Election fraud is the secret “assassin’s mace” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that has long confounded security hawks, according to tech billionaire and entrepreneur Patrick Byrne, who back in August assembled a cyber intelligence team to analyze the U.S. voting system.
“For 10 years or more, there have been references to a coming ‘assassin’s mace’ in the Chinese literature—where they take out the United States with one stroke,” Byrne told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program. “The national security community in the United States has been trying to figure this out: Is it their new aircraft carrier? Is that the hypersonic missile? Is it this, that, is it an EMP?”
“I don’t think so, ” he told host Jan Jekielek. “The one stroke that takes the United States out is what we’re experiencing right now.”
The 2020 vote involved “massive election fraud,” he says. “Not voter fraud, but election fraud.”
Byrne has been a driving force in the research for lawsuits filed by attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. He has also been working together with ASOG, the company that recently carried out the forensic audit on voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan.
Byrne said he started investigations back in August, and that as a result, he anticipated the very irregularities which he later observed in the November election.
He says his team of online security experts now believes Chinese developers are “under the hood” of the software that has infiltrated at least two of the main voting systems in the United States.
Suppliers of such election software and systems involved in the U.S. election have responded to allegations of voting irregularities with consistent denial that their systems can be manipulated or that they have any such connection to foreign governments.
‘Reverse-engineering the Coup’
Byrne described the election as a soft coup.
“We are basically reverse-engineering this coup,” said Byrne, in reference to his team of 30-40 people.
Byrne says that he fell in with cyber experts who had been looking at election manipulation since 2018 when they were hired as part of a blue-ribbon commission set up to examine potential election fraud in Texas.
“That group has had two years to really reverse engineer what the rest of America has had a couple of weeks to understand,” he said. “They had already figured out really about a dozen different ways you could defeat an election or hack an election—in a broad sense of hack, not necessarily just electronic cyber guys hacking.”
According to Byrne, they found cheating was possible “at an industrial level, in terms of generating hundreds of thousands of fake votes.”
Byrne says the pattern of manipulation can be identified through examining three key points—what he calls “three buckets of facts.”
“One bucket is understanding the systems themselves and how they were built: the functionality that was built into them and the vulnerabilities that exist.”
The second bucket, he says, relates to how the election process played out. “[In the event of fraud] you would expect people to have certain experiences when they either go in and vote or if they volunteer and work in the precincts.”
A Georgia Republican Party poll watcher looks over voting machine transporters being stored at the Fulton County Election Preparation Center in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 4, 2020. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
He gives the examples of vote tabulating being shut down, of poll watchers being denied entry, and of the video of election workers pulling out cases of ballots from under a table after observers had gone home and then scanning them.
The third bucket, he says, is the extreme statistical outliers that would be thrown up by such a manipulation process.
“Things like that happened—these statistical outliers: Having 123,000 votes in a row going to one candidate; or in Pennsylvania, I believe it was 580,000 votes got processed that were 99.4 percent for Biden… and they came through exactly when all the Republicans had been told they had to leave.”
“They’re on the order of you winning the Powerball lottery this week, and next week and the week after—and that happening in dozens of places around America at the same time.”
“When you put those three different narratives together, they also just come together perfectly. They all reinforce each other.”
Traced to China
Byrne says that the manipulation of the voting systems can be traced back to China.
“There’s a chain of command basically from China through Iran to Cuba and Venezuela,” he said. “The Chinese are funding Smartmatic through the Panamanian division of Smartmatic, but it bounces through Venezuela.”
“There is code buried within the Dominion machines that has been turned up that seems to show Chinese provenance.”
“There are Chinese developers under the hood of this stuff back in China who are actually getting their software into the Smartmatic systems which have infiltrated at least two of the main voting systems used domestically.”
Smartmatic’s headquarters located in Boca Rotan, Fla., on Dec. 2, 2020. (The Epoch Times)
“I say this as a guy who loves China,” he adds. “I speak Chinese, I have a great affection for China and the Chinese people—but I’m not such a big fan of the CCP.”
Smartmatic says its products were used only in one LA county in the U.S. 2020 election and has consistently denied any claims of wrongdoing or involvement in voter or election fraud past or present. It says it has no involvement with any governments or political parties or with Dominion.
Dominion Voting Systems has also consistently denied any wrongdoing or vulnerabilities in its systems and said that it does not use software owned by Smartmatic and that it has no ownership ties to the governments of China, Cuba, or Venezuela. Dominion products are used in 28 states.
Byrne, however, says that software created by Smartmatic went through a series of corporate mergers, acquisitions, divestments, and licensing agreements before ending up in at least two of the main commercial voting systems being used in the United States, including Dominion. “Its genetic lineage [goes] back to the software,” he says.
A number of other analysts have signed affidavits to the same effect.
Dominion has also come under scrutiny for its ownership structure after its parent company raised funds with the help of a Swiss bank before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The transaction, peculiar in several ways, has led some to speculate that a Chinese entity could be an indirect investor in the company.
Byrne says that stealing the national election doesn’t require cheating across the board. “There are six counties that you need to steal. If you steal these six counties around the country, that flips the six states they’re in, which flips the electoral college votes that come with them, which flips the nation, ” he said. “You’ve got to take six places and cheat like crazy there.”
He says that some online security experts, who he describes as white hat hackers, say that they would give the election systems a rating of just one or two out of 10 for security.
Loyal members of the Chinese Communist Party are working in British consulates, universities and for some of the UK’s leading companies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
An extraordinary leaked database of 1.95 million registered party members reveals how Beijing’s malign influence now stretches into almost every corner of British life, including defense firms, banks and pharmaceutical giants.
Most alarmingly, some of its members – who swear a solemn oath to ‘guard Party secrets, be loyal to the Party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life…and never betray the Party’ – are understood to have secured jobs in British consulates.
Among them is a senior official at the British Consulate in Shanghai. Its headquarters is also home to intelligence officers from the UK security services.
The official describes their role as supporting ministers and officials on visits to East China.
While there is no evidence that anyone on the party membership list has spied for China – and many sign up simply to boost their career prospects – experts say it defies credulity that some are not involved in espionage. Responding to the findings, an alliance of 30 MPs last night said they would be tabling an urgent question about the issue in the Commons.
Writing in The Mail on Sunday today, former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith says: ‘This investigation proves that members of the Chinese Communist Party are now spread around the globe, with members working for some of the world’s most important multinational corporations, academic institutions and our own diplomatic services.
‘The Government must now move to expel and remove any members of the Communist Party from our Consuls throughout China. They can either serve the UK or the Chinese Communist Party. They cannot do both
The Foreign Office last night insisted that it has ‘robust procedures in place to keep information secure and to vet staff at our overseas posts’. It is understood they are aware that they employ party members.
However, a senior Whitehall intelligence source said the revelations did raise security questions. ‘In that station [the official] will be sat one floor away from the MI6 team and could have identified intelligence officers.’
The database was originally leaked on Telegram, the encrypted instant messaging app, and passed in September by a Chinese dissident to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), which comprises more than 150 legislators around the world who are concerned by the influence and activities of the Chinese government.
Dating from 2016, it includes the names of party members in Shanghai, the largest city in China and its financial hub.
The list is divided into more than 79,000 branches, many of them affiliated to individual companies or organizations.
In total, the Chinese Communist Party has more than 92 million members, but competition to join is fierce with fewer than one in ten applicants successful.
After authenticating the material, with the help of data security analysts Internet 2.0, IPAC passed the database to four media organizations around the world, including The Mail on Sunday. Detailed analysis of it by this newspaper reveals that:
A party member who studied at St Andrews University worked at various consulates in Shanghai including that of the UK;
Chinese academics who swore the oath to assist the party attended British universities where they were involved in potentially sensitive areas of research including aerospace engineering and chemistry;
There were more than 600 party members across 19 branches working at the British banks HSBC and Standard Chartered in 2016. Both have drawn criticism for their response to Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong;
The pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and AstraZeneca – both involved in the development of coronavirus vaccines – employed a total 123 party loyalists;
Firms with defense industry interests including Airbus, Boeing and Rolls-Royce employed hundreds of party members.
Security sources believe the initial data leak came from a dissident who targeted an outwardly unremarkable office block in Shanghai which housed the records.
Despite the near certainty of being executed for treason if caught, he or she probably accessed it via a server before downloading it on to a laptop and releasing it on Telegram where it was found by IPAC. As well as the names of members, the database has places, dates of birth, Chinese ethnicity and in some cases addresses and telephone numbers.
