summarize, the common assumption that the Pilgrims' 1621 event should be judged against the forms taken by later Puritan thanksgivings - whether or not those are even correctly understood - overlooks the circumstance that the Pilgrims did not have those precedents when they attempted something new, intentionally based not on old English tradition but on biblical and Reformed example.

Shenkman has not invented these views. Attempts to be accurate frequently make the same assumptions. For example, the History Channel states that, "the colonists didn't even call the day Thanksgiving. To them, a thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific event, such as the winning of a battle. On such a religious day, the types of recreational activities that the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians participated in during the 1621 harvest feast - dancing, singing secular songs, playing games - wouldn't have been allowed. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims minds."

The identical text is copied without credit on the webpage of the International Student & Scholar Programs of Emory University:

It's worth pointing out that Winslow says nothing about "dancing, singing secular songs, [or] playing games." Those might be intended among Winslow's general term "recreations," but to specify and cite them as proof that the Pilgrims' day was "a secular celebration" is over-reaching.

Thanking Whom?

Assuming the nature of the festival was non-religious, some sites proclaim that there was a thanksgiving, but that the Pilgrims were not thanking God. Instead they were thanking the Indians for the help that had contributed to the colonists� survival during the first year. For example, "Rumela Web" says, "The Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock held their Thanksgiving in 1621 as a three day 'thank you' celebration to the leaders of the Wampanoag Indian tribe and their families for teaching them the survival skills they needed to make it in the New World."

A site that provides Thanksgiving Day recipes and menus says, "The Pilgrims invited the Native Americans to a feast to thank them for all they had learned."

Another site [member account required] provides a psychological analysis: "Not only was this festival a way to thank the Wampanoag, but it also served to boost the morale of the remaining settlers."

Such redirection of the thanks is consistent with the modern assessment expressed in "The Truth about the First Thanksgiving," by James Loewen, "Settlement proceeded, not with God's help, but with the Indians'."

We think the Pilgrims should have thanked the Indians. Nonetheless, while most modern historians explain events without dependence on providential intervention, it is still inaccurate to bend the evidence to suggest that the Pilgrims' attitude was not predominantly providential, and did not result in thanks to God for help received from the Indians.

Bending evidence, plus inventing details found in no historical source, is not a monopoly of the secular interpretation. For example, Kathryn Capoccia's online Sunday School lesson, "American Thanksgiving Celebrations," displays an incredibly imaginative disregard for historical evidence:

"Two weeks before the celebration was to take place a proclamation was issued stating that a harvest festival was to be held, which would be preceded by a special religious service and would be open to both Separatist church members and nonmembers. Everyone was urged to publicly offer gratitude for God's provision. The invitation was also extended to chief Massasoit." [...] "In response to the invitation Massasoit appeared in camp with three braves. Two days later he was joined by ninety other braves who provided five deer, a flock of geese, fifteen swordfish and small sweet apples for the celebration. The ceremonies began on the last morning of the festival [sic] with a worship service led by Elder Brewster. Then ground sports, such as foot racing and wrestling were held, as well as knife throwing contests. The settlers demonstrated musket drilling and shot a cannon volley. Then the feasting began in mid-afternoon at the fort. Everyone was seated in the open at long tables. At the end of the meal the settlers toasted the Indians as friends. The adults exchanged gifts with each other: Massasoit was given a bolt of cloth by Bradford, the warriors received cooking pots and colored beads in strings. The Indians reciprocated with a beaver cloak for Bradford and several freshly killed deer that could be smoked and stored for winter. The Indians presented the children with lumps of candy made from sugar extracted from wild beet plants. When the ceremonies were completed Elder Brewster quoted the Bible as a benediction, 'I thank my God upon every remembrance of you'". This level of fabrication is rare. It recalls the oratory of a century ago, that inspired the balloon-pricking emotions of countless would-be debunkers.

Colored Clothes, No Buckled Hats! My Goodness!

Similarly disconnected from Winslow's version are the common corrections to misconceptions about Pilgrim costume. Numerous sites let us know that the Pilgrims did not always wear black, and some even assert excitedly that it is important that we know about this discovery.

Timothy Walch, writing for History News Services, says, "Finally, it's important to dispel one last Thanksgiving myth — that the Pilgrims dressed in black and white clothing, wore pointed hats and starched bonnets and favored buckles on their shoes. It's true that they dressed in black on Sundays; but on most days, including the first Thanksgiving, they dressed in white, beige, black, green and brown." Surprisingly, Walch talks about buckles on shoes, instead of the common cartoon iconography of buckles on hats (itself an anachronism derived from a brief fashion in the 1790's). While Walch's point about color in workday clothing is true, I'm not sure it can come as a surprise to very many people. Nowadays most illustrations show Pilgrims in multi-colored clothing, often using photographs of the colorful actors at Plimoth Plantation. Even children now in their thirties will have learned about the Pilgrims from pictures showing varie-colored clothing. It wasn't always that way (cheaper books once were restricted to monochrome illustrations), but none of the websites gives a good explanation of the origin of the stereotype - the error is paraded simply as yet another example of inherited ignorance.

Only one genuine portrait of a Pilgrim exists - that of Edward Winslow (now in Pilgrim Hall Museum). Painted in 1651 in London, where Winslow acted as a diplomat representing the interests of New England colonies before various government committees, it shows him dressed appropriately in the very expensive black formal wear that most Pilgrims could not afford. From his portrait, as well as from other 17th-century portraits (that tended to show rich people) history painters of the early 19th century derived some ideas of costume. But they did not restrict their research to portraits of the rich, they also looked at pictures of common people in Dutch genre paintings. In romantic visions of historical scenes, the 19th-century history painters showed Pilgrim leaders in black, but others in a variety of colors. None of the dozen or so history paintings on Pilgrim themes at Pilgrim Hall Museum (the foremost collection) shows the Pilgrims uniformly in black - most wear scarlet, russet, green, ochre, grey, blue, or brown.

However, 19th century Americans became familiar with the Pilgrims through black and white stereoptype engravings, not paintings. At the same time, black clothing had become cheaper to produce and was expected for Sunday-best attire, not just among the wealthy. It was easy to imagine that the Pilgrim leaders as seen in black-and-white engravings were dressed in a way that was nearly familiar.

And, yes, they did call themselves "Pilgrims."

Almost as frequent as remarks about the color of their clothes are the website assertions that these colonists did not call themselves "Pilgrims." James Loewen, in "The Truth About the First Thanksgiving," writes that "no one even called them 'Pilgrims' until the 1870s."

This sort of belief is derived from a common misconception that because the manuscript of William Bradford's journal "Of Plymouth Plantation" was lost from the late 18th until the mid 19th century, no one was familiar, until the rediscovery, with his famous phrase, "They knew they were Pilgrims." The discovery of that phrase is thought to have appealed strongly to the Victorian imagination and to have led to the term "Pilgrims" as a designation for the Plymouth colonists. Bradford, however, was not the first to apply the name in print to these colonists - that was Robert Cushman in 1622 (in the book now called Mourt's Relation). Bradford's own words were excerpted and published by Nathaniel Morton in New England's Memorial, first printed in 1669 (and reprinted in 1721, 1772, and twice in 1826). The term Pilgrim, never forgotten, was used repeatedly in the later 18th century and throughout the 19th century, at celebrations in Plymouth that attracted attention throughout New England if not farther. If Mr. Loewen thinks the word "Pilgrim" was not applied to these people before the 1870's, one wonders what he thinks the local worthies of Plymouth were doing when in 1820 they founded the Pilgrim Society.

The Plymouth colonists considered themselves and all other earnest Christians to be on an earthly pilgrimage to a heavenly goal. Most of them were serious about their faith and puzzled by the presence among them of a few who demonstratively were not. Referring to themselves in that context they used the New Testament image expressed in print by Robert Cushman in 1622: "But now we are all in all places strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners [...]" The full Bible citation, which these people knew and recognized as a text that gave re-assuring self-identification, was this (Hebrews 11:13-16, Geneva translation, 1560):

"All these dyed in the faith, and receiued not the promises, but sawe them a farre of[f], and beleued them, and receiued them thankefully, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrimes on the earth. For they that say suche things, declare plainely that they seke a countrey. And if they had bene mindeful of that countrey, from whence they came out, they had leasure to haue returned. But now they desire a better, that is an heauenlie: wherefore God is not ashamed of them to be called their God: for he hathe prepared for them a citie."

The foregoing unifying phrase - strangers and pilgrims on the earth - is misunderstood as a dichotomy in George Willison's book Saints and Strangers (New York: Reynall & Hitchcock, 1945). Willison�s Hegelian analysis of Pilgrim history as a conflict between religious fanatics he calls "saints" and disinterested, economically motivated opponents to them, whom he identifies as "strangers," has become a rarely questioned presumed truth, never doubted on the internet. It is basic to Willison's dismissive interpretation of the Mayflower Compact as an instrument of minority control. For Willison, the dialectical tension was resolved by a happy synthesis that bore similarities to the democratic triumph of the American common man over tyranny at the end of World War II. Willison was speaking to people who saw themselves in his description of the Pilgrims, as people who "were valiantly engaged [...] in a desperate struggle for a better order of things, for a more generous measure of freedom for all men, for a higher and nobler conception of life based upon recognition of the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual." Stirring words, they introduce Willison�s description of the process of conflict that was for him the meaning of being a Pilgrim.

For the Pilgrims themselves, in specific contexts other identifying terms were useful. In their application to move to Leiden, they said they were members of the Christian Reformed religion - thus indicating that they were the sort of people Leiden wanted as immigrants. Distinguishing themselves from Puritans who stayed in the Church of England, they called themselves Separatists. In New England, for legal purposes connected with rights to distribution of the common property and land, the colonists referred to anyone who had arrived before the 1627 division as "Old Comers" or "First Comers." Their general self-identification, however, was "pilgrims" in the New Testament sense. Their first use of the term in America is seen in the name given the first child born in the colony - Peregrine White. "Peregrine" comes from the Latin peregrinus meaning "pilgrim" or "stranger."

[1]Mourt's Relation, published in cooperation with Plimoth Plantation by Applewood Books, Bedford MA, Edited by Dwight B. Heath from the original text of 1622 and copyright 1963 by Dwight B. Heath, p. 82.

[2]Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 by William Bradford. A new edition by Samuel Eliot Morison; First published Sept. 19, 1952; 21st printing Jan. 2001, p. 90.

Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 2

The Fake Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1623

The invented secular harvest festival augmented by the redirection of thanks towards the Indians and the assertion that "Pilgrims" was a name not used by the colonists, has become widely accepted. What's to be done? Fake it! Instead of simply pointing out that this version of the past fails to account for the Pilgrims' habitual piety and is thoroughly inconsistent with the documentary evidence, someone has felt it necessary to invent a document that replaces the 1621 purported non-thanksgiving with a celebration that does include all the sentiments and specifications that Winslow's description lacks. Many websites whose authors would like to maintain an emphasis on the Pilgrims' religious attitudes to support their own, quite different convictions now tell a fake story instead.

The cute text, widely circulated on internet sites (or excerpted, for example), is: "William Bradford's Thanksgiving Proclamation (1623)

Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings.

— William Bradford Ye Governor of Ye Colony"

["Ravages of the savages" indeed! Ye, ye, ye, ye!]

This is demonstrably spurious, as my friend Jim Baker pointed out in 1999. His remarks are repeated by various people - usually without credit to Baker - Dennis Rupert, for example.

The false proclamation does not appear in any 17th-century source - not in Bradford, not in Winslow, not in Morton's New England's Memorial, not anywhere. Internal evidence suggests it is a 20th-century fraud. No mention of Plymouth Rock exists before it was pointed out in the mid-18th century, and the term "great Father" (for God) is a 19th-century romantic quasi-Native term that Bradford never used in his acknowledged writings. There are further anachronisms. For example, in 1623 there was no pastor in Plymouth Colony. Pastor John Robinson was still in Leiden, so services were led by the deacon, Elder William Brewster. William Bradford never referred to himself as "your magistrate" in years when he was governor. Bradford dated documents "in the year of our Lord" - sometimes adding the year of the monarch's reign. He never referred to landing on Plymouth Rock (not even as "Pilgrim Rock") and certainly did not use it as a date-base. The Pilgrims did not imagine themselves as seeking "freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience." They wanted freedom to worship according to their interpretation of biblical commands, which they thought was exclusively correct - and correct externally to any dictates of their own consciences. Finally, it's amusing that the 29th of November 1623 (Old Style) was not a Thursday but a Saturday (according to the tables in H. Grotefend's Taschenbuch der Zeitrechnung des Deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (ed. Th. Ulrich, Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1960).

While it is often impossible to locate the ancient origin of such internet myths, this fraud is relatively recent. Samuel Eliot Morison was unaware of it when editing Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Knopf, 1952); Eugene Aubrey Stratton does not mention it in his Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986). I have not discovered whether it appears anywhere before it made its way into William J. Federer's America's God and Country: An Encyclopedia of Quotations (Coppel, TX: Fame, 1994) and the source Federer gives - David Barton's The Myth of Separation (Aledo TX: Wallbuilder Press, 1991), p. 86. The text has been dropped from recent editions of Barton's book, but that doesn't put an end to repetition of the nonsense, especially on internet sites. A request to David Barton for information on this remains unanswered. On Barton's historical inventiveness, see:

Rob Boston, "Sects, Lies and Videotape: Who Is David Barton, And Why Is He Saying Such Awful Things About Separation of Church And State?" (Originally published in Church & State, 46, Nr. 4, April 1993, pp. 8-12).

Rob Boston, "David Barton's 'Christian Nation' Myth Factory Admits Its Products Have Been Defective." (Originally published in Church & State, 49, No. 7, July/August 1996, pp. 11-13).

Jim Allison, "An Index to Factual Information About David Barton And His Books".

Nicholas P. Miller, "Wallbuilders or Mythbuilders".

That people stressing the religious attitude of the Pilgrims use this invented 1623 "Thanksgiving Proclamation" is ironic. They might have been satisfied with the truth. The 1621 event did express the Pilgrims' religious attitude of thankfulness for God's providence and therefore should be adequate for their modern purposes. Moreover, in the summer of 1623 the Pilgrims held another special day of thanksgiving to God when they considered that their prayers for rain were answered, a drought ended, and their crops were saved. It wasn't in November and no stirring proclamation is preserved. Yet the "secular" interpretive ignorance that denies that the 1621 event was a thanksgiving had triumphed to the extent that someone from among the fundamentally disgruntled must have thought it clever to fight back. It is another question entirely, what the relation of the Pilgrims' religious attitude bears to modern understanding, that would make it urgent to use faked evidence to prove the Pilgrims were thanking God. Obviously the Pilgrims were religious - but what has this to do with anything other than an honest understanding of the past? Their religiosity scarcely provides support for any particular doctrinal viewpoint now; and no one is likely to become religious because it has been proven that the Pilgrims were.

