By Rick Manning

Thanksgiving 2019 is in the rearview mirror and most Americans after having sated themselves on turkey, pumpkin pie and football have turned their eyes toward the Christmas spending season with three short weekends left before the gift giving extravaganza, also known as the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

But it would be a mistake to forget the Pilgrims and the important role which they played in our nation’s founding until November roles around next year.  2020 marks the 400^th anniversary of this seminal event in our nation’s history, and is a unique time for Americans to rediscover God’s providence in our founding.

One thing is certain, the New York Times did not randomly choose the name, 1619 Project, for their expansive effort to deconstruct the legitimacy of Judeo-Christian western European thoughts, actions and human progress in the new world.  They chose it as a symbol to attack and delegitimize the origins of America, the greatest experiment in freedom in human history.

This makes the battle over what happened in New England when a small group of Christian “separatists”, now known as the Pilgrims, landed and built their village at an abandoned Cape Cod Wampanoag Indian village of Patuxet a flash point in the shocking fight over America’s moral right to exist.

This group of Christian separatists who rejected the Church of England, along with the subsequent establishment of Boston and the rest of New England by a different group of Christians (the Puritans) who sought to purify King Henry XIII’s mandated Church of England so important, were the heart of what became America in the revolutionary 18^th century.

I will leave it to renowned historian Gordon Wood to eviscerate the emphasis which the 1619 Project puts on slavery as the driving force of the American Revolution, but instead will focus upon the religious motivations of the Pilgrims, as a core principle of the left is to deny the Judeo-Christian origins of our nation.

The Pilgrims originally left England for Holland to avoid religious persecution.  They were “separatists” meaning they did not wish to reform the Church of England, but instead sought a completely separate Bible-based system of worship. However after a decade in Holland, historians report that church members became dismayed that their children were becoming Dutch, and the new world provided the best hope to establish a separate Godly community.

While about half the 102 settlers on the original Mayflower were not part of the separatist movement, the Mayflower Compact which secured voting rights for new arrivals bound the tiny community together. Within one year, half of those original settlers were dead from cold, disease and hunger, leaving the future uncertain.

On a religious front, in 1611, King James of England had released his “authorized” English translation of the Bible which is still in common usage today, but the separatists and many English speakers of the time retained the Geneva Bible, an English translation from 1560 which included scriptural cross references and other study helps — as their trusted source for the Word of God. William Bradford, the first Governor of the Plymouth Plantation, was so determined to read the unfiltered Word of God, that he learned Hebrew in order to consume the Old Testament in its native language. In fact, Bradford’s headstone bears the inscription, “The Lord is the help of my life”, in Hebrew.

There can be no dispute that the pursuit of a Godly Christian life was at the root of the Pilgrims’ very meager existence.

After initially attempting an economic system of mutual sharing on the shores of Cape Cod, Bradford writes in “Of Plymouth Plantation” that the people were allowed to farm their own land to end their current “misery.” A misery of hunger, poverty and discontent sewed by a system which demanded the strong do much of the work feeling enslaved by the rest as they derived no extra value for their work.

These basic facts — the God fearing and seeking nature of our nation’s earliest founders combined with their practical rejection of socialism will be under attack or buried by those who seek to undermine America’s moral legitimacy through the 1619 Project in the next year.   

It is reasonable to hope that the Department of Interior has been creating an historically accurate teaching series about the Judeo-Christian and private property base which undergird the Pilgrim’s experience.  Dissemination of the Pilgrims’ truth in schools and throughout our historical landmarks systems to mark the 400^th anniversary would be valuable so that our children and adults have a reliable source to reference to counter the likely inundation by the 1619 propaganda barrage designed to kill our country at its roots.

Given the infiltration of those determined to poison the tree of liberty into our governmental institutions, it would be wise, if this has not already happened for all materials to be given a historical review prior to dissemination so that our government does not feed the disinformation cancer which threatens America’s very existence. 