The consular official is registered in a communist party branch within a company called the The Shanghai Foreign Agency Service Corporation, a state-owned employment agency.
Oath of loyalty which party members swear
New members of the Chinese Communist Party swear an oath of loyalty in front of a traditional flag bearing a hammer and sickle to signify proletarian solidarity.
With fist raised, they say: ‘It is my will to join the Communist Party of China, uphold the Party’s program, observe the provisions of the Party Constitution, fulfil a Party member’s duties, carry out the Party’s decisions, strictly observe Party discipline, guard Party secrets, be loyal to the Party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life, be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the Party and the people, and never betray the Party.’
While there are 92 million members across China, this equates to just six per cent of the population. Indeed, competition is fierce with less than one in ten applicants accepted.
The rewards are not purely ideological. Senior positions in business, academia and government are almost exclusively occupied by party members.
Experts say that since coming to power in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping has emphasized the importance of the Party with members compelled to attend more regular meetings and undergo appraisals.
It employs almost 2,000 people and its website says it ‘provides comprehensive and high-quality services to more than 100 foreign organizations in Shanghai including foreign consulates, foreign news media, and foreign schools’.
Analysis of the data shows at least 249 Communist Party members were registered with the agency in 2016.
Academics on the membership list include some living and working in the UK. They include a research fellow in aerospace engineering at a leading university who also works for a private company.
Aerospace engineering is designated by the British Government as among the seven most militarily sensitive university subjects.
Students from countries that are not in the EU or the ‘Five Eyes’ network of Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are required to have an Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS) certificate.
During the application process, they are asked to declare any state-linked funding, although some security experts fear the vetting process is not stringent enough. The research fellow did not respond to a request for comment last night.
The US security services have been increasingly concerned about the threat of Chinese espionage on campuses.
In the nine months to September, 14 Chinese nationals were charged over alleged spying offences and the Trump administration last week changed its visa rules so members of the Chinese Communist Party and their families can stay or get travel documents for only a month.
Last week, John Ratcliffe, the US Director of National Security, warned that China posed the ‘greatest threat to democracy and freedom’ since the Second World War and was striving to dominate ‘the planet economically, militarily and technologically’.
Australia revoked the visas of two professors from China in September amid suspicions they were involved in espionage. One of the men appears on the leaked membership list.
The database also reveals that party members work for many British and international companies in China, several involved in the defense or pharmaceutical industries.
Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Airbus and the French defense contractor Thales each have dozens of party members or more on their books while the British banking giants HSBC and Standard Chartered both have hundreds. Jaguar Land Rover was another company with staff who were members of the party.
Cosco, a major Chinese shipping firm, even has two branches in the UK for its seven members. Three are based at the port of Felixstowe, Suffolk, which receives almost half of Britain’s container trade.
In total, the list for 2016 reveals 2,909 members working for Cosco across 118 branches worldwide.
None of the companies above said they banned members of the Chinese Communist Party from being employees.
There is no evidence that any of the firms named above has been targeted or fallen victim to espionage and each insists it has measures in place to protect data, staff and customers.
Reacting to the findings, former Foreign Office diplomat and China expert Matthew Henderson said: ‘This is yet further proof of how China has inveigled its way into the British establishment. We are dancing with rabid wolves, intent on driving a wedge between Britain and America, overthrowing democracy and outstripping the West.’
Sam Armstrong, from the Henry Jackson Society foreign policy think-tank, said: ‘This is a deeply disturbing illustration of China’s spread across the globe which we can’t look away from and must tackle head on.’
And a former CIA and White House intelligence analyst, who specializes in East Asia affairs, said: ‘This is what the Chinese Communist Party is and you can’t trust them. They’re always looking for opportunities where they can take advantage of relationships, friendships, whatever, to further the interests of the Communist Party.’
However, Robbie Barnett, an affiliate of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London and at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said: ‘It’s not likely that many members in China actually believe in or care about Communism, so it’s largely a nation-building project, not an ideological one.
‘That’s just one of the many reasons that a McCarthyism, catch-all approach doesn’t make sense, even apart from the fact that it would be a gross abuse of people’s human rights.’
Last night, a Chinese Embassy spokeswoman said: ‘We urge the media to abandon ideological bias and Cold-War mentality and view China, the Communist Party of China and China’s development in a rational and impartial manner.
Chained: Media mogul who defied tyranny
Handcuffed, bound in chains and flanked by police officers, businessman Jimmy Lai is led to court to face charges of colluding with foreign powers.
The pro-democracy media mogul, one of the few business leaders in Hong Kong to speak out against the draconian new national security laws, was denied bail yesterday over allegations he had asked foreign countries to impose sanctions.
Mr Lai, 73, owner of the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily and founder of Next Digital Media, has repeatedly called for international action over the erosion of liberties in Hong Kong.
The charges reportedly relate to tweets he posted, including one in May asking Donald Trump to impose sanctions on China, and his decision to launch an English-language edition of Apple Daily.
Hong Kong politician Ted Hui, who lives in Britain after being forced into exile, told Radio 4’s Today programmed: ‘I feel extremely heavy watching my friends go to jail, perhaps for life. Freedom of speech is totally collapsed in Hong Kong and it’s extremely alarming to the world.’
Mr Lai’s arrest is the latest in a crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement since the sweeping national security law passed this summer by Beijing, which allows Chinese security forces to operate there.
Last week, activists Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam were jailed for taking part in an unauthorized protest last year. Teenage activist Tony Chung was also convicted last week of desecrating the Chinese flag, and at least 16 other activists were arrested.
The devotee who works just yards from MI6 spies
Outwardly at least, the British consulate in Shanghai – at 17F Garden Square – appears wholly unremarkable. There is little to distinguish it from the other high-rise buildings that crowd the city’s historic riverside district. What goes on inside, however, is quite a different matter.
One consular official identified in the leaked database is said by security sources to work near to a team of MI6 officers operating under diplomatic cover. Intriguingly, and some critics of the China’s regime may think worryingly too, the official is apparently on the floor below or, as one security source put it, ‘down a staircase’.
There is no evidence that anything untoward has taken place, but the simple fact that a Chinese Communist Party member is working in close proximity to intelligence officers has in itself given rise to concerns that the UK is ‘playing with fire’.
Long known as a city of intrigue, Shanghai was fabled in the 1930s as the Paris of the East, China’s most modern metropolis, a haven for gangsters and intellectuals, colonials and radicals, the new rich and the ultra-poor.
The communist revolution changed all that and the city’s famous vitality was largely stamped out. Even in the late 1980s, when other parts of China were modernizing fast, Shanghai lagged behind.
Now its appearance is positively futuristic. The skyscrapers in the gleaming financial district Pudong, for instance, dwarf the old colonial waterfront across the Huangpu river.
One senior Whitehall security source claimed: ‘In that station [the official] will be sat one floor away from the security services team.
‘In theory, anybody walking past where the official works and up the staircase could be identified as an intelligence officer and that information passed back to the Communist Party.’
IAIN DUNCAN SMITH: With hopeless naivety, big business and universities have failed to understand that China is out to destroy our way of life
By IAIN DUNCAN SMITH for the Mail on Sunday
Joining the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is quite unlike signing up for a political party here or in any other democracy. It might seem closer to joining a crime family in the New York Mafia.
Members have to swear overriding loyalty to the one party that has ruled in China since the 1940s.
They must pledge to ‘guard party secrets’, to ‘fight for communism throughout my life’ and to be ready at all times ‘to sacrifice my all for the Party’. The oath is for life and sworn in the presence of party officials. Swift, harsh punishment would result should they ever dare to break it.
Belonging to the party is no mere formality. The CCP demands secrecy, cunning and utterly ruthless discipline from its millions of members. Notoriously secretive, its authority is absolute.
Members are routinely schooled in the beliefs, tenets and principles of Chinese Communist thought.
Democracy and freedom are such existential threats, for example, that violence and oppression are necessary to quash them. Western nations such as the UK are locked in mortal conflict with China and must be defeated.
It is a party whose beliefs about religious minorities remind us of the racist policies of the worst dictators of the 20th Century.
The CCP sees nothing wrong with rounding up Uyghur Muslims, placing them on trains and carting them to ‘re-education camps’ where women can be sterilized and the men put to forced work.
