Authored by Timothy C. Hemmis via RealClearHistory,

In the United States, November 11th has been known as Veterans Day since 1954 (before that, it was known as Armistice Day). Originally, Veterans Day commemorated the Allies’ victory in World War I. However, after the Second World War, veterans of that conflict including Dwight Eisenhower pushed to expand the holiday to honor all veterans. In many ways, this holiday is about giving thanks to those who have served in wars to protect the United States of America. In that sense it is as much a day of thanksgiving, if not more so, than the one at the end of the November.

The Thanksgiving we all know and love, which we celebrate with turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread dressing/stuffing, cranberry sauce, and a multitude of pies, began as a solemn day of prayer and remembrance. Churches and political bodies often declared a day of thanksgiving after major events. These “holidays” could take place any time of the year. So why November?

President George Washington issued the first national day of thanksgiving on November 26th, 1789 as a day for prayer and giving thanks to God “for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation.” But Washington’s declaration was not the start of an annual holiday.

President Abraham Lincoln, from the prompting of writer Sarah Josepha Hale, officially set a national holiday on the final Thursday of November in 1863. Established during the Civil War, the new holiday encouraged Americans to remember and give thanks for blessings and military successes of the United States of America. Lincoln and Hale both thought a holiday could help heal the divided nation.

By the 20th century, Thanksgiving morphed into the feast we know today. The modern holiday is loosely based on the “First Thanksgiving” that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony had in 1621, which was a harvest feast and a solemn day.

The rise of American consumerism during the late 19th century led to the growth of holiday meals and celebrations. During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the holiday was moved to the third Thursday of November, which allowed for a few extra days of Christmas shopping to help boost an economy that had been limping along during the Great Depression. One could say that the holiday creep started with FDR.

As both Veterans Day and Thanksgiving are sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas, these November holidays have unfortunately been relegated to a secondary status.

Despite the origins of both these days of thanksgiving, we often forget the history and get swept up in the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. There is nothing wrong with putting up your Christmas tree early, but hopefully you and your family can pause and celebrate the two days of thanksgiving this November.

Timothy C. Hemmis is Associate Professor of History with a specialization in Early American History at Texas A&M University – Central Texas in Killeen, Texas. His research focuses on empire, national identity, war and society in Revolutionary America (1750-1815). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2015. He is a fellow with the Jack Miller Center.

President-elect Donald Trump plans to make Elon Musk “secretary of cost-cutting” to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in slashing $2 trillion from the federal budget—about a third of what the bloated federal government spent in the latest fiscal year. This once-in-a-generation initiative will cut thousands of federal workers and reduce or even eliminate the vast cancerous bureaucracy with a new small government led by capable leaders.

Musk wrote in an X post on Sunday night that this shock-and-awe approach will have “obstacles overcoming the Kafkaesque nature of the rules governing this vast bureaucracy and ensuring that maniacally dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration. ” 

Musk was responding to Vivek Ramaswamy’s X post, “We won & now have a once-in-a-century opportunity to radically downsize the size, scope, and mission of the federal government. And the top obstacle to our success won’t even be the Democrats.” 

Indeed, the obstacles are overcoming the Kafkaesque nature of the rules governing this vast bureaucracy and ensuring that maniacally dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration! https://t.co/ObfnIeuTXa

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 11, 2024

Trump is less than three months away from implementing his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’… and thousands of federal workers across DC, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore region have been put on notice for potential job loss.

A recent report by the Washington Post showed that approximately 15% of the 2.19 million civilian full-time federal employees in the US (data from 2023), or about 328,500, live in Northern Virginia, suburban Maryland, and even a touch of West Virginia. 

The other 85% work elsewhere around the country. 

More recent figures show that figure is as high as 373,000 in the Virginia, DC, and Maryland region. These job cuts could spark economic turmoil and reshape the DC landscape—or the beginnings of draining the swamp. 

President-elect Donald Trump revealed on Sunday night that he plans to appoint Tom Homan, who served as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement between 2017 and 2018, as the next “border czar.” 

“I am pleased to announce that the Former ICE Director, and stalwart on Border Control, Tom Homan, will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation’s Borders (“The Border Czar”), including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. 

Trump continued, “I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders. Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.” 

“Congratulations to Tom. I have no doubt he will do a fantastic, and long awaited for, job,” Trump said. 

In recent weeks, Homan gave one of the most based interviews on immigration to the far-left media outlet CBS News’ 60 Minutes. When asked about the taxpayer cost of deporting millions of illegal aliens, he responded, “What price do you put on national security?”