Bartonis interest is to paint a picture of America as a particular sort of Christian nation since the beginning of its colonization. To make the Pilgrims even more religious than is indicated by their own words is dishonest. Removing the spurious quotation is a commendable step in the right direction. Considering that the Pilgrims interpreted their religion to mean that the Christian community bore responsibility to treat the Indians with respect and legal equality (see my book Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1699 (Boston: NEHGS, 2002)); noticing that the Pilgrims' laws proclaim that the community bore responsibility for the care of widows, orphans, the poor, and the infirm; and discovering that the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson argued in favor of cautious religious toleration and asserted that the church had no special authority over the magistrate, which he said was required to deal equitably with non-believers as well as believers, I'd be happy to see such Christian principles applied to modern America. Good luck to Mr. Barton and his colleagues in ensuring this happens!

The Libertarian's First Thanksgiving

Fred E. Foldvary has picked up the false 1623 date eagerly and given it a different twist. "The rains came and the harvest was saved. It is logical to surmise that the Pilgrims saw this as a sign that God blessed their new economic system, because Governor Bradford proclaimed November 29, 1623, as a Day of Thanksgiving." That's the opinion of Foldvary, Editor (1998) of The Progress Report and Lecturer in Economics, Santa Clara University.

So - the Pilgrims weren't thankful to God for a bounteous harvest as such, nor were they expressing gratitude to the Indians for help received. They were congratulating themselves on the discovery of the benefits of individualist capitalism!

The Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1999 published Richard J. Maybury's article "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax" (originally seen in The Free Market, November, 1985). Maybury (self-styled business and economic analyst) wants to correct our idealized view of the Pilgrims: "[T]he harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves." [...] "they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food." [...] "The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first 'Thanksgiving' was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men." Then it all changed: "in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines." [...] "Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful." [...] "Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them." So there you have it - neither God's providence nor helpful Indians, just materialistic private profit.

The theme recurs in numerous imitative articles online. In 2004, Gary M. Galles, professor of economics at Pepperdine University, ended his praise of Pilgrim property with a political admonition: "Though we have incomparably more than they did, we can learn much from their 'way of thanksgiving.' But we should also remember that our material blessings are the fruits of America's system of private-property rights and the liberties they ensure, including the freedom to choose our employment and spend money as we see fit. Those rights are under constant assault today, from limits on people's ability to contract as they wish, especially in labor relationships, to abuses of government's eminent domain." Robert Sheridan, who teaches constitutional law at the San Francisco Law School, quotes the full text (from the San Francisco Chronicle) and expertly dissects Galles' underlying assumptions about modern society, in his own article "Thanksgiving Nonsense and Propaganda".

A slightly abbreviated version of Galles' remarks is published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

The Independent Institute's website has a similar article that was published for Thanksgiving in 2004 in the Charlotte Observer and in the San Diego Union-Tribune. "The economic incentives provided by private competitive markets where people are left free to make their own choices make bountiful feasts possible," says Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at San Jose State University. "That's the real lesson of Thanksgiving."

Elaborating on Maybury's view of Thanksgiving, Newsmax columnist Geoff Metcalf becomes even more definite: "[A]n economic system which grants the lazy and the shiftless some 'right' to prosper off the looted fruits of another man's labor, under the guise of enforced 'compassion,' will inevitably descend into envy, theft, squalor, and starvation. Though many would still incrementally impose on us some new variant of the 'noble socialist experiment,' this is still at heart a free country with a bedrock respect for the sanctity of private property - and a land bounteous precisely because it's free. It's for that we give thanks - the corn and beans and turkey serving as mere symbols of that true and underlying blessing - on the fourth Thursday of each November."

True history? Does it make any difference? As Kamensky says, "It's true to its purposes."

For the purposes of historical accuracy, nevertheless, I think it's worth mentioning that the Pilgrims' initial system of working the land by changing field assignments each year had nothing at all to do with socialism - it was the consequence of an early and unrestrained form of capitalism whereby the colony, its products, and the colonists' productive labor were absolutely and entirely mortgaged to the London investors, whose loans had to be paid off before any of the Pilgrim colonists could own free-hold property. The colony as a whole and its colonists were indentured. Their contract is now lost; probably it was among the missing first 338 pages of William Bradford's letter-book. The shift away from rotating field assignments did not result in private property, just a modification of the organization of the indentured labor. Private real property came for these colonists in 1627 when a small group among the colonists - the "Purchasers" - bought the debt and the responsibility to pay it off. A temporary monopoly on the fur trade was reserved to them as compensation for their higher personal responsibility and financial exposure.

A Cornucopia of Grievances

So if Thanksgiving was not about the discovery of private property's profitability, not about help offered to the colonists by the Wampanoag Indians, not about God's providence - what was it?

"The first day of thanksgiving took place in 1637 amidst the war against the Pequots. 700 men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe were gathered for their annual green corn dance on what is now Groton, Connecticut. Dutch and English mercenaries surrounded the camp and proceeded to shoot, stab, butcher and burn alive all 700 people. The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony held a feast in celebration and the governor declared 'a day of thanksgiving.' In the ensuing madness of the Indian extermination, natives were scalped, burned, mutilated and sold into slavery, and a feast was held in celebration every time a successful massacre took place. The killing frenzy got so bad that even the Churches of Manhattan announced a day of 'thanksgiving' to celebrate victory over the 'heathen savages,' and many celebrated by kicking the severed heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls." So says Tristam Ahtone, at 13Moon.com. There were preliminary events before this celebration of atrocity, according to Ahtone. Although the 1621 harvest festival in Plymouth was not in his opinion a thanksgiving, he informs us that "Two years later the English invited a number of tribes to a feast 'symbolizing eternal friendship.' The English offered food and drink, and two hundred Indians dropped dead from unknown poison." This echoes the words of James Loewen (quoted by Jackie Alan Giuliano in "Give Thanks - Un-Turkey Truths"): "The British offered a toast 'symbolizing eternal friendship,' whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison." Loewen places this event in Virginia.

Ahtone's remarks connecting the "First Thanksgiving" with the Pequot War are frequently copied or excerpted, with slight variations. Sometimes it's not Massachusetts Bay responsible, but the Pilgrims. "The next day, the English governor William Bradford declared 'a day of Thanksgiving', thanking God that they had eliminated the Indians, opening Pequot land for white settlement." That proclamation was repeated each year for the next century." This was posted by "Ecuanduero" on the Discovery Channel.com, in 2003.

William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians, A Hidden Heritage, writes that, "In 1637 Governor Bradford, who saw his colonists locked in mortal combat with dangerous Native Americans, ordered his militia to conduct a night attack on the sleeping men women and children of a Pequot Indian village. To Bradford, a devout Christian, the massacre was imbued with religious meaning."

Clearly we should realize that these people were not nice, but just exactly how bad? "Not even Charles Manson and Jim Jones combined could compare with that murderous Doomsday cult — the Pilgrims," says a website article called "The Pilgrims, Children of the Devil: Puritan Doomsday Cult Plunders Paradise." The site calls itself the Common Sense Almanac, Progressive Pages (and claims to be a project of the Center for Media and Democracy).

The story forms the foundation for stirring generalizations. "It is a serious mistake to practice holidays based on a false history," one site admonishes us. "The young people find out on their own that they are involved in a lie, and it makes them rage with fury and contempt. [...]It should surprise no one that after raising children honoring the memory of the Pilgrim fathers, that they grow up to hate freedom as much as the Forefathers did. It should surprise no one that a society that worships the Pilgrims — who ruthlessly scalped the Indians (teaching them how to do it), who indiscriminately torched Indian villages, and murdered their women, children and elders in the precursors of total war, and holocaust — should produce children who grow up to join street gangs, and who seek the experience of murdering other human beings for kicks."

The story told by Ahtone, Katz, and others is derived from a report that surfaced in the 1980's. "According to William B. Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, the first official Thanksgiving Day commemorated the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children during one of their religious ceremonies. [...]"

This version in First Nations News is from an article by Karen Gullo that first appeared in Vegetarian Times, 1982. Newell's material is quoted over and over. Newell, who is described in one site as having degrees from two universities [wow! Fancy that!], was convinced about the solidity of his research: ""My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay." http://www.s6k.com/real/thankstaking.htm

What's not authentic is the claim that William Newell was head of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, whose faculty cannot recall him at all. When the department was founded in 1971, Newell was 79 years old. See the letter by department chair Jocelyn Linnekin. And what is completely untrue is the idea that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony participated in the 1637 Pequot massacre. Although asked to send military assistance, the Plymouth court did not respond until two weeks after the slaughter had been carried out by a mixed force of soldiers from Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, and the Narragansett tribe (no "Dutch and English mercenaries"). As Bradford himself reports, the Pilgrims were told their aid was too little, too late; they could stay home. (See my book,

Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England's First International Diplomat (Boston: NEHGS, 2004), pp. 164-168.)

Is this important? Or is the lie "true to its purposes"?

Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce Part 3

The National Day of Mourning

The purposes can best be understood as fitting in with the description of the Pilgrims that animates the so-called National Day of Mourning sponsored by the United American Indians of New England. "The pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims)" [yes, that again] "did not come here seeking religious freedom; they already had that in Holland. They came here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when they arrived on Cape Cod — before they even made it to Plymouth — was to rob Wampanoag graves at Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians' winter provisions of corn and beans as they were able to carry. [...] The first official "Day of Thanksgiving" was proclaimed in 1637 by Governor Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who had gone to Mystic Connecticut to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children, and men."

This characterization of the Pilgrims was written in 2003 by UAINE leaders Mahtowin Munro and Mooanum James, whose father Frank James (Wamsutta) made the 1970 protest speech that started the Day of Mourning at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Wamsutta spoke out against decades of inequality in words historically vague and not entirely accurate. He clearly announced the continued presence of Wampanoag Indians to a society that he thought had too often treated them as bygone relics. But his measured anger at real injustice bore little of the demonizing divisiveness championed by UAINE in later years.

From the repetition of Mahtowin Munro's and Mooanum James' remarks in countless websites associated with Native American interests, it would appear that the Wampanoag tribes consider themselves best represented by the UAINE protests. The words of Russell Peters published by Pilgrim Hall Museum contradict this.

Russell Peters, A Wampanoag leader, died in 2002. Who was he? "Mr. Peters [M.A., Harvard] has been involved in Native American issues at a state, local and national level. He [was] the President of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1976 to 1984, a member of the Harvard Peabody Museum Native American Repatriation Committee, a member of the White House Conference on Federal Recognition in 1995 and 1996, a board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, a board member of the Pilgrim Society, and the author of Wampanoags of Mashpee (Nimrod Press), Clambake (Lerner Publications), and Regalia (Sundance Press)." Russell Peters expressed regret at the deterioration of the social potential of the Day of Mourning. "While the day of mourning has served to focus attention on past injustice to the Native American cause, it has, in recent years, been orchestrated by a group calling themselves the United American Indians of New England. This group has tenuous ties to any of the local tribes, and is composed primarily of non-Indians. To date, they have refused several invitations to meet with the Wampanoag Indian tribal councils in Mashpee or in Gay Head. Once again, we, as Wampanoags, find our voices and concerns cast aside in the activities surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday in Plymouth, this time, ironically, by a group purporting to represent our interests."

The 1970 event at which Wamsutta spoke was organized by the American Indian Movement, whose leader Russell Means wrote, in his autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread (with Marvin J. Wolf, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), "Americans today believe that Thanksgiving celebrates a bountiful harvest, but that is not so. By 1970, the Wampanoag had turned up a copy of a Thanksgiving proclamation made by the governor to the colony. The text revealed the ugly truth: After a colonial militia had returned from murdering the men, women, and children of an Indian village, the governor proclaimed a holiday and feast to give thanks for the massacre. He also encouraged other colonies to do likewise - in other words, every autumn after the crops are in, go kill Indians and celebrate your murders with a feast. In November 1970, their descendants returned to Plymouth to publicize the true story of Thanksgiving and, along with about two hundred other Indians from around the country, to observe a national day of Indian mourning."

One of the odder results of the "Day of Mourning" is the appearance in a couple of Thanksgiving Day sermons of the unfounded claim that some Pilgrims considered having a day of mourning to commemorate those who had died the previous winter, but that instead they chose to thank God for their continued preservation. This colonization of the protest rhetoric can be seen at Presbyterian Warren [excerpted at] Trinity Sermons.

Genocide

That's a mild contrast to Mitchel Cohen's "Why I Hate Thanksgiving" (2003), now re-duplicated incessantly. "First, the genocide. Then the suppression of all discussion about it. What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this 'holyday' commemorates? [...] all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor. Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. [...] I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to [is] the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika � not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and ... they will be the new Indians." See, for some sanity, Guenter Lewy's "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?"

Mr. Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix," the national newspaper of the Greens/Greens Party USA. He's annoyed. (Who wouldn't be - loving nature and living in Brooklyn?) He's also a romantic with an ideal view of Natives living in a pristine environment, rather like the peaceful, ecologically wonderful place imagined by Plimoth Plantation's Anthony Pollard (known as Nanepashemet). "The Wampanoag way of life fostered a harmonious relationship between the People and their natural environment, both physical and spiritual. [...] fighting was just part of the search for harmony when conditions had become intolerable or justice was denied."

Lies My Teacher�s Telling Me Now

The annual clamor of the aggrieved finds significant expression in website materials aimed at providing school teachers with a balanced (meaning non-colonial) view of Thanksgiving. One of the most important and widely copied articles is an introduction to "Teaching About Thanksgiving" written by Chuck Larson of the Tacoma School District.

Originally issued in 1986 by the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Washington, "Teaching About Thanksgiving" is no longer available from that State. It continues to be distributed by the Fourth World Documentation Project and the Center for World Indigenous Studies, among others. I hope it has been withdrawn by the state in response to the withering criticism it received from Caleb Johnson, whose Mayflower topics website presents much documentary material about the Pilgrims.

"The author of the 'Fourth World Documentation Project' lesson plan on Thanksgiving, published all over the internet as well as distributed in printed form, claims to have a strong background in history," writes Johnson. "But nearly every sentence of the entire lesson plan has a significant factual error, or is simply story-telling (making up stories and details to fit within a set framework of given historical facts)." Johnson's detailed, devastating line-by-line corrections attracted the attention of the New York Times. I have seen only one website for teachers that carries the Larson material and that also includes a reference to Johnson's work, and then only as if to provide an alternative to the nonsense they continue to present as the main material. But Johnson definitively destroyed the credibility of the lesson plan - why keep on providing it? Are the lies true to some purpose?

Mentioning that Johnson's work is worth looking at is, nonetheless, at least more generous than the ad hominem attack on Johnson that was mounted by Jamie McKenzie of the Bellingham, Washington, School District.

