Dakota Beacon

The presidential term coming to an end this week has brought us quite a lot - some promised and some totally unexpected.  We got a large portion of a wall built.  We rebuilt our economy and confronted the communist Chinese.  We have suffered through a virus attack by these same communist Chinese which has exposed some of our worst as well as our best governors and their beliefs as to our basic human rights.  We have seen enormous growth in respect for the United States abroad where it counts - among world leaders.  We got out of the WHO because it was acting as a surrogate for the communist Chinese government.  We have forged strong alliances in the Far East to counter the aggression of China, we have exposed and condemned to all the world the slave labor and the genocide being perpetrated in China against minorities as well as political dissidents.  We have achieved peace in the Middle East among long-term rivals and enemies while isolating Iran as a purveyor of world-wide terror.   But perhaps the most important legacy of this term of President Trump is that he has been instrumental in lifting the veil and revealing to the world exactly who our leaders are in government, the media, entertainment, sports, the military and all other aspects of public life.  We have learned who has unshakable principles and who is for sale.  That has been his greatest accomplishment thus far.

Each January, we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. for his leadership in combating racial segregation and securing civil rights for African Americans. However, critics lately have charged that King’s legacy has been “whitewashed,” or remembered selectively. A 2019 Guardian editorial laments that Americans have “Disneyfied” the reformer, saying that we recall his earlier, comforting successes while overlooking his later frustrations and political radicalism. Psychologizing the critique, a 2020 NBC News opinion piece decries that King’s memory is abused for the purpose of cultivating “complacency” and a sense of “absolution.”

As bracing as these correctives seem, they miss the mark. It’s true that King’s desire that black Americans escape disparate poverty and violence remains frustrated. But it would be a mistake to suppose that this unfinished work necessitates anticapitalism, antimilitarism, or the psychologizing antiracism of the whitewash narrative. Rather than being a self-serving power move, sober remembrance of King’s reliance on Christian ethics and the American Founders recovers a radicality befitting King’s ultimate vision of “the Beloved Community.”

GOOD JOB!; DON'T PANIC YET; UNEXPECTEDLY DECENT; COAL CREEK UPDATE; BEGGAR THY NEIGHBOR; A START IN ND; DETROIT RALIROAD; ROAD TRAINS; THE NINTH RESERVE DISTRICT; MINNESOTA BORDER CITIES; DAKTOIDS

There is a lot of negativity in America today.  However, there are some very positive outcomes of Trump's presidency and there are lessons we can all take away from four years of success against all odds.

It’s no small thing for a black Baptist preacher to write that America’s Founders furnished great wells of democracy. Although laid down by mere mortals, America’s founding documents, “dug deep,” are moral resources blessing a people for generations.

King echoed his confidence in America’s founding when he spoke of the “bank of justice” and “great vaults of opportunity.” In his “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963, he asserted that the Founders had signed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Of course, lament was built into his message: for African Americans, that note, like a bounced check, came back marked “insufficient funds.” Yet he did not stop at the point of grievance. He continued, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”

How ironic.  BLM spent the summer destroying every vestige of our arts and culture they could find.  They left minority-owned business in rubble throughout Minneapolis.  They are now deeply implicated in the recent Capitol riot which derailed an important function of Congress and ended with five or more dead.  The McKnight Foundation is funding this.  The NWMAC is responsible for its choice of theme.  I don't know about anyone else, but I have had enough.  Small-time functionaries are selling America in bits and pieces and we are supposed to tolerate it.  I'm done with this.

These are important reasons to unplug the television. But greater justification exists. The mainstream media no longer presents “news you can use” expecting the public to reason through the “facts” and draw their own conclusions. The media in general, and television in particular, has become another form of entertainment, a business venture, advocating one line of thought. True journalism is dead.

Enter a classic media critique by sociologist, teacher, and author Neil Postman (1931-2003) and his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” (1985). He argues that TV as a medium expressing ideas primarily through alluring visual imagery reduces politics, news, history, education, and Christianity to merely entertainment. Inevitably, this leads to the trivialization of public discourse.

