Republican campaigning in Oklahoma isn't campaigning--it's offered as a history course for college credit.
Anybody familiar with this face?
He's the many-honored historian J. Rufus Fears, and he is now conducting an open-to-public, for-college-credit lecture series which incorporates Republican talking points into a lecture promoted as an American History presentation. Credit for attending this lecture series is given by both Northern Oklahoma University and Oklahoma University. According to the flyer, he has unnamed corporate sponsors, not revealed by either university.
The above is a newspaper advertisement for the event, but it doesn't stop there--at an event held to choose an architectural artist for a railing of the new building for the Cherokee Strip Museum, stacks of both mailers and larger fliers were available, as if the city itself was promoting the lecture series:
I attended the first of the lectures last night and noted with astonishment how Dr. Fears interwove in his account of the rebellion against Britain the following Republican talking points:
- The establishment by the Declaration of Independence that ours is a nation established under religious principles;
- The sanctity of the right to bear arms;
- The sanctity of life of the unborn;
- There are things that are absolutely right and things that are absolutely wrong;
- We used to be a nation united under shared religious principles and are no more--and religious principles are the only legitimate principles to unite under (and yet he followed such statements by declaring he was bipartisan. I can only guess that he means that his statements were absolutely correct and the party in error should toe his line).
...among others.
The presidential campaigning in my area isn't overtly so; there haven't been any significant campaining so far outside of a few yard signs popping up here and there. And yet we have this lecture series.
Before that, there was a similar presentation by Republican elected officials on Veterans' Day at a nursing home nearby, under the guise of "Veteran Appreciation Day"; at both the lecture and the nursing home, the case was made for God, We Are A Country At War, and Ours Is a God Blessed Empire.
What I want to know is, which of our founding fathers, outside of Hamilton, intended us to be an empire at all--and when.