On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.
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“Give Me Liberty”
Author: Redactor
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The Attacks on Tesla
“I can’t walk past the TV without seeing a Tesla on fire,” lamented Elon Musk.
“At least ten Tesla dealerships, charging stations and facilities have been hit by vandals,” a Friday NBC News article explains, “many of whom have lit cars on fire, while a growing collection of videos posted to social media have shown people defacing and damaging Tesla vehicles.”
NBC’s estimate may rest on a Fox News report that actually listed ten Tesla dealerships and charging stations by name and location.
“Some of the most prominent incidents have been reported in left-leaning cities in the Pacific Northwest,” asserts the Associated Press, “like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, where anti-Trump and anti-Musk sentiment runs high.”
These appear to be “spontaneous” eruptions of hatred towards Elon Musk, whose DOGE task force has loudly proclaimed major cuts to “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government.
“The Hamilton police in Ontario announced that over 80 Tesla vehicles were damaged in a vandalism attack at a Tesla service center,” a Canadian news source reports.
“US Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Thursday that three defendants accused of vandalism targeting Elon Musk’s Tesla electric vehicle company could face up to 20 years in prison,” adds the BBC.
“Bondi said the damage to Tesla cars, dealerships and charging stations was ‘domestic terrorism.’
“Arrests and charges against the three suspects were previously announced by prosecutors.”
Musk is the electric automobile company’s largest shareholder, at 5.3 percent, but investment firms own no small amount of Tesla stock, and the hit in price hurts more people than Mr. Musk himself. “‘Hang onto your stock,’ Elon Musk tells Tesla workers,” explains the Financial Times, and “urges vandals to ‘stop being psycho,’” but does anyone expect programed leftist saboteurs to “stop being psycho”? Really?
Paul Jacob’s commentary on the uprising of saboteurs appeared at this website on Wednesday.
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Grover Cleveland
What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?
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Templar Order Dissolved
On March 22, 1312, in the papal bull Vox in excelso, Pope Clement V dissolved the Order of the Knights Templar, after five years of suppression, torture and executions that began with the events of Friday the 13th, October 1307.
March 22nd marks some sad days for Americans, too:
1622 — Algonquians killed 347 English settlers around Jamestown, Virginia, a third of the colony’s population, during the Second Anglo-Powhatan War.
1631 — The Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables.
1638 — Anne Hutchinson was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent.
1765 — The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which levied taxes directly on its American colonies.
On a brigher note, on March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, led by governor John Carver, signed a peace treaty with Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoags; Squanto served as an interpreter between the two sides.
This week, here at Common Sense, we did not celebrate the birthday of Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), whom some of my friends regard as the last great president of these United States. It wasn’t even mentioned in Tuesday’s Today feature.
Is there any reason to devote a column to him?
Sure:
- He was the only president, prior to Trump, to serve two non-consecutive terms, designated as the 22nd and 24th president in the history books.
- Like Trump, and like presidents Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was born in New York; like Van Buren and the Roosevelts, he had, before his presidency, served as governor of that state.
- Also like Trump, he weathered a major sex scandal. Accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, he admitted to it. And still got elected.
- Grover Cleveland also made history by being the first president to get married in the White House. He married his former ward — itself something of a scandal — in the Blue Room during his first administration.*
The main truth about Grover Cleveland, though, was that he was a great believer and practitioner of honesty in government, and was the last real limited government man in the office — though, like all presidents, he was hardly consistent on this issue. He supported sound money, and opposed (but could not stop) the imperialist move of annexing Hawaii. He could be called President Veto, for his 584 vetoes held the record until the first four-term president stretched out enough years in office to beat it.
He also knew his place: “Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters.”
He was the only Democrat President in the half-century following the Civil War, when the Republican Party dominated, and was — consequently — super-corrupt.
Today we have a Democrat-turned-Republican fighting an ultra-corrupt Democrat-dominated federal government.
Donald Trump could learn a lot from Grover.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* This made his bride, Frances Folsom, the youngest First Lady in history — at the age of 21. There was a 27-year difference between them.
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Jimmy Dore
When the devil comes he’s not gonna have horns, he’s gonna have a crew neck sweater and glasses.
Comedian Jimmy Dore on John Papola’s Dad Saves America podcast (March 13, 2025).
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Selma March
On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Nearly two decades earlier, the Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, passed Congress. The date was March 21, 1947. The amendment, ratified on February 27, 1951, set a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States. This was an obvious reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more than three terms in office.
The first section of the amendment reads as follows:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
What do the JFK assassination files and an obscure booklet called “The Adam and Eve Story” have in common?
Both are examples of how the CIA and other Deep State actors keep us guessing and in the dark: by over-classification.
A “sanitized” copy of Chan Thomas’s immortal classic of seeming ultra-nuttery, the aforementioned “Adam and Eve Story,” was de-classified in 2013. Now on the CIA’s website, it floats a wild theory about human history and life on this planet, complete with repeated global, world-turned-on-end catastrophes.
Most people had never heard of the work until de-classified and placed on the website. The Wikipedia entry mentions the de-classification of the document but not why it was classified as secret in the first place.
Here’s a theory: to confuse us.
The only reason most people ever give the booklet a second glance is because the CIA made it secret.
Now turn to the present, with something circulating today as “evidence” from the recent release of backlogged JFK assassination documents: a summary of passages in the New Left journal Ramparts, June 1967. It reproduces a rumor about one Gary Underhill and his alleged blurting out that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible” for the shooting in Dealey Plaza.
All the rage online, but this document was merely the re-regurgitation of public information — which is what an awful lot of classified material is.
We take note of this Underhill story not because it proves anything, but because the report was made secret in the first place.
It’s almost as if they want some people to believe something, and others to scoff at it all.
But maybe what they are doing is burying us in useless “information.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Cathedral,” The Atlantic Monthly (1846).
What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was published. By the end of the nineteenth century, it became the century’s second best-selling book, after the Bible.