“Profiles in Freedom” – Heroes Who Shaped America by Carl Higbie
A Book Review by Stephen L. D’Andrilli, Co-founder, President and CMO of The Arbalest Quarrel
Carl Higbie, the author of “Profiles in Freedom,” is a true American Patriot. He is a former decorated Navy SEAL and is currently the host of “Carl Higbie Frontline” on Newsmax. He is a Senior Appointee to President Trump, a successful businessman, and advisor to several national foundations, corporations, and coalitions. Higbie is also the author of four books and is considered a highly respected authority on American politics, the military, and national security.
In this book, Higbie tells us, “If you were born American in this current sliver of time in the history of mankind, you won the lottery.” We are so fortunate and too many take it for granted. He reminds us that “. . . our good life was not an accident. It was created on purpose by people with an uncommon drive, and that drive was given to us by our Founding Fathers in the form of a government that offers its citizens the right to achieve as much or as little as they desire.” I agree with Higbie on both these points.
Higbie recognizes that our Founders wanted to ensure free enterprise in America. He says, “[t]hat is the message of America ideals. That is why people brave dangerous deserts, cross shark-infested waters, and hide in storage containers to get here. We are their Promised Land.”
This should not be forgotten because it is part of our history. Higbie believes, “[t]hose who helped build this country lived and died for their ideals so that we could have a better life.” He advises, “[t]he wise will not only build on that, but they will teach their children to do the same.” He dedicates his book, “. . . to those who challenge others to do good, to be better, and to dream dreams. . . .” And he encourages all of us to influence others in the same manner.
“Profiles in Freedom” serves as reminder of the remarkable things that Americans are able to accomplish because of our Nation’s ideals.
The book is a compilation of short stories about many of those people and their accomplishments, which contributed greatly to making our Country exceptional. This is why Higbie refers to these people in the subtitle of his book as, “Heroes Who Shaped America.”
Their bold exploits were neither accident nor luck. Fulfilling their objectives requires courage, resilience, a strong sense of purpose, and extraordinary sacrifice, all of which they had in abundance. Achievement of their personal goals, ambitions, and endeavors benefited not only themselves but the Country as a whole, and the world too.
I enjoyed reading every story. It is interesting to learn how these Americans, being at the right place at the right time, played a pivotal role in our Nation’s history. Viewing America from the early days of Settlement and Colonialism, then through our Nation’s Founding, and up to modern times, through the stories of individual Americans who helped establish our Country’s success and greatness, was a captivating, inspiring adventure for me. That same courage, resilience, purpose, sacrifice, and love of Country, exemplified by these early Americans, is not fortuitous. These same traits are found in many of our Countrymen today.
This book reinforced my conviction that history must be preserved. And I share this conviction with U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin, who wrote in his Foreword to Higbie’s book, “History should be taught as it happened and honor those who built the nation that has prospered so greatly. We must teach our children to emulate this success and learn from their blunders.”
Senator Mullin makes important points. I would add that the “blunders” seen today are not the failings naturally occurring that mark all those Americans who strive for success. After all, fortitude and tenacity to succeed despite failures are traits of all great Americans.
But, today, we see something occurring in our Country that is insidious as well as dangerous to a Free Constitutional Republic and to the Security of a Free State.
There is a movement afoot to dismantle our Republic, to endanger our Free State, and to transform our Nation’s ideals and core values into a thing monstrous, alien to our Nation’s core values, and strange. This is not happenstance.
This destructive collection of destructive influences, comprising a multitude of people, organizations, and government, is large-scale, multifaceted, well-organized, and well-funded.
The scope of this effort to dismantle our Country, an independent, sovereign nation, and to dissolve our Constitution, brings into play a multiplicity of powerful, ruthless, determined forces, operating both inside the United States and outside it. Their agenda and aims are broad and ambitious, marked by persistence, firmness, and single-minded purpose. They seek nothing less than the dissolution of the Republic, the eradication of the Bill of Rights, together with elimination of the concept of fundamental, unalienable, preexisting natural law rights, a reframing of the Articles of the Constitution to exclude a doctrine of “checks and balances,” a pronounced reshaping of the Nation, away from its founding principles and toward adoption of the Collectivist ideology, acceptance of international norms of morality, thought and conduct, and recognition of the supremacy of “international law and custom” over U.S. law and jurisprudence.
