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RETROSPECTIVE
When you were a kid, what did you tell everybody you wanted to be when you grew up? How does that jibe with what you actually became? I thought I was destined to be a teacher or a missionary. The few occasions of substitute teaching while I was in college for a classmate disabused me of that former objective when I saw that many high school students even 45 years ago were less interested in learning than they were in seeing how far they can push the new teacher. I had no problem exercising discipline, but I was disappointed that even in a Christian School, many students really weren’t interested in the subject matter. I guess that was just a dosage of reality for me.
Then when I was on active duty in the U.S. Air Force in the Philippines in the early 1970s, I had much opportunity to attend local churches and outstations and to travel with some American missionary friends to remote parts of the country, including the jungles of southern Palawan. After I did my military service, I went to a Christian university hoping to return to the Philippines as a missionary. I even came to Hawaii in 1978 to study linguistics in preparation for a translation ministry.
But, God had other plans for me. That was one of my first times to realize that God accomplishes His Will but not always by the means that we desire or expect. The malaria which I contracted in the jungles of the Philippines while helping a real missionary minister to the local indigenous people was instrumental in my getting a full-time federal job and being classified as a disabled veteran. So, that in a nutshell is how I got from where I was to where I am now but not by the route that I anticipated.
Whenever I give a personal anecdote like this, it is always with the intention of applying it to something that has more of a general application to society and not just to myself only. I am by no means a politician. But since I retired as a Federal Officer and left the Hatch Act restrictions behind, I managed to get involved in several unsuccessful conservative political campaigns. I don’t think that I’m a jinx and that they were unsuccessful because of me. It has more to do with being a conservative in a deep blue state like Hawaii. But it showed me, that even though you know that what you believe is right, it doesn’t always mean that you will prevail in the secular world.
History and geography have always been my favorite subjects which shows you how atypical I am. First, let’s look at how America has changed over the centuries. Then we can look more specifically at presidential elections during the last 75 years or so.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
I have long heard about the Frenchman’s famous voyage to America nearly two centuries ago. First, here is some basic information on him from a Google query.
“Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, colloquially known as Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution.”
“French sociologist and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) traveled to the United States in 1831 to study its prisons and returned with a wealth of broader observations that he codified in ‘Democracy in America’ (1835), one of the most influential books of the 19th century.”
Now, let’s consider a few of his better known observations:
“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
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I am inclined often to think what life would be like if I were in a different epoch in history or a different part of the world. I have had the good fortune to live in several parts of the United States and to have traveled to several foreign countries. This has helped me to realize how not only our heritage and our upbringing, but also our environment, influence the way we see our role in the world around us.
God did not intend for me to remain in Northeastern Oklahoma or to be able to get directly in touch with my Mvskoke (Creek) heritage at a young age but rather has led me in a very roundabout path full circle to do that now in my golden years of retirement. So the past and the future meet.
But, the one key element in all this is what de Tocqueville so clairvoyantly said back when America was still a frontier society of indigenous peoples and pioneers. America, despite many tarnishes on our society and on our image, has not always been as good as we should be, but we have still been a great example for the rest of the world about what decency and respect for others can do to make a society worth living in.
If decency and goodness are not the first adjectives that come to your mind in describing the America of 2021, then we need to come to a screeching halt, retrace our path, and get back to where we once were. There have always been bad elements in this culture like any other. There are groups and individuals who do not exemplify the righteous ideal that we are now discussing. But the overwhelming majority of the American people have been decent law-abiding good neighbors and family to one another. There never was a time until now that evil appeared to be on the ascendancy and decency appeared to be on the decline.
“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”
That was how the Frenchman saw it 200 years ago. Now in our current age of hedonism, morality has been transmogrified into some kind of nebulous subjective concept. Liberty has been redefined into the freedom to do whatever I tell you that you should do and therefore have me ensure that you never deviate from my condescending patronization. I, the Great American Government, will make you happy whether you like it or not.
“When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.”
Imagine that two centuries ago it was understood that history is who we are and that without history, we are nothing but a blank slate which is what they now want so they can write on that blank slate anything they shall desire, including the specious rhetoric of the Marxist distorted version of egalitarianism. They confuse equality of outcome with equality of opportunity.
But to do that, they must destroy our history. Iconic figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln must be besmirched. Honest Abe must be portrayed as the ultimate racist rather than he who issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves and to respect the right of all Americans of every race and ethnicity. We shall indeed walk in darkness and the lights are already dimming as I write these words if we allow those who would wash away our memories to succeed.