McKenzie complained in 1996 that Caleb Johnson did not list his own academic credentials that would suggest his website should be considered authoritative. Johnson had, after all, cast doubt on the value of Larson's "strong background in history." McKenzie, on the other hand, did not take the time to compare Johnson's careful quotations of source materials with the slipshod work of his academically qualified colleague down in Tacoma. (Although Johnson's essays are typically not footnoted, having only a source list at the end, Johnson has taken the trouble to re-publish the texts of many of the original documents on his site.) But McKenzie's major complaint in 1996 was that the internet in general did not provide much information about Thanksgiving, and that scholars with credentials were not creating the sites. There's certainly more now, and some of it is provided by professors. If one has doubts about the professor of anthropology William B. Newell, who's been forgotten by the University of Connecticut, there's the University of Colorado's Professor of Ethnic Studies, Ward Churchill, asking us, "what is it we're supposed to be so thankful for? Does anyone really expect us to give thanks for the fact that soon after the Pilgrim Fathers regained their strength, they set out to dispossess and exterminate the very Indians who had fed them that first winter? Are we to express our gratitude for the colonists' 1637 massacre of the Pequots at Mystic, Conn., or their rhetoric justifying the butchery by comparing Indians to 'rats and mice and swarms of lice'"?

And there's the late Professor James Deetz, who thought Thanksgiving only became associated with the Pilgrims around 1900, evidently disregarding the implications of Winslow Homer's famous Thanksgiving Day illustrations in Harper's Weekly, Nov. 27, 1858, Dec. 1, 1860, Nov. 29, 1862, and Dec. 3, 1864, as well as Thomas Nast's "Thanksgiving Day, 1863" (published as a double-page center illustration in Harper's Weekly, Dec. 5, 1863). Nast includes a vignette in the lower right corner labelled "country," whose main praying figure is recognizably derived from the representation of the Pilgrims' minister John Robinson in Robert Weir's painting "The Embarkation of the Pilgrims," completed in 1843 in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington.

Despite its filiopietistic motivations, the huge desert of misinformation has left Caleb Johnson's work as one of a small number of oases of calm study, equalling the level of the so-called Plymouth Colony Archive Project established by James Deetz, Patricia Scott Deetz, and Christopher Fennell (which, however, despite valuable information about the colony, says nothing significant about Thanksgiving).

McKenzie also objects to Johnson�s "failing to mention some of the information which other sites provide about the Pilgrims taking the Native American corn and digging up and taking things from grave sites." In fact, Johnson publishes all the evidence there is about those issues. Because no evidence supports the inflated claims, McKenzie thinks that the Pilgrims have been "sanitized."

Unsanitized would be the word for Brenda Francis's version. She says that she "read on Binghamton University's website that the Pilgrims were starving and even went so far to dig up some remains of the Wampanoag people and eat them as a means to survival."

This directly contradicts William Bradford, who, after repeating the second-hand rumor that some Spanish colonists had been reduced to eating "dogs, toads, and dead men," proclaims that "From these extremities the Lord in his goodness kept these his people [the Pilgrims], and in their great wants preserved both their lives and healths; let his name have the praise." (Bradford's History "Of Plimoth Plantation" (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1901), p. 165: [subscribers].

The Binghamton site that is Brenda Francis' source has a student newspaper article (Nov. 21, 2003) by Rachel Kalina, who relays that the "Pilgrims were able to survive their first winter partially because of guidance by the natives and because they dug up the deceased Wampanoags to eat the corn offerings in the graves." That's not quite the same as necro-cannibalism.

Quoting from James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 91, the teacher of a course in "Debunking and Dissent" - Colby Glass of Palo Alto College (TX), maintains that "...the Pilgrims continued to rob graves for years."

There are three points of interest here: first, Winslow's description of examining graves (our only source of information) does not support these assertions; second, the corn found by the Pilgrims was not found in graves; third, I'm unaware of any evidence so far found to indicate that corn was included in graves on Cape Cod at all. Let alone that the Pilgrims were cannibals!

In the book now called Mourt's Relation, Edward Winslow wrote that the Pilgrims, exploring, found a path that took them to "certain heaps of sand, one whereof was covered with old mats, and had a wooden thing like a mortar whelmed on the top of it, and an earthen pot laid in a little hole at the end thereof. We, musing what it might be, digged and found a bow, and, as we thought, arrows, but they were rotten. We supposed there were many other things, but because we deemed them graves, we put in the bow again and made it up as it was, and left the rest untouched, because we thought it would be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchres." Passing through several fields recently tended, they came upon a house, from which they removed a European ship's kettle. Next to the house was a heap of sand, which when excavated yielded two baskets filled with Indian corn. One contained thirty six ears, "some yellow, and some red, and others mixed with blue [...] The basket was round, and narrow at the top; it held about three or four bushels." Filling the kettle with loose corn, two of the Pilgrims suspended it on a stick and carried it away. The rest of the corn they re-buried. Two or three days later, they returned for the remaining corn, also finding and taking some beans and more corn, totaling around ten bushels. The following morning they found a much larger mound, covered with boards. It turned out to be the grave of a man with blond hair, whose shroud was a "sailor's canvas cassock" and who was wearing a "pair of cloth breeches." The body was accompanied by a "knife, a packneedle, and two or three iron things." Clearly this was the body of a European. An infant's body was buried together with this man. Reburying the bodies (as was customary in Europe), they continued to look for corn but found nothing else but graves, which, considering their desire not to "ransack their sepulchres," they presumably did not disturb once it was clear the mounds did not contain baskets of corn. Having learned to recognize graves, three days later the Pilgrims avoided disturbing a cemetery. They "found a burying place, one part whereof was encompassed with a large palisade, like a churchyard [...] Within it was full of graves [...] yet we digged none of them up, but only viewed them and went our way." Mourt's Relation (1622) has been republished numerous times. Caleb Johnson has made it available online at Mayflower History.com.

Winslow's words are our only evidence. Nothing impels us to doubt his information that the Pilgrims opened the grave of a European sailor and his child, reburying them after removing from the grave a few items that to a European would not have been considered grave offerings having any symbolic significance. The Pilgrims exhibited memorable sensitivity in refraining from disturbing Indian graves, once they learned to recognize them. They did not dig up graves in order to eat corn buried as grave offerings. There is no indication they removed corn from any graves. The corn was found in baskets whose shape when packed in earth would result in domed pit spaces. There is nothing to support the idea that corn was placed in graves as offerings, although small gifts of corn have been found in graves excavated by archaeologists working hundreds of miles away (the American southwest and Peru, for example).

The amount the Pilgrims found in storage baskets - two or three bushels in the first, and three or four in the second - is a large, bulky quantity. From 1986-1991, I was Chief Curator of Plimoth Plantation. The collections at that time included all the archaeological material from excavations of burial sites in the Plymouth Colony area carried out by Harry Hornblower II and James Deetz, and others with whom they worked. I carried out a detailed examination of the thousands of items in the collections, specifically looking for corn - in hopes of having it studied scientifically so we could replicate the exact type of corn growing in the area in the early 17th century. Although some floral remains had been saved from excavations that included burial sites, there was no corn, not a single kernel. Had it been the practice to bury bushels of corn as grave offerings, surely there would have been some in the materials carefully excavated from these ten Native burials. There was nothing. Neither was any discovery of corn recorded in the careful notebooks kept by Hornblower (there were no Deetz notebooks present, and no published reports). This absence is consistent with the absence of corn among grave goods from several Cape Cod Native burials, recently transferred to Native authorities for reburial, from the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.

Throughout the accounts of these discoveries of storage baskets of Indian corn, Winslow repeats the intention to try to meet the Indian owners and negotiate repayment for the corn that had been taken That was an intention to provide compensation for what the Pilgrims understood would be considered theft if no payment were made. (During the first year, Pilgrims stole corn; Indians stole abandoned tools.) Establishing that neither side would steal from the other was an important part of early negotiation between them. Attempts to locate the specific owner of the corn were ultimately successful and repayment was made (see Pilgrim Edward Winslow, p. 36).

In "Deconstructing the Myths of 'The First Thanksgiving,'" Judy Dow and Beverly Slapin contradict the documentary evidence. They base their comments largely on information provided to them by Margaret Bruchac, an "Abanaki scholar" working in collaboration with Plimoth Plantation's Wampanoag Indian Program. "There is no record that restitution was ever made for the stolen corn, and the Wampanoag did not soon forget the colonists� ransacking of Indian graves, including that of Massasoit's mother."

One may surmise that Bruchac was confused in making the reference to the grave of Massasoit's mother, which is undocumented. Probably what is meant is the removal later of two bearskin rugs from over the grave of the mother of Chickatabut, sachem of the Massachusetts (see my book Indian Deeds, p. 13). It is meretriciously clever, nonetheless, to turn Winslow's statement of respect for the Indians and their graves into a pronouncement about the Wampanoags' long memory of "the colonists' ransacking of Indian graves." The up-to-date construction of "memory" and "oral history" to fit the needs of current political concerns is blatant.

Dow and Slapin end their deconstruction with the remark that "As currently celebrated in this country, "Thanksgiving" is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship."

Alternatively, Russell Peters said, "The time is long overdue for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags to renew a meaningful dialogue about our past and look towards a more honest future."

Does it matter what of this is true? Was that the wrong question? Who do we want to be in the ever-changing Now? Intrepid demolishers of straw-man myths? Inventors of new myths to serve new political purposes? Historians?

#History #Thanksgiving #Religion #America

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kallio20ahsgov · 5 years

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Blog Post #2 Media Assessment of Issue

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/teen-vogue-back-to-school-climate-daniel-turner

S: Focuses on how Teen Vogue magazine in particular isn't promoting how to end climate change but instead is just promoting the political aspects of it. The magazine is only promoting things kids want to hear and are easy to do in order to end climate change.

A: This article was written by Daniel Turner on Fox News. Fox News is an extremely republican news casting site therefore articles including this one tend to face republican.

C: This article was published mid August. More recently climate change activism has been at its peak. This attracts many opposing articles to be written.

A: This source was created for a republican audience. This means that the article seemed to attack liberals and their view.

P: This article is subjective. His claim was that, “Just about everyone peddling a product is capitalizing on this lucrative period, including those selling political ideologies”. This means that he believes Teen Vogue was using climate change as a way to appeal to young audiences without promoting all sides to the story. I agree with his claim that Teen Vogue in particular is using climate activism to promote their company.

S: The author debunks many popular trends to end climate change. He tells of how many recycling methods do not work. He also tells of more powerful ways to make a difference. He also shows that these ways are very unappealing.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/climate-sunrise-debate-dnc-protest

S: Focuses on how although protesters are doing everything they can, we need millions of people to take to protesting as well as show on voting day to see change.

A: This article was written by Zahra Hirji from Buzzfeed News. Buzzfeed is a left sided news casting system which creates a bias in political views on the issue.

C: This article was published in early July. Climate change activism has been on the rise recently and has brought many people to protest leading o many articles to be written. Also, this time is also when extreme consequences from climate change could be seen in temperatures.

A: This article was written for a democratic audience because it was published on Buzzfeed News. It also calls for a spread of awareness and more debates.

P: This is a subjective article. The authors claim is that, although there may be many protesters bringing attention to the situation, the more awareness there is, the more likely change will be seen. I agree with this claim. The more people calling for something to happen, the more likely it is to happen. The more talk, both good and bad, the more attention to the cause.

S: The author uses the Sunrise Movement to show how many people are getting things done. She also uses examples of debates being had and coming up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/08/13/five-takeaways-posts-analysis-warming-climates-united-states/

S: This article was written to show what the Washington Post Analysis of climate change showed. It focuses on the takeaways from the findings.

A: This article was written by Chris Mooney from the Washington Post. The Washington Post news casting system is an unbiased provider of facts and information.

C: This article was written mid August just after an analysis of global warming came out. The article was written to provide takeaways from the findings.

A: This article was written for everyone to read. It was written from an unbiased perspective so that everyone could get the pure facts without any opinion being mixed in.

P: This was written in a neutral point of view. It gives pure facts of what was found and shows that urban sprawl may lead to global warming, but it is not the only cause. It defeats certain arguments and builds to others.

S: The evidence from this article was from the analysis done by the Washington Post. All facts that they used were taken from this analysis and therefore are all presumably correct.

-You can definitely pick out who is writing each of these articles and state their political standing on the issue. They all seem to believe that climate change is real though. The problem is they all see it in different levels of severity. The neutral article seems to show no opinion of severity and just states facts while the Fox News article is not too worried and the Buzz Feed article needed action immediately.

- I definitely agree with all articles in different ways. I would say I most identify with the neutral standing argument because i tend to just listen to facts. I dont have a very solid stance other than knowing there needs to be change. To me, it seems as though both sides want change, its just a matter of the amount of change.

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myvideosscripts-blog · 5 years

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ONISION'S ACCUSATIONS DEBUNKED + RECEIPTS

Hello everyone, and before you make a comment on the sound, consider not doing that and reading the description box first and I am aware that my videos are low quality. Please understand that this is what I do in my spare time, it's not my job and I don't have the kind of time Greg has to dedicate to my channels, I actually take care of my family. Thank you and remember to reach out on my social medias down below if you wish, just give me a little request! Let's begin (and if you already know everyone involved please just skip to the time stamp where I debunk Greg's accusations against Madison and Ayalla: 10:30

Greg has struck again. I have a few videos on the back burner because this dude just wants to dig himself a hole so deep, he's about to go straight through the earth's crust and hit the mantle. The video we are debunking today is Greg's attempt to smear those who are coming forward with accusations about how absolutely trash he is.

Before we dissect and debunk his video I think we should take a look at the history of each party involved. For the sake of continuity, I'll be referring to Kai (formerly known as Lainey and Taylor, and I think even Eli at one point) as Lainey and I will be using they/their pronouns. I also want to address comments I made about Lainey changing their mind on... everything, because they do. That's no excuse for me to question their gender and I deeply apologize for that. There's no excuse for that and I won't attempt to make one.

We'll start with the largest figure in all of this. Onision, also known as Greg and more recently "character" but because nothing out of his mouth is blatantly fact, nor opinion, nor joke, we'll refer to him by his biological given name, Greg. Remember how I said in my last Greg video regarding the allegations that he is both technical and metaphorical when it suits his narrative. Keep that in mind throughout this video. It's very important.

