Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during the Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.
Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.
We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.
Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?
Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up.
The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno — and not yet a foot of track laid.
Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?
California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.
When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns — and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our single replacement span in less than four years.
It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.
Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on a quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project.
Our website is celebrating its 10th year of being online !
The above link will take you to our Conservative Women’s website where you will find 10 years’ worth of articles, photos and videos that have been posted on the site. Looking for a great article that you would like to reread? You will find it there as it is like a library of all our postings. All the categories that I post under are listed
alphabetically on the right hand side of the screen. Click on the category you are interested in and all the articles and videos posted under that category will appear.
There is a separate photos category of photos that I have taken over the past 10 years of many conservative events and parties. Its a fun trip down memory lane.
As an extra bonus, I am happy to say that our website gets between 200 to 400 hits every day ! Thanks to all of you who have sent me so many of the articles that I send out via email and post on our website. Conservative Women’s Forum is also on facebook that is open to the public. No personal information is posted on facebook, only conservative articles. Tell your friends to check us out . Enjoy ! Nancy
For all of us who love classic architecture, this is wonderful news ! Nancy
Washington, D.C., is a melange of architecture that makes little sense. Some of it is Roman, (the Supreme Court, the Capitol Building, etc.), some of it is French (namely, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), and the rest is downright ugly.
The Trump administration wants to change that. A draft of an executive order entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” would make classical Roman and Greek architecture the default for new federal buildings in Washington.
Spearheaded by the National Civic Art Society, the order attempts to restore Washington’s aesthetic and do away with the damage wrought by contemporary architecture, which has “created a built environment that is degraded and dehumanizing,” the society said.
The following is an abridged version of a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 2, 2019, during the College’s 175th anniversary gala. Videos of this and other speeches delivered during the gala are available at fourpillars.hillsdale.edu.
Today many condemn the idea of nationalism by connecting it to race hatred (e.g., white nationalism). But historically, the modern nation-state has proven uniquely suitable to preserving individual rights. The American nation in particular was successful in uniting individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and creeds into one people based on shared principles, a unique physical space, and a common national story. Our nation is the best example in human history of positive nationalism.
The key to this benign nationalism is American citizenship, based on an understanding of American exceptionalism and formed by the American melting pot. But today, our citizenship is eroding and, along with it, American nationalism in the positive sense is disappearing.
American citizenship is eroding in three ways.
First, we are blurring the line between mere residents and citizens. We have between 45-50 million non-native-born residents in the U.S. today—the largest absolute number we’ve ever had. There’s no legal problem with the 30 million of them who have green cards or have acquired citizenship—although even 30 million is a challenge for the American melting pot to assimilate and integrate.
But we also have, according to a recent Yale and MIT study, about 20 million people who are here illegally. In regard to them, the classical ingredients of American citizenship—the right to leave or enter the country as one pleases, for example, or to vote in elections, or to reside here as long as one pleases—are being blurred.
How is America to be defined? By its failures or its triumphs? Today, there seems to be an obsession with the former and a dismissal of the latter. Is this dark vision of the freest and most prosperous nation on earth an accurate narrative or a cynical distortion? James Robbins, columnist for USA Today and author of “Erasing America,” considers that question in this video. How we view America’s past will very much shape America’s future.
Although this article was written by Dennis Prager in 2017, the conflict between the Left (not Liberalism) and the Right is even sharper today. I have highlighted the paragraph in this article that describes what Liberalism used to stand for. We cannot allow the Left to destroy our core traditional values that were the foundation of our country.
It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.
In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.
This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents’ offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.
There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.
Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.
The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.
An excellent rebuttal to the NYTimes idiocy of basing the founding of our nation to the year 1619. The year of the first slave to arrive. Russian collusion didn’t work so let’s try to divide the country with racism.
Written by one of Hillsdale’s finest grad student.
By reframing America’s founding around slavery, the New York Times’ 1619 Project misreads history along with the role Americans played in realizing the ideals of the Declaration.
By Joshua Lawson Joshua Lawson is a graduate student at the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College. He is pursuing a masters degree in American politics and political philosophy.