“The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”
That is the difference between free enterprise and Communism. There isn’t any
Communist, Marxist, socialist society on earth that respects the wishes of private citizens. That was historically one of the main distinctions between the GOP and the Democrat Party. But now things have become so blurred that there are only career bureaucrats with no real ideological differences who do what they do only to perpetuate their own grasp on power and greed. Don’t trust any of them. They just want to control your life and take away your right to think and act for yourself and your family.
The thing I noticed here in Hawaii all last year was that the Democrat One-Party Machine which is currently crowing about the implosion of the Hawaii GOP (another story for another time) never consulted business owners about what decisions they would make to try to control the plan-demic. 60-day emergency powers by the governor were extended indefinitely without anybody asking or caring how or why. All this in a state whose Constitution does not even provide for a recall of the Governor as does California’s.
The contribution of private citizens who built the industrial base and the high technology of this country has been totally ignored. Now, government wants to decide and control everything and they really don’t care what you or I think. With the complicity of their pocket media and Big Tech, the government has accomplished in the last year what they could not do in the previous two and a half centuries which was to take away the free-spiritedness of Americans and turn so many of our countrymen into acquiescent serfs who just await the next order from their masters up above.
Now let’s turn from this review of de Tocqueville’s prescient observations to a discussion of the issues and factors that have driven our American presidential elections since World War II.
1948 TRUMAN ~ DEWEY
As a baby boomer I was actually born in that time just before Harry Truman was sworn in for his first and only full term in office after serving the remainder of Franklin Roosevelt’s 4th term. So, I can’t really speak a lot about the domestic and international issues though that was the time period in which China fell to the Communists, when Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan to form their own independent Republic of China which still exists today despite the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Beijing. Domestically, overall it was a time of peace here in the United States.
1952 EISENHOWER ~ STEVENSON
The Korean War was raging and Americans were dying and fighting against Communism on that far away North Asian peninsula. Dwight Eisenhower was the five-star general in charge of Operation Overlord when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy and freed Europe from Nazi tyranny. He fulfilled his intentions to obtain a cessation of hostilities in Korea.
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1956 EISENHOWER ~ STEVENSON
I was in elementary school in Coquille, Oregon when the adults voted in the hallway of our building. It’s no wonder that few today even remember Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower was a decent but not flamboyant head of state.
1960 KENNEDY ~ NIXON
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a war hero in the South Pacific and the scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family. He ran against VP Richard Nixon who came across as sweaty and inarticulate during the first national televised presidential debates. It was a close election in which JFK’s Catholicism was an issue. Americans at that time were sensitive that an American president not be controlled by any foreign potentate, or any such ideology whether religious or secular. The concerns were proven unfounded as JFK during his tragically short time in office stood up for America and faced down Russian dictator Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1964 JOHNSON ~ GOLDWATER
After that tragic November day in Dallas, LBJ was sworn in aboard Air Force One on the way back to Washington DC. He was a crude southern demagogue from Texas. He exploited the Civil Rights Movement for political purposes rather than due to any personal convictions. Democrats managed to paint Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona as a warmonger, yet it was LBJ who really got us into the quagmire in Southeast Asia in an ill-intentioned war that the bureaucrats did not have the guts to carry through to victory after sacrificing other families’ sons and daughters in a needless war in Indochina. If it sounds like I’ve gone from reporting to editorializing, it’s because I came of draft age at that time before there was a Selective Service lottery in effect. I did my military time in the U.S. Air Force in the Philippines and Okinawa, but have friends and relatives who did serve our country valiantly in combat. My point in this context is just that it really does matter who is president and what their priorities are.
1968 NIXON ~ HUMPHREY
After the second tragic assassination of a member of the Kennedy family in a period of less than 5 years, instead of Robert Kennedy, it was Hubert Humphrey who ran against Richard Nixon after that turbulent summer of student protests. Those who thought Nixon’s career was dead when he lost to JFK 8 years earlier, found him now entrenched in the Oval Office. He did not win the war in Vietnam but he did eventually disengage. That’s the best word I can use for it: disengage. You really don’t want to hear what else I could say about it but I will not. I just ask our civilian and military leaders today, why there are all those names on the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC who did not need to die in a stupid inconsequential war half a world away? Nobody needed to come back as a quadriplegic and nobody needed to suffer for the rest of their life even to our present day from the effects of Agent Orange. Will we ever learn?
To digress for just a moment, it appears that the Vietnam War era was where America’s perception of ourselves as invincible was forever altered. No more unconditional surrenders by our enemies such as in World Wars 1 and 2. Not even a clean-cut as in Korea where at least the South remained free. If we look at what has happened since in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, we see that nobody now knows how to end these foreign forays today which they initiate.
