The Sons of Confederate Veterans has sued to return a 30-foot-high obelisk to its original site in front of the Decatur Courthouse.

The monument was taken down and moved to storage last year after a judge in Decatur agreed with the city’s argument that it had become a threat to public safety during protests about racism and police brutality.

The suit was filed Wednesday. It contends that the monument was not found to be a public nuisance. DeKalb County Judge Clarence Seeliger’s ruling last year said it had become “an increasingly frequent target of graffiti and vandalism, a figurative lightning rod for friction among citizens, and a potential catastrophe that could happen at any time if individuals attempt to forcibly remove or destroy it.” His final order, in September, said the obelisk should never be returned to the square.

In an email Decatur City Attorney Bryan Downs called the suit a “tardy, vexatious attack on properly entered rulings by a Georgia court of law.” He said the SCV had more than three months to try to intervene before Seeliger’s final order but did nothing. “The Petition they have now filed is factually incorrect, legally flawed, and procedurally deficient,” Downs wrote. “In short, it is a lost cause.”

Three entities have already expressed interest in acquiring two statues of Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson removed from the downtown Charlottesville parks. City Manager Chip Boyles said at Monday’s council meeting that two of the interested entities are in-state and one is out-of-state.

Virginia law requires a 30-day window for the City to offer the statues to any museum, historical society, government or military battlefield. The offer expires July 7.

The problem is that the City does not want to give the statues to: “Just any organization… They need to be in the hands of an organization that is trusted to speak for the whole community, one that will help shift the narrative to one that is inclusive and anti-racist.” In other words, they will not give them to the SCV, UDC, nearby museums, or any organization that will actually preserve or redisplay the monuments.

In short, these monuments were removed in violation of law and damn’d if the law is gonna interfere with how they are disposed after that fact.

Tropical Storm Claudette battered North Carolina after killing at least 12 people in Alabama over the weekend.

A new Hill-HarrisX poll finds that thirty percent of Republican voters say they believe President Trump will “likely” be reinstated to office this year. The results are comparable to other polling from Politico-Morning Consult released this month that showed nearly three in 10 Americans believe Trump will be reinstated.

Meanwhile, 26 percent of independent voters said it’s likely that President Trump will be reinstated while 13 percent of Democrats said the same.

As of September 1, 2021, United Airlines will be adjusting its appearance standards for uniformed, customer-facing employees, including customer service representatives and flight attendants. Then as of later this year these relaxed standards will apply to other work groups, including pilots, ramp service employees, etc.

These changes are intended to “reflect a more modernized look, with inclusive standards that better permit freedom of gender expression.

United will be sharing the full details of updated guidelines next month. Among other things, we can expect more inclusive policies around visible tattoos, nose piercings, hair, make-up, and nails. The below pictures apparently show some of the updated standards that we can expect.

How many think the “news” media has only been a problem for the past few decades, from sometime around the 1950s until now? If this is what you believe then you have already swallowed half of their lie. In fact, the “news” media–so called–has been a propaganda organ of the Deep State from sometime in the 1840s. And always with a leftist slant!

If you are doing the homework you can begin to notice this in the late 1840s with some of the coverage given to the 1848 socialist and communist revolts in Europe by Horace Greeley’s paper the New York Tribune. Articles by Charles A. Dana for Greeley’s paper purported to cover what was going on at that time in Europe. What they didn’t tell you was that Dana was actually participating in those socialist revolts and then sending back “news” that made them look good. This is a tactic that has been used by the Left ever since then and it must work because lots of naive people seem to buy into such gobbledygook

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This was particularly noticeable in the left-of-center coverage given to abolitionist/terrorist John Brown. The book John Brown’s War Against Slavery by Robert E. McGlone observed that: “To call the role of abolitionist correspondents in Kansas is to compile a list of John Brown’s admirers and disciples: James Redpath, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Addison Williams, Richard J. Hinton, Richard Realf, John Henry Kagi, and others. Just twenty in 1855 when he came to Kansas, Scottish-born James Redpath was a correspondent for three Republican papers, including Greeley’s New York Tribune.”

And he continued: “Englishman Richard J. Hinton, another reporter for Eastern newspapers, arrived in Kansas in June 1856. He soon joined Brown’s ‘army’ and later claimed he would have been at Harpers Ferry had he been properly informed on the date of the attack. Richard Realf reported for Eastern papers and rode with (James) Lane before volunteering to serve under Brown. John H. Kagi, Brown’s second in command at Harpers Ferry reported on Kansas for the Washington National Era..Kagi was the associate editor of the Topeka Tribune…”

Then there was leftist Unitarian Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who was “always ready to invest money in treason.” McGlone tells us that “His ‘letters from Kansas’ ran in several Eastern and Midwestern newspapers over the signature ‘Worcester’.” Do you begin to get the idea that John Brown was top-heavy with “news” correspondents? Obviously the political and theological Left had big plans for Brown and his agenda or he would not have rated this much “news” coverage.