It’s there in plain sight. Spelled-out in its mission statement, the New York Times’ 1619 Project seeks to “reframe” American history to mark the year 1619 as the “true founding.” By doing so, the project will “[place] the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center” of the American story.
The year 1619 was chosen for the Times’ “re-founding” to mark when the first slaves arrived in the English settlement of Jamestown. For the Times, this moment irredeemably tainted the nation. Yet viewing the centuries-old actions of men through a 21st-century lens will not solve our present social tensions. Slavery was a heart-wrenching, obstacle during America’s birth, but by no objective analysis was it the central factor of the founding as the 1619 Project claims.
Slavery Is a Blight on All Humanity, Not Just America
Slavery was and is an abomination. The ownership of one man over another is an affront to both natural law and our God-given inalienable rights as human beings. It is an evil part of America’s past—as well as that of nearly every nation on earth. The fact that slavery has a universal heritage does not absolve American slave owners, but it does provide a necessary historical context.
During the 17th century, slavery was, sadly, an accepted part of life throughout the world. By A.D. 1619, slavery had existed for more than 5000 years, dating back at least to Mesopotamia. At the time the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish and Portuguese had been enslaving blacks and native peoples in the New World for more than 100 years. Native American tribes had been enslaving each other for who knows how long before that.
What’s notable about the United States is not that its citizens held slaves, but that the West’s crusade to end slavery began after Jefferson penned the aspirational words of America’s founding document.
America’s Founding Ideals Aren’t Lies
Written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 7,600-word flagship essay of the 1619 Project asserts that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” Forgiving the fact that America is not a democracy but a constitutional republic, what ideals does she mean? The central organizing principle of the American founding was the preservation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Hannah-Jones claims, “white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.” She provides no evidence or examples for this sweeping assertion. Alternatively, we know from numerous primary sources that the Founding Fathers did believe those words.
Jefferson’s original final draft of the Declaration explicitly referred to black slaves not as property but as men and castigated King George III for suppressing parliamentary efforts to prohibit or restrain “this execrable commerce” (referring to slavery). Letters written to John Jay show Alexander Hamilton hoping the Revolutionary War could lead to the emancipation of blacks and appraising them equal to whites in their abilities. Additional examples are plentiful.
Without the Founders’ Compromise, America Wouldn’t Exist
Very interesting to see the difference between President Trump’s message to the new citizens compared to former President Obama’s message to the new citizens Nancy
VIDEO – PRAGER U – A FINE TIME TO BECOME AN AMERICAN
Renown Oxford-trained historian Niall Ferguson recounts his recent experience of becoming an American citizen. His unique impressions are both moving and surprising — even to him.
Are you tired of hearing about the endless talk of President Trump and the Mueller Report ? This video interview of Andrew Breitbart from 2009 gives an inside look into the thinking of the man who pushed back fiercely against liberalism. Nancy
Identified as one of the ten most important people in the media that nobodys ever met, Andrew Breitbart details why leftward-leaning Hollywood is dangerous for America and why the people who run it are uninteresting, vitriolic, and vicious. Segueing from Hollywood to the Internet, Breitbart explores why the right dominates talk radio and the left seems to do better on the Internet and how the decline of print media is changing the nature of the national political conversation.
The American Trinity: The Three Values That Make America Great
Nearly every country on Earth is defined by race or ethnicity. Not America. What makes the United States different? Dennis Prager outlines the values that have allowed the American people to flourish and, unlike immigrants almost everywhere else, transformed those who arrived from across the globe into full Americans—regardless of where they were born.
This is a movie that was produced during the Obama Administration and warns of the many dangers facing our country – Socialism, Marxism, Globalists, Globalism, Agenda 21, Sustainability, The Secret Society, Bilderberg, the push for a National ID and Biometrics, Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia Law, Open Borders, Gun Control, the Federal Reserve system and most of all, Collectivism versus Individualism.
Today, President Trump is addressing many of these dangers and is it any wonder he is facing such hostility from the entrenched elitists in our country ?