To keep things as brief as possible while also hitting the main points, Greg has always been problematic on youtube. These days he chalks it up to being a jokester and everyone else just not getting it. Sure, Greg. He has a history with younger girls and publicizing his relationships, and exploiting his "personal experiences" and those involved, whilst getting upset if the other party does the same, these are facts. Forums like lolcow and kiwifarms and Greg himself have documented this. Greg has also exploited his own drama, claiming to want to squash things to garner sympathy from his audiences and the skeptics among us. He has ALLEGEDLY rated inappropriate photos of underage girls on his forum... I'll be using that word, allegedly quite a bit in this video. He has allegedly coerced women into having sex with him. He has allegedly harassed women via text, phone call, twitter, video - women whom are either easy targets, like Eugenia Cooney who I've voiced my opinion on, Jaclyn Glenn whom is staying neutral and/or not voicing her opinion on the current situation (as of right now), Shiloh who was "too much to handle" but also was so underage at the time that he ALLEGEDLY drove her across the country so that he could legally consummate their relationship. Speaking of which, according to this 2017 twitter interaction, Greg seemingly replies to Billie saying "I'm not a liar or a criminal. I'd take 1 person like me over 100 like you any day. You got dumped, again, you can leave now." To which Ayalla, another big part of this, replies, "this coming from the man who told Billie to shave her head and get a tattoo that says, "I'm a liar" to prove herself". Thanks to tumblr I found the following screenshots. Shiloh said on her blogspot that shaving off the rest of her hair caused her to become depressed and that her femaleness had been stripped from her completely. In the next screenshot (which looks like a wiki article) it reads: "On June 30th, 2011, Shiloh uploaded a video titled "BALD!!!" to one of her channels to announce her newly full shaved head. Throughout the rest of their relationship she dyed her short hair different colors and wore wigs. This did not cause controversy until later when Shiloh revealed more of her side of the relationship on her tumblr. She claims that Greg forced her to shave her head and told her, "I want you to shave your head cause you're a good bitch." She says he took her into the bathroom and shaved her head. She says she felt ugly and de-feminized because of it. Could it be a coincidence? Sure, suuure. There are a plethora of details I could go into to make this an hour long video to absolute kill my computer, but rather than doing that, just comment with anything you'd like me to cover and I'll do my best to do that. Until then, explore the rabbit hole that the internet has to offer about this.

Next, let's explore Lainey. Lainey has been at the center of quite a few controversies mostly due to their proximity to Greg. Lainey is 24 years old and claims that Greg and them started dating February 7th 2012, however the article on their wikia page, states that they were married in November 2011, so that's a little conflicting. That would mean they married Greg when they were around 16 years old and Greg was 25. When they met, Lainey had a striking resemblance to Shane Dawson, a particular obsession of Greg's, however that could be attributed to Lainey's scene/emo phase... and not any pressure from Greg to look like a guy he kissed and has since made numerous accusations about. Lainey specificly said in a livestream with Sarah that they were Sarah's guardian, which makes this entire situation a little messed up. I can speculate the Lainey Sarah relationship, but I'll save that for another time. The last thing I'll mention is that Lainey has made numerous tweets using slurs that I won't repeat.

There's an interesting timeline on reddit regarding Greg and Lainey, which I'll leave in the description if you want to dive a little deeper into those two. And though Lainey is an adult therefore fully accountable, I have a little more sympathy for them, despite their seemingly blind loyalty towards Greg. Lainey is complicit in everything that has happened in the house of horrors. At 24 years old, that needs to change or you need to be ok with the drama channels calling you out.

Next in this is Sarah, who was a long-time fan of Lainey. I need to correct myself in saying that Sarah was actually 14 when she and Lainey interacted, but was 16 years old upon meeting in person, which strikes me as odd, especially given that Greg has used the age of consent technicality before and how 16 years old is the age of consent in Washington. It's a little odd to me. Sarah was allegedly having... home trouble when she joined the household. There's been a lot of vague alluding to... well... abuse, it seems. Despite the fact that Sarah might be mature for her age, she still was only 14 years old when they interacted vs Lainey's 20 years old, a 6 year age gap. There's been a bit of drama with her online, like confusion about her mental disorder (borderline, not bipolar - apparently those two still get confused). Sarah used to confide in Lane, and frequently ask her to delete texts. During a livestream with Sarah and Lainey, when the first grooming accusations came out a couple years ago, Lane watched the broadcast and both Sarah and Lainey allegedly "freaked out" on Lane. For the record, Lane had no direct contact with Greg and Lainey, and there was nothing beyond brief twitter interactions between Lane and Lainey.

Next we have Madison who was strictly friends with Greg and Lainey, and states to have only ever had platonic feelings for the both of them. But given that Greg has accused her of inappropriate conversation and over-staying her welcome at Greg's house of horrors, and Greg's history with rejection... the following information is not so surprising, but keep in mind we're seeing things from a very limited scope. Madison and Greg were friends for just a few years shy of a decade when she found out she was blocked, to her it was out of nowhere. But there could have been discussions between Greg and Lainey about how one or the other felt uncomfortable, and since Greg is a manipulator, he may have even told Lainey half-truths about Madison, and their interactions. The only reasonable explanation for being blocked was that she had made a video explaining to her audience that Greg's DDlg video was done preemptively on his part with cruel intentions behind it, and/or misleading her to make the uncomfortable video. She clearly states, and I've never seen him actually deny it, that Greg brought up the idea of doing his usual diaper bs, and she could actually explain and give context behind the kink (although if kink isn't the correct term in this case, please let me know in the comments). There's also been some controversy with her making a statement against Greg, retracting the statement and apologizing for it, and lashing out at RSN for inciting drama.

The last player in this situation is Ayalla, easily the most consistent and honest out of everyone here. Ayalla is a musician here on youtube who was introduced to Lainey and Greg through Billie and Social Repose - the former is her best friend and the latter being her now ex. Her previous experiences with Greg and Lainey have not been positive - having resorted to posting a cease and desist against Greg when he wouldn't stop posting about her, which makes one of his recent videos all the more... ugh gross.

With all that said, we're going to thoroughly debunk this video made alleging that Ayalla and Madison are creeps. Bear in mind, he is attempting to discredit them after these allegations came out to sway his audience and any skeptics watching that they are not credible sources.

It starts off saying "the truth will set you free", which probably should say "the truth will send greg to jail or at the very least to the authorities possibly resulting in having to register as a sex offender, so why not make a video making allegations against those brave enough to speak out against greg and lainey's inappropriate and immoral behaviour (if not blatantly illegal... allegedly)"

The next slide is a screengrab of Madison with the caption "Onision ended his friendship with this girl for repeatedly trying to be in a relationship with him and his spouse despite him having no interest in her, cheating on her boyfriend with his boss at Fred Meyer and going behind Onision's back to trash talk him all while pretending to be his friend". I haven't seen the deleted tweets that Madison made with regards to her and Greg's friendship ending and I can't find them (though if you have access of them, feel free to leave a comment of the link below or DM me on instagram or twitter, all links are in my bio). Madison has gone on stream herself to debunk this, and Lainey has also made statements about this situation. The statement that has absolutely zero proof is that Madison tried to be in a relationship with either of them, and she has vehemently denied those claims. Greg mentions that his zero interest has to do with the cheating and gives details, but Madison herself has stated that her now fiance is her daughter's father. Bringing up specific details like that, repeatedly, is a diversion tactic so that his viewer will hopefully not think twice to ask for the evidence. Whether or not she cheated on anyone is irrelevant in this video.

Next, it reads: "Not long after Onision cut ties with her she decided to connect with a girl who cheated on Onision and gather dirt from the very same girl Onision dumped for cheating on him." The amount of exes Greg claims to have, also who he claims cheated on him, is such a large number that Madison could walk down the street and bump into anyone who he says he dated. She's allowed to befriend others, especially given that she was hurt by the random ending of said friendship. And if Madison had made them feel uncomfortable, either of them could have voiced that instead of coming up with this elaborate story of all the terrible things she did while never taking responsibility for their own actions. Greg is incapable of doing that, but Lainey gives half-hearted, almost disingenous apologies for any of their wrong-doing.

Next the slide reads, "Onision and his ex started dating legally, consentually, however this girl lied to everyone and told everyone that Onision had dated her when she was younger than the age she was. And here are the receipts." Notice how Greg is not naming this person at all. The receipts he shows, are between him and Madison and this seems to be about the clip of her and BillytheFridge about Greg's alleged interactions with underage girls. Greg is blue, Madison is white. I'll do my best Greg voice for you all.

It's dated Saturday December 29, 2018, just last month. Greg says "Unfortunately we're going to have to sue you for slander. Best of luck to you." Madison replies, "Okay. I will press charges for this then." And Greg replies, "For?" The next message is a screenshot or document that says Washington Wiretapping Laws, and I'll provide the larger image which states that Washington is a two-party consent state. In his next message he says, "Like I said, there is no recording of your voice without consent." He sends a separate message a minute later saying, "We are going to have to sue you however, as there is a recording of you publicly slandering me." She never outright slandered him, she questioned his motives and stated some simple facts.

Madison responds, "You stated out loud, verbally to me that you were presently recording me. If you deleted it then great. But you verbally stated to me on the phone call you were recording me." Directly after, and her message was cut off in the screenshot, she says, "Be my guest. I don't have a fn dime. So you won't get anything out of it but paying for your own legal fees. And what I said wasn't untrue." Greg replied, "You were informed on the phone that you were wrong about Shiloh's age. You need to publicly state that." He never actually denies verbally telling her he was recording her, he just says that there isn't a recording. As for Shiloh's age... when they started recording videos together, Greg was 24-25 and Shiloh was 17, there's been speculation that Greg was talking to Shiloh while he was still married to Skye. There's a lot of conflicting information regarding when Lainey and Greg got together. I remember reading somewhere that Lainey was 15 when they first started talking, there are texts between the two that state they were 16 when Greg asked them about being his soulmate. In 2012 they were already married.

Moving on, he says, "You also implied I was a pedophile, you need to retract that statement as well. Otherwise we have to sue. It is our only option." I do find it interesting that just a couple days after the stream where she had made the comments, and RSN made the video with all of the clips, Greg texts her. I can definitely see where it looks like Madison has inside information on Greg. The general consensus is that she's afraid of Greg and that's why she retracted her statement, flippantly saying it was a poor choice of words, however I believe if she does have information about him and underage girls, she should join the other brave people who have come forward and say something. With the recent wetland situation, which fines are up to 10s of thousands of dollars, and given that Greg complains about his finances, and he even stated that he was using the money from his bogus gofundme for a forum (rather than paying himself, if he's so financially stable), it's safe to assume that Greg does not have the money to pay a lawyer and court fees in order to sue anyone. Don't be afraid to tell the truth. Stand by your convictions.

Madison replies to his message saying "I'll speak to Shiloh and I'll say what ends up being the truth. If I was wrong I will happily state that. I already publicly retracted the statement regarding you being a pedophile. Multiple times. But have you retracted yours regarding Shane? No. Have you retracted your comments regarding me being a sexual predator toward you or your family? No. You have not."

Greg responds "Please watch the documentary I made on Shane. It proves your wrong. Also I never called you a sexual predator. You are wrong about that as well." In this text we're seeing technical Greg. He implied many times that Madison made his family feel uncomfortable, that she overstayed her welcome, etc. Though I think it's a jump to use the word sexual predator, I can understand why Madison would feel that way. Technically he didn't call her that. His Shane Dawson "documentary" had no clear point, but even if she wasn't refering to that, Greg has made a lot of statements against Shane Dawson.

Madison replies, "You want me to dig out the texts you decided to publicly tweet about me?" I think those are deleted now by the way, but with Greg's audience, it doesn't matter if they're deleted, the damage is done.

Greg's reply is, "ALso why would you be in contact with a self-admitted pathological liar (my ex of over 7 years ago)? Do you not see how weird and inappropriate that is? I broke up with her for cheating on me, then I end your and my friendship/refuse to work with you, and this is what you do?" He makes a few more messages, but this one speaks volumes because it looks as though he is trying to make her out to be the bad person when he's been accused of something. Classic deflecting Greg.

The next three texts say, "Like I said, I never called you what you say I did. However I do have proof you slandered me, heavily. Retract, completely or we sue. And you need to retract it on the same place you accused me. On both the Drunken Peasants and wherever else you wrongly acused me." That was at 1:28pm. At 4:11pm Madison's response to him is cut off which says "Do not contact me again." So if there's anything in between those messages, Greg hasn't show us.

Greg reponds to her, "Expect to hear from my lawyer."

Madison says, "I retracted the statement you requested me to retract. Do not contact me again." But that's not good enough for Greg, and this next text of his shows us the controlling nature behind this "man". He says, "Unless you completely retracted your implication that I was ever with a 16 year old and also retracted your implication that you believe I am a pedophile on both The Drunken Peasants & Twitter (as well as anywhere else you said it) I will still be pursuing you legally, making an example out of people" (and it cuts off, but we can assume what it says). The words Greg chooses to use speaks volumes. Unless you do this, I'm gonna do that - whereas she already retracted what she needed to saying that it was a poor choice of words. Her opinion is not something that she legally needs to change. She can believe he's a pedo all she wants. We can believe that shady stuff goes on in the House of Horrors all we want. You can't sue someone for having an belief or opinion.

Next slide is where he highlights the message from her and uses the caption, "She made a public false claim about Onision, and admits it was false. Yet the damage is done. People continue to believe her lies, despite the fact she admitted she did not tell the truth." Once again, the use of his words speaks volumes. He always stresses the words honest and truth. As for the damage being done, the same can be said about his implications and accusations against Shane Dawson. Shane actually has the money and the means to sue Greg for the malicious things Greg has said about Shane. But it only counts if Greg is in that position, right?

The next slide is what Greg probably thinks is an unflattering photo of Ayalla. You could google a better image of her, but Greg uses this tactic that we see so often in the news and media of using unflattering images of people to paint them in a negative light. The caption reads, "This is the ex girlfriend of Social Repose. Onision defended her when she was being blackmailed by Social Repose. She is also the friend of Onision's ex girlfriend, who Onision dumped repeatedly for lying, cheating, and illegal drug use." Greg once again attempts to put himself on a pedestal by saying he defended someone, whilst also victimizing himself claiming that Billie lied, cheated, and participated in illegal activity. Which is interesting given that by all accounts, Greg himself is a criminal. In true Onision fashion, let's go over the definition of criminal: Criminal. noun. 1. a personal who has committed a crime. Destroying wetlands is a crime. Also, Greg is a cheater as well, considering he continued his relationship, or at least attempted to, with Billie, the person he refers to in this, while Lainey was taking care of their kids.

Next he says, "This girl claims that Sarah, a girl Onision and Laineybot first met in person when she was 16 and were only friends (and remained just friends even after she turned 18) "groomed" the girl." He conveniently left out the fact that Lainey was in contact with Sarah when she was as young as 14 years old. Lainey was 21 at the time. If it was a cis-man in contact with a 14 year old girl, it would be considered disgusting and creepy, so how about we toss out the double standards and call it like it is.

