2026-04-18, Simply Saturday.

Administrivia.

Wheatie Wisdom.  If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.  No running with scissors.  No food fights. 

AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.

Wolf Speak.  No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree.  Every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post. 

America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…

In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.

1. Pass SAVE America Act
2. Trash Filibuster
3. Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
4. Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
5. Trash Blue Slips
6. Confirm Trump Nominations.
7. Codify Trump Executive Orders.
8. Ban Sharia Law.

Speaking of embracing…THIS.

If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.

KK

It’s Saturday.  GOT Coffee?  GOT Tea?  GOT Scroll Wheel?  😊

— 

APMEX https://www.apmex.com   Bitcoin https://www.bitcoin.com/

Prices pulled last evening.  Gold $4,846.80  Silver $81.57   Bitcoin $77,164

—

Road To Liberty. (Series). Dropping until, IF, fresh stuff posted.

—

The following from American Stinker, related to USA 250. Interesting read.

Audio at the link.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/usa_250_setting_the_stage_for_revolution.html

USA 250: Setting The Stage For Revolution

America, Great Britain, and the Western world on the eve of the Revolution.

S. David Sultzer | April 16, 2026

Image created using AI.

NOTE. Eight minute audio, of this article, at link below.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/usa_250_setting_the_stage_for_revolution.html

What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. — John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815 (Bold mine.)

As the year 1760 dawned, England and its perennial enemy, France, were at war for global dominance, fighting on five continents. It would later be known as the Seven Years War, with its theaters in North America labeled the French and Indian War and the 1st Anglo-Cherokee War.

By 1760, great, wind-driven ships traversed the world’s oceans. The Age of Sail, which began in the 15th century, and its companion, the Age of Discovery, had transformed the world through trade. Before 1600, in every developed society across the world, a tiny minority of royalty and their associates were wealthy, while all about them, the vast majority lived in subsistence-level poverty. That changed only with the advent of world trade, mercantilism, and capitalism, which together lifted the majority out of poverty and created a middle class.

Image by Our World In Data. CC BY 0.

(Slow Guy. Coincidence, I’m sure. GDP per capita in England, Shot Up, about 1913.)

By 1760, about 1.5 million people lived in the North American colonies, and the population growth rate was set to double in 20 years. The colonies had benefited from nearly 150 years of the British government’s “benign neglect.” As the Privy Council told South Carolina’s new governor in 1722, that policy was intended to make colonial governments as “Easy and Mild as possible to invite people to Settle under it.”

By 1760, a prosperous middle class had developed in the colonies. It was a society unburdened by Europe’s ultra-wealthy, permanent noble class. When Lord Wortley Montague died in London in 1761, his estate was worth over £1.3 million. When the wealthiest merchant in Boston, Thomas Hancock (John’s uncle), died near the same time, his estate was valued at only £70,000.

The colonies were also unburdened by Europe’s permanently impoverished underclass, for they had great economic mobility and opportunity. As one British visitor, Nicholas Cresswell, wrote in contrasting the colonies with Europe, “here there are no fears [of poverty] and with the least spark of industry, a man may support a family…”

In 1760, religious issues were of central concern, although the nature of the battle had changed.

For a thousand years, Islamic wars of conquest had demanded Europe’s energy. By 1760, the Muslim attacks against Europe had ended. Barbary pirates, who enslaved some 1.25 million Europeans, including American colonists, were still a problem (indeed, two of America’s first wars, the First (1801-1805) and Second (1815) Barbary Wars, were against the pirates), but they were not what led to America’s Revolution.

What mattered in the colonies were Christian schisms. Christianity had always been the indispensable beating heart of Western civilization, but the Reformation of 1517 splintered the universal Catholic Church, leading to numerous Protestant sects. Europe was riven by internecine religious wars and religious persecution, pitting Christian against Christian.

For two centuries, Protestant minorities in Europe were persecuted. This was as true for the Huguenot Protestants in Catholic France as it was for the Puritans and all others who dissented from the state religion of England, Anglicanism. Many European and British Protestants fled to the North American colonies.