Each and every member has subscribed to all of this and more – harvesting organs from religious minorities, locking up lawyers, crushing the spirit of its own people. There is little room for deviation in political thought in Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party.
It would be bad enough were these individuals confined to China, where they have a vice-like grip on political power.
However, The Mail on Sunday’s investigation shows that CCP influence is spreading around the globe, with members working for some of the world’s most important multinational corporations, academic institutions and even our own diplomatic services.
Much of their spread into the UK took place under the so-called Golden Era, or project Kow Tow, as I prefer to call it. The UK welcomed China, believing – wrongly – that China would open up its economy and that Chinese investment would bring welcome growth, investment, and prosperity to the UK.
It is hardly surprising, then, that City of London behemoths Standard Chartered, KPMG and Ernst & Young each hired several hundred CCP members across several branches in China.
And it is even less surprising that HSBC tops the shameful league table of companies willing to comply with Chinese Communist Party rules. HSBC likes to criticize Brexit for its perceived small-mindedness, with adverts telling the UK ‘we are not an island’.
Its own behavior speaks volumes, however. Last week, it rushed to freeze the bank accounts of exiled Hong Kong lawmaker Ted Hui. Earlier in the summer, it issued statements denouncing the democracy protests.
Now we learn that it apparently once employed more than 300 members of the very party that is orchestrating the draconian crackdown in Hong Kong. Time and again, HSBC has proved itself to be Beijing’s favorite bank.
None of this would be remarkable in a Chinese institution but for a British bank – regulated and headquartered here in London – it is inexcusable.
The conduct of HSBC and other UK financial institutions is not just wrong but immoral.
We can only hope that this leak confirms the truth that is beginning to dawn on businesses around the world. Operating in China carries an inbuilt ethical and reputational risk. We already know that household brands have been linked with slave labor from Uyghur prison camp detainees in the Xinjiang region.
Mounting evidence links the Party to state-sponsored concentration camps and genocide against Uyghur minorities.
So when will rich multinational firms decide it is no longer worth the damage to their brand?
The threat is not just to their corporate image, by the way, or to our moral standing as a nation – it is a threat to our security. Companies such as Boeing, Airbus, Thales, and Rolls-Royce each play an essential role in manufacturing equipment used by our Armed Forces.
They make some of our most advanced weaponry and are trusted to guard top-secret designs for our most sensitive assets and facilities. Yet collectively they employ hundreds of Chinese Communists who have pledged to serve the Party above all else.
Other vital firms such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline employ hundreds of Communist Party members, giving them access to networks, designs and supply chains.
Then there is the matter of academics in the UK, some of whom are studying among the most sensitive subjects at our universities.
In recent years we’ve come to understand that China is systematically targeting – and stealing – academic technology.
In September, our Government barred Chinese military scientists from sensitive research. Now we know why.
Most troubling of all is the discovery that this scourge extends to our own Foreign Office.
Applicants to the FO are among the most closely vetted in Government, and rightly so. Staff in our consulates and embassies will see and discuss matters of state.
They are rightly considered among the most useful potential ‘assets’ by foreign intelligence services. Even the most anodyne pieces of information can have implications for national security.
So the Foreign Office will need to explain to the public and to Parliament how it is that we employed lifelong members of the Chinese Communist Party in one of the most sensitive facilities in the UK diplomatic network, the consulate in Shanghai.
An urgent investigation must now take place into exactly what sort of access this individual – and other Communist Party Members – have had.
I believe the Government must now move to expel and remove any members of the Communist Party from our consulates in China. They can serve the UK or they can serve the CCP. They cannot do both.
There is a common theme of naivety running through our companies, universities, and government officials.
We have failed to recognize that at the core of China’s system is a system of ideas and values that not only runs contrary to ours but seeks to overcome it. The interests of the Communist Party come first.
It is not that China has sought to hide this reality but that we in the free world have been prepared to turn a blind eye to it for so long.
Small wonder, then, that Xi Jinping states openly that China will have the world’s most powerful military forces in the world by 2049.
The question today is this: to what degree have our institutions and big business been helping him achieve his goal?
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 305 of title 5, United States Code, and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy and Principles. As expressed in Executive Order 13777 of February 24, 2017 (Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda), it is the policy of the United States to alleviate unnecessary regulatory burdens placed on the American people. Overly burdensome occupational licensing requirements can impede job creation and slow economic growth, which undermines our Nation’s prosperity and the economic well‑being of the American people. Such regulations can prevent American workers and job seekers from earning a living, maximizing their personal and economic potential, and achieving the American Dream. The purpose of this order is to reduce the burden of occupational regulations in order to promote the free practice of commerce, lower consumer costs, and increase economic and geographic mobility, including for military spouses.
My Administration is committed to continuing this important work by partnering with State, local, territorial, and tribal leaders throughout the country to eliminate harmful occupational regulations, which are frequently designed to protect politically connected interest groups. To this end, in October 2019, my Administration announced the establishment of the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation, which works with State, local, and tribal leaders to advance occupational licensing reforms, better align State and Federal regulations, and eliminate unnecessary regulations that drive up consumer costs.
Occupational regulations can protect practitioners from competition rather than protect the public from malpractice. Unfortunately, the number of occupational regulations has substantially increased over the last few decades. Since the 1950s, the percentage of jobs requiring a government-mandated occupational license has increased from less than 5 percent to between 25 and 30 percent. By requiring workers to acquire new licenses when they move to a new jurisdiction, occupational regulations reduce worker mobility, disproportionately harm low‑income Americans, and are particularly burdensome to military spouses who must relocate to support the service members committed to keeping our country safe. Additionally, blanket prohibitions that prevent individuals with criminal records from obtaining occupational licenses may exacerbate disparities in employment opportunity and increase the likelihood of recidivism, particularly as regulatory barriers to enter lower- and middle-income occupations are associated with higher recidivism rates. Licensing requirements unnecessary to protect consumers from significant and demonstrable harm also frequently impose expensive educational requirements on potential job seekers, even for occupations with limited future earnings potential. According to recent research, licensing requirements have cost our country an estimated 2.85 million jobs and over $200 billion annually in increased consumer costs.
Therefore, it is the policy of the United States Government to support occupational regulation reform throughout the Nation, building on occupational licensing reforms enacted most recently in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and South Dakota, guided by six principles:
Principle 1. All recognized occupational licensure boards should be subject to active supervision of a designated governmental agency or office.
Principle 2. All occupational licensure boards recognized by a State, territorial, or tribal government that oversee personal qualifications related to the practice of an occupation should adopt and maintain the criteria and methods of occupational regulation that are least restrictive to competition sufficient to protect consumers from significant and demonstrable harm to their health and safety. The policies and procedures of such boards should be designed to protect consumer and worker safety and to encourage competition.
Principle 3. State, territorial, and tribal governments should review existing occupational regulations, including associated scope-of-practice provisions, to ensure that their requirements are the least restrictive to competition sufficient to protect consumers from significant and demonstrable harm. State, territorial, and tribal governments should also regularly review and analyze all occupational regulations, including associated personal qualifications required to obtain an occupational license, to ensure the adoption of the least restrictive requirements necessary to protect consumers from significant and demonstrable harm.
Principle 4. Individuals with criminal records should be encouraged to submit to the appropriate licensure board a preliminary application for an occupational license for a determination as to whether the criminal record would preclude their attainment of the appropriate occupational license.
Principle 5. A State, territorial, or tribal government should issue an occupational license to a person in the discipline applied for and at the same level of practice if the individual satisfies four requirements:
(a) the individual holds an occupational license for that discipline from another jurisdiction in the United States and is in good standing;
(b) the individual verifies having met, as applicable, the minimum examination, education, work, or clinical-supervision requirements imposed by the State, territory, or tribe;
(c) the individual:
(i) has not had the license previously revoked or suspended;
(ii) has not been disciplined related to the license by any other regulating entity; and
(iii) is not subject to any pending complaint, allegation, or investigation related to the license; and
(d) the individual pays all applicable fees required to obtain the new license.
Principle 6. Accommodations should be made for any applicant for an occupational license who is the spouse of an active duty member of the uniformed services and who is relocating with the member due to the member’s official permanent change of station orders.
Sec. 2. Review of and Report on Authorities, Regulations, Guidance, and Policies. The head of each executive department and agency (agency) shall, within 90 days of the date of this order and every 2 years thereafter:
(a) review the agency’s authorities, regulations, guidance, and polices to identify changes necessary to ensure alignment with the principles set forth in section 1 of this order; and
(b) submit a report to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (Director of OMB), the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and the Assistant to the President and Director of Intergovernmental Affairs (Director of IGA) identifying all necessary changes identified pursuant to subsection (a) of this section.