Moving on, in the next slide Greg mentions everything he did for Ayalla as though that has any bearing in the situation... especially since it was years ago. Notice that this is one of Greg's favorite tactics making him seem like a caring, good guy. It reads, "This girl spent about a week total around Onision, free housing, free meals, collaborating in videos, free plane ticket paid for by Onision, and knows for a fact we never did not do anything inappropriate with Sarah. In fact she knows very well that I (Onision) was often mean to Sarah. Which I have since apologized for."

What strikes me as odd is that Greg, the literary guy, says "we never did not do anything inappropriate" Freudian slip or just a rush in editing? What also strikes me as odd is that he says, in fact she knows I treated Sarah like crap, as though that makes any of this better.

Next slide reads, "In fact the only reason this girl was even around Kai and Onision is because Onision's ex begged Onision to bring her, despite Onision preferring not to take care of another adult's expenses." This is a world of crap right here. For starters, Greg can't stay consistent and switches from referring to Lainey as Lainey and as Kai. He also fails to include Lainey in the relationship.... Lainey was the one who initially pursued Billie and the intent was for those two to have the relationship, to which Greg sorta invited himself into and whether by spousal pressure or insecurity, Lainey allowed for a very short time. It's clear with how many failed poly relationships that this marriage should not be poly but rather just open. As for the begging, I believe this was debunked already. Billie did not beg for Ayalla to be there but asked. However by using the term beg, Greg attempts to make Billie and Ayalla look as though they had stepped on his toes. He could have said no, but he didn't. That's on him.

Next slide reads, "Onision's ex indicated that this girl was the reason why previous relationships did not work out because her ex-boyfriends did not like her." That has absolutely no fact behind it, we're literally supposed to take Greg's word for it. This is Greg attempting to pit Billie and Ayalla against each other. Notice how he uses "indicated" instead of "stated".

Next, "Other than her previous boyfriend who allegedly cheated on her with Shannon (the youtuber) according to Onision's ex at the time they were dating." This is one of the few times Greg mentions a person's name, and he uses the word allegedly. Allegedly to cover his own ass. I'm sure this is to deflect and create drama between other people. Remember when it comes to Onision, he loves to deflect from his own issues and stir up stuff between other people... allegedly.

Next is where it gets real with allegations. Greg states in this slide, "While this girl lies about Sarah being groomed, she leaves out the fact that she asked Sarah if Sarah would have sex with her in just the short week she was around Onision, Sarah, and Kai. So you can understand why I regret ever flying her out. She is a liar and a pervert." Meanwhile Ayalla ain't stressing because she knows that's not true. Greg asked Sarah to make a video saying that there was no sexual intercourse between them and Sarah, but doesn't ask her to make a video with these allegations? Is Sarah even aware that he's using her as a pawn in his twisted game? Furthermore, the evidence is stacking against Onision and Lainey about the grooming allegations. Whereas there's nothing remotely substantial to back up the claims of Ayalla asking Sarah to sleep with her, besides Greg's statement. Not even from Sarah herself, this is coming from Greg.

Next, "Remember how the first girl asked Onision to stop contacting her right after she realized she was wrong and retracted her slanderous statement? People often do this when they realize they have lost the argument. They have nothing left to defend themselves with, because the truth is not on their side." Wrong on so many counts. Let's bring the texts up again, part of them are cut off. Madison retracted her statement multiple times already, but Greg really wanted it in text. She did not lose anything. People often tell others to not contact them when they are tired of being harassed and/or don't want contact with that person. Since he continued to threaten her with being sued via text - rather than actually following through with it - he did not respect her statement. Greg does not understand what the truth is, given how biased this video is. Next slide he says here are the receipts (spoiler alert they aren't actually receipts, just screenshots, in which he proves that he doesn't respect the wishes of anyone telling them to stop contacting them):

We can assume he has tried to call her and she texts him: "Anything you have to say to me you may say in writing. I don't know what you could possibly discuss with me." Straight to the point.

Greg's response: "It's ok. Our lawyer will contact you." Again bringing up the lawyers that he allegedly doesn't have the money to pay for.

Ayalla responds: Looking forward to it.

And rather than ending it there, he texts her at length the next day: "Sarah very clearly asked you to not talk about her/to leave her alone. Why are you harassing Sarah? Can you please stop causing problems in her life?" I'm gonna stop to say, there's no evidence or screenshots of harassment. The fact that Ayalla slipped up and used Sarah's name in a stream is very clearly just a mistake. Anyone who had tuned into the livestream was there because of the allegations against Onision and Laineybot with Sarah. I understand her not wanting to be named, and Ayalla did her best, it was clearly not malicious. "Additionally Sarah has made it clear you hit on her when you were at our house. You even asked her if she would be willing to sleep with you, and these are Sarah's words." Unless Sarah comes forward to accuse Ayalla, it bears absolutely zero truth. Given what both Lane and Ayalla have had to say about Sarah and what Sarah has said about her possible future relationship with Lainey, I cannot believe Greg.

"I keep hearing about the things you are saying and you admitted you have brain damage acording to Sarah who watched your live stream." Having brain damage does not equate to memory damage, it could be that she has trouble with finding the correct words, and needing extra time to find the correct words. Classic Greg trying to discredit someone with more evidence than he could provide.

"Please get help for your issues and leave Sarah, who has asked you to not discuss her in any way, alone." And this is the Greg who has shown a little bit of concern and empathy lately, but by Greg's own admission, it's easy to fake. "You are harassing her and she just wants to live her life." Again, no evidence of harassment. You got receipts on that, Greg?

"Lastly, you will be receiving a cease and desist soon." Except he continues not just in this same text, but in another.

"You told me long ago to move on, and I did, yet here you are, trying to get back in all of our lives. Please take your own advice, leave Sarah alone and be happy with your own life. Thank you and get well soon." For starters, I feel as though if Ayalla wanted to actually be in their lives, she would reach out to them personally instead of speaking out against them. Secondly, Greg attempts to put himself on this pedestal by showing us his fake concern by telling her he wishes her well.

"Additionally Sarah confirmed most everything you're saying about her is a lie. I'm going to assume you are saying these things as a result of the brain damage you mentioned. I do hope you get well soon." Again, Greg tries to discredit Ayalla and claims that Sarah has confirmed Ayalla being a liar, without providing a lick of evidence. She can't confirm anything, all she can do is say, "uh yeah, false." And I understand why Sarah would say none of this is true, if she's attempting to stay in Greg and Lainey's lives, and maybe she thinks she's the exception because she's just so mature for her age, but she's still young and fully capable of being manipulated by Greg.

Ayalla replies, "I have asked you repeatedly to stop contacting me Greg. You may paint me however you wish but I know the truth and you can't hide from it anymore." Again, short and to the point.

Greg says, "Then why does everyone involved, both Sarah and Kai, claim you are lying? You, a person who was only around for one week, who also hit on/asked Sarah to sleep with you?" Ok, before we continue, I want to mention that if Sarah truly was 16 at the time and Ayalla was 18 or 19, it would have been legal. I'm going to read this for all of you, so that you may get a better understanding of why Greg is wrong on so many counts:

The Washington Age of Consent is 16 years old. In the United States, the age of consent is the minimum age at which an individual is considered legally old enough to consent to participation in sexual activity. Individuals aged 15 or younger in Washington are not legally able to consent to sexual activity, and such activity may result in prosecution for statutory rape.

Washington statutory rape law is violated when a person has consensual sexual intercourse with an individual under age 16. The age of consent is raised to 18 when the partners are a foster parent and foster child, when the older partner is at least 60 months older than their 16 or 17 year old partner and abuses their significant relationship(as defined by RCW 9A.44.010) to have sexual intercourse, or when the partners are teacher and student(this law was actually interpreted by the Washington State Supreme Court to extend to students up to 21 years old).

I don't personally believe that Ayalla would say that considering she was in a relationship with Social Repose at the time, but even if that was the case, it would have been legal for her to ask, or even act on it. It would have been completely illegal for Sarah to have sexual relations with Lainey if she were 16 because of Lainey's guardianship, which they spoke about in a stream. Now that Sarah is 18 years old, it would be legal. Morally questionable, but legal.

Continuing, Ayalla responds, "Your lies will get you nowhere." Greg says, "That's Sarah saying this." Either she is using his phone to which she would probably not refer to herself in the third person the way Greg does. Also, she never states that Ayalla asked her that, or remotely hit on her. Ayalla responds, "Please stop contacting me." Greg does not respect this and continues, because he has a fundamental lack of respect for all women. That's nothing new though.

"Stop talking about Sarah, publicly humiliating her. None of us are saying anything bad about you publicly, you are the one who needs to stop. Sarah asked you, I'm defending her right to privacy. You need to move in with your life, finally." Sarah is an adult now, at 18 years old, so she will be treated as such. No one can defend her using harassment.

Ayalla simply says, "Do not contact me again." Take a shot every time she has to say that. Don't do that, you'll get alcohol poisoning.

Once again, Greg disregard her wishes and says, "All right! Just please don't ask people like Sarah to sleep with you and then years later claim others were as perverted as you are." Oh, Greg. You're doin too much. He literally says, don't ask people like Sarah to sleep with you... what? People who you want to possess or...?

"Best of luck to you and reviving from your brain damage. Seriously, wish you will. Cease and desist is being sent soon and legal action will be taken against you if you continue to humiliate and harass Sarah." Again with the brain damage to which Greg doesn't even know the extent of. Why bother mentioning cease and desist if you already said that if not to use it as a scare tactic? And he also says he'll pursue legal action if she continues to humiliate and harass Sarah... which there's no evidence of anyway, so clearly he's not going to.

Greg being Greg doesn't even end it there, "Heal, get well and find a better use of your time than harassing victims of your sexual harassment (Sarah was 16 at the time you asked her if she would sleep with you) - Get help and become a better person. Goodbye." Was Greg a cheerleader when he was younger because I can almost hear him chanting, "Be aggressive, passive aggressive." Again, no evidence and big if, but if it were true it would not be illegal for Ayalla to ask Sarah to sleep with her.

And of course, in all caps, Ayalla says "STOP CONTACTING ME".

In the next slide, he says "Sarah asked this girl to stop talking about her, directly, and in response this girl tweeted "the plot thickens" - Ok, for starters, Ayalla could have been talking to multiple people about this situation and found out more. Your attempt at correlating is not a direct causation.

"Then proceeded to live streaming, exploiting Sarah for personal gain despite her asking for her to not speak of her. She then uploaded a youtube version of her live stream, where she made hundreds of dollars on her channel, which prior got barely any views." He doesn't know how much she made, and since it is her channel she is allowed to do what she wants. Also, Ayalla has 50k subs, so I'm sure she gets more than just barely any views.

Next slide, "In response to this liar/pervert who asled a 16 year old girl if she wanted to sleep with her making false claims about Kai, the now adult Sarah made the following public statement." Again, harping on the accusation, making it seem like it's illegal. The now adult Sarah did not address anything other than what Greg allegedly asked her to address... something no one was even accusing them of. Grooming has been speculated and there's more evidence of that than anything.

Over this video, Greg has made captions, which read, "Sarah asked this girl to stop talking about her/stop srpeading lies, yet she continued. This video was made as a public plea to discontinue the lies. The girl simply refuses to stop harassing Sarah"

Let me repeat. The accusations were about the inappropriate nature of Lainey and Sarah's relationship and grooming.

"The ex girlfriend of Social Repose" keyword ex and they are no longer associated with each other. "the friend of a girl who was dumped repeatedly for lying, cheating, breaking the law" Greg's way of being a hypocrite. "The girl with nearly no views on her youtube channel" actually about as much if not more than Greg, so... "who was asked by multiple parties to not try and exploit their lives with lies," which she didn't do. "the girl who has everything to gain off lying to the public through revenge and monetary gain for her friend being dumped" why does he keep bringing up Billie... the dude doth project too much if you ask me. "The girl who also asked a 16 year old Sarah to sleep with her (and Sarah backs up this claim)" Sarah just said she didn't want others speaking for her, so she herself can accuse Ayalla publicly, and even then, it's not illegal - whereas anything between Sarah and her former guardian was entirely illegal.

"The girl who also, with Onision's ex, Onision's ex tried to convince a 16 year old Sarah to starve herself like she did, to become part of her eating disorder" that is so grammatically incorrect I can't properly address it, but again, Sarah's an adult now she can address it herself. "and the friend of Onision's ex who offered Sarah illegal drugs, as a 16 year old" no evidence, Greg, "who tried to get Sarah to move in with them as well..." and honestly if the latter is true, I'd assume it had something to do with being concerned about Sarah's wellbeing... you know, like how Lainey took her in for Sarah's wellbeing.

"Again, all facts backed up by Sarah's claims." If you're going to use the term facts, back it up with evidence. Claims are not evidence. "Sarah, a person who is does not have Youtube channel and does not try to turn drama into money" except when she livestreams about the drama?

The next slide is of Madison again where he harps about how desperate she was to date Greg and Lainey. "And this girl, someone who tried to get in a relationship with Onision and Kai and was repeatedly rejected." EVIDENCE. "A girl who cheated on her boyfriend with his boss, who was drunk while slandering Onision, someone who went out of her way to connect with Onision's ex of over 7 years." Hang on though, it's not really that hard to get in contact with another person... like you type some words... sorta how it wouldn't really be that hard for Greg to look up laws about age of consent laws and the EPAs stance on wetlands.

"A girl who lost her friendship with Onision for going behind his back while still trying to be his friend, dishonest." Sure Jan.

Next slide he completely contradicts what he had texted to Madison, "And admitted she was wrong about Onision, issued a public retraction of what she said about Onision." So it's almost like he manipulated her into the retraction to specifically discredit her in this video. Hmm... interesting.

Next slide is of both Ayalla and Madison. The above heading reads, "You trust these two people, one of which admitted she lied.. and the other asked a 16 year old girl if she wanted to have sex with her..." Under the photo of Madison it says "Lied about Onision publicly and later admitted it/retracted." She didn't lie though... she admitted it was a poor choice of words but not that it was a lie. And under Ayalla, it saus "Asked a 16 year old girl if she wanted to have sex with her and offered the 16 year old drugs illegally" do i need to harp on the legalities like Greg harps on his ex, who was initially just supposed to be dating Lainey until he forced his way into the relationship. Was that a poor choice of words? Allegedly.

In the next slide there's a picture of Lainey with what looks like Greg's mom and he has a caption pointing the picture, "And this is the person you think is guilty? THIS is the person you guys are demonizing and trying to ruin the life of? Over what?" Then a caption pointing to a picture of Ayalla reading, "This girl's attempt at five seconds of fame?"

This is Greg's poor attempt at mimicking what the news and media does by using a flattering picture of Lainey and an unflattering one of Ayalla, because he thinks this sweet picture of his mom and Lainey will make us change our minds when there's a lot of shady stuff online that doesn't paint Lainey as this innocent party.