Cecilia Vega asks: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”

“Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” says Tom Homan, head of ICE during Trump’s family separation policy. https://t.co/If9G1sNEzj pic.twitter.com/TIWhi25Vdu

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 28, 2024

At the Republican National Convention in July, Homan told Trump supporters: “I’ve got a message … to all the illegal aliens in violation of federal law … you better start packing now.” 

This is Tom Homan, President Trump’s Border Czar. His message to all the illegals who crossed the border will give you goosebumps, “You better start packing now… cause you’re going home.”

And to the cartels, he said, “Trump will wipe you off the face of the Earth! YOU’RE… pic.twitter.com/ygZICaVVJb

— George (@BehizyTweets) November 11, 2024

Homan recently torched far-left activist lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while on The Hill.

President Trump just put this man, Tom Homan, in charge of deportations. 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/S5xYeV1Nmm

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 11, 2024

While Homan secures the southern and northern borders and oversees the deportation of illegal aliens, there will be significant moves by the Trump administration to disrupt and destroy dark money financial and trade networks that have sparked the horrific 100,000 US drug death overdose crisis per year caused by fentanyl and other drugs – much of which starts as precursor chemicals shipped from China, cooked into fentanyl by Mexican cartels, then flooded in the Lower 48. 

More on Trump’s plan to eradicate Mexican cartels: “Show No Mercy”: Trump’s Campaign Pledge To Annihilate Mexican Cartels Goes Viral.

Make Law And Order Great Again.

Authored by James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer via American Greatness,

President Donald Trump’s election victory on November 5 was an epochal event in American history. The American people gave Trump a mandate with almost 51% of the vote. He received over 73 million votes, more than four million more than his opponent. A new American coalition—traditional Republican voters united with lower middle class, working class, African Americans, Hispanics, and white women—provided the monumental victory. At such a significant time, it is important to consider how America arrived at such a historical moment and what must be accomplished in the years ahead.

Retrospectively, Americans must understand how they came to this place in their history. According to the exit polls, a whopping 72% of Americans understood that their country was on the wrong path. America’s political ideology, culture, and traditions were under assault by the so-called “progressive” wing of the Democrat Party. The Biden-Harris administration weakened the economy, caused inflation rates not seen since the 1970s, opened U.S. borders to some 15 million people and facilitated their relocation throughout the U.S. and so weaponized the legal system to wage lawfare against Trump, his major political and legal advisors, and against many of his supporters.

In the realm of foreign and defense policy, the debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the failure to deter the war in Ukraine, the horrific attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent wars it unleashed. Significantly, the Biden-Harris regime failed to deter Communist China’s hyper-aggression directed against U.S. allies like the Philippines and partners like Taiwan, and most importantly against the American people through the deaths of a quarter of a million of our fellow citizens from Chinese-provided fentanyl and the intellectual capture of so many of the American elite who parrot the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policy positions to advance the CCP’s interests.

The deeper cause of how America arrived at this point is the embrace of Marxism by the Democratic Party and thus its increasing totalitarianism and alienation from the American people. In its embrace of this ideology, the Democrat Party demonstrated that it had completely become detached from the American experience, ideology, history, and culture in its effort to transform America into a one-party state on the road to totalitarianism. The American people saw this effort to continue the “fundamental transformation” of America—as Obama identified it on the eve of the 2008 election—and rejected it.

Prospectively, there is so much that must be accomplished to repair the great costs that the Biden-Harris administration has inflicted upon the American people. As Trump has already stated in the immediate aftermath of his historic election victory, his first actions will be to “dismantle the Deep State and return power to the American People.” His stated goal is to return the government to the people, not the unelected bureaucrats that have installed themselves as a fourth branch of government. As such, the reform of government employment policies will be a major objective for his administration.

Likewise, a second Trump administration will address inflation, uncontrolled illegal immigration, economic stagnation, and the enormous national debt that risks destroying the Republic. The U.S. is in dire fiscal and economic circumstances and Trump will have to confront these issues immediately as they will be thrust upon him on January 20.

In foreign and defense policy, the situation is just as dire. U.S. conventional and nuclear forces must be strengthened. The defense industrial base must be restored to meet the threat from Communist China. The principal danger, the CCP, must be defeated by cutting it off from U.S. trade and investment—decoupling must be pursued with vigor. Furthermore, all Chinese entities should be prohibited from raising capital in U.S. markets. Its hyper-aggression must be checked by credible U.S. military power in conjunction with its allies and partners, like Japan, Korea, Australia, Thailand, India, and Taiwan.

Increasingly, Americans recognize that the CCP is illegitimate. It is the product of Soviet imperialism, and so is a colonial government ruling the Chinese people. Xi Jinping has no more legitimacy to rule the great Chinese people than we do. The second Trump administration will need to use the bully pulpit of our nation to inform the world of the CCP’s illegitimate control over the people of China.