1972 NIXON ~ McGOVERN
“McGovern McCan’t” is the best campaign slogan I have ever heard and it totally banished the man from South Dakota into ignominy. Nixon won and was flying high until Watergate brought him down. It actually wasn’t Watergate so much as it was the cover-up of Watergate. A lesson about how lies catch up to everybody eventually. I cast my first ballot ever as an absentee while serving at Clark Air Base, Philippines. I was over 18 in 1968 but at that time the voting age was 21.
1976 CARTER ~ FORD
Because VP Spiro Agnew had resigned and Jerry Ford had taken his place, he became President when Nixon resigned in 1974. The amiable former Congressman from Michigan was apparently a decent fellow but not very adept at governing. After all, he had not campaigned to become president or even VP in the first place when Nixon thrust him into that spotlight.
Jimmy Carter did a great head fake and convinced us all that he was just a simple peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. We neither knew how incompetent he was nor of his animosity toward Israel and preference toward Islamic states in the Middle East. His brother Billy Carter was even a lobbyist for Gaddafi in Libya. I have previously written at length about Carter’s lack of a plan to deal with Iran which started the generation of hostility from that rogue nation which we still face today. Carter totally undid any good that he may have commenced in the Camp David Accords between Israel’s Begin and Egypt’s Sadat.
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1980 REAGAN ~ CARTER
Many young folks today don’t even remember that Ronald Reagan had challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination at the Kansas City Convention in 1976 but fell short. Some were still not that confident that he would win in 1980 but he prevailed over the hapless Jimmy Carter. I was on vacation from Hawaii in the Philippines and listening to the election results on the American Forces Radio and Television Service, American Forces Philippines Network AFRTS/AFPN. Because I did not submit a request for an absentee ballot and mail ballots were otherwise not provided for, that is the only election that I inadvertently missed in casting a vote.
1984 REAGAN ~ MONDALE
There are actually some parallels that come to mind between the 1984 election and our most recent one of 2020. I don’t believe I have heard anybody really articulate this up until now. Reagan in his first term was a popular and powerful president who intimidated foreign enemies. He set the gears in motion for the demise of the Soviet Union. Mondale was a weak, bumbling individual, who chose a female running mate hoping demographics would help. As a result, he won only his home state of Minnesota and forever Democrat Washington DC. Even Hawaii was on the red state map that year if you can imagine that!
Reagan actually won 49 states. So considering these parallels, Reagan and Trump, Mondale and Biden, Ferraro and Harris, why was the outcome different this time? I’ll let you ponder that for a while.
1988 BUSH 41 ~ DUKAKIS
How many of you even remember Michael Dukakis? Joe Biden tried to campaign that year but he had to drop out because of accusations of plagiarism. Remember that? Anyway, long story short, George HW Bush won.
1992 CLINTON ~ BUSH 41
Only one Clinton has successfully campaigned for President of the United States to date and that is not likely to change in the future, however much Hillary or even Chelsea might have pipe dreams for the future. The “read my lips, no new taxes” line really sunk the first President Bush and nothing he could do could overcome that so we got Billy Bob from Arkansas and his malevolent ambitious wife.
1996 CLINTON ~ DOLE
Bob Dole was a good Senator from Kansas and a World War II hero, but everybody knew from the outset he had zero chance of upsetting the alley cat in the Oval Office. Not much more really needs to be said about that election.
2000 BUSH 43 ~ GORE
I used to call that one the Election from Hell. But hanging chads in Florida were nothing compared to what we have experienced since November 4, 2020. Notice I said the 4th and not the 3rd. That is because on the 3rd, things were going one way and on the 4th they started going another way. But hold on, we’ll get to that. Gore eventually conceded when the Rehnquist Supreme Court did its constitutional duty which the Roberts Supreme Court two decades later failed to do.
2004 BUSH 43 ~ KERRY
It’s insufficient just to say Kerry was swift-boated because he brought that upon himself by what was either a faulty memory or intentional falsification of his time in Vietnam. Despite the invasion of Iraq which didn’t turn out the way he hoped, Dubya was still in charge after his erratic response to 9/11.
2008 OBAMA ~ McCAIN
This election is the one where the real what ifs came into play. What if John McCain had not saddled himself with the publicity magnet of Sarah Palin as running mate. It wasn’t really gender. It was more the idiosyncrasies of the lady from Alaska. The problem was that it took all the attention off of the totally weird factors regarding the background of Barack Hussein Obama II, once known as Barry Soetoro of Indonesia. I won’t get off on a tangent here discussing our 44th president, but just saying his background was not scrutinized would be a gross understatement and let’s just leave it at that for now.