In the next slide, he lines up a well done photo of Lainey, a well done selfie of Sarah, and a photo of Ayalla midspeech, basically just repeating what he had already claimed.

Then he dedicates a slide just to the word and and an elipses, followed by a slide, again harping on Madison, which says that Madison "claims she publicly retracted her statements about Onision" except using the phrase claim is incorrect because she factually retracted her statement by saying, I REPEAT, it was a poor choice of words. Next to an image of Greg and Lainey, with the caption "if very happy he is no longer friends with a liar like her." She may flip flop, but at least the chick corrects herself.

Long story short... is the next slide. Followed by a slide of both Sarah and Ayalla but with the word pervert over Ayalla's photo... The caption says the same shit he's been claiming in this video. The next slide of Madison is pointless really and pretty much his attempt at being gracefully petty, but falls short because it's Greg.

Next, Greg says in true narcissistic fashion - oh no, there I go diagnosing a narcissist without any credentials, just my diploma from Google University - he says "To everyone else, I forgive you for being wrong... But now you have no excuse to continue being wrong."

Then Greg asks everyone to go to twitter and apologize to Lainey, and to comment an apology to Sarah on that video... because he needs the engagement that badly I guess.

And in his next slide he alleges, "We are still pursuing legal action against this girl, who has yet to retract her statements and will be pursued in court with three separate witness and other evidence that remains private." I love that he claims he has evidence and conveniently states that it's private after previously saying that he's taking Sarah's word for it and Sarah is the one making all of the claims. I repeat, claims.

TL;DW: Greg is trying to manipulate his audience into believe that he and his spouse are not predators by attempting to discredit one person who has come forward, and another person who made a passing statement in a livestream and apologized saying it was a poor choice of words.

If you've had any interaction that you find odd or questionable or has made you feel uncomfortable, don't hesitate to reach out. My twitter and instagram require requests and you can reach out to me, but I am not the only one willing to listen. Ayalla has made a tweet saying her DMs are open, and if there are any other youtubers, streamers, etc who are open to listening, please feel free to comment and I will the comment a heart.

I'll catch you guys in my next video.

#scripts #onision allegations

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aceofanxiety · 6 years

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Why Anti-Immigration, and Anti-Refugee Rhetoric is false.

In Modern America and by politically far right groups throughout the world statements are being made to try to push people of their countries to racist beliefs under the guise of economics or protection of their countries, these statements are false and have been used in the past by fascists and even by the United States.

Note: The sources are in the order of the information that is given, all of which are credible sources and many of which are direct, or quoting direct government information.

1. Myth: Immigration is increasing, The Truth: Immigration to America is and has been slowing significantly, both illegal and legal, since 2005 when we had the greatest number of immigrants coming over to America. Illegal immigration has also almost stagnated and is at equilibrium meaning that the number of illegal immigrants coming over are the same amount as the people who are living.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/09/20/overall-number-of-u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-holds-steady-since-2009/

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/

2. Myth: The majority of immigrants are Mexican or Hispanic. The Truth, over the past 40 years Mexico was the dominating group for immigration to the United States due largely to its medium population, and the spike in crime due to the introduction of dangerous drugs such as cocaine and heroin into Mexico by the CIA in the Contra Drug Trafficking, and after the regions in South and Central America were weakened by the American war on communism. This lead many Hispanic people to search for a better life, for safety in America. However; currently the majority of immigrants both legal and illegal are coming from China/Hongkong, or India, where increasing levels of population cause difficulty in finding employment. The reason that there are more Hispanic immigrants in the country is because they have been coming over for a much longer period of time at a steady rate.

https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/ch01p2.htm

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/mexico-drug-cartel-neoliberalism/

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/historic-shift-new-migration-flows-mexico-fall-below-those-china-and-india

3. Myth: The immigrants who come over are “lazy”, “thieves”, or “rapists.” The Truth: Immigrants or non-naturalized citizens make up 14.1% of the population and have a lower unemployment rate than naturalized citizens. This claim that is usually part of a stating that they are a drain on the government or are taking from government welfare programs, the truth of this matter is, they aren’t. Illegal immigrants have very little access to government programs unless victims of human trafficking, and the ones they have access to are WIC, which gives food to Women, infants, and children, and Emergency Medicaid, both of which together cost 2 billion, which is 1% of the Medicaid budget and 0.01% of the total US budget. Legal immigrants are also less likely to go off of government assistance from fear of losing citizenship because of it which under federal regulation they can if they are likely to be “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence” in which case they can loose their green cards, and can even cause deportation of permanent residents. It is also estimated that all losses due to illegal immigrants are made back up by their addition to social security that they themselves can never receive. Lastly immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than naturalized citizens, this is evident in how despite crimes are more likely to be reported against all poc especially against Hispanics with the racist threat of deportation there are less reports of crimes against immigrants both legal and illegal per person and jailing per person than for naturalized citizens. This is also seen that despite immigrants coming into the country at a rate that only started decreasing in 2006 while crime has declined since 1970, as well as that states with large amounts of immigration legal and illegal including states with sanctuary cities often claimed to cause havens of crime and drugs, actually have declining rates of crime and lower crime than cities with smaller immigrant populations. This statements that are used to place that immigrants are a burden upon society or that they are rapists, bringing with them crime and danger is rooted in American Nationalism and Isolationism, and racism, currently supported by America First defenders, in firstly anti-Irish immigration following the potato famine, and then later against jewish people both before the Holocaust and after, under fear that they were communists that were going to disrupt the American system and many were illegally deported, additional reading on parallels and on this is in the sources below.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/forbrn.pdf

https://econofact.org/do-undocumented-immigrants-overuse-government-benefits

http://www.apsanlaw.com/law-250.What-are-the-harmless-Public-Benefits-for-immigrants-and-the-Ones-to-pass-up.html

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/03/30/the-myth-of-the-criminal-immigrant

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/criminalization-immigration-united-states

http://criminology.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-93

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/belin/13469761.0024.001/--jewish-cold-war-anxiety-and-identity-in-the-aftermath?rgn=main;view=fulltext

https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008297

4. Myth: Why don’t they just come over legally? The Truth: This article does a nearly perfect job explaining this but to quote the article title “Why don’t they just get in line? There is No Line.”

https://americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/why-don%E2%80%99t-they-just-get-line

5. Myth: Europe is being destroyed by violent crimes from the refugees, mainly from Syria. The Truth: While some areas were not prepared economically for the influx of people, and had some financial issues many areas where helped financially while crime has remained stagnant or gone down in areas where refugees are. Myths exist about how “Sweden is the Rape Capital of the World” as Donald Trump stated however this simply is not true, upon looking at the information Sweden has had a stagnant number of sexual crimes for a decade, this myth is due to two main factors, firstly Sweden has more sexual crime than other countries per population because it charges each sexual assault as a seperate action and because compared to many other countries rape is more often reported and more often strongly investigated,and secondly because the sensationalization of these acts in Sweden by many people supporting isolationist views or nationalist views as an example of how these refugees are causing issues while the cases would normally not be broadcast to such a high degree. Sweden has also been hit with rumors, due to the large number of migrants that it took in, more than any other country per dollar, which created a rumor of “no go zones” where reported the police will not go; however these do not exist, what does exist however is “vulnerable areas” which is a project started by the Swedish police to label areas with more active crime, and where gangs may exist in order to better deal with these areas, which usually requires, more police the opposite of no police, the number of these areas have grown after the refugees were brought in, while this would seem to signal a rise in lawlessness in these areas to people such as Nigel Farage, in truth these cities have actually had decreasing crime and have been added to the list because of the increased analysis abilities of the Swedish police. Sometimes the myth is brought farther back into America saying that refugees are causing rape and crime in America; which was largely seen in the Nationwide broadcasting of information about a rape case where two young refugee men reportedly raped a minor, which was later found to be false after they were convicted from Islamophobic pressure from the nation and the townspeople, and they were sent to jail only to be later freed after being shown around the nation as rapists. This lead to the stating of the Syrian Refugee Crisis a crisis that never actually existed as the majority of refugees like any other immigrants began to settle calmly and peacefully into their new homes, with refugees the unemployment is extremely low and crime rates drop dramatically in cities where they become a large part of the population. However the falsehoods about a crisis still exist despite being debunked and are largely believed however they are simply untrue.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/crime-sweden-rape-capital-europe/

https://www.thelocal.se/20170621/no-go-zones-what-you-need-to-know-about-swedens-vulnerable-aeas

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/magazine/how-fake-news-turned-a-small-town-upside-down.html

https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/is-there-a-link-between-refugees-and-u-s-crime-rates/

This did not address many current issues because this was mainly going against far right rhetoric in order to shed some light on the true situation by providing factual information with sources that should not be able to be argued against as being fake, as they are mostly neutral except for ones where I either felt that the source usually leaning was neutral on this topic or had more information or where there was a dearth of true information on the topic by a variety of sources.

If there are any other issues that you want me to discuss in this manner with a variety of sources, or maybe one of the above in more detail tell me, this does not mean I will get into individual discussions it means I will make another post like this; however I will likely do many more on similar topics regardless.

Have a nice day! And stay informed!

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patriotsnet · 3 years

Text

How Many Presidents Have The Republicans Tried To Impeach

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-presidents-have-the-republicans-tried-to-impeach/

How Many Presidents Have The Republicans Tried To Impeach

The Trump Administrations Treatment Of Immigration Exclusively As A Criminal And National Security Matter Is Inhumane Impractical And Must End The Bernie Sanders Campaign Wrote As President Bernie Sanders Would Make Undocumented Immigration A Civil Matter And Fundamentally Reform The Government Agencies Tasked With Enforcing Immigration Law In A Way That Views Immigration As A Historically Valued Process Thats Woven Into Our Countrys Fabric

Hey Bernie — those who are here by less than legal means are breaking the law. That is a criminal matter, not a civil one.

And, for the record, many of the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks on our country had overstayed their visas and were in violation of our immigration laws, thus additionally making it a matter of national security.

But you probably already knew that. You just don’t care.

Sanders has released an immigration plan that would impose a moratorium on deportations, “break up” existing immigration enforcement agencies, grant full welfare access to non-legal immigrants and welcome a minimum of 50,000 “climate migrants” in the first year of a Sanders administration.

According to Fox News, the plan effectively establishes Sanders at the far left of the immigration debate, as he aims to energize a base that helped drive his 2016 primary campaign amid competition from other liberal candidates in the field this time around.

Bernies Dangerous Open Borders Agenda Would Incentivize Illegal Immigration And Continue The Flow Of Illegal Drugs And Criminals Into Our Country Spokesperson Michael Joyce Said Meanwhile President Trumps Steadfast Leadership On This Issue Has Resulted In A 63 Percent Decline In Illegal Immigrant Apprehensions Since May

Trump has previously indicated that he believes liberal immigration policies from his opponents will help him win in 2020.

When a number of Democrats raised their hands in June to a debate question about whether those not in the country legally should get health care, Trump declared it “the end of that race!”

While most of the Democratic nominees are pushing similar agendas on immigration, Joe Biden has not yet committed to the same level of reform.

Immigration Is Not A Threat To National Security His Plan Says It Is Long Past Time We Break Up The Department Of Homeland Security And Refocus Its Mission On Keeping Our Country Safe And Responding Effectively To Emergencies

Part of his plan disbands both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection . Matters to do with deportation and enforcement would return to the Department of Justice, while customs matters would be sent to the Treasury and naturalization and citizenship to the State Department.

Instead, border enforcement would focus on “stemming the flow of firearms and drugs at ports of entry that have contributed to the opioid epidemic and stopping human trafficking.”

He would abolish measures such as DNA testing and facial recognition technology for immigration and border enforcement.

For those immigrants, legal or not, who are in the country, Sanders accelerates the call to include ALL in welfare programs and other government services such as health care. Under Sanders, everything is on the table for everyone in the country regardless of immigration status.

The things that Sanders wants to offer independent of immigration status: Medicare-for-all, College-for-all and free universal school meals .

Sanders is also pushing for Congress to pass Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Embrace Act, which opens all welfare programs to all immigrants, legal or not.

Sanders also wants to streamline legal immigration channels, reduce fees, and provide funding to unite immigrants who are stuck in backlogs.

The Republican National Committee on Thursday called the plan “dangerous.”

Devin Nunes Says Gop Majority In The House After 2022 Midterms Could Spell Trouble For New President As Fringe Conservatives Seek Retribution

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Related video: Sean Hannity attacks Trump’s ‘lacklustre, meandering’ impeachment defence

Republicans could face significant pressure to impeach Joe Biden should they win back a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, California congressman Devin Nunes has warned.

Speaking to Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, the Donald Trump loyalist suggested the GOP’s right-wing fringe could use any newfound power in Congress to push for a revenge impeachment against President Biden after his predecessor became the first commander-in-chief in American history to be impeached twice by the House.

“Republicans have a good chance of taking the House in 2022,” Mr Nunes said. “Now, if that happens, and let’s – for example, we don’t know what’s gonna happen to Hunter Biden’s laptop. We don’t know what’s gonna happen with the Durham investigation . But I could see the pressure would become great for us to actually have to impeach Biden.”

“Now look, I don’t want to do that, but you’re going to have people that are going to be saying that,” he added.

His allusion to the computer owned by the president’s son refers to a pre-election story popular among Trump supporters concerning the device being handed over by the owner of a Delaware repair shop to prominent Republican lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Interesting Fact Did You Know Democrats Have Tried To Impeach Every Republican President Since Eisenhower

The site had made the proclamation that the information delivered from the meme shared online was “Mostly False”, but when reading the rationale behind why they made such a claim revealed aspects that erred toward being more truthful. The Snopes article read:

What’s True

Articles of impeachment were introduced against five of the six Republican presidents who have served since President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

What’s False

Articles of impeachment were not introduced against President Gerald Ford; a handful of Democratic politicians filed articles of impeachment against President George H. W. Bush Sr. and President RonaldReagan but their efforts did not receive the backing of the entire Democratic party; and the impeachment efforts against President Richard Nixon received bipartisan support.

So, the infamous debunking website had claimed that this was a mostly false statement since that only five of the six Republican presidents had articles of impeachment brought towards them while in office.

Yet, the real kicker is that they failed to mention that Gerald Ford wasn’t even an elected president and had only stayed in office for slightly over two years.

The circumstances of Ford’s appointment were stemming from the Nixon’s fall from grace and his original vice president resigning over the disgrace of the Watergate scandal. With all the country had been through at that point, impeachment on the appointed president Ford would have been insufferable.

My Father Came To America As A Refugee Without A Nickel In His Pocket To Escape Widespread Anti

Sanders’ plan was written in conjunction with several immigrants who were shielded from deportation by former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

In the plan, he promises to extend legal status to those eligible under the DACA program, as well as to grant relief for their parents. He also promises to use executive authority to allow immigrants who have violated our laws by living in the U.S. for five or more years to stay “free from threat of deportation.”