Trump’s victory also provides the opportunity to save more than America. It provides the chance to defend Western civilization, upon which America’s foundation, history, politics, culture, and intellectual life are anchored. The Progressive Left’s (that is, Communists’) attack against America’s political ideology, history, and culture is part of a broader effort to destroy Western civilization. Initially, the left undermined it through the “ideas industry,” universities, K-12 education, think tanks, media, social media, television, and film. Then they labored hammer and tongs to overthrow it. Trump has the opportunity to repair the tremendous damage that the left has done carefully and deliberately to Western civilization. Working with European, British, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian allies and other peoples around the world who value the contributions of Western civilization, Trump can begin to fix the damage.

Under Trump, the direction of the nation is clear—as it is for any ship embarking on a new journey. The ship of America must be sounded, the damage repaired, and a renewed course, like the ones originally charted by the celestial constellations that guided Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Reagan, must be set. If we stay true to our constitutional principles, America will once again have a fair wind and a following sea as it returns to its political ideology, principles, and traditions. That course opens the door to the best years in America’s history.

The American people understood their plight and were searching for decades for an effective leader, only to be disappointed and frustrated with Republican Party candidates, which led to a profound alienation of the base from the Party establishment. Trump had brilliant careers in real estate and television before he entered politics. But he chose to throw his hat into the ring because he identified with what was happening to the American people.

In turn, the American people saw clearly that Trump was the vessel that would enact their course change. His tremendous courage, acumen, charisma, indefatigable physical stamina, thick skin, and political instincts are without parallel in modern American history. As such, the American people have unquestionably placed their trust in him to empower the saving of America. Trump has accepted that sacred challenge. He has excelled and will do so again in this colossal task because it is evident to Americans that he loves America, the American people, and is a fighter. The American people gave Trump his victory because they saw that Trump’s triumph is America’s.

Authored by Edward Ring via American Greatness,

It’s Wednesday, the 6th of November, and America has chosen a new president. But we may not know the results for days or even weeks.

While there is a chance we will see a quick and decisive Trump victory, the media has prepared us for a protracted aftermath to election day. This raises an obvious question: Was there election rigging in 2024? Did the uniparty establishment and the institutions they control, desperate to prevent a Trump victory, break the rules? Did they cheat?

Answering this question in the affirmative doesn’t have to rely on the countless alarming allegations that are dismissed as unfounded conspiracy theories, even though there are so many of them:

The potential for mail-in ballot fraud, hundreds of ballots received at a single address, dozens of ballots received at a single address, questionable last-minute changes in verification procedures by the US Post Office, inaccurate voter rolls and fraudulent voter registrations, voter data leaks to partisan NGOs, vote harvesting, counterfeit ballots, destruction of legitimate ballots, ballot dumps, selectively applied “malfunctions” of voting machines in multiple states, last minute “patches” to fix voting machine software, illegal immigrants voting, and selectively applied closures of polling stations or inadequately staffed polling stations causing voter suppression.

You can claim there is no basis for concern over any one of those alleged cases of calculated, potentially widespread fraud. You can even dismiss the impact of fining and disbarring attorneys who challenged the integrity of the 2020 election and thus have deterred many attorneys from challenging this one.

The election was still rigged.

Anyone who watches David Muir at ABC, Lester Holt at CBS, Norah O’Donnell at NBC, or Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett at PBS will know this election was rigged, thanks to a multi-year propaganda campaign of shameless lying by the news anchors and reporters at the most prestigious networks in America. If you make it your business to keep track of what these “trusted news sources” are telling voters, it is obvious how hard they’ve tried to influence the election.

ABC News, for example, pretty much every single night for the last few months, has opened their newscast with 5-10 minutes where they heap slime all over Trump and praise Harris. If you watch the source material, for example, Harris’s CNN Town Hall, then watch the excerpts highlighted on ABC, you get two completely different impressions of her competence and integrity. Precisely the same tactic is used with Trump, but to the opposite effect. Watch one of his news conferences in its entirety, then watch what is grabbed, out of context, and presented on ABC.

Critics of Trump’s often brusque persona and often unvarnished condemnation of the media must ask, if they’re going to be fair, how would anyone react? For nearly ten years, David Muir has told us, with a straight face, that “the walls are closing in on Trump.” Along with fake scandals like the Russian collusion hoax, over and over we hear gross misrepresentations of things Trump has said. He mocked a disabled reporter; no, he didn’t. He told people to inject bleach to treat COVID; no, he didn’t. He called neo-Nazis “fine people;” no, he did not. And on and on it goes.

David Muir earned particular enmity among people who just wanted fair news coverage during the debate between Trump and Harris, when, for example, Muir insisted on “fact-checking” Trump but left Harris alone. For example, Muir contradicted Trump’s assertion that crime rates had risen, and Muir was wrong. The data, as Trump attempted to explain, was missing statistics from California’s major cities. Once that data was added, Trump’s claim was proven accurate.

