Archive for the ‘American Exceptionalism’ Category
VIDEO – IMMIGRANT FROM CUBA WHO THANKS THIS COUNTRY FOR ALL HIS OPPORTUNITIES
Saturday, July 18th, 2020
let’s NOT forget our history…. pray for Americawww.facebook.com/101043269988443/posts/3334019716690766/This man made me so emotional. He tells it like it is. Maybe you have heard this already but I just watched it on FB.
PRESIDENT TRUMP AT MOUNT RUSHMORE
Tuesday, July 7th, 2020
Trump at Mount Rushmore
Progressives deride his defense of America’s founding principles.
At Mt. Rushmore, Trump uses Fourth of July celebration to stoke a culture war
—Los Angeles Times
Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message
Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore
—Associated Press
At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day
—Washington Post
President Trump delivered one of the best speeches of his Presidency Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, and for evidence consider the echo-chamber headlines above. The chorus of independent media voices understands that Mr. Trump is trying to rally the country in defense of traditional American principles that are now under radical and unprecedented assault.
Dark? In most respects Mr. Trump’s speech was a familiar Fourth of July ode to liberty and U.S. achievement that any President might have delivered in front of an American landmark. “No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America. And no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation,” he said.
Contrary to the media reporting, the America Mr. Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity. He highlighted the central ideal of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” As he rightly put it, “these immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom” that included the abolition of slavery more than a half century later.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON – MEMBERS OF PREVIOUS GENERATIONS NOW SEEM LIKE GIANTS
Sunday, May 3rd, 2020MAKE ARCHITECTURE GREAT AGAIN !
Saturday, February 15th, 2020
Make Architecture Great Again
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.
“AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP IS ERODING” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Saturday, December 28th, 2019
“American citizenship is eroding”
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.
VIDEO GOODBYE AMERICA PRAGER U
Monday, October 28th, 2019
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.
AMERICA’S SECOND CIVIL WAR BY DENNIS PRAGER
Sunday, October 13th, 2019
America’s Second Civil War
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.
NO, AMERICA WASN’T BUILT ON SLAVERY, BUT FAITH THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL
Wednesday, August 28th, 2019
No, America Wasn’t Built On Slavery, But Faith That All Men Are Created Equal
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
VIDEO PRAGER U – A FINE TIME TO BECOME AN AMERICAN
Tuesday, July 2nd, 2019