Sanders wants to provide a “pathway to citizenship” via Congress for all undocumented immigrants living in America — which he says is currently around 11 million — and would ensure that “old or low-level contacts with the criminal justice system” do not prevent illegal immigrants from walking along that path.

As president, Sanders says he would also decriminalize illegal border crossings, instead making it a civil violation. He would also end detention for those without a violent crime conviction.

Upon being sworn in, a President Sanders would halt all deportations until there was a full audit of “current and past practices and policies.”

He would also end the Trump ‘Muslim travel ban,’ as well as other Trump policies such as the Migrant Protection Protocols and defunding of sanctuary cities.

They are called public defenders.

You mean, like the corruption, repression and poverty in Venezuela, caused by the very socialism he wants to bring to America?

Did You Know That Democrats Have Tried To Impeach Every Elected Republican President Since 1960

Threat title:Did You Know That Democrats Have Tried to Impeach EVERY Elected Republican President since 1960?Of course there was no Republican POTUS elected in 1960, because Kennedy was elected. Nor was there one in 1964 when LBJ was elected. 1968 did see a Republican POTUS when Nixon squeaked in, but no impeachment was introduced against him until after the 1972 re-election. And when it was, it was supported from every side. So here already the OP has padded his specious claim by twelve years. And counting. 1976, no Republican, Jimmy Carter elected. Finally in 1980 and 1984, Reagan the Republican elected and re-elected and Henry Gonzalez filed impeachment articles that went nowhere. OP has padded his dates by 27 years. In 1988 HW Bush was elected, Gonzalez again files article, again goes nowhere. 1992 and 1996 was Clinton, who did face impeachment but ruh-roh, he’s not a Republican. So apparently, somebody filed articles against Dubya.The Cliff’s Notes to cut the bullshit.SFX: sound of emptying balloon

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”– Albert Einstein

Gop Sen Collins: Trump Incited An Insurrection To Prevent Peaceful Transfer Of Authority

From CNN’s Clare Foran

GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who was among the Republicans who voted to convict former President Trump, spoke on the Senate floor explaining her vote, saying Trump “incited an insurrection with the purpose of preventing that transfer of power from occurring.”

“Instead of preventing a dangerous situation, President Trump created one. Rather than defend the Constitutional transfer of power, he incited an insurrection with the purpose of preventing that transfer of power from occurring,” she said.

Collins said that Trump’s “actions to interfere with the peaceful transition of power – the hallmark of our Constitution and our American democracy – were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction.”

“The record is clear that the President, President Trump abused his power, violated his oath to uphold the Constitution and tried almost every means in his power to prevent the peaceful transfer of authority to the newly elected President,” she said.

“My vote in this trial stems from my own oath and duty to defend the Constitution of the United States. The abuse of power and betrayal of his oath by President Trump meet the Constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors and for those reasons, I voted to convict,” she said.

Most Senate Republicans Back Measure Saying Trump Impeachment Trial Is Unconstitutional

Dareh Gregorian

Senate Republicans voted Tuesday for a measure that would have declared the impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump unconstitutional because he is no longer in office.

The motion, by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was defeated by a vote of 55-45, showing that Democrats have an uphill climb to secure the 67 votes needed for a conviction. Among those who voted for the motion was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has said he is undecided whether to convict Trump and who worked on the trial calendar with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

McConnell, when he was majority leader, rebuffed Democrats’ efforts to hold the trial while Trump was in office.

Senators were sworn for Trump’s second impeachment trial earlier Tuesday, a day after House impeachment managers delivered to the Senate the article of impeachment accusing Trump of incitement of insurrection in the Capitol riot this month.

The senators were given the oath by Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the president pro tempore of the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of Donald John Trump, former president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws, so help you God?” Leahy asked the assembled senators.

Leahy is presiding over the trial instead of Chief Justice John Roberts because Trump is a former president.

Stacey Plaskett Addresses Emotional Toll Of Seeing Black Women Used In Trump Defense

“Those 43 who voted to acquit the president did so because they were afraid of him, because they were more interested in party and in power than they were in our country and in duty to their Senate oath,” she added.

Plaskett said Trump “will be forever tarnished” by the impeachment.

“I think it leaves him for all history — our children and my grandchildren will see in history that this was the most despicable despot attempting to become a fascist ruler over a country that was founded in democracy,” she said.

President Biden said the attack on the Capitol “has reminded us that democracy is fragile.” Above, Biden speaks during a visit Thursday to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Evan Vucci/APhide caption

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President Biden said the attack on the Capitol “has reminded us that democracy is fragile.” Above, Biden speaks during a visit Thursday to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

President Biden responded to the Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump on Saturday by reminding Americans that truth must be defended, saying the impeachment of the former president was a stark illustration of the danger posed to democracy by lies, misinformation and extremism.

And Biden said that although Trump was acquitted, his actions in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection were not “in dispute.”

New Report Suggests Most Scholars Are On The Other Side; Trial Could Start This Week

WASHINGTON—The political fate of President Trump, and any ambitions he might have for reclaiming the White House in 2024, could be settled by who wins a debate over whether a president can be convicted through the impeachment process after leaving office—a matter on which the U.S. Constitution is silent.

The House impeached Mr. Trump last Wednesday for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for conduct culminating with a speech exhorting thousands of his followers to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and “fight like hell” against congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

“Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed…unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts,” the impeachment resolution, which won support from 10 Republicans, alleges.

The Senate could take the next steps—trying Mr. Trump and voting on his guilt—as soon as this week. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote by senators present; assuming perfect attendance, 17 Republicans would need to join all 50 Democrats to find Mr. Trump guilty.

Trump Lawyer: His Call To Georgia Officials To ‘find’ Votes Was Taken Out Of Context

Trump’s lawyers largely sidestepped Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked during the question-and-answer session: “Are the prosecutors right when they claim that Trump was telling a big lie, or in your judgment did Trump actually win the election?”

Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen shot back, “My judgment? Who asked that?”

“I did,” Sanders replied.

“My judgment is irrelevant,” van der Veen said.

“You represent the president of the United States!” Sanders yelled back before Sen. Patrick Leahy, the presiding officer, gaveled the chamber back to order.

Trump’s rhetoric about widespread fraud and a stolen election was false, dismissed by many courts stemming from dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and allies across several key states.

After Speaking Out On Impeachment Herrera Beutler Heads Toward Clash With Her Party

“The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” he said, “and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”

McConnell rebuked Trump for his actions after the insurrection as well.

“He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored,” he continued.

“No. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” he said. “Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger.”

But McConnell said that the process of impeachment and conviction is a “limited tool” and that he believes Trump is not “constitutionally eligible for conviction.”

“The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal,” he said.

He said that the text of the question of constitutionality is “legitimately ambiguous” and that he “respects” his colleagues for reaching either the conclusion to acquit or convict.

Seven Republicans broke ranks with their party in voting for a conviction.

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Michael van der Veen, defense lawyer for former President Donald Trump, gives closing arguments during Trump’s second impeachment trial on February 13, 2021.

Trump’s Defense Closes Its Case By Saying Impeachment Trial Is A ‘complete Charade’

Manager Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado rebutted the defense’s argument that Trump has been denied due process.

“We had a full presentation of evidence, adversarial presentations, motions. The president was invited to testify. He declined. The president was invited to provide exculpatory evidence. He declined. You can’t claim there’s no due process when you won’t participate in the process,” he said.

He noted that impeachment is separate and distinct from the criminal justice system.

“Why would the constitution include the impeachment power at all, if the criminal justice system serves as a suitable alternative once a President leaves office?” he asked. “It wouldn’t.”

Neguse also sought to address an allegation raised by defense attorneys, that the impeachment trial was rooted in hate. He turned to a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“This trial is not born from hatred,” said Neguse. “Far from it. It’s born from love of country. Our country. Our desire to maintain it. Our desire to see America at its best.”

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On Saturday morning, senators voted to hear from Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler as a witness in the impeachment trial. Later, an agreement allowed a statement by her into the record without calling her.

The Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump won’t be hearing from witnesses after all.

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If Convicted Removal From Office Possible Disqualification From Government Service

If a president is acquitted by the Senate, the impeachment trial is over. But if he or she is found guilty, the Senate trial moves to the sentencing or “punishment” phase. The Constitution allows for two types of punishments for a president found guilty of an impeachable offense: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

The first punishment, removal from office, is automatically enforced following a two-thirds guilty vote. But the second punishment, disqualification from holding any future government position, requires a separate Senate vote. In this case, only a simple majority is required to ban the impeached president from any future government office for life. That second vote has never been held since no president has been found guilty in the Senate trial.

Trump Lawyer: His Call To Georgia Officials To Find Votes Was Taken Out Of Context

Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen shot back, “My judgment? Who asked that?”

“I did,” Sanders replied.

“My judgment is irrelevant,” van der Veen said.

“You represent the president of the United States!” Sanders yelled back before Sen. Patrick Leahy, the presiding officer, gaveled the chamber back to order.

Trump’s rhetoric about widespread fraud and a stolen election was false, dismissed by many courts stemming from dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and allies across several key states.

Mcconnell: Trump Is Practically And Morally Responsible For Provoking Capitol Riot

From CNN’s Adrienne Vogt

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the Jan. 6 Capitol attack a “disgrace.”

“They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth. Because he was angry. He had lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” McConnell said.

“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President,” he added.

McConnell said there were “wild myths” about election fraud, but he said he defended Trump’s right to bring any complaints to the legal system.

“As I stood up and said clearly at that time, the election was settled. It was over. But that just really opened a new chapter of even wilder, wilder and more unfounded claims,” he said. “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”

Trump “did not do his job” to end the Jan. 6 violence, McConnell said.

McConnell called the Trump defense team invoking Trump’s voters during the impeachment trial “as a human shield against criticism.”

Watch:

Democrats Use Video Of Capitol Attack To Remind Senators Of Purpose Of Impeachment

Senators were brought back to the day of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol when Tuesday’s Senate trial opened with a 13-minute video containing clips from that day, from the president’s exhortation at a rally near the White House that his followers should go to the Capitol to the ensuing attack.

The video included footage of rioters breaking windows and chanting “stop the steal” as they disrupted the process to certify the 2020 presidential election results, falsely believing Trump’s claims that President Joe Biden won due to widespread fraud.

Members of Congress were shown in the video being escorted out. One clip showed the moment a Capitol Police officer shot Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who had joined the rioters trying to get into the House chamber.

The clips were followed by Trump’s words on social media, directing the rioters to “go home with love and in peace.”

“Senators, the president was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on Jan. 13 for doing that. You ask what a high crime and misdemeanor is under our Constitution? That is a high crime and misdemeanor. If that’s not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing,” said House impeachment prosecutor Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

“They don’t need to show you movies to show you that the riot happened here. We will stipulate that it happened, and you know all about it,” he said.

Stacey Plaskett: Trump Trial Needed ‘more Senators With Spines Not More Witnesses’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and West Virginia GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito both cited constitutional concerns in their decision to vote to acquit Trump.

Virgin Islands House Del. Stacey Plaskett, another impeachment manager, told NPR’s Weekend Edition that they didn’t “reverse course” on witnesses but instead succeeded in adding Herrera Beutler’s statement describing a conversation between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Trump as the attack was ongoing.

“I know that people have a lot of angst and they can’t believe that the Senate did what they did . But what we needed were senators, more senators with spines, not more witnesses,” Plaskett said.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close ally of President Biden, reportedly urged House managers to relent on witnesses. He told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that spending “months fighting over witnesses” wouldn’t have been worth it.

“What the House managers needed wasn’t more witnesses or more evidence, what we all needed was more Republican courage,” he said. “This was the most bipartisan verdict in American history, a strong rebuke to President Trump, but frankly at the end of the day, the trial had reached its natural conclusion.”

Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump, after 10 GOP House members voted to impeach Trump for inciting the mob that breached the U.S. Capitol.

Republican Who Wanted To Destroy Bill Clinton During 1998 Impeachment Has Regrets

A former Republican congressman who led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998 said he paid a visit to the former Democratic president a few years ago to ask forgiveness for his role in the affair.

“I hated Bill Clinton, wanted to destroy him, asked to be on Judiciary Committee so that I could impeach him,” said Bob Inglis, R-S.C., in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast.

Inglis visited Clinton a few years ago at the former president’s office in Harlem, he said, in what he described as a “very interesting” meeting. Inglis informed Clinton that he joined the Judiciary Committee as soon as he was elected to Congress in 1992, the same year Clinton was elected president, with the intent of impeaching him.

“I hated you so much that I wanted to impeach you,” Inglis told Clinton.

Clinton “sort of flinched,” Inglis said. “I said, ‘Yeah, I know you hadn’t done anything yet, but so much did I hate you.”

“I told him that it wasn’t good for my soul, it wasn’t good for the country, for me to have that level of animosity toward him,” Inglis said. “He didn’t say the words that you would hope to hear, which is, ‘You’re forgiven.’ But in every way he has expressed that to me. He’s been very kind to accept the apology for sure.”

Inglis left his seat in Congress in 1998, the same year the Republican-controlled House impeached Clinton, to run for the U.S. Senate. He narrowly lost to Democratic incumbent Sen. Fritz Hollings, who had held the seat since 1966.

_____

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expatimes · 3 years

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Donald Trump still believes US election was 'rigged'

US President Donald Trump publicly declared himself the winner of the presidential election Wednesday and called for it to be “turned around” while unleashing a litany of debunked theories and falsehoods as evidence of his victory.

“This was an election that we won easily. We won it by a lot, ”he told a meeting of the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee by phone.

“This election was rigged and we can't let that happen; we can't let it happen for our country and this election has to be turned around because we won Pennsylvania by a lot, and we won all of these swing states by a lot, ”Trump said.

The president has been tweeting many of these claims since Election Day and especially since Joe Biden was declared president-elect on November 7. But this was the first time he has spoken publicly about the results since his last post-election news conference on November 5 .

RIGGED ELECTION!

- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2020

Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, were at Wednesday's meeting in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which across also featured various witnesses from the state who claimed voter fraud and irregularities.

The president, who said he was calling from the Oval Office and was watching the proceedings on television, spoke for just over 11 minutes and outlined his reasons why he was convinced that the Democrats "cheated" and won a "fraudulent election". Every one of his justifications has been debunked and almost all of the lawsuits his legal team has filed have been tossed out of court.

Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, left, and Jenna Ellis, right, argue on behalf of Trump's claim of a 'rigged' election at Wednesday's hearing of the Pennsylvania State Senate Majority Policy Committee in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania [Julio Cortez/AP Photo]

The states Trump referenced Wednesday - Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin - have already certified their election results, except for Wisconsin, where two counties are undergoing a recount and no widespread irregularities have surfaced so far.

