Mark Bearden

Reader, engineer/technologist, Christ-follower, husband, father. Small-'L' libertarian supporter of the anti-totalitarian counter-revolution.

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

I may often feel
like a leaf blown by a storm
But I know Whose Breath
the wind is.

-- Job 30:22; Psalm 104:4

https://t.co/J9h8gjNnGl

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

1775's Declaration: "We most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being, with one mind, resolved to die freemen rather than live slaves."

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

@VigilantFox To tyrants (including the modern ones) this document is one of the most dangerous ever written. Pair it properly with its precursor, the 1775 "Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms" by the 2nd Continental Congress. (Link in reply.)

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

@VigilantFox The 1776 declaration that we all know of is really Part II. This is Part I:

https://t.co/SGFA8JUwHX

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

What an appalling speech the Mayor of New York delivered for the 250th anniversary of the nation.

Sadly, it reflects the view of America propagated for years by Howard Zinn and his like-minded colleagues in the universities and believed by armies of the young: a dark, oppressive country where common people are denigrated by tyrants and oligarchs, where immigrants are treated with contempt, where those with “soft hands” hold the wealth created by those with dirty hands.

No sensible person would claim that our country is without flaws, but the relentlessly negative picture painted by Mayor Mamdani is just absurd.

And it is the fruit of the Marxism that, sadly, is all the rage today.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Mamdani got the whole American dream in eight years. Came here as a kid, got citizenship in 2018, now he runs the biggest city in the country.

And on America's 250th birthday he sat down at George Washington's desk and told us everything wrong with the place.

I'm not even angry. I'm disappointed.

Here's the picture he painted:

He mocked the people who supposedly think America "becomes less the more people it welcomes."

Said it belongs "only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin."

Called our streets a place where "masked agents" are "terrorizing" people.

Said the country's wealth was built by "calloused, dirt-streaked hands" and then left to rot.

Looked out from Washington's desk and called the Americans who built this economy "small" and "weak."

Okay Mamdani. You hate it so much, why'd you come here?

Let's put that picture up against the actual country.

He's a Muslim kid born in Uganda and he's the mayor of New York. A guy back in his own birthplace said it plainly: over there he'd have had to claw his way in. Here we held the door open.

We've got the most diverse Congress in our history. It was never about skin color, no matter how many years the left spent forcing that story onto a country that kept proving them wrong.

A machine that grinds immigrants down? Nearly half the Fortune 500 was started by immigrants or their kids. 231 companies.

Apple, son of a Syrian.

Google, a kid who came over from the Soviet Union.

Amazon, son of a Cuban.

Put them together and they out-earn Japan, out-earn Germany. That's not a country grinding people into the dirt. That's a country handing them the keys.

It's been and always will be the land of opportunity.

And more people want in here than anywhere else alive. 53 million immigrants live here, the most of any nation on earth. We're 4% of the world's people and we hold 17% of the world's migrants.

Every year since 2007 you ask the whole planet where it'd go if it could go anywhere, the answer comes back the same. America. Number one. The line to get in wraps around the globe.

Here's the line he won't draw. I will.

Legal immigration built this country. The strivers. That's the front door working the way it's supposed to, and I'll defend it all day. You need to earn your spot, respect our laws and customs.

But that's not what we're running anymore.

Four years of Biden's open border blew the doors off. The foreign-born share of this country just hit 15.8%. An all-time high. Higher than Ellis Island, more than triple what it was in 1970.

The Census Bureau didn't expect that number until 2042 and we smashed past it. And on top of it, a record 14 million people here illegally, who cut in front of every single person who did it the right way.

The front door built America from Ellis Island to today. The fence is a different thing. Pretending they're the same is how you end up calling every American who wants a secure border a bigot.

And we've earned the right to standards. This is the most wanted country on the planet. We get to choose who walks in. You want in? Build something. Contribute. Earn it. Nobody's owed anything.

You come illegally, you commit crimes, you steal from taxpayers, you should get deported. That's not terrorizing the streets.

Mamdani walked through that front door in 2018. He of all people should be defending it. Instead he stood at Washington's desk and spent his speech blurring the line between the people who came the right way and the ones who broke in.

The man even admitted out loud that America is exceptional. Then spent the rest explaining why it isn't. On the one day the whole country stops to celebrate itself, he reached for the darkest story he could find.

That's not a man who's lost about America. That's a man who's angry at the country that gave him everything he has.

You don't like it here? Nobody made you come.

Nobody's stopping you from leaving. But you won't. They never do. Because there's nowhere else on earth that hands a person this much of a shot.