But McGlone hasn’t told you everything. Whether that was on purpose or not I can’t say, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. To fill in some of the missing bits of info, we need to go to Arthur Thompson’s book To The Victors Go The Myths And Monuments. Mr. Thompson can always be depended on to give some what most of the rest leave out. He notes, of Brown that: “Brown also had veteran 48ers Charles Kaiser, August Bondi, and Charles W. Lenhardt who rode with him in Kansas, and the Chartist (English socialist) Richard J. Hinton. Many short histories of Brown leave out any reference to the majority of the aforementioned men. Brown was admired by Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Dr. Samuel Howe, and Frederick Douglas Frederick Douglas was close enough to Brown that Brown confided in him the location of what would become the raid on Harpers Ferry. After the raid, Douglas also fled temporarily to Canada for fear that he would be prosecuted for abetting. The official story is that he was worried about guilt by association. Actually, evidence captured at the time in the possession of John Brown implicated Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, and Douglas…The membership in a wide variety of conspiratorial organizations just among the men who rode with Brown indicates a broad-based influence within the Left.

So you can see that the Left had plans to use Brown and his agenda for their own purposes. Brown was the cannon fodder for part of their leftist revolution in this country. So please, you folks on the left, please don’t continue to bleat about how communism was no problem in this country until Roosevelt. You are trying to defraud us of 100 years of your active agenda in this country in the hope that we will not pick up on it. Sad to say, for you, it isn’t working anymore.

Australia News reporting on Joe Biden

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Flag Day is upon us, with the Fourth of July not far behind. No better time for a frontal assault on a cherished American ritual—the Pledge of Allegiance.

Though conservatives will be most aghast at this undertaking, the open-minded ones will soon discover they should be among the pledge’s greatest critics.

Before I open fire, a brief explanation for international readers: The Pledge of Allegiance is recited by children across America at the start of start of each school day. It’s also incorporated into many meetings held by federal, state and local governments and private groups as well.

Standing and facing the flag with hand over heart, one recites: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Many who consider the pledge a cornerstone of conservative values will be surprised to learn it was written by a Christian Socialist named Francis Bellamy, who was run out of his pulpit at a Boston church for preaching against capitalism, and who called Jesus Christ a socialist.

His radical cousin, Edward Bellamy, wrote a popular novel, Looking Backward, which glowingly describes a future in which government controls the means of production and where men are conscripted into the country’s “industrial army” and compelled to work in roles assigned to them by central planners.

While working for The Youth’s Companion, a children’s magazine, Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892, timed to be introduced in patriotic celebrations accompanying the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival.

According to a summary of Bellamy’s account of his writing of the pledge, he aimed for brevity, as well as “a rhythmic roll of sound so they would impress the children and have a lasting meaning when they became grown-up citizens.”

Given his beliefs, Bellamy was well-suited for creating a loyalty oath that conditions Americans to subordinate themselves to a powerful central government. Make no mistake—in pledging allegiance “to the republic,” Americans are doing precisely that.

That’s consistent with Bellamy’s wish for state sovereignty and individual liberties to yield to a centralized national government, but it’s starkly at odds with the founding spirit of the country.

Central to that spirit are the notions that government should be a servant and not a master, and that all government should be viewed with deep, ongoing wariness— certainly not the reverence demanded by the Pledge of Allegiance.

Free people have no business pledging loyalty to any government. It’s government that has a duty of loyalty to the people, with no more essential demonstration of that loyalty than the protection of the rights of individuals.

Bellamy didn’t just write the pledge, but also instructions for an accompanying ritual that feels simultaneously religious and militaristic:

“At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the Flag the military salute—right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it… At the words, ‘to my Flag,’ the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, towards the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.”

Yes, Bellamy directed civilian children and adults to render a military salute to the flag, perhaps laying the philosophical groundwork for the eventual creation of the socialist “industrial army” his cousin envisioned in his novel.

The arm outstretched toward the flag came to be called the “Bellamy salute,” and it endured for several decades before its striking similarity to the Nazi salute prompted its replacement in 1942 by the familiar hand-over-heart gesture.

I haven’t always felt this way. Conditioned by 13 years of public school, I continued sincerely reciting the pledge at various functions far into my adult life. Following my U.S. Army service, I’d even stand at attention with heels locked—Bellamy would’ve been proud.

It was only after learning the true meaning of liberty and the animating spirit of our system of government that my mind was changed. If your experience is like mine, once you begin recognizing the pledge as the authoritarian loyalty oath that it is, you’ll soon develop disdain for its nearly every phrase.

Two elements of the pledge are especially destructive of a healthy mindset regarding the relationship between the American people and government: “One nation” and “indivisible.”

First, in creating the United States of America, the founders were not forming a single nation. The U.S. Constitution is a compact of independent states, with the word “states” taking its highest political meaning that puts Virginia, for example, on par with France.

That compact delegated certain, limited powers to a federal government so it could perform stated functions in service to the separate states. As James Madison wrote, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.”

