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LINCOLN/REAGAN DINNER

On Saturday, June 20, 2020 The Iosco County Republican Party held their annual Lincoln/Reagan Dinner at the VFW Hall in Oscoda.  We had the best turnout we have had in years.

We were joined by Dan Althouse Sr. and Dan Althouse, Jr., two members of the band Victory 4, who played several songs, some of which Dan, Jr. wrote.  They were excellent.

David Chandler, Iosco County Chair, acted as Master of Ceremonies, with Calvin McLaren, County Road Commissioner, leading in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Monica Chandler gave the Invocation, followed by a Welcome from Donald J. O'Farrell, County Commissioner.  In addition, we were joined by County Commissioner, Terry Dutcher, Road Commissioner, Ben Brewer and Christopher Martin, Baldwin Township Planning Commissioner. 

Our guest speakers, Clifford Humphrey of Hillsdale College, gave a really interesting talk.  Lewis Rudel has a Guest Column on the speech.  We were also joined by State Senator Jim Stamas, State Representative, Sue Allor, who gave us a very interesting talks about about the present state of affairs in Michigan and what is going on in the state legislature.

Special acknowledgement was given to our Century Club Member: Hubert Fisk,  Gold Members: Christopher & Lindsey Martin, Donald J. and Jennifer O'Farrell and Patrick & Jane Ruster, and Platinum Member: Maureen Rudel.

Guest gifts were provided by Maureen Rudel and Student Guest Sponsors were Pat & Jane Ruster and Sandy & Gary Hollabaugh.

We had a wonderful dinner catered by Mancino's. 

GUEST COLUMN
Lincoln's Speech to the Young Man's Lyceum Club
By Lewis C. Rudel

At the annual Lincoln/Reagan Republican Dinner, the featured speaker was Clifford Humphrey, from Hillsdale College and he spoke about the Lincoln speech of January 27, 1838 to the Young Man's Lyceum club. Clifford did an excellent job of tying this speech to the current events going on now with the "mobicratic" rule that Lincoln spoke about. 

The speech is about 24 minutes long and it is scary how appropriate it is now. In particular, with the tearing down of George Washington's statue in Portland. One particular quote at the end of the speech where he is talking about Washington is really interesting. Donald Trump might want to use this: 

"Let those materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws; and that we improved to the last, that we remained free to the last, that we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place, shall be that which we learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington."

The whole speech is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbJ8RrhVv0.

K-12: ELON MUSK SAYS TAKE THE RED PILL
By Bruce Deitrick Price, May 30. 2020

Elon Musk is one of the brainiest people on the planet and a fighter. He invented PayPal on his way to launching SpaceX and Tesla. Last week, Musk threatened to sue Alameda County because the pols wanted his employees to stay well distanced on a Tesla production line. Yeah, right, Musk replied — you'll have to arrest me first.  Musk, once a liberal in good standing, explained his outrage: "Somebody wants to stay in the house, that's great[.] ... But to say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their g------ freedom[.] ...

Everything people have worked for all their lives is being destroyed in real time. I think the people are going to be very angry about this and are very angry."

Musk exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers: "Take the red pill."

The New York Times goofily referred to his message as "cryptic." Most people know that the hero in The Matrix films is offered a choice between a blue pill (comfortable delusions) and a red pill that lets you see reality and truth.  Never mind what the Times suggests; taking the red pill is not a new development. Fox News reported in 2017: "People of all ages and ethnicities are posting YouTube videos describing 'red pill moments' — personal awakenings that have caused them to reject leftist narratives imbibed since childhood from friends, teachers, and the news and entertainment media."

According to Newsweek in 2018, "The pop culture metaphor has become a popular phrase among conservatives. 'Being red pilled' widely signifies a free-thinking attitude and having been awakened."  Piers Morgan, once a CNN host and a typical liberal, found political upheaval in his red pill. "Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable," Morgan explained in a 2019 interview with Ben Shapiro. "Liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal and it is a massive problem. Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They're fed up with snowflakery."

Professor Steve Turley, a conservative commentator, said Morgan's new attitudes are "easily understandable and indeed justified by the tyrannical nature of PC culture."

What's all this got to do with public schools? Everything. They are the perfect embodiment of a tyrannical P.C. culture, which populism and conservatism should oppose.  Go ahead: take the red pill, and grapple with the shocking truths of K–12 malfeasance. The professors and bureaucrats who mismanage our public schools claim they care about education, your kids, and our country. A steady diet of blue pills makes that sound reasonable.  It took years for me to be red-pilled. Finally, I couldn't escape the conviction that deep down in their Progressive hearts, our professors of education are actively hostile to kids, this country, and education as traditionally defined.  When you take the red pill, you see with clarity that millions of American children don't learn to read for a horrifyingly specific reason. No, it's not bad eyesight or a genuine disability. It's because American public schools insist on using a method known not to work. Whole Word (AKA sight-words) devastates genuine literacy and thus educational progress. 