This country took him in and made him a mayor. He owes it. It doesn't owe him a thing.

We're not perfect. We're the best odds a human being has ever been handed. 250 years old, the richest and freest country alive, and the whole world is still clawing to get in while nobody's trying to leave.

They hold America to a standard they'd never hold anyone else to, then act shocked it falls short.

It's nonsense.

Respect the country. Especially when it's the reason you're standing at that desk at all.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Happy 250th Birthday America! 🎉 Tokyo is celebrating with you tonight with beautiful fireworks lighting up the bay and Rainbow Bridge plus Tokyo Tower glowing red white and blue!

It makes me so happy as a Japanese person to see this warm friendship. Real allies celebrate together like this.

God bless the USA and God bless Japan 🇺🇸🤝🇯🇵

[Leor Sapir @LeorSapir]

I'm thinking of starting a nonprofit called More Than Words that matches land acknowledgers with Native Americans families. If you acknowledge that you're on stolen land, my organization will match you with a specific family whose land you or your ancestors stole. You would then transfer "your" property to the rightful owner, with More Than Words covering all associated legal and administrative fees.

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

@dave_brown24 You mean that general who has a history of amplifying politics within the armed forces? I guess he knows what to criticize in others, as surely he looks in the mirror!

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

@JonahDispatch She's the most recent to reveal herself as a traitor to constitutionalism and conservatism? (John Roberts made that clear for himself much longer ago?)

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

“Now, are we a people or are we an idea? We’re both. That’s the honest answer. We are a people with a story, a language, a history — and we are a creed that anyone can join. That’s the miracle of it. A Taiwanese boy eats his first cheeseburger and decides he’s moving to the country that invented it, and twenty-five years later, he’s a citizen, married to an American, and an ordained minister standing before his church thanking God for 250 years of this nation. He loves this country more than the tenured cynics who were born here and can’t stand it. I’ll take a thousand of him. When you bind yourself to the ideal, you become one of the people. No other country on earth has ever really offered that. To this day, none does.”

https://t.co/x00baUJNoo

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

@ajsport99 @brivael It may happen in a near-instant the moment the Democrat party retakes majority/presidential power.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Pre order my book : https://t.co/nqiU3FYymQ

[Alexandra Spears ✝️🇺🇸🪈 @Alexandra4Trump]

@tizzywoman We had a tyrannical government under Biden.

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

Great working definition of totalitarianism: "This intellectual straitjacket where you're not allowed to have ideas. Even if you agree with 80%, it's never enough. You have to be 100%."

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Peter Thiel just named the rule that decided if Elon Musk stayed or left. It has nothing to do with left or right.

Thiel: "I've known Elon since 2000. He was never doctrinaire, but for the first 20 years, he was left of center."

Tesla. Clean energy. Electric cars. About as left of center as it gets.

Then the terms changed.

Thiel: "This intellectual straitjacket where you're not allowed to have ideas. Even if you agree with 80%, it's never enough. You have to be 100%."

No idea on Earth requires 100% agreement. Only power does.

Thiel: "There's just no individuality left whatsoever."

Thiel: "The Democratic Party, it's like the Empire. They're all Imperial stormtroopers. We're the ragtag Rebel Alliance."

Not just him. Every institution that used to reward the odd ones now filters them out before they rise.

He didn't change. The room did.

Thiel: "It certainly seemed incredibly dangerous to me what he did, incredibly courageous."

Thiel: "Elon gave people a great deal of cover."

Not because he won the argument. Because he went first.

The straitjacket only holds you if you believe you need permission.

Everyone still wearing one is calling it a coat.

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

This is simply the answer! (Psst, a secret...for the D.C. version of the problem, it has a name: "federalism")

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

The more power government has the more we have to worry about politics

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

@NamesareHard8 @megbasham @chucktodd That's an impressive poll you shared. I wonder how the question was worded. (The linked article doesn't say.) Here's another impressive poll that seems contrary, "lol" (and this article gives the wording of the poll questions):

https://t.co/E8MgGiS5Md

[Mark Bearden @MBearden_Reads]

@kevinnbass An "LOL" or two would also have seemed appropriate, and maybe a quotation of some contemporary pop song lyrics? Why should an opinion be dry and dull?

[John Ziegler @Zigmanfreud]

Here, the brilliant @Miss_Snuffy from London explains Zoran Mamdani Mania better than anyone in America has so far done so…

This is a great, but terrifying speech…
😱🤦‍♂️🤮🥲