In the mid-17th century, Great Britain was in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. It had been convulsed by a bloody civil war pitting Protestant sects against Anglicans (the British version of Catholicism) and against Catholics. In Scotland, the Jacobite rebellions saw the Scots fight for Europe’s Catholic monarchs and against the Protestant English.

Other than the Jacobite rebellions, these conflicts were all about the ancient “rights of Englishmen,” which are detailed here. These rights, which began with the Magna Carta and included no taxation without representation and the right to due process of law, were mostly spelled out in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, to which the monarch agreed after England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688.

By 1760, roughly 80% of colonists in North America were members of persecuted Protestant sects, including Congregationalists (Puritans), Baptists, Quakers, Scots Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and German Lutherans. By 1760, English Anglicans made up only about 15% of the colonial population. Jews were about 1% of the colonial population, as were Catholics, despite their religion being proscribed in all but Maryland’s colony.

In 1760, there was bad blood between Massachusetts’ mostly Congregationalist population and the royally appointed Anglican government. Already a decade earlier, the Congregationalist minister Rev. Jonathan Mayhew had given a sermon justifying the prior century’s English Civil War, when Puritans beheaded the Anglican king.

Rev. Mayhew combined the Bible (Romans 13:1-7) and John Locke’s 2nd Treatise of Government to reach a religious justification for rebellion and revolution against a tyrannical king. His sermon deeply affected a young John Adams, then sitting in the pews. As historian J. Wingate Thornton has described it, this sermon was “The morning gun of the American Revolution.”

The (mostly Protestant) British colonists in North America during this time of civil strife had the words ‘British liberty’ on their lips. They knew their history well and were immensely proud to be British. They knew the Magna Carta and were proud to live in a land where they could speak freely and, in theory at least, be free from tyrannical government.

When Patrick Henry, in 1765, wrote in the Virginia Resolves that the colonists had all the Liberties and Privileges of Englishmen, including the right to be taxed only by their democratically elected governing body, he was not innovating. He was treading a path already blazed in England for half a millennium.

Finally, to this mix of economic and traditional liberty, the year 1760 added one more thing: the Enlightenment. It was a period of rationalism and reason—a search for objective truth in all aspects of life. It would lead to great advances in science, economics, and political theory. Societally, it would lead to the First Great Awakening, a religious revolution in the American colonies and the UK. That, in turn, would lead to the abolitionist movement. For the first time in human history, people argued that slavery was morally wrong. By 1760, Quakers formed the colonies’ first abolitionist society had formed among the Quakers. Ben Franklin eventually became its President.

In the UK, with its long history of both individual rights and Christianity, the Enlightenment led to classical liberalism. As John Locke wrote in his 2nd Treatise of Government, God gave man the right to life, liberty, and property. No man could give away those rights, nor could a government infringe upon them except for war and law enforcement. Other rights, such as freedom of speech and the right to democratically elect a representative of one’s choice, were derived from and were necessary to enjoy these God-given rights. (Bold mine.)

It’s noteworthy that the Anglo Enlightenment reached its apogee in the United States in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the preamble to The Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Bold mine.)

Those words came from numerous inspirations, not least John Locke.

But even as the new United States was busy creating a constitutional framework for this new, classically liberal nation, the Enlightenment was reaching a different, bloody conclusion in France. In the crucible of the French Revolution, all of the modern ills of Western civilization were being born:

• socialism,
• the police state,
• state terrorism,
• state-sponsored atheism, and a
• war on Christianity
• as a first step to destroying Western Civilization, then
• for socialists to rule over the ruins.

^^^ Bold and format mine.

All of history since 1792 has been a competition to see whether the French or the American Revolution will win in the West. Let us hope, on this, the 250th year of our nation’s birth, that it is the latter.

(Slow Guy. Much of the above I knew. Serious dot connecting, having read this article.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/usa_250_setting_the_stage_for_revolution.html

—

Justice Thomas buries progressivism, in speech at Austin University.

