July 7, 2020
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Win or lose in 2020, Trump’s Mt. Rushmore Address warning of the left’s cultural revolution is his most important speech yet
Win or lose in
2020, President Donald Trump’s July 4th warning against the left’s cultural
revolution and cancel culture in his Mount Rushmore Address will forever be
remembered as one of the most important speeches of his presidency. In it,
President Trump provided an unapologetic defense of American culture, history,
freedom and values that stands in stark contrast to what he called “a merciless
campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and
indoctrinate our children.” For the future of our country, this is a struggle
that if we lose, it is America as a whole that will lose. The question may be whether
there is enough good sense left in the nation to heed Trump’s warning and
reject this new brand of radicalism that is tearing away at the very fabric of
our nation. We face a collectivist nightmare of social tyranny, censorship and thought
police. Free people should speak up now — before it is too late.
Cartoon: What Matters Most
The media ignores violent
crime in America’s inner cities that disproportionately kill African Americans.
Video: Why are some G. W. Bush admin. alumni backing Joe Biden and his socialist policies for President?
Rick
Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government appears on NewsmaxTV's
Chris Salcedo Show to ask what were the former Bush Administration employees
even thinking when they endorsed Joe Biden for President?
Rich Lowry: Patriotism is becoming ‘white supremacy’
“Never before has
a speech extolling America’s virtues and the marvels or the nation’s heroes
played to such poor — and completely dishonest — reviews. At Mount Rushmore on
Friday night, President Trump gave a speech that was very tough on the woke
Left, while largely celebrating America — its Founders, its ideals and freedom,
its capacity for self-renewal, its astonishing variety of geniuses,
adventurers, warriors, inventors, and great musicians and athletes. Then, his
speech ended, and the press piled on with one of its most its unhinged and
dishonest performances of his presidency, which is saying something. The
Associated Press headlined its report on the speech ‘Trump pushes racial
division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore.’ If and when the day arrives when
championing our Founders and exulting in July 4 is flatly considered an
expression of white supremacy, we will look back at the reaction to the Mount
Rushmore speech as the canary in the coal mine.”
Win or lose in 2020, Trump’s Mt. Rushmore Address warning of the left’s cultural revolution is his most important speech yet
By Robert Romano
Win or lose in 2020, President Donald Trump’s July 4th warning against the left’s cultural revolution in his Mount Rushmore Address will forever be remembered as one of the most important speeches of his presidency.
In it, President Trump provided an unapologetic defense of American culture, history, freedom and values that stands in stark contrast to what he called “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”
While rioters continue to burn American cities and a wave of violence continues following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, the cultural revolutionaries of today make no distinction between racial injustice in America and those who historically have stood against those injustices, targeting even statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Union generals from the Civil War like Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln and proponents of abolishing slavery including Frederick Douglass.
Just on Jefferson alone, the author of the Declaration of Independence who proclaimed “all men are created equal” — which was the inspiration for Abraham Lincoln in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates that eventually drove Lincoln’s ascension to the presidency in 1860. Without the Declaration, and Lincoln’s use of the founding ideal as being antithetical to slavery, and he might have never become a national political figure instrumental in winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery in the America.
But that’s not good enough, apparently, to the radicals.
The revolutionaries therefore are not merely targeting symbols of racial injustice in America, but of even America’s efforts to stand up for civil rights against those injustices. It is an attack on our history itself that denies all the progress we have made as a nation in classic revisionist fashion.
As Trump noted, “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies — all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”
In that sense, it is a war on patriotism and love of country very generally. Can a nation long endure that hates itself? The radicals don’t think so as they target our human nature to view things generationally, that these historical grudges endure and exceed our bonds as countrymen and must be avenged, even today.
The most important warning to the American people from the speech itself was against what the President called “cancel culture” as Americans have become afraid to express their politics and love of country in many cases, for fear of professional and personal repercussions.
Trump explained, “One of their political weapons is ‘Cancel Culture’ — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.”
Now, while President Trump declared that “it has absolutely no place” in America, cancel culture has become pervasive in today’s political, economic and cultural environments.
As Trump noted, “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”
So, what gives?
On one hand, it might be easy to call cancel culture a bubble of outrage, centered on the Trump presidency that might fade this later year or in 2024 when his job is coming to a close depending on the outcome in November.
But students of history paying attention to the long game know better. After all, the radicals are waging a war on history itself and it is not one that the public can somehow appease with a single electoral outcome. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are not even good enough for this mob.
If Trump loses in November, we’ll find out very quickly if the struggle was merely on one president — or all of his supporters, too. I tend to think the latter.
This is no high-minded attempt to elevate discourse here. It is an widespread attempt to stifle it and to suppress dissent against this growing cultural revolution. The radicals want the country. It is a battle for hearts and minds. In the immediate sense, that makes the election itself the battlefield, but it won’t be the end there, win or lose for Trump.
For the future of our country, this is a struggle that if we lose, it is America as a whole that will lose.
The question may be whether there is enough good sense left in the nation to heed Trump’s warning and reject this new brand of radicalism that is tearing away at the very fabric of our nation. We face a collectivist nightmare of social tyranny, censorship and thought police. Free people should speak up now — before it is too late.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
Cartoon: What Matters Most
By A.F. Branco
Click here for a higher level resolution version.