Like William Bradford learning Hebrew, America may need to go back to the original source documents in order to learn a history rooted in God and individual freedom, and the 400 year anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth is the ideal time to begin truly rediscovering America.

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

Cartoon: A Little Help

By A.F. Branco

 

Click here for a higher level resolution version.

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Democrats must not have the votes for impeachment

Nov. 25, 2019, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in response to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s statement on CNN that “I want to discuss this with my constituents and colleagues before I make a final judgment on this…”:

“Adam Schiff attempted to walk back his demand for impeachment this weekend on CNN in one of the most transparent political act of capitulations in recent memory. Schiff and his Democratic cohorts have been attempting to impeach and delegitimize President Trump since before the 2016 election. And for the past three years have sought to undermine President Trump at every turn. The damage Schiff has done to our nation is incalculable through his abuse of the very serious impeachment clause in the United States Constitution. Now there is talk in Washington of pushing for a meaningless censure of the President in the House of Representatives while putting President Trump on double not-so-secret probation for a future impeachment.

“Three things are clear. Democrats don’t have the votes for impeachment in the House. The American public is telling Speaker Pelosi to start passing legislation like the proposed USMCA, budget cuts and border security. And, the administrative state’s coup against the President has been rejected once exposed to open hearings. It’s time for Congress to stop their efforts to undo the results of the 2016 election and focus on the business of the American people.”

To view online: https://getliberty.org/2019/11/democrats-must-not-have-the-votes-for-impeachment/

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ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured report from the Washington Times, China has been stealing U.S. intellectual property from our nation’s universities, a Senate report reveals:

China exploiting U.S. schools to steal research, Senate report finds

By Stephen Dinan

China has built its economy in part on research funded by taxpayers in the U.S., then siphoned across the Pacific Ocean by academics recruited by Beijing to act as double agents, stealing intellectual property from their American universities, a bipartisan Senate report revealed Monday.

The academics signed contracts that in some cases committed them to hiding their dual research status from their U.S. employers while giving China a first look at their work, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations found.

Beijing’s interest in stealing U.S. military and economic secrets has long been known, but the federal government was slow to act, the report says.

“American taxpayers have been unwittingly funding the rise of China’s economy and military over the last two decades,” said Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Republican and chairman of the investigative subcommittee, adding that “our own federal agencies have done little to stop their actions despite being aware of China’s talent plans.”

One China-backed researcher downloaded more than 30,000 files from an Energy Department lab and then fled back to China. In another instance, the report detailed how a professor at an American university working in a science field with both civilian and military applications found a way to circumvent U.S. export rules and get his findings back to China.

Investigators said he was paid by federal agencies to perform research while running a China-based lab, and he sponsored visiting Chinese students in the U.S. He then used the students to transfer his research back to China without having to travel himself.

The federal agency that investigated the case said many of the visiting students were “directly affiliated with research and development organizations involved in China’s military modernization efforts.”

Senate investigators said China has more than 200 programs to recruit research talent at home and abroad. The Senate report looks at one of them, the Thousand Talents Plan, which is directly run by the Communist Party Central Committee.

Investigators obtained some of the contracts that Thousand Talents Plan recruits sign with China and found researchers were pledging to hide their ties from U.S. institutions, all while promising to share their findings with their Chinese overseers.

One contract urged a researcher to run “shadow labs” in China, and other contracts required researchers to recruit others into the program. One Senate investigator compared it to a pyramid scheme and said it was no wonder the Thousand Talents Plan exceeded Beijing’s goals for growth.

“Chinese talent recruitment plan members misappropriated U.S. government funding, provided early basic research ideas to their Chinese employers, stole intellectual capital from U.S. basic research before it was published, and engaged in intellectual property theft,” the report concluded.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in July told Congress that the bureau is increasingly concerned about China’s talent recruitment strategy and pointed out that the U.S. taxpayer is often providing the money for the research that is advancing China’s “economic dominance over us.”

But the FBI was slow on the draw, the Senate report says.

The bureau had a list of China-backed researchers in 2016 but didn’t share the information for two years.

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