YT.

Drawing on his extensive tenure as a jurist, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a moving address at The University of Texas at Austin on the continued relevance of the Declaration of Independence. Describing the Declaration as the foundation of American government, Justice Thomas emphasized the need to valiantly safeguard its principles. Doing so, he detailed the threats to the Declaration’s principles, arguing that progressivist philosophies from the early 20th century to today seek to disregard the principles espoused there and eliminate natural rights in the process. Justice Thomas also shared the ways in which pivotal seasons in his own life—from his Georgia upbringing to his Catholic high school education—shaped him both as a jurist and as a citizen.

59:41. Perhaps play above video in background.

OR Coffee & Covid reported on Justice Thomas’ speech as well.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/otto-von-poopy-head-friday-april ht BarkerJim

On Wednesday, Justice Thomas, age 77 and apparently immune to biographers, marched into the University of Austin and declared independence from the administrative state on its behalf. ABC reported, “Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas blasts progressivism as threat to America.” Blasts is accurate. But bazooka’d might be the mot juste. He called progressivism “an existential threat” to America, compared it to totalitarianism and slaveholding, and explicitly called for resistance comparable to the original American Revolution. Fix bayonets! It was a declaration of war.

Thomas, 77, delivered his incendiary remarks at the University of Austin Law School’s special 250th anniversary event on Wednesday. They were broadcast live on CSPAN to the entire world.

“As we meet today, it is unclear whether our Constitutional principles will endure,” the Justice began, warming to his theme. “At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream … called progressivism.” It must be rooted out. “Progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life,” he said. “It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”

In a single sentence, he ripped progressivism and the most annoying bumper sticker ever made.

He described the tentacled ideology as a European concept, a foreign import, landed on our shores by President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). “Progressivism was not native to America. President Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired” so that we could “catch up with the more ‘advanced and sophisticated’ people of Europe.”

Progressivism flips the board on the Founders’ original intent. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government,” Thomas explained. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government,” and “requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with the Constitution.”

He called progressivism a murderous ideology. “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based,” he said. “Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.”

Residents of several neighboring states could hear the collective gasp from the faculty lounge at Harvard. It was the Supreme Court equivalent of dropping a live badger into a crowded elevator at a Democratic Socialists convention. He continued, going further, correctly noting that U.S. progressives embraced eugenics, racial segregation, forced sterilization, fascism (national socialism), and the grotesque notion that oats and nuts can somehow be “ethically milked” —whatever that is— if you squeeze them hard enough.

Thomas traced the murderous movement straight to elitist arrogance and scorn for ordinary American values. “President Wilson described the American people as ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn’ and ‘foolish,’” he continued. (Though, to be fair, if you’ve ever driven on I-95 in South Florida, you’ll admit Wilson at least had a talking point.) Worse, the justice explained, “Wilson lamented that we do too much by vote and too little by expert rule.”

“Progressivism,” Thomas declared, “is retrogressive.”

He spoke carefully, as one of the nation’s top legal minds would. But it was nothing less than a call for revolution. “In my view,” he dramatically concluded, “we must find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had, so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs.”

Then came the call to action: “It’s our country. It’s governed by our consent. Let us act like that and take ownership of it.” Stab them in the face. (After a fair trial, of course.)

🔥 In Austin, Justice Thomas stopped treating progressivism as a mere policy preference and openly described it as a rival regime. Progressivism is a wacky, spike-helmeted Bismarckian project that “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government.”

It denies that rights are God‑given, and insists they flow from an all‑powerful administrative state. Because progressivism is “opposed to those principles,” Thomas explained, “it is not possible for the two to coexist forever,” a line that sounds less like standard conservative rhetoric and more like a formal declaration of war, easily comparable to the most inflammatory language found in the Declaration of Independence itself. (Democrats treat the Declaration of Independence the same way you treat a smoke alarm— by removing the battery to make it stop beeping.)