Fifty different sovereign societies exercising numerous and indefinite powers, without regard to the federal government and, whenever necessary, in outright defiance of it. That’s the United States of America.

With each “one nation” incantation, however, American children and adults are conditioned to view their states as insignificant political subdivisions, while embracing the primacy of the federal government and the centralization of power in Washington, DC.

However, of the pledge’s 31 words, “indivisible” should give greatest offense to American patriots. The very existence of the United States—created by secession from the British empire—is a testament to political divisibility as a foundational human right.

The Declaration of Independence explicitly expresses that sentiment:

“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

By reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and proclaiming the United States of America “indivisible,” Americans disclaim their human right of self-determination. They also surrender their ultimate means of holding government accountable: Every government should exist under perpetual threat of disintegration.

Scouring the pledge for positives, one can appreciate that Bellamy rightly referred to the government as a republic and not a democracy—an important yet underappreciated distinction.

Likewise, we can all embrace the idea of “liberty and justice for all.” However, the pledge implies that’s the current state of affairs, rather than a far-off ambition.

That ambition is undermined by the powerful central government advanced by Bellamy’s pledge. Today, it faces a potent new threat from those who, pursuing “equity,” seek to undermine the rights of individuals by imposing new forms of government-sanctioned discrimination.

Civics aside, it’s worth noting that, since its introduction, the pledge has also sparked objections on religious grounds—and I’m not referring to the 1954 addition of the words “under God,” and its attendant controversy about the separation of church and state.

Rather, many religious people reasonably view pledging allegiance to a flag as a form of idolatry, or something uncomfortably close to it. Before you scoff at the idea that the U.S. flag has evolved into a “graven image” in the Second Commandment sense, consider that citizens are encouraged to dispose of worn-out flags by burning them and, after a period of silent reflection, burying the ashes.

Other religious individuals are put off by the idea of swearing faith to a government. One such critic quotes the Christian bible’s Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters.” You don’t have to ponder that long to see many profound conflicts between the bible’s values (e.g., “blessed are the peacemakers,” “thou shalt not steal”) and the U.S. government’s.

No matter where the hand is placed in what Gene Healy rightly calls a “slavish ritual of devotion to the state,” it’s safe to say if the Pledge of Allegiance had never existed, and Americans were to observe a similar rite in another country, most would surely recoil at the authoritarian spectacle.

Alas, there could be no such opportunity: Richard Ellis, author of To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, looked but couldn’t find another country that has anything like it.

Created by a socialist and now fiercely championed by those who think they’re conservatives, the Pledge of Allegiance will likely continue warping Americans’ thoughts about the relationship between citizens and government for many more years to come.

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In this 78th broadcast of TBR Radio Presents: The TBR History Hour, Dr. Ed talks with an anthropologist and political activist about his books being removed from WalMart and Target. Also discussed is why the so-called “Conservative” media turns on its own, virtue-signaling, the coming balkanization of America, and the surprising but logical reason why the guest actually encourages the teaching of critical race theory.

Click to “watch” this week’s  TBR Radio Presents: The Barnes Review Radio Hour:

Its been a busy week in my old neighborhood.

The Thornton Fractional High School District 215 has two schools, T.F. North H.S.in Calumet City, Illinois and T.F. South H.S. in neighboring Lansing. My mother, aunts, uncles, and several cousins attended and graduated from Thornton Fractional High Schools. I rode my bicycle as a kid around the campuses, played on their ballfields, and had I not used a different address to commute to High School I should have been a graduate of T.F. North myself.

In keeping with the “north – south” theme, T.F. South had a Rebel mascot. At least they did last week.

When I was a kid, Calumet City was a predominately white neighborhood with a lot of Polish, Italian, and eastern Europeans. Mainly blue collar. Lansing was “lily white” and more upper-middle to lower-upper class. Now, several decades later, two-thirds of students in the Thornton Fractional High School District 215 are Black. Most of the blacks live in Calumet City, Burnham, Hegewisch, and have Chicago zip codes. All of whom would attend T.F. North.

Urban sprawl is making its way into Lansing. But the School Board is trying to make it look like they are scrubbing the mascot because the school is 2/3 black when in reality the majority black population is on the opposite side of the District. And as for the black people who I knew, growing up around Thornton Fractional South, well, lets just say that they were all proud Rebels. Talking to people in the neighborhood today, proud Rebels all but a stirred-up few remain.

Still, the Thornton Fractional Board would not even entertain a dialog. They were hell-bent to “protect” a group who were not in large part effected against a beef that they did not even have. And when those who were supposed to “offended” dared to try and say that they were not, well, they were told to set down shut up, and assume their Marxist decreed “victim” position.

So I went to the T.F. South website today and all remaining vestiges of The Rebel were scrubbed earlier in the week. At this moment, T.F. South H.S. does not have a mascot.

Reporting from Lansing, and in Chicago’s far south suburbs – “Rebel pride” remains – at least for now.

Deo Vindice!

Dr. Ed