Just in the last few days we’ve had the big four broadcast news anchors telling us that Trump wanted to put Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad, wants reporters covering his rallies to get shot, “groped” a woman back in the 1990s, expressed “deeply troubling” admiration for Adolf Hitler, held a “Nazi rally,” and intended to use the military against “the enemy within,” along with endless distorted repetition of everything bad they’ve ever said about him. All of this “news” was either truth twisted beyond recognition or outright lies. Meanwhile, their coverage of Harris has been indistinguishable from a paid Harris campaign ad.

There’s no end to the legacy television news media’s war on Trump. It’s not subtle, and despite their dinosaur status, they still exercise decisive influence over millions of voters. For the 2024 season-to-date, ABC Nightly News has averaged 7.7 million viewers, NBC averaged 6.4 million, and CBS averaged 4.7 million. PBS is now a big player as well, with a regular viewership of more than 5 million. That’s nearly 25 million regular viewers, with an average age of 65, nearly all of them high-propensity voters, and very few of them likely to be perusing alternative media. Cable news, for all the visibility and big audiences for the hosted talk shows on their networks, doesn’t compare. Recent estimates for primetime viewers of Fox News have averaged 359,000, versus 175,000 for CNN and 160,000 for MSNBC. Cable news audiences are dwarfed by the audiences for broadcast news content, which is overwhelmingly anti-Trump and pro-Harris. Tens of millions of Americans have been thoroughly brainwashed by these networks. But what about social media and online searches?

Back in 2015, Robert Epstein, a research psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, published “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections.” Continuing his research, in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2019, Epstein claimed that biased search results on Google “impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.” Epstein’s studies are compelling reading, and very little has changed. Google still controls 90 percent of the search engine market in the United States. In 2024, Google employee political donations favored Democrats by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. Draw your own conclusions.

As for social media, much is made of Twitter’s transformation into X, with no more censorship. Twitter, or X, has 95 million users in America. That’s a lot. But in the United States, Facebook has 194 million users, Instagram has 166 million users, TikTok reaches 170 million people, LinkedIn connects 200 million, and YouTube’s regular US viewers number 246 million. As a neutral platform, X’s audience reach is exceeded by more than 10 to 1 by the other major online platforms. With the lone exception of X, every one of these platforms employs biased algorithms designed to suppress conservative content. As for print media, intervention by the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to abstain from a presidential endorsement is too little, too late. Every newspaper and magazine with national reach, with the half-hearted exception perhaps of the Wall Street Journal, have been so anti-Trump and pro-Harris it is almost comical.

Social media, search engines, and legacy news media. In every facet of information gathering, the vast majority of Americans have been continuously exposed to anti-Trump, pro-Harris messages. None of this has been happening by accident. Michael Shellenberger, formerly a progressive liberal who was once honored as a Time Magazine “Environmental Hero,” has evolved into an investigative journalist of extraordinary integrity and courage. In recent years, his work has focused on what he has dubbed “the censorship industrial complex.” In a recent substack post, commenting on America’s news media from newspapers to television to online platforms, he had this to say, “It’s not a mirror of reality. It’s not just biased. And it’s not just deferential to the state or the party. It’s a propaganda arm dishonestly representing powerful political, ideological, and financial interests.”

Shellenberger, who alleges government manipulation of information sources available to Americans, is not alone. Mike Benz, a former US State Department official, claims that the U.S. government has become increasingly concerned about the rise of populist movements in the U.S. and around the world and is actively interfering in media freedom. Another window into how this is working is documented by Ben Shapiro in a must-watch video, where he describes the network of state-supported NGOs and quasi-private sector agencies that influence who gets advertising dollars and who gets boycotted, in an ostensibly benign effort to “create a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce approved narratives.”

It ought to be obvious to anyone who finds both sides of the story by using alternative media that in a fair election, America’s print, video, and online media, and search engine results, could have easily delivered just as much negative coverage about Harris as they have inflicted on Trump, and they could have delivered just as much positive coverage about Trump as they’ve lavished on Harris. Maybe the only rules that were broken were supposed norms of journalistic integrity. But by an order of magnitude, America’s sources of “news” and information were massively tilted in favor of Harris and against Trump.

If for no other reason but media bias, this election was rigged. As a result, regardless of the outcome, half of all Americans have lost faith in fair elections. Even if every allegation of actual, fraudulent, widespread rigging is false, nobody who thinks so will change their minds. For them, the media sources that might help debunk any of it have no credibility. That is a crime perpetrated by the elite who control these institutions that transcends even this moment.