Sec. 3. Identification and Report of Opportunities to Encourage Occupational Regulation Reform. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, and every 2 years thereafter, the head of each agency shall submit a report to the Director of OMB, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and the Director of IGA identifying a list of recommended actions available to any and all agencies to recognize and reward State, territorial, and tribal governments that have in place policies and procedures regarding occupational regulation that are consistent with the principles set forth in section 1 of this order; and
(b) Within 120 days of the date of this order, and every 2 years thereafter, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, in consultation with the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Labor, the Director of OMB, the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, the Director of IGA, and the heads of other agencies and offices as appropriate, shall submit a report to the President identifying:
(i) recommended changes to Federal law, regulations, guidance, and other policies to ensure alignment with the principles set forth in section 1 of this order;
(ii) recommended actions to be taken by agencies to recognize and reward State, territorial, and tribal governments that have in place policies and procedures regarding occupational regulation that are consistent with the principles set forth in section 1 of this order; and
(iii) a list of criteria that may be used to evaluate whether a State, territorial, or tribal government has in place policies and procedures that are consistent with the principles set forth in section 1 of this order.
Sec. 4. Implementation of Recommendations to Recognize and Reward State, Territorial, and Tribal Regulatory Reform. (a) Within 180 days of the date of this order, and every 2 years thereafter, the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, in consultation with the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the heads of other agencies as appropriate, shall seek and report on information from State, territorial, and tribal governments regarding whether they have in place policies and procedures consistent with the principles set forth in section 1 of this order and shall make the report publicly available, including on agencies’ websites. The information sought shall be consistent with the criteria identified as required by section 3(b)(iii) of this order.
(b) Consistent with applicable law, and to the extent that the President approves any of the actions recommended pursuant to section 3(b)(ii) of this order, agencies shall implement such actions for the purpose of recognizing and rewarding a State, territorial, or tribal government that has in place policies and procedures regarding occupational regulation that are consistent with the principles set forth in section 1 of this order.
Sec. 5. Definitions. For the purposes of this order:
(a) “Active supervision” means:
(i) reviewing proposed occupational licensure board rules, policies, or other regulatory actions that may restrict market competition prior to issuance;
(ii) ensuring that any entity seeking to impose occupational licensing criteria adopts the criteria that are least restrictive to competition sufficient to protect consumers from significant and demonstrable harm to their health or safety; and
(iii) analyzing, where information is readily available, the effects of proposed rules, policies, and other regulatory actions on employment opportunities, consumer costs, market competition, and administrative costs.
(b) “Agency” has the meaning given that term in section 3502(1) of title 44, United States Code, except that the term does not include the agencies described in section 3502(5) of title 44, United States Code, other than the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.
(c) “Occupational license” means a license, registration, or certification without which an individual lacks the legal permission of a State, local, territorial, or tribal government to perform certain defined services for compensation.
(d) “Occupational regulation” includes:
(i) licensing or government certification, by which a government body requires personal qualifications in order to be permitted to practice an occupation; and
(ii) registration, bonding, or inspections, by which a government body does not require personal qualifications in order to be permitted to practice an occupation.
Sec. 6. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
Soooo many mayor changes are taking place worldwide that in truth we cannot discuss now. Anyways, what it is important noticing is that today a mayor Solar Eclipse is taking place, visible in South America.
This eclipse is bringing the gestation of a new humanity, and it starts as cleansing all feminine wombs from ALL past mistakes/darkness= disposing what no longer serve so it can make room for the I AM or the super God that is coming to earth. To understand this we must think that the earth is us. This is a fact. And when we say womb we are including all feminine wombs whether from younger women, and old.
The goal is dissolving all darkness to light so the super God can enter the earth’s womb!
This mayor event will connect with the Winter Solstice that would be on December 21st, where Jupiter and Saturn will be so close as forming a single unit that would look as the Christmas star. This event has not happened since 800 years.
All day today, and starting at 1pm to 2pm is a good time for all women across the world making the intention for cleansing themselves- focusing in their wombs. Bringing all past/darkness to light.
Now you might ask, and what it is the work of the male then? The answer is that the masculine energy then would ankh the forces of space with matter.
Great times to be alive everyone! Make sure to eat light, pray, and or meditate, make a difference to whomever you can, and as well start getting your dancing shoes in order because in a not too far away future, you are going to use it!
courage. patriotism. love. for. all.
If you would like learning more about Knowledge, then you might want to take the time to listen to this enlighten being explaining what is taking place worldwide, within us, and the Universe. He is kind enough to translate from English to Spanish. Mind Blowing!
Excellent by Mike Pompeo, however, we hope that on the next presentation he would speak about how our country, due to Communism almost lost all its moral values. Just think, China owns the perverted Hollywood that aim at sexual immorality with minors, homosexuality, transgenderism; drug additions, and cannibalism in all forms.
Communism infiltrated our government agencies and just about every politician, and as whores that they are, have slept with a communist agent from China, and or affiliate. Communism also infiltrated our universities, churches and theirs religions, public schools, and even nurseries. And last but not least they owns the propaganda’s lying machine that worldwide goal is brainwashing the human race with false information. They also owns Big Pharma, the entity that teach the guys in white coat false science about our body so they can prescribe their own lethal un-natural so call prescribe medications that never ever would heal the body, such as for blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, and etc, etc., instead of homeopathic healing minerals. In fact it was communism that gave us the FDA, the CDC, Fentanyl, Opioid, abortion clinics within each neighborhood of America and the world,+ and vaccines that as prescriptions drugs are aim at destroying our immune system.
Globalism is a disguise form of Communism. Just ask the Teachers Union; the Department of Education, the banking cartel, and or ask any Rabbi that teach/practice the TALMUD= the old version. The Old Talmud teaches Communism= the destruction of the human race by any means; the destruction of our environment with harmful technology, the poisoning of our food supply, and even poisoning of the air we breath. Communism is the sole responsible for the murdering/genocide of our children worldwide in all forms. The sole responsible for the falling of our societies moral values, and as well almost the destruction of our country, the United States.
However, ALL is changing, and those that are still practicing these immorality, they would be accountable for their own actions matters not where they are and who they are. The China Virus and or Communism is at the last stage of its reign worldwide. Any form of government that aim at the destruction of its own people must cease and desist. Our humanity is not for sale. Our humanity are not public property for the few to use as collateral to create wars, and corporations. The party is OVER.
We pray that our humanity wake up, and have courage to speak up, and stands as powerful beings that they are against evil. Silence no more because if we do keep silence, this is a sign of approval for their own malicious doing.
This presentation below starts at the 9 minutes mark. And notice how the host is wearing a mask! We are thinking that if he is so academic, he should know at least some physiology, or otherwise he would not be wearing the disgusting mask. We are also thinking if he knows what Carbon Dioxide is. China shill, is it not?
enjoy. learn. share.
https://youtu.be/veucMIIEVFs
http://wetheonepeople.com/explosive-presentation-by-mike-pompeo-at-georgia-institute-about-chinas-infiltration-worldwide/ = this posting
Texas argues that these states violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution because they made changes to voting rules and procedures through the courts or through executive actions, but not through the state legislatures. Additionally, Texas argues that there were differences in voting rules and procedures in different counties within the states, violating the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Finally, Texas argues that there were “voting irregularities” in these states as a result of the above.
Texas is asking the Supreme Court to order the states to allow their legislatures to appoint their electors. The lawsuit says:
Certain officials in the Defendant States presented the pandemic as the justification for ignoring state laws regarding absentee and mail-in voting. The Defendant States flooded their citizenry with tens of millions of ballot applications and ballots in derogation of statutory controls as to how they are lawfully received, evaluated, and counted. Whether well intentioned or not, these unconstitutional acts had the same uniform effect—they made the 2020 election less secure in the Defendant States. Those changes are inconsistent with relevant state laws and were made by non-legislative entities, without any consent by the state legislatures. The acts of these officials thus directly violated the Constitution.
This case presents a question of law: Did the Defendant States violate the Electors Clause by taking non-legislative actions to change the election rules that would govern the appointment of presidential electors? These non-legislative changes to the Defendant States’ election laws facilitated the casting and counting of ballots in violation of state law, which, in turn, violated the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution. By these unlawful acts, the Defendant States have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but their actions have also debased the votes of citizens in Plaintiff State and other States that remained loyal to the Constitution.