2012 OBAMA ~ ROMNEY
While most conservatives today almost universally would consider Mitt Romney as a Republican In Name Only, in 2012 he was the alternative to another term for The Manchurian Candidate who said he would and actually did fundamentally transform America. I will just mention the most salient fact that Romney refused to use the Benghazi incident which had happened on September 11th, 2012 against Obama because he was afraid of being accused of playing the race card. Both McCain and Romney basically wimped out. So we got BHO for eight not-so-wonderful years.
2016 TRUMP – CLINTON
Early in the campaign, I had supported first Dr. Ben Carson and then Ted Cruz. But when Donald Trump entered the race, it became inevitable that he would be the GOP nominee. Hillary and the Democrats were basically caught off guard. I won’t spend too much time on this because I think virtually all of my readers today well remember the election four years ago.
2020 TRUMP ~ BIDEN
Yes, I put the names in that order intentionally. I am basing this on legal votes only. I’m not going to reiterate everything you already know because this is still so very fresh in all of our minds, bar none. Suffice it to say that when Hillary determined that under no circumstances would she or the Democrats ever accept another defeat no matter what, the scheme began to deny President Donald Trump his earned re-election by any means necessary. If you want to read more about this sham election, please go to this link.
SUMMING IT UP
So, what did happen to America as we once knew it? Obviously, we’re not the country we were in 1831 when the Frenchman came over for a visit. But a lot more has changed than simply industrialization and technology. The attitude and the mentality of Americans has changed. The heart of our country is no longer as it was. We have lost that understanding of our uniqueness and greatness which President Trump tried so hard to restore. Ask yourself what is President Joe Biden’s vision of America? Does he see us as a good and gracious and decent people or a shining city set on a hill as Ronald Reagan said? Does Joe want to Make America Great Again or does he want to erase our history and make us forget who we are and where we came from? What does he think about when he sees those portraits of his predecessors around the White House?.
But the biggest concern is not what Mr. Biden thinks. The question is who and where is the power behind the presidency today? What you see is just a façade. It’s like a movie set at Universal Studios with a wall that has nothing but props behind it. So, we really need to figure out who is working back there in the darkness. Joe Biden is just a placeholder under the control of a New World Order, the players in which deliberately remain obscured from public view. I don’t want to say it is Xi Jinping. Nor do we want to attribute it to George Soros or Bill Gates. I think we should probably start by looking at an ex-president who is currently building a home without all the proper land permits on the beach in Waimanalo on the Island of Oahu.
Realize that this is not just Obama’s third term figuratively speaking, but that he and the New World Order which he represents have taken control of our country. Our Christian and traditional family values stand in the way of their subjugation of America. What we have to do now is to quit looking to politicians to lead us. We have to avoid groupthink at all costs. Now that we are in the opposition to the powers-that-be, let us coalesce around mutually held values and the decency that makes America America.
There is no political solution. Decency and goodness in the hearts of mankind do not come from elected officials. Continue living your life as you know is right and do not allow anyone to gaslight you into thinking that you are the problem.
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As I said earlier, God does not always do things the way we expect to reach His planned objective. But we get there all the same. This Biden-Harris administration was not what we wanted. I will not pray for its failure because that would mean failure for our country and not just for our putative president. Take one day at a time and be prepared for whatever may come. The chances are there will be such a backlash against the malfeasance of those currently inside the DC Beltway that our country will fare much better in the future.
THE ALPHA AND OMEGA, THE BEGINNING AND THE END
I have read the last chapter in the Book of Revelation and God’s people prevail through His Almighty Grace. I won’t give you a lesson in eschatology, but we are much closer than anyone realizes. Everything happening now is just setting a scene for that which is to come. What we are experiencing in the present is not the end of the world. But it is a warning that God’s ways supersede the ways of humankind.
Whether Donald Trump pulls a Grover Cleveland and wins a second non-consecutive term in 2024, we do not yet know. But God does. He gave us a free will, but only His Omniscience can see what lies ahead. For us, it’s just over the horizon. Through faith and perseverance, we shall reach that God-ordained horizon unscathed!
COVID-19 lockdowns are taking down an independent news outlet
Nobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.
Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it.
When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that.
Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the resurgence of lockdowns that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance.
The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $17,300 to stay afloat through March when we hope the economy will be more open, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated.
The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. In November, 2020, we hit 1.2 million visitors.
We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above.
As the world spirals towards radical progressivism, the need for truthful journalism has never been greater. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going.
American Conservative Movement
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