🔥 Critics on the academic left understood what Thomas was really up to. Progressive historian Tad Stoermer argued that the justice “is not doing what his critics will say he is doing,” meaning just a generic MAGA broadside, but “something considerably more precise, and considerably more dangerous.” In Stoermer’s view, Thomas is trying to reclaim the “sacred ground” of the Declaration for conservatives while banishing progressivism into the “profane” category— beyond the Pale of America’s civic religion altogether.

Stoermer wasn’t wrong.

Democrats furiously attacked the messenger —Thomas’s motives, his ethics, and his “extremism”— but gingerly avoided his central premise: that progressivism rejects the Declaration’s God‑given natural rights and aims to replace them. In short, they’re not saying he’s wrong. It’s like if the doctor tells you that you have a tapeworm occupying your small intestine, and you respond by criticizing the doctor’s leprechaun tie. You still have the tapeworm, but at least you didn’t have to talk about it anymore.

Their ad hominem reaction all but conceded the justice’s point. On cable news and in friendly write‑ups, Democrats denounced Thomas for “blasting” progressivism, accused him of endangering democracy, and recycled the usual ethics grievances— but none of them would touch his underlying claim that modern progressivism treats rights as government favors rather than gifts from God.

For instance, they didn’t argue that the Declaration’s language about being “endowed by their Creator” is wrong, or even that it’s compatible with Wilson’s idea of rights doled out by administrators; they just changed the subject. Their studied silence on the first principles is a kind of quiet confirmation that Thomas correctly identified the fault line— and Democrats decided not to fight him on that unfavorable ground.

Thomas essentially told them their political religion is a cheap German knockoff that leads to tyranny, and they responded by accusing him of using the salad fork to eat the crusted venison. Plus, he came in the wrong RV.

All that is well and good. But here’s the thing. Justice Thomas is not exactly a wallflower. When he speaks, he says exactly what he thinks, and always has. But he’s never gone this far before. He’s never declared war on progressivism as an “existential threat,” and declared, with all the majesty and force of his high office and at the peak of his rhetorical skill, that only one form of government can ultimately survive.

Does this new boldness mirror something happening behind the scenes in SCOTUS’s private chambers? Was it intended to frame a pending decision that could cause a political earthquake, like birthright citizenship, perhaps? Is this post-pandemic expert fatigue, and now even Supreme Court justices feel free to say out loud that the ideology of expertise itself is perverse and incompatible with popular self‑government?

Or does Thomas’s 9-minute manifesto mark a brand-new cultural inflection point?

We know one thing for sure: the conservative counter‑revolution has been winning. It gained ground during the excesses of the Biden administration and the pandemic, when the right fought a mostly defensive war against mandates, censorship, and rule-by-bureaucracy. It shifted into offensive gear after Trump’s re‑election, scoring visible victories against DEI, trans‑ideology, open borders, and a long string of similar cultural outposts.

And now, with Justice Thomas standing up in Austin to boldly announce that progressivism “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration, and hence our form of government” and “cannot coexist forever” with it, the counter‑revolution looks remarkably like an army that has seized the high ground and is preparing to march onto the final battlefield.

We only need to get Justice Thomas a helmet with a spike on top, and then we’ll be fully prepared for the final boss battle— progressivism itself.

Ease up on the scroll wheels. Or not. 🙂

—

Perfect time, for America to sever the chains. STOP propping up allies, friends…freeloading mooches. After their sucking up on America’s treasure, for decades.

Image AI. From American Thinker

“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Arnold Toynbee.

We, can NOT allow America to go the way of Europe and England. Down the…

—

“Meme them until they cry, then make memes about them crying” – Don Tzu…

—

Never, Ever Forget…What they did to us during Covidiot, the Poisonous Jabs.

Merica…The Land that I, We Love.

---

—

West Side Story Saturday

America

4:56

Tonight 

6:06

Maria 

3:06

—

Seriously…

…We’ll get through this, just fine!

—

Relax. It’s Saturday. Back To Basics…

—

Someone mention, fishing…

Trace Adkins – Mind On Fishin’ 

3:22

—

Night crew, your nickel.

KK