Texas approached the Supreme Court directly because Article III provides that it is the court of first impression on subjects where it has original jurisdiction, such as disputes between two or more states.
Also watch the video below where Sidney Powell speak of what it is ahead with the election, and after she filled documents in the State of Georgia. All is moving towards the Supreme Court!
On Friday, August 14, 2020, the President signed into law:
S. 2163, the “Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys Act,” which establishes the Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys to study and make recommendations to address the conditions affecting Black men and boys;
S. 3607, the “Safeguarding America’s First Responders Act,” which extends death and disability benefits under the Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program to public safety officers who die or become injured as a result of COVID-19; and
S. 3637, which extends protections for service members in a residential or vehicle lease who are impacted by stop movement orders due to a local, national, or global emergency.
On October 20, 2020, the President Signed into Law:
H.R. 4779, which extends to September 30, 2027, the Undertaking Spam, Spyware, and Fraud Enforcement with Enforcers beyond Borders (U.S. SAFE WEB) Act of 2006, which authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to provide assistance to foreign law enforcement agencies investigating fraudulent or deceptive commercial practices;
S. 294, the “Native American Business Incubators Program Act,” which establishes a business incubators grant program within the Department of the Interior to promote economic development in Indian reservation communities; and
S. 832, which nullifies the Supplemental Treaty Between the United States and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of Middle Oregon.
LAW & JUSTICEIssued: On Friday, December 4, 2020, the President signed into law:
H.R. 835, the “Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act of 2019,” which imposes criminal sanctions on certain persons involved in international doping fraud conspiracies; and requires restitution for victims of such conspiracies;
H.R. 1668, the “Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020,” which establishes security standards for Internet of Things (IoT) devices owned or controlled by the Federal government;
H.R. 3589, the “Greg LeMond Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2019,” which provides for the award of a Congressional Gold Medal to Greg LeMond, in recognition of his service to the Nation as an athlete, activist, role model, and community leader;
H.R. 4104, the “Negro Leagues Baseball Centennial Commemorative
Coin Act,” which requires the Department of the Treasury to mint and issue coins in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues baseball;
H.R. 8276, which authorizes the President to posthumously award the Medal of Honor to Alwyn C. Cashe for acts of valor during Operation Iraqi Freedom while serving in the United States Army;
H.R. 8472, the “Impact Aid Coronavirus Relief Act,” which modifies the application requirements for the Impact Aid Program for fiscal year (FY) 2022 and the requirements for allocations to states under the Migrant Education program for FY 2021;
S. 3147, the “Improving Safety and Security for Veterans Act of 2019,” which requires VA to report to the Congress regarding VA policies and procedures on patient safety and quality of care, as well as steps taken to increase patient safety and quality of care both generally and at the VA medical center at Clarksburg, West Virginia; and
S. 3587, the “Department of Veterans Affairs Website Accessibility Act of 2019,” which requires VA to study and report on VA websites’ accessibility to individuals with disabilities.
On Thursday, December 3, 2020, the President signed into law:
H.R. 5901, the “Information Technology Modernization Centers of Excellence Program Act,” which requires the General Services Administration to establish an Information Technology Modernization Centers of Excellence Program to facilitate the adoption of modern technology by executive agencies on a reimbursable basis.
Today, we celebrate the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery in our country. One hundred and fifty-five years later, we remember the millions of souls unjustly subjected to the oppressive institution of slavery and recommit to pursuing the enduring promise of our Nation that all people have the God-given right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
On December 6, 1865, Georgia became the 27th State to ratify the 13th Amendment, forever enshrining the end to slavery and all of its badges and incidents into our foundational governing document. This landmark moment in the history of our country signaled the dawn of a new era in American society and marked the end of an evil injustice that stained our national character. In the years since, African Americans have made monumental contributions to the culture and economy of our great Nation, fueling the success of our country and the fulfillment of its core values and promises.
The 13th Amendment denoted an end to a Nation divided between slave States and free States, a critical step toward realizing the long-known truth of the equality of all people. Today, as we mark this milestone, we also remember the incredible sacrifices made in the years after ratification by so many patriots in pursuit of equality under the law. We resolve to continue to work to strengthen the bonds of unity between all Americans. In remembrance of the indomitable spirit of the men and women who toiled and died under the yoke of slavery, in honor of the soldiers who fought and died to free them, and in service to our founding ideals, we will continue to root out and destroy hate and injustice in order to more firmly secure the promise of our Nation for future generations.
The United States of America is the greatest country in the world because our history is one of constant progress toward the timeless principles of equality and justice. As President Abraham Lincoln stated, the Founders always “meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society” for us to revere, look to, and strive for. We are the Nation that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous country in human history. Today, we recommit to building on this progress and continuing our march as one people toward a freer and brighter future for all.
Nearly 250 years ago, heroes of our Revolution signed the Declaration of Independence, offering a bold enumeration of inalienable rights endowed to us by our Creator. In time, with independence secured from a tyrannical monarchy, our Nation etched these principles of liberty and equality into the law of our fledgling Nation when we ratified our Constitution. The revolutionary idea they embodied — that certain individual rights are beyond the reach of government — has resonated around the world. Today, and this week, we celebrate our sacred rights and the example they have set for the rest of history.
James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights text, was initially skeptical of the need to secure specific rights explicitly in the Constitution, believing the checks and balances inherent in our system of government would operate to achieve that objective. But he came to recognize the value that the Bill of Rights could provide and worked to ensure that the individual rights and freedoms of Americans were precisely enumerated in the highest law of the land. Madison was acutely aware that, while a government formed to serve its people is just and legitimate, “power, lodged as it must in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” Accordingly, he worked to imprint essential human rights, including the rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, and free exercise of religion in our foundational legal text, empowering generations of Americans by protecting them from government abuses.
The revolutionary understanding of human rights reflected in the Declaration of Independence and encoded in our Constitution has provided a blueprint for the world in advancing individual human rights. In 1948, looking to our Bill of Rights as a model, the United Nations General Assembly established the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes the “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights” of mankind. Earlier this year, we also celebrated the 45th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Accords, in which the Western World acknowledged similar fundamental human freedoms in defiance of the Soviet Union.
Despite these milestones, the world is still plagued by tragic human rights abuses, including the oppression of women, forced labor, racism, and ethnic and religious persecution. My Administration continues to fight these injustices on all fronts while calling on other sovereign nations to respect the unalienable rights of their people. Earlier this year, I signed an Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, which protects and fosters freedom of expression for Americans on social media and other platforms and also seeks to combat human rights abuses abroad, like the mass imprisonment of religious minorities in China, which are often obscured by a cloud of false information online. Additionally, I recently signed an Executive Order on Advancing International Religious Freedom, which prioritizes this fundamental freedom in American diplomacy and recognizes that advancing religious freedom abroad is vital to combating rising levels of violence and crimes against humanity around the globe. There is no greater defender of liberty than the United States, and we will remain steadfast in our efforts.
During Human Rights Day, Bill of Rights Day, and Human Rights Week, we cherish the unique story of our Nation and celebrate the patriots who helped our country secure our fundamental rights, freedoms, and values for ourselves and our posterity. We also take pride in the role that this heritage has played in advancing and protecting human rights around the world. America’s commitment to individual liberty and human dignity is at our very core. We acknowledge that the principles set forth in the Bill of Rights are foundational, and we recommit to ensuring their legacy in our country as we continue to lead the way toward stronger human rights protections around the world.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 10, 2020, as Human Rights Day; December 15, 2020, as Bill of Rights Day, and the week beginning on December 6, 2020, as Human Rights Week. I call upon the people of the United States to mark these observances with appropriate ceremonies and activities.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of December, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fifth.
Three-star General McInerney joins us LIVE to talk about the seized CIA servers in Germany, the Insurrection Act , military tribunals, and the President’s best moves moving forward. Also some insights with Bobby Piton.
https://youtu.be/oojQydmdsOs
More
https://youtu.be/AaaPhvCe74s
http://wetheonepeople.com/election-report-general-mcinerney-talks-insurrection-act-more/ = this posting
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, an event which President John Quincy Adams described as the “birthday” of our nation. You might expect this seminal moment in world history to be commemorated with great fanfare. But don’t get your hopes up.
