Street interviews of college students (and teachers) about the Fourth of July, find many have no idea why we celebrate Independence Day. To remedy this vast ignorance of what makes these United States exceptional, Bill Whittle launches a marketing campaign for ‘America Platinum’ — the only card you’ll ever need and it’s already in your wallet.
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Video below hosted at Rumble.
21 replies on “America Platinum: How to Market the USA to a Generation Ignorant of Her Exceptionalism”
It’s a nice sentiment, anyway…
Doesn’t anyone else here see the freight train coming our way?
I.e., The world Economic Forum., et al.?
Raise your hand if you see more evidence of them in control, and not us…
How’s your healthcare..? A joke?
How about that legal system? Clean and pristine?
Go to Montana and check out Helena Hand Baskets…
Time for Bill to call Ben Shapiro’s moving company and get out of Dodge…
Two 10 year olds we know from our block approached us while we were working in our yard earlier this week. Not only are we thrilled to see kids actually playing outside untethered to electronics this summer, these two charmed us with their hand-made paper name tags Scotch taped to their T shirts and their very official clipboard filled with notebook paper they’d headed “Animal Selter” under which they’d drawn some fairly straight columns where we could sign up to donate. When I asked which animal shelter they planned to donate to, well, they weren’t sure yet, and anyway, we didn’t need to give them any money, we could just sign. The whole idea was so delightful – bored kids semi-executing a generous impulse so obviously of their own making – that we signed and gave them $10 and told them we would be so happy if they took a picture of them handing over the funds at the shelter, then printed it out and stuck a copy of it inside our storm door. They thought their moms might be able to help them with that, thanked us, and then proceeded to knock on a few more doors down the block. A short while later they returned and said that one lady (at a house with a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign, no less) told them she thought they needed a permit for that. “A permit!” we exclaimed, “To heck with that! You don’t need a permit. You freely asked and we freely gave. You don’t need anyone’s permission for that.” “Yeah,” said one, “c’mon, we’re just kids!” “Not just kids,” we told them, “You’re Americans.”
Any recommendations for a civics instructional/informational book/booklet for pre-teens? Maybe a Classics Illustrated kind of thing?
How to market? Start with attaching a nice price tag. Seriously.
Did you people read Stranger from the Strange Land? Somewhere by the end it drops the observation, that the marks will NOT take anything seriously if it is just offered and available for free. Free is a pretty high level concept that must be kept to those who reached the 4th circuit.
When can I get my card? Can I get them for my family?
Signed: Not just any yeahoo
Sadly most in Australia would not be able to answer the similar questions about our history and constitution but there is a good chance that we would know the answers to the questions about America than the kids interviewed.
The Australian version is a little longer and has safeguards that would have prevented the current electoral mess in the USA. Its also a gold card; we are allowed to own that stuff.
Superb! Count me in!!
Here’s the background for my American Platinum Card
You are not free because you asked permission from your master to exercise your right to liberty, it is called a drivers license.
Your “liberty” to swing your fists ends immediately before they come in contact with someone else’s nose. Operating thousands of pounds of hurtling metal on public roads occupied by the noses of other people (and the rest of them, not just their noses) is a privilege.
Operating a motor vehicle is not the same as unrestricted travel.
You have to earn that privilege by passing a basic competence test. You can lose that privilege by demonstrating wanton disregard for other people’s noses — I.E. reckless and drunken driving.
You might be the best, safest, soberest, most courteous driver in the world, but without drivers licenses no one else can have any confidence in that. Because the worst would be just as able to get on the roads legally as the best. True, a plastic card doesn’t stop someone from driving who should not be doing so but denying or revoking it is a mechanism for further action should they do that.
In fact, while it’s absolutely true that possession of a valid drivers license doesn’t mean you’re Mario Andretti or any sort of pro — only that you passed some very basic tests, which still doesn’t make you a safe driver and Lord knows there are some real eggheads on the road — the removal of the requirement to demonstrate basic competence and the means to officially deny under penalty of law those who should not under any circumstances be operating a motor vehicle … Would constitute a serious, avoidable safety concern to everyone else on the road.
This is one of the bigger problems with illegal immigrants, they drive unlicensed ignoring both vehicle and insurance laws and flee when they do damage to someone else’s life. This is what is behind the misguided programs some states are implementing to license illegal immigrants. Those states foolishly think that if they license them and then they do something to lose their license they will stop driving. They won’t. All licensing illegals does is legitimize them.
