We’re stocked with DEI-fed social warriors; we’re dangerously short on USA-centered citizens like Staff Sgt. Harry Wells.
By M. D. Kittle, THE FEDERALIST 27 May 2024
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We received some sad news last week. The mother of one of my best friends died. As a fellow of a certain age (child of the ‘80s), parents passing, unfortunately, is becoming a regular occurrence.
Karen was 82, with brain aneurysms and other health complications. Her doctors had told her she effectively had a ticking time bomb in her head. So, we weren’t necessarily surprised to learn that she had died suddenly, but we were deeply saddened.
It always seems the sun shines a little less brightly when good, kind people check out of Hotel Humanity. Selfishly, it seems the sunshine is even dimmer when we lose a true champion in our lives. And Karen was, for reasons not entirely clear to me, a faithful champion of the Kittle cause.
In recent years, Karen talked a lot about the father she never knew, and how she was looking forward to meeting him in heaven. She was a toddler when her dad, a staff sergeant in the Army’s famed 88th Infantry Division — the Blue Devils — was killed in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II’s Italian campaign.
The Army-typed casualty list is long and breathtaking. Harry O. Wells, from the rolling hills of southwest Wisconsin, was a very young man when he died fighting on a hill in Italy known as Monte Battaglia, or Battle Mountain. His 350th Infantry Regiment was recognized for extraordinary valor.
‘Seven Bloody Days’
Wells, like so many of the young men of the Greatest Generation who fought in World War II, had a bright future in front of him. Before entering the service in December 1942, Wells had attended aeronautical school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and worked at an aircraft plant in Cleveland. His promising life was cut short a long way from home.
The staff sergeant’s last week on earth was spent holding off German soldiers in northern Italy’s Tuscan–Emilian Apennines mountain chain.
“For seven days, amidst powerful counterattacks, the men of the battalion repulsed each attack with fighting ability and teamwork, therefore, their objective was accomplished,” an entry in American War Memorials Overseas sums up the brutal contest in military terms. But the Allied victory came with a terrible cost.
The Army Historical Foundation describes the tense weeks leading up to the great battle, noting the 88th “could sense it was once again to go into combat.” The Blue Devils attacked on Sept. 10, 1944, enduring enemy fire and “rainy, cold and miserable” conditions at the front. They marched through deep mud and water in “some of the heaviest fighting that fall.”
“While studying the Allies to figure out where to launch his main attacks, Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, the German commander, held his reserves in preparation for a surprise counter-attack,”
“That attack occurred 28 September when elements of four German divisions assaulted the 350th Infantry atop Mount Battaglia. For seven bloody days, the Blue Devils threw back every assault and held the critical position.”
“They had won the battle, but not without great cost — approximately fifty percent of the 350th were killed, wounded, or missing. For its heroic part in the ferocious fighting at Mount Battaglia, the 2d Battalion, 350th Infantry, earned a Distinguished Unit Citation.”
Karen’s father, with a wife and 2-year-old daughter waiting for him, was among the many who would come home in a casket.
A ‘New Birth’ in Selfishness
On this Memorial Day weekend, we remember the countless stories of devotion from the men and women who so selflessly served their country in its gravest hours. We particularly commemorate the service members like Staff Sgt. Harry Wells who, as President Abraham Lincoln so eloquently noted in his Gettysburg Address, “gave the last full measure of devotion.”
When Lincoln delivered his brief but ever-resonating remarks at a newly consecrated memorial to the soldiers killed on that Pennsylvania battlefield, he spoke of the duty the living had to ensure that “these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from earth.”
I think of the millions of American freedom fighters who in so many ways fought for democracy and against despots and totalitarianism in just about every corner of the world over the last century and a half. Yet I can’t help but think how so much of what the union soldiers struggled for, what Harry Wells and so many of the Blue Devils died for, is disappearing or gone in modern-day America.
Our government of the people, by the people, for the people, is perishing before our eyes thanks to leaders who put power before individual liberty. The politics of personal identity and selfishness have replaced the founding values that made this God-blessed nation worthy of fighting — and dying — for.
The United States faces a crisis in military recruiting. There are a lot of reasons for that, but a loss of faith in the nation and its leaders is at the core. When the Pentagon is more interested in pushing an LGBT agenda than in preparing soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen to fight, confidence is a diminishing commodity. When you have a commander-in-chief who has routinely vilified the nation he is supposed to be serving, it’s a tough sell to ask young men and women to put their lives on the line to defend it.
And how do you field an army of of democracy defenders when many of your young men and women have been falsely taught that their country is not the land of the free and the home of the brave, but the prison of the oppressed by the powerful and “privileged”? The freedom fighters of Wells’ generation have been replaced by self-involved campus brats who are incredibly defending terrorists, tyrants, and practitioners of genocide.
How confident are you that today’s leftist-indoctrinated younger Americans would or could defend America if another world war comes?