Even if the coronavirus hadn’t cancelled the celebration, the left’s cancel culture would have. The same wokesters who are busytopplingstatues and banningliterature have unfairly maligned our Pilgrim fathers and reframed the history of the nation they founded.
“There appear to be few commemorations, parades, or festivals to celebrate the Pilgrims this year, perhaps in part because revisionist charlatans of the radical left have lately claimed the previous year as America’s true founding,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said last week in a speech honoring the Pilgrims’ 400th anniversary.
The “revisionist charlatans” he was referring to are the authors of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which commemorates the year that the first ship arrived in the Virginia colony carrying African slaves. Recognizing the significance of the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery is certainly worthwhile, but the 1619 Project’s authors went beyond recognition and sought to “reframe” all of American history around the events of 1619. For this, they havebeenroundlycriticizedbyhistorians who decry their many inaccuracies and revisionist interpretations (including, for example, their claim that the American Revolution was fought in order to preserve slavery in the colonies).
Most of the criticism has focused on the Project’s controversial claim (which was later scrubbed from the New York Times’ website) that 1619 is the year of “our true founding,” not 1620 when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth and planted the seed of our democracy that ripened in 1776.
In a Times op-ed rebutting the critics, Nicholas Guyatt argues that “the 1619 Project radically challenges a core narrative of American history” by refuting the notion that “the story of the United States [is] a gradual unfolding of freedom.” Instead, the Project’s authors “describe a nation in which racism is persistent and protean. White supremacy shapeshifts through the nation’s history, finding new forms to continue the work of subjugation and exclusion.”
In other words, they think Abraham Lincoln got it wrong when he said our nation was “conceived in Liberty.” They think it was conceived in racism.
And now there is a push to incorporate the 1619 Project into school curriculums to assist the woke revisionists who are already hard at work rewriting our history one school kid at a time, just as they’ve been busy for years now “reframing” the history of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving.
Ann Coulter gave an excellent summary of the new woke interpretation of Thanksgiving: “As every contemporary school child knows, our Pilgrim forefathers took a break from slaughtering Indigenous Peoples to invite them to dinner and infect them with smallpox, before embarking on their mission to fry the planet.”
She’s not joking. America’s teachers have “begun a slow, complex process of ‘unlearning’ the widely accepted American narrative of Thanksgiving,” Education Weekreported last year. To unlearn the “myth” of Thanksgiving, educators are seeking ways “to help students appreciate colonial oppression of Natives and the violence that ensued from it.” The article helpfully includes a video of PBS NewsHours’ Judy Woodruff explaining that the “quintessential feel-good holiday” of Thanksgiving actually “perpetuates a myth and dishonors Native Americans.”
The story of Thanksgiving fares even worse on college campuses, where students are taught that it should be commemorated as a “National Day of Mourning,” not a day off for food, family, and football. “It’s kind of just based off the genocide of the indigenous people,” one student at Minnesota’s Macalester College told the College Fix. “The history of the holiday is obviously not the best. It’s very violent and oppressive,” said another.
Sorry, no. This left-wing “narrative of Thanksgiving” is historically inaccurate garbage. We know who the Pilgrims are and what they did because they meticulously documented everything for posterity.
Our Founding Myth
Our knowledge of the Pilgrims comes from two primary sources. The earliest account is from Edward Winslow, whose report on the founding of the Plymouth settlement was published in London in 1622, just two years after the Pilgrims arrived in the New World. The more detailed and authoritative account comes from the Pilgrims’ second governor, William Bradford, whose poignant and eloquent history Of Plymouth Plantation, written between 1630 and 1651, tells the story of the community from their formation in England to their exile in Holland and their eventual founding of the Plymouth Colony.
Any fair reading of the primary source documentation will give you all the evidence you need to understand why we chose the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth as the date of “our true founding” and as the basis of our founding myth.
But before I examine that record, let me make clear what I mean by the term founding myth. To call an event a founding myth is not to denigrate it or to question its historical accuracy. The fact that Americans don’t understand this is an indictment of our education system, which longer teaches the classics.
Our nation’s Founders understood what a founding myth meant. They used the term – just as I am now using the term – in the way the ancient Greeks and Romans understood it. A nation’s origin myth isn’t a falsification of history meant to deceive. Quite the contrary! It is a story rooted in history that reflects a nation’s most sacred values, rituals, and identity. To call something your founding myth is to state: This is who we were, this is who we are, and this is who we aspire to be.
An origin myth often describes the emergence of a new civilization out of the ashes of an older one.
Take, for example, the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem recounting the founding myth of ancient Rome. In one of the most memorable passages, Virgil provided us with a perfect reflection of the Roman concept of pietas, which means a religious and familial duty. Virgil described his hero, Aeneas, fleeing the burning city of Troy while grasping the hand of his young son and carrying on his back his elderly father who is cradling in his arms their family’s household gods. In that beautiful tableau, Aeneas reflects all the values the Romans held most sacred: He is protecting his family and honoring his gods, as he flees the fall of one civilization and courageously sets out to found another, greater one in Rome.
There is a reason why we chose the Pilgrims and their establishment of the Plymouth Colony in 1620 as our origin myth, not the Virginians who settled in Jamestown over a decade before that date. Our reasoning had everything to do with the Pilgrims’ lack of racism. Americans always aspire to be on the side of righteousness, and the Pilgrims were nothing if not righteous.
Their story embodies our most sacred American values. Like Aeneas fleeing the fall of Troy, the Pilgrims saw themselves as fleeing a cataclysmic conflagration about to engulf Europe. And like the Roman hero, they too hoped to build a new civilization with a spark from the dying embers of the old one.
This is exactly how John Quincy Adams viewed the story of the Pilgrims. In a speech in 1802 commemorating the landing at Plymouth, Adams described the Pilgrims as America’s origin myth; but unlike other nations, the heroes of our founding myth were clearly known to us by their historical record, and they were defined by their virtue, not by their conquest.
“In reverting to the period of [their] origin, other nations have generally been compelled to plunge into the chaos of impenetrable antiquity, or to trace a lawless ancestry into the caverns of ravishers and robbers,” Adams told his American audience. “It is your peculiar privilege to commemorate, in this birthday of your nation, an event ascertained in its minutest details; an event of which the principal actors are known to you familiarly, as if belonging to your own age; an event of a magnitude before which imagination shrinks at the imperfection of her powers. It is your further happiness to behold, in those eminent characters, who were most conspicuous in accomplishing the settlement of your country, men upon whose virtue you can dwell with honest exultation.”
What’s more, Adams explained that the Pilgrims were the antithesis of cruel or racist conquers seeking to vanquish and plunder. Instead, they “were illustrious by their intrepid valor no less than by their Christian graces … Their glory has not been wafted over oceans of blood to the remotest regions of the earth. They have not erected to themselves colossal statues upon pedestals of human bones, to provoke and insult the tardy hand of heavenly retribution. But theirs was ‘the better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom.’ Theirs was the gentle temper of Christian kindness; the rigorous observance of reciprocal justice; the unconquerable soul of conscious integrity.”
So, who were these heroes who engendered such praise?
Let me tell you their story using their own words. You will see why we chose their arrival as the date of “our true founding” and why that decision says everything about who we were, who we are, and who we aspire to be.
Saints and Strangers
The Pilgrims were devout Christians, and much like evangelical Christians today, these Englishmen and women sought to live by a simpler Biblical-based faith modeled after the early church of the Apostles.
They wanted to live as a community that worshipped and worked together, but England and its established Church enacted laws that forbade religious gatherings in private houses. These laws basically thwarted the Pilgrims’ ability to practice their faith as a community. So, in 1608, faced with the threat of imprisonment for their faith, the small community fled England and settled in Holland, which was known as a refuge for Protestant dissenters.
But after living a decade among the Dutch, they realized it was time to leave the Old World altogether. In 1618, Europe was on the cusp of one of the most violent periods in its history. The conflict, which became known as the Thirty Years War, would pit Protestant and Catholic European powers against each other. For the Pilgrims, the impending cataclysm seemed like the beginning of Armageddon. They felt the best course of action was to leave the Old World behind and try to establish some holy remnant in the new one.
Getting there was the hard part. The small community was not wealthy. They were humble working class folks. They were pious husbands and wives with children seeking a place where they could worship in peace, not adventurers seeking treasure and conquest on behalf of a monarch. Nevertheless, the congregation pooled its resources and obtained a land patent from the Plymouth Company to settle in an area at the northernmost tip of the Virginia Company’s colony. They would eventually receive financing from London bankers who offered to back their venture with the understanding that the Pilgrims would repay these debts with their labors in the New World.