Be that as it may, I don’t want just anyone out there hurtling down the same road as my family or myself. The requirement to obtain and maintain a valid operators license is not excessively burdensome. If The State wants to remove that requirement then I’m OK with it, as long as they also remove the prohibition against me hunting you down and shooting you in the head if you kill my kids, grandkids, or anyone else I care about while operating your motor vehicle.
Too, lack of a valid driver’s license does not prevent you from travelling. You can ride with someone else who is licensed, call a taxi, take a train or an airplane, etc. You can walk. You can go anywhere you like and even when the use of such facilities requires that you produce an ID, while the driver’s license is a very common ID it’s not the only one that can apply.
I’ve known several people that have gone their entire lives without ever possessing a driver’s license. They are no more curtailed in their liberty than someone who has a valid license. They have exactly the same “liberties” as you do. They are simply not allowed to OPERATE a motor vehicle but then most of those I know never wanted to, or needed to drive a vehicle themselves.
While there most certainly are curtailments of liberty and those infringements are getting worse and worse every day — The driver’s license isn’t one of them. The only people who I’ve ever heard make a serious case otherwise are Sovereign Citizens and if you’re one of those then I have no respect for you anyway.
I am not sure if that is the case or not. I suppose for some naive people it is, but I am willing to bet the enabling of voter fraud and other vote buying is as much a part of it. Even without voting fraud, getting people on lists for the census means more money allocated from the federal largess based on population percentages.
There is also the naiveté that just because someone now is allowed to get a license means they will. That a license implies legality and furthers other fraud is a greater reason than the permission to drive on public paid roads.
My comments are rather long, usually almost if not full essays. In writing them I often cover several aspects of the question at hand and they would be even longer if I had to make every single point precise and bulletproof.
When I said “Those states foolishly think …” I was using lower case “s” and referring to the ignorant people in the States that buy into the reason I gave in order to support licensing illegal alien drivers. There most certainly are politicians in those States and in the Federal Government that are motivated exactly by the things you point out. You’ll get no argument contrariwise from me on that.
If it were up to me an ICE agent would deliver every single one of those licenses, then cuff and take into custody the person whose name, picture and correct address is displayed thereon — For purposes of deportation.
Which of course would completely nullify the State’s licensing of illegal immigrant drivers because only the very most stupid among that group would try to get a license in the first place.
Obtaining a drivers license provides a choke point for identifying illegals. Because it has to be delivered to a real address in order for someone to take possession of the document. Even if the person on the license used the address of someone else who is cooperative, having an ICE agent deliver it would negate that tactic. Not the person on the license? No delivery. It wouldn’t take long until there were no more illegals applying for drivers licenses and in the meanwhile we’d catch a few more of the dumber ones.
That was all tangential to my point anyway. Obviously I’ve had this discussion over “liberty vs. driving privileges” before. I find the position that treating the lawful operation of a motor vehicle as anything but a privilege to be untenable. The kind of person who maintains such a view is thinking only of themselves and ignoring pretty much everything else. For the reasons I pointed out above and more. In my thinking that is anarchic and an indication of sociopathy.
You’re seriously lost on the terms.
You have the liberty to drive — on your private road.
The driving license in required to drive on the public road. Your liberty does not extend to do whatever you can think up on property of others’ or that is shared.
They don’t know the year???? WOW!!!!!!!!!!
They also don’t know what a civil war is.
This is a marvelous stealth idea – and in a mode most “kids” will understand.
But the real message has to be to get them asking “why don’t I know this stuff already?” And “How have I been short changed by the “system” and my schools? Seems I (or somebody) paid an awful lot of money to not have learned all that much.”
Of course, what was not shown was any of the CR interviewees who did know their history in a solid way. There had to be a few, right? Right?
I would like CR, or whoever made that video, to go into some random bars a few blocks away from the campus, where adults hang out and ask the same questions. Expensive places, dive bars, doesn’t matter. Someplace where people in their 40-70s are and see if they know the answers. I bet they do.
Then the question needs to be asked, what changed? (Rhetorical question, anyone who is a member here knows the answer(s) to what changed.)
Now you are going to tell me that I am “privileged” to be over 40 years old?
You “agist”, you!
But you are correct — the contrast would be very telling.
Play any game such as Trivial Pursuit with Millennials and you will own them on any questions related to History or Civics or Literature or Western Civilization, etc.
The other phenomenon I have experienced is their lack of embarrassment at being so ignorant of their heritage and the sheer arrogance of being uninformed.