The World War 2 Generation has mostly passed away. Some people are left, but if you meet a World War 2 vet who saw combat, they are likely to be 97-100. When I was at the National WW2 Museum in New Orleans a month ago for the opening of the Liberation Pavilion, I saw my old pal Paul Hilliard. I love Paul for a lot of reasons. He’s 98 now, but he’s still very active. He flew backseat on a Marine dive bomber 42 times. He likes to joke he had three squares a day and an officer for a chauffeur.
Paul has led an amazing life. He was a doer. He took risks few would take and his experience in the war allowed him to learn how to handle the fears that come with assuming that risk. On December 7, his life totally changed as did many in America.
Since we are losing these people every single day in America and the fact we are 82 years away from the event, the phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor” doesn’t have the same ring to it. No one remembers it. It’s just a photo in a history book.
Maybe the thing we need to remember is what changed. On December 6, 1941 America was self-absorbed. We were coming out of the Depression. We knew about the war in Europe, but frankly, every single poll showed that Americans wanted no part in that European war. Our military was smaller than Romania’s.
I guess it was the first “peace dividend”.
America did its part in WW1, and the memory was fresh in everyone’s mind. When you spoke with WW1 veterans, they didn’t want their sons fighting in a war.
It’s worth noting that immigration had been deliberately slowed by then. The people who took the boat from Europe to America were in their second and third generations. They were assimilated as Americans and didn’t want to fight in Europe. They had left Europe behind.
Then the Japanese had a very successful attack on Pearl Harbor. Overnight, everything was different.
It was similar to the day Kennedy was shot or 9/11, but not the same. History never repeats but it rhymes.
I was watching an “interview” on Meet The Press with House Committee Oversight Chairman James Comer. In it, the reporter didn’t act like a neutral objective questioner seeking truth like we hear they teach them to be in journalism school. He was an attack dog that was advocating for the President. Comer finally looked at him and realized the reporter had no banking experience and had no idea how money flowed through the banking system. Frustrating and laughable all at the same time. The reporter was and is pitiful.
In America on December 7, 1941, everything changed. What’s it going to take to change the minds of people like that reporter? I know some minds were opened up on October 7, 2023. Some more were opened up when the three elite credentialed Ivy League Presidents gave testimony this week in Washington.
What else has to happen?
A side note. I love to spar with the other side when the other side is thoughtful. But, I don’t suffer fools and frankly, there are just a lot of foolish people. Even when you show them peer-reviewed empirical data that flies in the face of their opinion, they don’t even acknowledge it.
Their logic might play well at the corner tap with the drunks that graze there every day. It doesn’t play on Main Street.
When they don’t even acknowledge it, that’s how you know they are in a cult. That’s what we are up against today. Cults. How do you deprogram them?
The FCC, struggling to react to their shrinking importance as traditional broadcasters continue down a terminally ill road, is prolonging the industry's certain demise. A bureaucracy as a regulator ends up being captured, and the FCC is no different. Broadband and streaming killed off this business model, and the FCC will be left with filing bogus lawsuits against tech giants to survive the industry they are complicit in killing off. The reporters, and "journalists" have been citing unnamed "experts" and "researchers" for years. The recent "There's no direct evidence..." bit has already fallen on deaf ears nationwide for anyone that's paying attention in earnest. Those "journalists" are quite aware their days are numbered as independent media continues to gain traction in the wake of Elitist Uberwealthy out of touch execs like Bob Iger at Disney and his ilk.
How do you brainwash someone? That's the real question. The cognitive dissonance out of the media, and journalists at large, is paralyzing to rational thinkers. That's the beauty of a cult. Nobody can see it when they're inside. It takes years of getting slapped in the face by authorities reminding them they were in a cult and the world doesn't work like their brainwashing told them. In our case, it is the Media at large that has brainwashed generations. It started when the Marxists began their slow march through the institutions after McCarthy was ousted.
Scott Adams has a decent approach in my opinion, at least initially to dealing with the brainwashed when they absolutely present their unwillingness to admit buying into hoaxes, mistruths and flat out lies that their media told them: "I'm sorry your news sources did this to you." Then let their cognitive dissonance go out like a slow tide. There's not much else we can do, even when these people are close to us. There is no reasoning with cognitive dissonance. And our country is chock full of people who've been feed this diet of toxic divisive lies and untruths, many emanating as disinformation out of every nook and cranny of the US Intelligence Community, that I personally see little hope of a mass-deprogramming. If someone else has a good idea, I'm all ears.
I wouldn’t say we’re so far from that WW II generation. We boomers grew up in the shadow of it, and it is still very much alive in us ( although we’re starting to move on too). I still recall the day in 1964 when my family drove through Aachen, where the Americans first entered Germany. The border process took us winding around still-ruined houses full of bullet and shell holes. Dad gave us the play-by-play as only a vet could. I was born in 1951, but still remember Pearl Harbor or the Bulge ( or Dachau and Auschwitz) like they happened yesterday. Because in the scheme of things, they did.