A merchant vessel called the Mayflower was charted for them, but the London financiers made it clear that the Pilgrims weren’t going to be the only passengers. The investors insisted that a rag tag crew of non-religious settlers—who the Pilgrims referred to as “the Strangers”—were also coming along for the ride, and that would soon become a source of awkwardness. But that was the least of their worries, really.
By the time the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, with 102 passengers onboard, they were setting sail way too late in the year for a successful journey. Trans-Atlantic sea voyages were a frightening and often fatal endeavor. It was comparable to going to the Moon or Mars. Even the best crossing was perilous, and that would be in springtime when the weather was more moderate. To set out in September meant they were arriving in winter … But wait, it got worse…
After 65 days—and two deaths—at sea, the Mayflower made landfall on November 9, 1620.
“Having found a good haven and being brought safely in sight of land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries of it, again to set their feet upon the firm and stable earth, their proper element,” Bradford wrote of that moment.
But the jubilation was short lived. They soon discovered they were over 200 miles off-course. They were nowhere near Virginia. And what’s worse, it was almost winter—inMassachusetts.
“Having thus passed the vast ocean, and that sea of troubles,” the Pilgrims “had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain and refresh their weather-beaten bodies, nor houses — much less towns — to repair to,” Bradford wrote:
As for the season, it was winter, and those who have experienced the winters of the country know them to be sharp and severe, and subject to fierce storms, when it is dangerous to travel to known places, — much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men; and what multitude there might be of them they knew not!
…Summer being done, all things turned upon them a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, presented a wild and savage view.
So, why didn’t they just turn around and head south for Virginia? Because the Mayflower’s captain told them that he couldn’t spare any more provisions. He needed to keep stores saved for his own return voyage to England. So, they had to shove off and muddle onshore as best they could because he wasn’t hanging around forever, and if they didn’t get a-move on he might just dump them onshore and abandon them to the elements before they even had time to build a shelter.
Again, Bradford, writing in third person, explained the situation the Pilgrims found themselves in:
If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now a gulf separating them from all civilized parts of the world. If it be said that they had their ship to turn to, it is true; but what did they hear daily from the captain and crew? That they should quickly look out for a place with their shallop, where they would be not far off; for the season was such that the captain would not approach nearer to the shore till a harbour had been discovered which he could enter safely; and that the food was being consumed apace, but he must and would keep sufficient for the return voyage. It was even muttered by some of the crew that if they did not find a place in time, they would turn them and their goods ashore and leave them.
The Kernel of Our Democracy
A new conflict arose before they could even get started. They had no governing agreement binding them. Their charter was for Virginia, not wherever this place was.
The “Strangers”—who weren’t especially civil or pious—felt no allegiance to the Pilgrims or to each other. They figured it was every man for himself. But with winter setting in and with dangerously few provisions to speak of, the Pilgrims knew that if they didn’t all stick together, they would all die.
Edward Winslow explained what happened next:
This day before we came to harbor, observing some not well affected to unity and concord, but gave some appearance of faction, it was thought good there should be an association and agreement that we should combine together in one body, and to submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent agree to make and choose, and set our hands to this that follows word for word.
Thus, they wrote out and signed what became known as the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony—and the first document to establish self-governance in the New World.
Here are the words:
IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. IN WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620
It was clear to them that the only thing binding them to this governing document was their own consent as the ones being governed by it.
“What they did was enact social compact theory that had been sort of kicked around in Europe, especially in Britain, for a while,” University of Oklahoma historian and author Professor Wilfred McClay told Breitbart News. “They created a body politic out of the consent of those who were aboard the ship, and they had the foresight to realize they should and could do that.”
The Mayflower Compact wasn’t an elaborate political and legal charter establishing a system of government, like our Constitution. Nor was it a treatise establishing a governing philosophy, like our Declaration of Independence. It was little more than a paragraph. But within that paragraph we have the kernel of our democracy.
This true historical event, taking place nearly two centuries before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, embodied a fundamental American value: the belief that government is based on the consent of the governed.
Our First Dark Winter
Having signed a governing agreement, the Plymouth settlers then elected their first governor, John Carver. During their first forays ashore, the settlers discovered that the area was largely desolate.
In the years prior to their arrival, the population of the local Indian tribes had been decimated by civil wars and by a plague brought by European fisherman. The disease had wiped out whole villages, where the settlers found only scattered bones, left to the elements because no one survived to bury them.
They decided to build their settlement on the ruins of an abandoned Indian village called Patuxet, where once as many as 2,000 Indians had lived before the plague ravaged the area.
So, finally on December 18, 1620, with the Mayflower anchored a mile offshore, the Pilgrims came ashore in the bitter cold, with rain and sleet pouring down on them, to build their settlement.
Is it any wonder that they lost over half their numbers that winter?
They were ill-equipped. The weather was impossible. Many of them didn’t even leave the Mayflower, and eventually the ship was turned into a makeshift hospital for the sick and dying. Those who settled in the village lived in constant fear of being attacked by hostile Indian tribes.
During the course of the winter months, so many members of the Plymouth Colony died that they were afraid to bury their dead lest the Indians realize how thinned out their numbers had become. At one point, they propped up the corpses against the trees surrounding the settlement and placed muskets in their arms to disguise the dead to look like sentries guarding the perimeter of the colony.
By the time March came around, the settlers were barely holding on, but the captain and crew of the Mayflower were ready to leave for the return voyage to England. This was a make-or-break moment for the Plymouth Colony. Would they survive on their own with their last tie to England gone and no hope of return?
Samoset and Squanto
At that providential moment, an Indian named Samoset of the Wampanoag Tribe walked into the Plymouth camp and astonished the Pilgrims by greeting them in English, which he had learned from interacting with various contingents from the Virginia Colony.
The settlers learned from Samoset that this area was the Wampanoag Tribe’s territory, but the tribe had been so weakened by the plague that their leader, Massasoit, felt increasingly at the mercy of enemy tribes, who also happened to be the same ones menacing the Pilgrims.
As Winslow recounted:
[Samoset] discoursed of the whole country, and of every province, and of their sagamores, and their number of men, and strength. The wind being to rise a little, we cast a horseman’s coat about him, for he was stark naked, only a leather about his waist, with a fringe about a span long, or little more; he had a bow and two arrows, the one headed, and the other unheaded. He was a tall straight man, the hair of his head black, long behind, only short before, none on his face at all; he asked some beer, but we gave him strong water and biscuit, and butter, and cheese, and pudding, and a piece of mallard, all which he liked well, and had been acquainted with such amongst the English. He told us the place where we now live is called Patuxet, and that about four years ago all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor child remaining, as indeed we have found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claim unto it.
Six days later, Samoset returned to the village with the Wampanoag leader Massasoit. After entertaining their visitors with food and sport, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags negotiated a mutually beneficial agreement. They would defend each other in the event of an attack by the hostile tribes. And later on, they would establish trade with each other. To help the settlers survive the next winter, an Indian by the name of Tisquantum, or Squanto, stayed with the settlers to show them how to plant their spring crops.
Massachusetts and Virginia
Squanto’s story offers us a good opportunity to explain the difference between the Plymouth and Virginia colonies.
Squanto spoke English because in 1614, six years before the Pilgrims arrived, an expedition from the Virginia Colony led by Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) charted the area around Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bay.
One of the commanders with Smith, a man named Thomas Hunt, decided to make extra money by kidnapping Indians and selling them into slavery. Squanto was among the victims Hunt trafficked to England, which is how he learned English. He eventually regained his freedom after his final captor, an English explorer named John Dermer, died during an expedition to the Wampanoag territory.
The tragic irony is that, had Squanto not been taken against his will across the ocean, he would have died with the rest of his village when Patuxet was wiped out by the plague. You see, Squanto was the sole survivor of the Patuxets—the people whose deserted village the Pilgrims had built their settlement upon.
And yet this man, who had so many reasons to curse the English, worked side by side with the Pilgrims that spring of 1621, showing them how to plant crops and assisting them in establishing trade with the surrounding tribes. Without his help, the Plymouth Colony would have failed.
From their encounters with Squanto and the other Indians, the men and women of Plymouth came to respect the Native people and feel shame for the treatment they had endured at the hands of other Englishmen.