A Pennsylvania judge issued an order halting any further Pennsylvania vote certification until a hearing on Friday in a case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans, separate to that of Trump's campaign claims.

Among Trump's unfounded claims on Wednesday:

Trump's claim: “Anybody watching television the night of the election was saying, I was called by the biggest political people, 'congratulations sir on a big win,' and all of a sudden ballots were dumped all over the place and a lot of horrible things happened. ”

Fact: Ballots were not being “dumped all over the place”; they were simply being counted, in some cases later than they normally would due to rules in some states that mail-in ballots could not be processed until Election Day or, in others, until after polls closed. The late-count phenomenon was well known and predicted long in advance of the election and there is no evidence of anything illegal behind it.

Trump's claim: “Between the voter suppression and all of the horrible things that happened to poll watchers… the poll watchers weren't allowed to watch. … If you were a Republican poll watcher, you were treated like a dog and the Democrats had no problem. ”

Fact: As The Associated Press has reported, “Trump is wholly misrepresenting a court case in [Pennsylvania] and what happened at voting places. No one tried to ban poll watchers representing each side in the election. Democrats did not try to stop Republican representatives from being able to observe the process. In addition, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court's ruling that Philadelphia “officials had given Republican observers sufficient access to the vote counting, without allowing them within 6 feet,” the Associated Press reported.

Trump's claim: "We got 74 million votes, and if you would've said 74 million votes the day before the election, every single professional in the business would have said there's no way of beating that."

Fact: Due to the surge in early voting, there were many predictions that the overall turnout would be record-breaking. The New York Times reported on October 31, “Over all, the early turnout has set the country on course to surpass 150 million votes for the first time in history.” On October 17, The Associated Press wrote, “Americans' rush to vote is leading election experts to predict that a record 150 million votes may be cast and turnout rates could be higher than in any presidential election since 1908.” It should not have been a surprise to anybody that a presidential candidate could have received more than 74 million votes.

Trump's claim: “People were getting two and three and four ballots in their home. People that were dead were signing up for ballots. ”

Fact: “In battleground states that Trump needed to win to secure a second term, there has been an influx of claims about illegally cast ballots - including some that say dead people voted in the election. Those claims haven't panned out, ”reports Politifact.

Trump's claim: "You look at Michigan with Detroit, you look at what happened in Detroit, where you have a voter, but you have more votes than you have voters."

Fact: “According to unofficial election results on the City of Detroit's website, on Nov. 5, there were 250,138 votes cast and 504,714 registered voters. Detroit has an estimated population of 670,000, ”reports The Associated Press. Poll books in some Detroit precincts revealed that "the number of names recorded in poll books did not match the number of ballots counted." But that numbered in the hundreds, and that is attributed to human error, something that happens in every election.

After laying all of this out, Trump has maintained, “it's a very sad thing for our country to have this. And they have to turn over the result. ”

The fact is there has been no overwhelming evidence to convince state elections officials or judges to completely halt vote certification, throw out ballots or most certainly “turn over” the will of American voters.

. #world Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=14769&feed_id=19975

#DonaldTrump #News #UnitedStates #USampCanada #USElections2020

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armeniaitn · 4 years

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Controversy Over Proposed Educational System Overhaul: A Coincidence or By Design?

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/culture/controversy-over-proposed-educational-system-overhaul-a-coincidence-or-by-design-43710-04-08-2020/

Controversy Over Proposed Educational System Overhaul: A Coincidence or By Design?

ARF Youth of Armenia protest the education minister in Nov. 2019

BY VICKEN SOSIKIAN

Azerbaijan has attacked Armenia and Turkey has joined them in carrying out major joint military drills as we speak. The country is still in a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, there is one other significant controversy brewing in Armenia that has gotten the attention and sharp criticism of rapidly growing circles in Armenia – a wildly ambiguous and highly criticized set of changes in the entire educational system, which many believe strip young Armenians of vital education that is necessary for the youth of a nation with such a rich culture, heritage and history; a country surrounded by enemies and country with a cause that has yet to be brought to its rightful and just conclusion.

Ever since coming into power Prime Minister Pashinyan and his Education Minister, Arayik Harutyunyan have talked about carrying out educational reforms. However, they have failed to review and address the educational strategic plan the previous government had prepared for review and adoption by the newly elected government in 2018. Contrary to the PR spin Pashinyan gives on things – not everything from the old is by default bad, as may be the case with the mentioned strategic plan. Nonetheless, the government has had more than enough time to review and (even) debunk the presented plan and create their own.

But the fact is they have done nothing regarding strategic planning. In addition to making one wonder what tangible work the Education Ministry has actually done in this regard (especially when lavish bonuses have been distributed quite generously to ministry employees), there is significant speculation that the absence of a strategic plan is not just another failure of the ministry, but done intentionally – leading to further mistrust of the already unpopular Harutyunyan.

Now, how can the Education Ministry plan to overhaul the entire education system without a plan? Perhaps, if we shed some light on the planned changes – it would help provide some clues:

Pre-military Education Armenian men are required by law to serve in the military upon graduation from high school. The current educational system includes a dedicated preparatory course where all students are taught about military strategy, tactics, history, and even practical on-field lessons. The fate of this critical subject is uncertain and unclear in the planned changes. Consistent with its ambiguous nature, the plans discuss changes to this important course and subject without specifying what those changes are.

Armenian Church Currently students in Armenia must take a required course dedicated to the Armenian Church. The proposed changes remove the Armenian Church as a dedicated course and combine it with Armenian History – another currently dedicated course. The proposal aims to replace two vastly significant courses with one. Regardless of individual faith, the Armenian Church is a national treasure for Armenians. It makes up a vital component of our history and identity. In fact, the Armenian Church is not only significant to Armenian history but to world history, as well as Christian history. Additionally, most critics of this change argue that the course is a source of moral and spiritual education for the youth.

Furthermore, Article 18 of the Armenian Constitution states that the country recognizes the exclusive mission of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church (as a national church) in the spiritual life of the Armenian people, in the development of their national culture and preservation of their national identity. Various circles are concerned that the removal of the Armenian Church course is a precursor to a possible future attempt to remove Article 18 – something that will in fact be more easily accomplished given unconstitutional amendments made recently that is now resulting in the replacement of three Constitutional Court judges.

Armenian History The course of Armenian History is also undergoing some changes, the most significant of which is the omission of the origins of the Armenian people. Our origins as native to the land that makes up a large swath of present-day Turkey is not only important because it is an undeniable fact, but it also serves as an important component of territorial claims made by Armenians.

Textbook and Faculty Changes The proposed changes also require the publication of new textbooks and combining of classes. In addition to the concern of changing the country’s textbooks to remove (or reduce) the history of our origins, our church, our military and so on; there is concern about how (and who) will teach the new courses. For example, currently, the Armenian Church course is taught by religious experts who do not necessarily have expertise in Armenian history. By combining teachers to accommodate the proposed changes, the students may be left with inadequately prepared or insufficiently knowledgeable teachers – which in turn leads to another concern; combining classes will result in widespread layoffs of faculty members.

The Turkish Connection However, the most concerning aspect of the textbook changes is the individual(s) who have been selected to develop the new textbooks. The lead on this project is Lilit Mkrtchyan. Although she is an associate professor at the Department of World History at Yerevan State University; Mkrtchyan’s involvement in various western backed projects that attempt to re-write Armenian history would have anyone with a slither of concern for the Armenian Cause up in arms. Mkrtchyan, now tasked with revising dozens of Armenian textbooks, is co-author of “History Education in Schools in Turkey and Armenia – A Critique and Alternatives.” If the title alone doesn’t cause alarm, you can go ahead and delve into the details of her work (https://bit.ly/319HE5i). The short of it (as titled by one of the projects she worked on) is an attempt to “challenge the image of the enemy as well as the current exclusivist narratives that the history education in Armenia and Turkey promotes.” I don’t know what Turkish schools teach (though I can take a guess), but in Armenia calling Turkey anything short of an enemy is unacceptable, for me at least – until the full resolution of the Armenian Cause.

Lack of Transparency and Accountability The above noted points have justly caused an uproar among virtually every segment of the Armenian population – including many who otherwise have supported the Pashinyan administration. However, the Education Minister’s failure to engage in public discourse on such a major overhaul of the educational system and his unwillingness to listen to input from students, teachers, administrators and academic experts has turned into widespread calls for his resignation. However, Pashinyan has not (at least publicly) called on Harutyunyan for accounting on this matter – leading the public to insinuate that his silence means agreement.

Of significance is the fact that the plan to overhaul the educational system is not going to be presented to the National Assembly but can be adopted by the government during one of its weekly meetings. The Pashinyan camp maintains total control over both the parliament and the government, but if it were to go through the parliament, the changes would at least be given more attention by the public through their elected representatives.

Coincidental or By Design? One would think that in addition to being led by a strategic plan, engaging a wide network of stakeholders for input, and being clear and transparent with its plans and intentions – the government would heed the recent Azeri attacks on Armenia and Armenians and Turkey’s call to combat the Armenian lobby (June 2020) as a sign to ante up on their efforts to enhance our education system, to teach more history to the youth, to provide more preparation for military service, and to instill a greater sense of love for our culture and heritage.

All this amid a state of emergency, which just happens to prevent the assembly of citizens in protest and just after illegally bull dozing through constitutional amendments, which shake the most basic principles of democracy in the country.

Coincidence or by design?

Read original article here.

#Armenia #Armenians #Covid-19 #Yerevan #Culture

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thisdaynews · 4 years

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Revealed:Churches were shut down in Nigeria during 1918 pandemic – Pastor Sam Adeyemi debunks Pastor Chris’ claim on Antichrist, 5G and Coronavirus (video)

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/revealedchurches-were-shut-down-in-nigeria-during-1918-pandemic-pastor-sam-adeyemi-debunks-pastor-chris-claim-on-antichrist-5g-and-coronavirus-video/

Revealed:Churches were shut down in Nigeria during 1918 pandemic – Pastor Sam Adeyemi debunks Pastor Chris’ claim on Antichrist, 5G and Coronavirus (video)

Pastor Sam Adeyemi has debunked Pastor Chris Oyakhilome’s claim of government shutting down churches to install the 5G network and the Antichrist being the cause of Coronavirus.

In an Instagram live chat with Pastor Poju Oyemade who is the founder and senior pastor of The Covenant Nation, Adeyemi said he studied how the 1918 pandemic affected Nigeria and found out that churches, mosques, schools and markets were also shut down at that time.

The Founder of Daystar Christian Centre stated that people are giving extreme interpretations of the current crisis, even though it has nothing to do with the Antichrist. He further disclosed that while air travel is the major means of passing on Coronavirus globally, the 1918 influenza was brought into Nigeria through the sea.

Adeyemi said;

“I went online, there was a pandemic 100 years ago, let me go and study it and check it out, because the interpretation that people are giving to this pandemic, they range from one extreme to the other,” Adeyemi said.

“I don’t even want to go into the details now, but there’s quarrel on social media now; from 5G to 10G and other things. I decided to check, how did it affect Nigeria?

“I found a research article by a history lecturer at the University at Birnin Kebbi. Beautiful research!”

“I had to buy it. But I was happy buying it, because when I read it, it was amazing, it dug into the British archives, all the records that the colonial officers kept.

“[In] 1918 September, when the thing hit, the way air travel now is the main thing for global transportation and it was air travel that moved the coronavirus around, it was sea travel that spread the influenza around then.

“The ships that brought sick people into the Lagos port; I got the names, the dates they arrived, how it spread in Nigeria.

“I’d tell you the one that I saw and almost screamed, they closed churches, they closed mosques, they shut down schools, they shut down markets. 1918. So, some of us now think it is the anti-christ that is at work, he does not want us to gather together and fellowship.

“We should just be thanking God that we have internet now and we can be relating without meeting together. They shut churches in 1918. So when the leader takes perspective like that, then you can calm people down and tell them there will be life after this thing.”

Adeyemi added that though there are opportunities in every crisis, it is a leader’s duty to see the opportunities and not to project fear on his/her followers.

Here is the video below;

View this post on Instagram

. . . The founder of Daystar Christian Centre debunked Pastor Chris’ claim of Government shutting down Churches to install 5G, and the Antichrist being the cause of Coronavirus

A post shared by Lindaikejiblog (@lindaikejiblogofficial) on Apr 7, 2020 at 11:17pm PDT

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plusorminuscongress · 5 years

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Harry Houdini: (How to Be a) Smooth Criminal

Harry Houdini: (How to Be a) Smooth Criminal By Neely Tucker Published October 28, 2019 at 10:00AM

Harry Houdini, July 7, 1912. The crate will be sealed and lowered into New York Harbor; he’ll escape. Photo: Carl Dietz. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Amanda Zimmerman, a reference assistant in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Since we’re approaching Halloween, we thought we’d drop in on America’s most famous mystic and magician, Harry Houdini. This article was adapted from the Library of Congress Magazine.

One of the most recognizable figures of the 20th century, Harry Houdini — escape artist, debunker of frauds, delver into all things mysterious — spent a surprising amount of time in the company of the police. The Library has his collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and it is filled with marvelous things — just ask author, actor and magician Neal Patrick Harris, who visited the collection before his recent appearance here.

One thing that you’lff notice is that the self-proclaimed Handcuff King routinely issued challenges to law enforcement, claiming that no handcuffs or prison cells could hold him — stunts that made Houdini famous around the world and frequently brought him into contact with people on both sides of the law. He spent a lifetime studying the methods of the criminal element to understand how they duped the innocent and unsuspecting.

This insight resulted in law enforcement occasionally asking for Houdini’s help in solving crimes. On at least one occasion, Houdini received an official police pass allowing him to cross any police barriers in an active crime scene or investigation.

From the Harry Houdini Collection. Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

This unusual level of involvement with police matters allowed Houdini to amass a huge amount of information related to crime, fraud and general wrongdoing. In 1906, he gathered this information and published “The Right Way to Do Wrong: An Expose of Successful Criminals.”

In the preface, Houdini outlines his purpose: “I trust this book will … put you in a position where you will be less liable to fall a victim.” Each chapter explores various classes of criminals, from burglars and cracksmen to “healers” and humbugs, revealing the tricks they use to con their innocent prey. Houdini condemns the behavior of criminals but also claims they have the same “talents” as giants of business and finance — only with their energy and skills applied in the wrong direction.

The books were sold primarily at Houdini’s own performances, and rumors circulated when it was published that criminals snatched up as many copies as they could in an effort to protect their secrets (rumors now supposed to have been started by Houdini himself). Perhaps Houdini truly did hope to use his knowledge to inform and protect the innocent public; perhaps he also saw this as an opportunity to once again display his incomparability as the master of all that mystifies.

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