The boldness and brashness of this attack, much of it successful, is not to be minimized. Its brazenness suggests that tens of millions of Americans, having been indoctrinated to hate our Country’s history, heritage, national ethos, and ethical values, have become cultists, willing activists on behalf of a cause grounded on the annihilation of all that is sacred to us, all that defines us as “Americans” and “Citizens of the United States.”
As Higbie illustrates, every era of our Nation’s history has witnessed and has had to cope with its own set of problems, obstacles, and adversity. Our era is no different, and the challenges ahead for us are immense. One of the most prominent and frightening aspects facing our Nation today is the attack on the minds of our Nation’s children.
America is a Nation of winners. Teachers ought to motivate our youth to succeed, to meet difficulties with poise and self-assurance, and to recognize that failures are not to be treated as insurmountable obstacles but as welcome challenges.
Children should be encouraged never to accept defeat without a fight, to trust in their own individual abilities, and their own indomitable will. The instructors of our young should instill in children, the passion to master difficult projects with confidence, and the desire to succeed. This should be what they do, but, unfortunately, and more frequently in recent times, we see the opposite.
Teachers indoctrinate our youth in a cult of submission. They nurture young minds with a defeatist attitude. Children are now taught to doubt their abilities, and to blame others for their failures. They are conditioned to place their faith in government and group collectives to satisfy their basic needs, rather than encouraged to place faith in themselves and in God, that they may satisfy not only basic needs, but their worth as individuals. But, once negative thoughts are placed in young heads, those negative thoughts can last a lifetime. Every life lost represents a tragedy.
Education today is aimed at creating mindless activists, robots who don’t think, but merely act—creatures operating from emotion alone, not from the intellect. Such people are easily manipulated and controlled. Mass conformity in thought and action is the rule. And this is by design.
A “Cult of Collectivism” has replaced the “Principal of Individualism,” the latter of which this Nation’s greatness and success derive.
Collectivism, as a social and political ideology, treats people like “cogs” in a machine. The “cog” has no worth but in service to the group, “The Collective.” Training young minds to think of themselves as a component of a gear wheel ought not be the aim of education. Rather, education should, in the cultivation of young minds, respect each child as a unique individual. In setting his own goals and striving to achieve them, each American serves both himself and the Nation as a whole. And that is where our Country’s greatness and success spring from. But the Cult of Collectivism aims to destroy a person’s individuality. This metamorphosis of thought is beginning to infect the mind of every American, leading to the death of the “Human Spirit” and to the decline and ultimate demise of our Free Republic. And that is the “Collectivists” game plan.
To the achievement of that end, the destroyers of American society have rewritten our Nation’s history. The curriculums devised today for Grade Levels K-12, make use of carefully crafted instruments to feed this new “Cult of Collectivism.” A person isn’t freed from these confining, stultifying programs, when progressing to college and university, and to post-graduate and professional schools. Instead, the curriculums of higher learning further cement societal-conforming nonsense in the minds of the purportedly erudite minds among us, and they impose these ideas on the rest of us. No one is safe from the effects of mass social and psychological conditioning made possible through advances in psychology and communication technology.
The instruments employed at a young age and reinforced as one grows older include pseudo dogmas, false and inflammatory historical revisionism, and social engineering programs. All of these tools are designed to reprogram a person’s thought processes, making a person peculiarly susceptible to accepting, as unblemished scientific truth, bald-faced absurdities.
Such terms and phrases bandied about in the Press and Social Media, disbursed throughout the institutions of Government, business and finance, science and technology, education and academia, arts and entertainment, include in part: “Wokeness,” “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), “Sustainable Development Growth” initiatives (SDG), “LGBTQ+”, “Identity Politics,” “Cancel Culture,” “Open Borders,” Multiculturalism and Moral Relativism, and heavy-handed, unapologetic Activism/Sedition/Propaganda visible in the Press, Broadcast and Cable News, Periodicals and Magazines, and even in “Comedy” television.