Historian Nathaniel Philbrick explains one encounter:
At Cummaquid they encountered disturbing evidence that all was not forgotten on Cape Cod when it came to past English injustices in the region. An ancient woman, whom they judged to be a hundred years old, made a point of seeking out the Pilgrims “because she never saw English.” As soon as she set eyes on them, she burst into tears, “weeping and crying excessively.” They learned that three of her sons had been captured seven years before by Thomas Hunt, and she still mourned their loss. “We told them we were sorry that any Englishman should give them that offense,” Winslow wrote, “that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that heard of it condemned him for the same.”
And that was just one tale of the atrocities committed by European explorers before the Pilgrims even arrived in the New World. In fact, even before hearing these tales, the Pilgrims were distrustful of the attitude of the other English settlers.
Before they left England, the Pilgrims were looking for a military commander for their settlement. By far the most qualified man for the job was Captain John Smith (again, of Pocahontas fame). No one knew the whole region better than Smith. He literally drew the map of it. But the Pilgrims didn’t like him. They found him arrogant and too worldly and figured they could just make do with his maps without hiring the map-maker.
The dislike was mutual; Smith despised the Pilgrim’s piety and later mocked their refusal to hire him. He would dismissively describe them as “humorists” (meaning religious fanatics) and would write that the Pilgrims refused “to have any knowledge by any but themselves, pretending only religion their governor and frugality their counsel.” And he meant that as an insult!
Smith was right that the Pilgrims could have saved themselves a lot of grief if they had hired someone who knew where he was going. But in the end, the Pilgrims survived thanks to their fortitude, the grace of God, and the help of their new friends.
And, yes, they did indeed regard the Indians as their friends. As Winslow recounted that year, “We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us; we often go to them, and they come to us.”
Far from being judgmental or superior to them, the Pilgrim Winslow described their Native allies as “a people without any religion or knowledge of God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just.”
Nearly two centuries later, John Quincy Adams would state that “no European settlement ever formed upon this continent has been more distinguished for undeviating kindness and equity toward” the Native Americans than the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
And that brings us to the Thanksgiving story.
Our First “Quintessentially Feel-Good Holiday”
With the help of Squanto, the Pilgrims had a successful harvest in the fall of 1621. They had come through the first winter, after losing 60 percent of their group. But rather than mourn the 60 percent lost, they rejoiced that 40 percent still lived and gave thanks to God.
Bradford wrote:
They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
The famous Thanksgiving harvest feast that we’ve come to cherish is from Winslow:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
And there you have it! The Pilgrims gathered for a harvest feast, and the Wampanoags joined them and brought venison to add to the feast, which lasted for three days and included sports (no word on whether it was football).
Let the record show that this first Thanksgiving actually was a “quintessentially feel-good holiday.”
Why Lincoln Chose 1620 to Rebuke 1619
So why did Abraham Lincoln choose to make this account of Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863?
Our origin myth was still a matter of some debate up until that time. Throughout the early nineteenth century, Americans hotly debated whether the nation’s founding should be celebrated as the Jamestown Colony in Virginia or the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. The decision to favor Plymouth was helped along by the rediscovery of Bradford’s beautiful diary, Of Plymouth Plantation.
Bradford’s manuscript had disappeared from the New World in 1777 when the last royal governor of the colony took it from the Old South Church in Boston and carted it across the Atlantic to England. He probably meant this as a final insult to the patriotic New Englanders who were reviled by the British as traitors and brigands fomenting rebellion.
For nearly a century Bradford’s manuscript was lost to Americans, until one Boston scholar happened to see a passage in another book quoting Bradford’s journal. He eventually discovered that the manuscript had been housed all that time in the library of the Bishop of London. (Yes, I know, the irony — the Pilgrim Bradford’s journal was being held by a bishop of the very Church that forced Bradford’s persecuted community to flee from England.)
For decades, the Brits refused to return the manuscript to its proper owners in the United States. (They really know how to hold a grudge.)
But in 1856 the British allowed a special edition of Bradford’s journal to be published, and that inspired a renewed appreciation for the Pilgrims and their history.
The publication came right at a time when our nation was on the cusp of a great conflagration—as bloody and catastrophic for us as the war that caused the Pilgrims to flee Europe. It was a fight over our most basic and sacred values: the right of all men—not just Englishmen—to live in freedom and enjoy the fruits of self-governance.
So, is it any wonder that in the midst of the bloodiest year of our Civil War—just one month before he delivered his Gettysburg Address—Abraham Lincoln decided once and for all that our nation’s founding should harken to Plymouth, not Virginia?
Of course, Lincoln chose to honor the ancestors of the New England abolitionists, not the rebellious slaveowners of Virginia.
On October 3, 1863, our 16th president declared that Thanksgiving would be commemorated as a national holiday every year on the last week in November in honor of the Pilgrim fathers.
In this sense, Lincoln chose the events of 1620 as our true founding in order to repudiate the events of 1619.
We chose the Pilgrims as our founding myth because they embodied our most cherished ideals. They were the best of us.
They endured despite the odds; and through trial and error, they established the principles of self-governance, private property, a common defense, and peaceful commerce as a means of coexistence. They even established the practice of religious tolerance and pluralism with the “Strangers” among them, who became friends.
What’s more, the decision to embrace the Pilgrims as our true founders was made at a time when Americans were most keenly aware of the scourge of slavery because they were fighting a bloody civil war to eradicate it. These Americans understood that slavery was not just a moral blight; it was a deadly contradiction that we couldn’t live with and still pretend to uphold the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. The generation that suffered the most to abolish slavery chose the Pilgrims as our founders because the Pilgrims embodied the ideals that inspired them to free the slaves. They wanted us to know that our nation was founded on God-given freedom, not racism.
This sentiment was made clear in the speech Massachusetts Gov. Roger Wolcott delivered in 1897 at the official ceremony to accept the return of Bradford’s manuscript by England to its rightful owners in America.
The Plymouth settlement was “the birthplace of religious liberty, the cradle of a free Commonwealth,” Wolcott said:
In the varied tapestry which pictures our national life, the richest spots are those where gleam the golden threads of conscience, courage, and faith, set in the web by that little band [of Pilgrims]. May God in His mercy grant that the moral impulse which founded this nation may never cease to control its destiny; that no act of any future generation may put in peril the fundamental principles on which it is based — of equal rights in a free state, equal privileges in a free church, and equal opportunities in a free school.
Equal rights, equal privileges, equal opportunities – that is what Americans have always aspired to uphold. Conscience, courage, faith – that is what the Pilgrims stood for and what they prayed their descendants would stand for.
To honor the founding of Plymouth in 1620 is not to ignore the horrific history of American slavery that began in 1619 in Virginia. And to celebrate Thanksgiving is not to dismiss the atrocities committed against our Native communities, even sadly at the hands of the Pilgrims’ descendants. On Thanksgiving, we acknowledge that the Pilgrims and the Natives did, in fact, come together in peace in November 1621.
We celebrate their story—and the ritual reenactment of it with a turkey feast and prayers of thanksgiving—to acknowledge our highest aspirations, not to whitewash our history or minimize our mistakes. Thanksgiving affirms who we want to be because it commemorates who the Pilgrims actually were.
“There is a kind of audacity about these people,” Professor McClay told Breitbart News. “The journeys were dangerous. The habitats into which they were coming were brutal. They lost many lives, and yet they had this sense—and [the Puritan leader John] Winthrop says it in his sermon—that they were on a mission from God, that ‘the eyes of all people are upon us’—which, when you think about it, this is like somebody going to the Moon—the dark side of the Moon—and saying, ‘The eyes of all people are upon us.’ Well, actually you’re on the Moon. Nobody’s watching! And yet they were so deeply committed to the vision of what they were doing, and that was the germ of what became ultimately a great nation.”
Actually, they knew that God was watching and all the future generations of their children.
In Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford described the fateful moment when the Pilgrims realized that they had landed in an unsettled area and there was no way to turn back:
What, then, could now sustain them but the spirit of God, and His grace? Ought not the children of their fathers rightly to say: Our fathers were Englishmen who came over the great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity.
… Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good, and His mercies endure forever. Yea, let them that have been redeemed of the Lord, show how He hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered forth into the desert-wilderness, out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord His loving kindness, and His wonderful works before the sons of men!
Amen. And Happy Thanksgiving.
Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News. Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.