ND GOVERNOR IS BULLISH; ACADEMICS TO STUDY DAKOTAS; RESERVATION HOT ZONE; THE CAUSES; THIRTY PERCENT STINGS; HERALD SUPPORTS REBELS; DID THE EAGLES TANK; THE LARGEST BUILDING IN ND; FORUM COMMUNICATIONS; DAKTOIDS

One of the last things I recall from my school days was a discussion in Mr. Kinzler's English Lit class.  We were studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.  Of course he wrote this with a look over his shoulder at his sponsor, Queen Elizabeth I - it was mostly sympathetic to Caesar, in other words.  But it seemed to me that Caesar was asking for it.  He had ended the Republic of Rome, shut down discussion and debate, began to dictate rather than serve.  I'm afraid I had little sympathy with Caesar when Brutus stuck him.  I was the Black Sheep then.  I am not so sure I am now.  Let me explain.   Today I see Big Tech as Caesar, not Donald Trump.  If we are to stop Big Tech we must have that moment on the steps of the Forum.  Trump must be both Brutus and Mark Antony.  We have no other course open to us.  Congress and the courts have betrayed our trust and failed to do their job of weighing evidence.  We are told to accept a crime.  It is finally time to do something.  Not violence.  Just enforcement of the law.

You know who I'm talking about… those sophisticated “man/woman-of-the-world” charming beguiling charlatans who live in their own little imaginary intellectual deserts. The member of the vaccine review committee who votes against the majority on so-called “principal”. The members of the organization who decline to vote for the majority approved platform because of a problem with an included element they disagreed with and voted against. The “prima donna” kind of sensitive vain undisciplined person that every team sport coach dreads.

Let's reveal a few names: Colin Powell, Jeff Flake, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cindy McCain, Bill Crystal, Lisa Murkowski. Please add a few of your own; there are more than a few to choose from.

Across the country, many high school students will soon make decisions to attend institutions of higher education. Many will deservedly receive scholarships. Unfortunately, not all scholarships are created equal—in fact, many scholarships are frequently funded unwittingly by one student to another student. It is called tuition discounting. In this article, Dr. James Thrasher examines tuition discounting and the consequences this practice has on students, debt, and higher education.

The year 2020 had been a hard year for most folks. Personally, the COVID-19 pandemic claimed three close friends. All were professors at the University of Alabama who played key roles in my career as a historian. Additionally, in August my wife Grace was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. It has metastasized to her lungs and associated skeletal structures. This is her third and probably last bout with cancer. Surgery in October put Grace in ICU for days. There was no Thanksgiving because, due to radiation and chemotherapy, Grace couldn’t eat. Our daughter and her family cancelled plans to visit due to COVID restrictions that would have led to a two-week quarantine when they returned to Pennsylvania. That’s when I gave in to the current “cancel culture” by canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It has been a dark time but if we look around there is so much that is beautiful.  

We are in a terrible crisis.

Today was to have been set for a peaceful protest in East Grand Forks in support of businesses struggling against government lockdowns.  It was cancelled.  Thank Antifa.  We must decide whether we want to be dictated to by a tag-team of domestic terrorists like Antifa and BLM, who hijacked the Million Maga rally in Washington and local tinpot dictator mayors and governors . . . or whether we will elect to conduct ourselves in peace and freedom.  Until we take a stand we will be the ones locked up.

Yesterday Trump did his fold and a hundred  twelve conservative pod-casters had to rewrite their next day’s scripts. The baddies got away clean and those of us who aren’t walking around wearing upside-down metal garbage cans and stumbling into walls can see pretty clearly there ain’t gonna be no election reform or draining the swamp on next time or nothin’ like that. Ron DeSantis can run if he likes. Or he can not run. Either or. So now what? Well, if we’re lucky the new regime will collapse within our lifetimes. Our long game is the dissolution of the New World Order. How about today, tomorrow, next week? Well, let’s look at some of the tactics the Left has used to bring us to our present state. One of them is to “other” your opponent. It’s time we get us some of that othering. The following article proposes a means of revenge. We don’t have a lot of pieces left on the board.