As we remember the selfless service members of conflicts past, we must contend with the selfishness of today. We’re stocked with DEI-fed social warriors; we’re dangerously short on USA-centered citizens like Harry Wells. We’d better come to terms with that fact or this nation under God as we have treasured it and many gave their lives to preserve will perish from the earth.
and look at the mildness of the pushback and the reference to the weaponization of the justice system. I wouldn’t normally post political statements by people in Arts and Entertainment since when it comes to anything but their craft they are not generally the brightest bulbs in the bunch.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/29/politics/video/dennis-quaid-trump-support-lcl-digvid
Universities are starting to embrace neutrality on outside issues. Trump wants to tax their endowments and they are terrified.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/harvard-university-statements-empathy.html
@Seb @Eve
Comments must be under 400 words. Comments must have less than 5 links.
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“Imperialism” is and must be self-centered.
@Sebastiien Zorn, when a comment is over 400 words and contains 5 or more links it automatically is referred for content moderation.
@chocopot
@Peloni
Nearly half of NYC arrests involved people not affiliated with schools, officials say
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/campus-protests-live-updates-police-ucla-encampment-rcna150340
134 protesters arrested on 2 campuses had no connection to schools, NYPD says
More than a quarter of protesters arrested Tuesday at Columbia and 60 percent at the City College of New York had no connections to the schools, the NYPD said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/03/columbia-arrests-not-students-nypd/
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“Passed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Patriot Act includes broad language that could be used to interpret protests as “terrorist” activity, according to civil rights lawyer and New York University professor Elizabeth OuYang.
And the law empowers the government to restrict immigration to anyone engaged in such activity, she added.
“Section 411 of the Patriot Act bars entry to non-citizens who have used their ‘position of prominence with any within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity’,” OuYang said.
“And what constitutes terrorist activity? And that’s where the secretary of state of the United States has broad discretion to interpret that.”’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/17/international-students-risk-immigration-status-to-engage-in-gaza-protests
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GOP lawmakers call for pro-Hamas student visa holders to be deported: ‘Not welcome here’
October 20, 2023
In The News
https://jeffduncan.house.gov/media/in-the-news/gop-lawmakers-call-pro-hamas-student-visa-holders-be-deported-not-welcome-here
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Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators
Trump has waffled on whether the Israel-Gaza war should end. But speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, he said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror.”
By Josh Dawsey, Karen DeYoung and Marianne LeVine
May 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/27/trump-israel-gaza-policy-donors/
@Sebastien
This is why the Soros paid agitators need to bring in their antifa agitators to fill the ranks of the protesting ‘students’ which of course remain masked and anonymous until they are arrested and their identities, and age, are revealed.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/poll-87-of-us-college-students-say-israel-hamas-war-not-a-top-issue-for-them/
googling: 80 percent of americans support israel
It’s comforting to know that these forces have been in conflict since the beginning of the republic but moderation* has always prevailed. Read Daniel Greenfield’s new book, “Domestic Enemies(1924).
And also a reason for us not to get too upset when informed that our comments have gone into moderation. 😀
Apropos of nothing, it was Peloni who told me that the laughing emoji was a colon followed by a capital D with a space before the colon and after the D. He mentioned some others but they were long. Wish I had them now. **
Sustainability obsessed Progressives love to say tyrannies are unsustainable. But history indicates otherwise. It’s democracies that historically had short life spans. The American formula seems to work as the Founders designed it despite temporary side-tracking glitches. Do we need – or have we got already in place a Second Foundation? 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
I have previously written that I believe the concept which Asimov said was based on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – and which was based on short stories he wrote which while serving in the merchant marines in New York Harbor during WWII/Shoah – was also inspired by the story of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai who created a community dedicated to preserving the knowedge and culture of the Jewish people – also like Lost Horizon (novel 1933, film 1937) but with a twist that – unbeknownst to them – would be the seed of the rebirth of the Jewish Commonwealth due to the objective historical forces brought to bear over the ensuing two millenia. Just my theory based on the strong similariities in the premise.
**Why is it so hard to remember whether the r or the n s doubled in tyranny; I always get it wrong and half to look it up because it doesn’t look right. and have to keep correcting it ? Reminds me of the Silly Sally riddles we posed as kids in which the listener is challenged to figure out why Silly Sally likes one thing and hates another which is a synonym for the first, the answer being that she likes words with double letters. Substitute Greta Thunberg for Silly Sally.
Why does Greta Thunberg like tyranny but hate “apartheid”?
Why does she like the mass murder of Jews but hate apartheid and genocide?
Why does she like Progressives and Musselmans ***but hate Jews?
Simple: Double or nothing..
{***The word Muselmann literally means “Muslim.” Some scholars believe that the term originated from the similarity between the near-death prone state of a concentration camp Muselmann and the image of a Muslim prostrating himself on the ground in prayer.
https://www.yadvashem.org › …PDF
Muselmann – Yad Vashem)
As a student of history for nearly all of my 70 years, and as a loyal and patriotic American, I can’t help but wonder if those who died to preserve our nation would take back their sacrifice if they were to come back and see what has become of our nation.
NOT the vast majority of us. Just a small cabal who unfortunately have grabbed the reigns of power.