Math is more of the same perverse intent. Your kids may struggle with basic arithmetic and become calculator-dependent at an early age. Why? Because Reform Math and Common Core Math befuddle children and deflate whatever native abilities they have. Take the red pill, and you will likely conclude that such bizarre instruction is not education, but a dirty trick that should be stopped.  Take the red pill, and then you see an impossible truth as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Constructivism? Oh, that's the hoax that prohibits teachers from teaching. Teachers are ordered to be facilitators, not teachers, so children have to be their own teachers. Now and then, this approach might work. But what typically happens is that children are overwhelmed by their galloping ignorance. They have no joy in learning.  Everyone, please take the red pill. As long as you think the schools are your friends, you won't take the time to grasp what sneaky tricks go on inside the classrooms. You won't exert yourself to make the schools better. 

All these years, the fraud in the public schools was right there before you. With the red pill, you may say, oh, my God, how could I have been part of this deception? They manipulate little kids and break their spirits.  Education officials have become arrogantly anti-education. They seem to be an alien presence that has foisted itself on us. Progressives appear to carry forward the aggression of Karl Marx, who threatened his fellow socialists, if they dared to disagree: "I will annihilate you!" 

Kanye West, unexpected fan of Donald Trump, released a tirade of tweets including a call for people to break "out of our mental prisons." Many conclude he has been red-pilled. We can hope so.  Kanye can give red pills to the people in Hollywood. Maybe they'll want to help our schools break out of their mental prisons.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com

Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them? Price deconstructs educational methods on Improve-Education.org.

GRETCHEN WHITMER SLIPS STATE MONEY TO LEFTIST POLITICAL OPERATIVES
TO SPY ON MICHIGANDERS. THEN LIES ABOUT IT.
By Monica Showalter, May 28, 2020

It's pretty amazing how many negative activities gather around Michigan's hard-faced and ambitious Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

Besides her outrageous performance on the coronavirus crisis — banning sales of garden seeds, seeding nursing homes with COVID-19 patients, forcing private dam operators to overfill their reservoir for greenie purposes, causing two of them to burst — she's also a liar.

We saw that clearly enough when her husband tried to put himself at the front of the boating queue by citing his marriage to her — cronyism at its worst — and she claimed that it was a joke. It was a story so egregiously bad that the only reason we didn't comment about it here at American Thinker earlier is that we mistakenly thought the story was fake. Now there's the matter of Whitmer's political corruption — succoring her political cronies at state expense to spy on Michiganders to beef up the Democratic Party operation, which she's also lying about.

According to the Daily Wire: Newly released emails show that Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer's office gave the "green light" for taxpayer money to be awarded to Democrat groups as part of the state's coronavirus tracing program.

"Whitmer's office gave the 'green light' for a COVID-19 contact tracing 'arrangement' she denied knowledge of and canceled amid outcry over a contractor with Democratic ties," Bridge Magazine, a local Michigan publication, reported. "Emails obtained through a public records request appear to show Michigan officials tried to avoid controversy by shifting work to apolitical subsidiaries of firms with known partisan leanings."

It would be bad no matter what the sneaky money was for, but in this case, the awfulness is multiplied because it's state money for leftists to spy on Michiganders — and not just spy on them, but use that information to benefit one political party's campaign operations. Guess which:

In late April, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Whitmer had given control of the state's contact tracing program to "one of the left's biggest technology firms" and that the move was seen as potential way of her "using the coronavirus to strengthen the Democratic Party's data operation."

The Washington Post reported that the group that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars were going to go "would be managed in coordination with EveryAction, a firm that is closely linked to NGP VAN, a technology provider that boasts that it powers 'nearly every major Democratic campaign in America.'"

That's handing leftists an illegal campaign contribution at taxpayer expense, amounting to naked political corruption.

Now she's lying about the whole thing. According to the Wire: Whitmer struggled to respond and had to resort to reading prepared notes when pressed  during a news conference in April about why she awarded the contracts to partisan left-wing groups.

"When it was brought to my attention, I told them to cancel it," Whitmer claimed. "This was an unnecessary distraction. Leadership is about solving problems. The correct process was not followed."

Whitmer refused to answer who was responsible for making the decision to use those companies.  This sounds like her bizarre response to the boat dock scandal, or her strange intransigence on keeping Michigan's economy closed, or her insistence on all mail-in ballots. She claims to be the good guy when it's clear as day that her hands are filthy with scandal. She seems to recognize it, too, which is why she keeps lying.

She's already under investigation by the state Legislature for her nursing home scandal. She ought to be under a big-time federal probe for this one. Something is way off about this woman, who will do anything to advance her own political prospects and those of her cronies. Her supposed popularity in her state is astounding, given the scale of her scandals. I suspect it's fake.

It's time for the feds to step in. This isn't normal politics.

Reprinted with permission from the American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com