The Speaker of the House has, as her first act of the new Congress, imposed some language restrictions on House Members.  Tulsi Gabbard is objecting but she's not the only one.  Language is being used to distort our lives. --SM

Today, January 6, 2021, was supposed to be "D-Day" for our 2020 election - the final act of a drama that has played out for months now, with everything from sinister Chinese agencies communicating with voting machines in Georgia or Michigan via talking thermostats, vote flipping on a gigantic scale, mass mail-in, unsolicited ballots mailed out to the dead, to people's pets, to non-residents, to people who "live" in post office boxes, poll workers denied access so they could observe counting, counting stopping only to resume in the dead of night when the observers and the press had gone home, trucks, vans, sports cars delivering ballots in the night in boxes, suitcases, garbage bags, duffel bags, fake water main breaks, crooked secretaries of state, more crooked governors, compromised judges from the state court level all the way to the Supreme Court, the improbability of a senile, doddering career politician whose son's laptop just revealed everything from child abuse and porn to treasonous "business deals" with hostile foreign nations and a damning message implicating the Democrat Candidate.  In the background were monster rallies of proportions we have never seen.  So - today was the big day.  Trump had summoned his troops from across the fruited plain, Congress was awaiting the drumroll of the reading of the electors, Vice President Pence played hide-and-seek (would he be there at all?  would Chuck Grassley have to step in?  if he was there what would he do?).  It was like a child's top spinning wildly across the floor.

How long can two separate Americas co-exist in the growing tension generated by two different notions of America’s founding, two different ideas about how we should be governed, two completely opposite theories of life, and two different philosophies about how we should go about managing our personal affairs? How long will people tolerate two separate applications of the law – one for the elite and one for the rest of us? How long will people observe alleged transgressions followed by years-long investigations resulting in no prosecutions or convictions? Is there any overlap or middle ground between the left and the right upon which all may agree? Somehow, somewhere, something must give way.

THEY TOOK THE VIRUS SERIOUSLY; DICKEY COUNTY; AN OPPORTUNITY; ATTACK ON HOEVEN’S OFFICE; YEAREND PATROL; SANFORD’S BAD RUN; CARSON WENTZ; TRIBES WANT UND TO LEAD; MIXED VIEWS; FAMILY FARMS; DAKTOIDS

CORONAVIRUS; SANFORD LOSES ITS POISE; OIL PROVED SLIPPERY; CONTINUING CHALLENGES TO DAPL; COAL CREEK IS ON LIFE SUPPORT;

This book explains how identity politics have been progressively employed throughout the last century, culminating in the last decade's stampede to cancel traditional American culture. A culture that believes in natural rights (from God and nature) and values the work ethic, individualism, and individual property ownership of free market capitalism. A culture resulting from a constitution and bill of rights that has been a model for the world around us.

The brainwashing of college students by socialist/communists in higher education during the last century has resulted in the continual erosion of American culture, replacing ethics and morality learned from parents and houses of worship with atheism (the ultimate spiritual vacuum) and its fellow travelers, class envy, greed, gluttony, perversion, fear, laziness, substance abuse, self-loathing, and the ultimate wages of unrepentant sin... eternal death.

So, let’s clasp a hand of friendship and share a good drink for old time sake.

At year’s end, on December 31 after an evening of celebration, the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” drift across the room as sure as midnight bells toll around the world.

 In the midst of turmoil during an unprecedented year, remember to bind together with family and friends. The value of enduring friendships transcend time; the reservoir of reciprocal regard inevitably inspires and sustains the human spirit.

Happy New Year!

On August 7, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit allowed enforcement of a dismemberment abortion ban in Arkansas and thus every other state in the Eight Circuit.         As a result, Attorney General Stenehjem should immediately put House Bill 1546 into effect by certifying House Bill 1546 to the legislative council.

 Attorney General Stenehjem would successfully defend House Bill 1546 if challenged in court. He signed amicus briefs in support of dismemberment bans in Texas and Alabama.

Please thank Attorney General Stenehjem for his pro-life work and encourage him to certify House Bill 1546 to the legislative council.