Video: Why are some G. W. Bush admin. alumni backing Joe Biden and his socialist policies for President?
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mi0uHQHRJY
ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column from the National Review, Rich Lowry takes on the media’s dishonest reporting of President Trump’s Mt. Rushmore Address:
Patriotism is becoming ‘white supremacy’
By Rich Lowry
The reaction to Trump’s Rushmore speech was unhinged.
Never before has a speech extolling America’s virtues and the marvels or the nation’s heroes played to such poor — and completely dishonest — reviews.
At Mount Rushmore on Friday night, President Trump gave a speech that was very tough on the woke Left, while largely celebrating America — its Founders, its ideals and freedom, its capacity for self-renewal, its astonishing variety of geniuses, adventurers, warriors, inventors, and great musicians and athletes.
Then, his speech ended, and the press piled on with one of its most its unhinged and dishonest performances of his presidency, which is saying something.
The Associated Press headlined its report on the speech “Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore.”
(The delicate way the news service put the targeting of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt was inadvertently amusing: “He zeroed in on the desecration by some protesters of monuments and statues across the country that honor those who have benefited from slavery, including some past presidents.”)
The New York Times played it exactly the same way in its news alert:
“Breaking News: President Trump delivered a dark and divisive speech at Mount Rushmore, leaning into the culture wars and barely mentioning the pandemic.” — The New York Times (@nytimes) July 4, 2020
CNN led a news report with this: “On a very different Fourth of July holiday, when many Americans are wrestling with the racist misdeeds of the country’s heroes and confronting an unrelenting pandemic with surging cases, their commander-in-chief is attempting to drag America backward — stirring fear of cultural change while flouting the most basic scientific evidence about disease transmission.”
The opening of a Washington Post report struck a similar note: “President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.”
The Post wrote this even though the Rushmore speech didn’t mention Confederate monuments.
It’s worth underlining that none of these pieces were columns or op-eds. All purported to be straight news written by straight-news reporters.
So what did Trump say at Mount Rushmore? “Our Founders,” he declared, “launched not only a revolution in government, but a revolution in the pursuit of justice, equality, liberty, and prosperity.” In insisting that all men are created equal, they “enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever.” Indeed, “these immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom.”
He said that Americans “believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for citizens of every race, background, religion, and creed. Every child, of every color — born and unborn — is made in the holy image of God.”
He warned of those attacking the Founding of our country: “They would tear down the principles that propelled the abolition of slavery in America and, ultimately, around the world, ending an evil institution that had plagued humanity for thousands and thousands of years.”
And not just that: “Our opponents would tear apart the very documents that Martin Luther King used to express his dream, and the ideas that were the foundation of the righteous movement for Civil Rights.”
He ran through a roll call of American heroes: “We are the country of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. We are the land of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill Cody. We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton — General George Patton — the great Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, and Mohammad Ali.”
He called for children to be taught “once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King, when he said that the Founders had signed “‘a promissory note’ to every future generation.”
In sum, he insisted, “it is time to plant our flag and protect the greatest of this nation, for citizens of every race, in every city, and every part of this glorious land.”
So where’s the hate? Where’s the white supremacy? Where’s the Confederacy?
You can say that the speech was insincere, or that Trump’s tweets matter more than anything he reads from a Teleprompter, or that he doesn’t have the credibility to make this sort of speech, but you can’t say it was racially divisive.
There’s no doubt that Trump’s attacks on the Left were hard-edged. In one line oft-quoted by journalists, he said, “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.”
You can object to the label “fascism,” which as a general matter is overused in our political debate, or argue that “absolute allegiance” puts it too strongly, but Trump is obviously right about the illiberal character of the wave of cancellations sweeping our culture.
In fact, I suspect that the very journalists who scoff at his description all know that if they or their colleagues say something disparaging or even skeptical about Black Lives Matter, their jobs would instantly be at risk.
Trump’s proposed “national garden” of statues of our heroes can also legitimately be criticized as gimmicky, with a random list of people to be honored. Yet, the idea is a version of a compromise proposal sometimes floated in the statue wars: Don’t tear down what we have, build more.
The proposed list, by the way, includes Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Booker T. Washington, and can’t possibly be characterized as racially divisive, either.
Part of what is going on here is simply a reaction to anything Trump says or does, but there is a deeper factor at work. The media presumes that it must necessarily be wrong to criticize, as the Washington Post put it, a “racial justice movement” — it’s catch-all phrase for the woke Left.
Forced to choose between what once would have been the uncontroversial patriotic sentiments expressed at Mount Rushmore and that movement, it’s not even close — patriotism has to be thrown overboard.
If this seems to be putting it too starkly, just wait. This tweet from Colin Kaepernick on July 4 was ominously forthright:
“Black ppl have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized + terrorized by America for centuries, & are expected to join your commemoration of “independence”, while you enslaved our ancestors. We reject your celebration of white supremacy & look forward to liberation for all.” — Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) July 4, 2020
That position still seems extreme, but so did kneeling a couple of years ago. Now, it’s going to be de rigueur for many athletes.
If and when the day arrives when championing our Founders and exulting in July 4 is flatly considered an expression of white supremacy, we will look back at the reaction to the Mount Rushmore speech as the canary in the coal mine.
To view online: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/president-trump-mount-rushmore-speech-distorted-by-media/