Truth and critical thinking are suppressed. People are reduced to unthinking, conforming drones. Failure to conform is met with harsh rebuke. The worst thing imaginable to the adherents of the “Cult of Collectivism” is for the individual to truly be individual.
The most destructive societies in history have made use of instruments to force compliance to the will of autocrats. Originally, use of physical torture was in vogue to compel compliance. Today, however, the tools utilized to compel compliance are more subtle, and even more effective, as the person so conditioned is transformed into a true believer and fanatic disciple of the gospel of this “Cult of Collectivism.” The methods are different today, more sophisticated. But the goal is the same. To compel obedience—either through “the lash” or through opiates and psychological conditioning.
Higbie echoes the poignant point, “ . . . to forget history is to repeat it” when reciting a remark from President Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address: “If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.
To drive home Reagan’s point, the author’s intention in writing “Profiles in Freedom” is to ensure that the American spirit is never eroded. If the public remembers the great accomplishments of past Americans, our Nation’s historical memory will remain intact.
A few of the profiles in this book may not be known to most people. Other profiles are likely well-known or at least familiar to many through their school lessons. But, for those Americans who may have forgotten the names and accomplishments of those individuals whom Higbie discusses in his book, the profiles will serve as an informative, entertaining, and welcome refresher course.
When you read this book you will learn how Thomas Dermer, Captain John Smith, William Bradford, William and Hannah Penn, and the American Indian, Squanto, paved the way for all of those who would settle in the New World and would follow in the formative years of Colonial America. You will be fascinated to learn, “[m]ore than 30 million people can trace their ancestry to the 102 passengers and approximately 30 crew aboard the Mayflower when it landed in Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, in the harsh winter of 1620.”
How much do you really know about the lives and unique contributions of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and pioneers like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark? Higbie provides you with the answers, describing the lives and contributions of each of these people in detail.
The founders of our Nation crafted a truly Free Constitution Republic, unlike anything that had existed before it or anything that would come into existence thereafter. These founders, the framers of our Constitution, created a wondrous path for America’s descendants.
Our Nation’s success reflects the sublimity and brilliance of those that constructed its foundation, and the adventurers and frontiersmen who followed, who have expanded the physical boundaries of the Country from the East coast to the West.
Higbie provides a wealth of information about so many incredible Americans who helped shape our history: Noah Webster, the American lexicographer, Father of the Dictionary; Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, Samuel Colt, a famous American weapons’ manufacturer, who gave us the iconic “Colt Single Action Army,” chambered in .45 Colt, aptly dubbed the “Peacemaker; Samuel Morse, whose telegraph literally connected the world; Theodore Judah, who started the transcontinental railroad; Ulysses S. Grant, known as the “Unconditional Surrender Grant” general who won the Civil War and became the 18th U.S. president; Frederick Douglas, who, after escaping from slavery in 1838, became a famous orator, writer, statesman, a leading voice for African American Civil Rights, and lifelong member of the Republican Party; Susan B. Anthony, American social reformer, and early crusader of the Women’s Suffrage Movement; Andrew Carnegie, industrialist, billionaire-philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest men in history; George Washington Carver, an African-American agricultural scientist, and inventor, who revolutionized Southern agriculture, saving farming in the South; Henry Ford, An American Industrialist, founder of the Ford Motor Company, who revolutionized factory production through the creation of the assembly line process, making possible production of reasonably priced affordable automobiles; and W. Edwards Deming, American business theorist, economist, physicist, and statistician, whose innovative applications of statistics to manufacturing processes proved so successful that he was hired by companies to assist them in producing quality products with higher profits. And, with a more productive workforce, the companies Deming worked with were able to enlarge their markets.
This is just a tidbit of what you can expect by reading this book. Start your journey in Higbie’s “Profiles in Freedom,” today. You Won’t Regret it!
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