American Power

Monday, July 6, 2020

Trump at Mount Rushmore

At WSJ, "Progressives deride his defense of America’s founding principles":

Trump at Mount Rushmore: Progressives deride his defense of America’s founding principles. https://t.co/kp0dgTD7wJ via @WSJ
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) July 6, 2020

"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."

— New York Times

"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.

Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. also believed this to be true, and Mr. Trump cited them both, as he did other American notables black and white, historic and more recent. There was not a hint of racial division in his words except for those who want to distort their meaning for their own political purposes. In any other time this paean to American exceptionalism would have been unexceptional.

But this year even Mr. Trump’s speech backdrop, Mount Rushmore with its four presidential faces, is politically charged. Each of those Presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt—is under assault for ancient sins against modern values, as progressives seek to expunge their statues and even their names from American life. Mr. Trump’s great offense against the culturally ascendant progressives was to defend these presidential legacies.

Divisive? Mr. Trump’s speech was certainly direct, in his typical style. But it was only divisive if you haven’t been paying attention to the divisions now being stoked on the political left across American institutions. Mr. Trump had the temerity to point out that the last few weeks have seen an explosion of “cancel culture—driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”

Describing this statement of fact as “divisive” proves his point. Newspaper editors are being fired over headlines and op-eds after millennial staff revolts. Boeing CEO David Calhoun last week welcomed the resignation of a communications executive for opposing—33 years ago when he was in the military—women in combat. The Washington Post ran an op-ed this weekend urging that the name of America’s first President be struck from Washington and Lee University.

Any one of these events would be remarkable, but together with literally thousands of others around the country they represent precisely what Mr. Trump describes—a left-wing cultural revolution against traditional American values of free speech and political tolerance. And he called for Americans not to cower but to oppose this assault...

Keep reading.

We Need Teach More History, Not Less

This is awesome!

From Wilfred McClay, at the Federalist:

Great piece by Wilfred McClay in @FDRLST. It is impossible to see how truly exceptional this country is without learning about the history we rose above.. https://t.co/rJlwzB1pL9
— Emily Domenech (@ehdomenech) July 6, 2020

Friday, July 3, 2020

The Coming Black Crime Bloodbath (VIDEO)

She's one of the most politically incorrect women in America, and she's riding a wave of prescience on Black Lives Matter. Super compelling interview with Epoch Times editor Jan Jekielek.

And at Amazon, Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Blonde Emily

On Twitter:

Blonde-rata! Are you loving @emrata's new look as much as we are? pic.twitter.com/WqQQLzYdIR
— Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) July 1, 2020

Emrata is a work of art in BODY PAINT. 😍 https://t.co/Z0R8j8pI58 pic.twitter.com/gBhTX5uVkJ
— Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) May 30, 2020

The police killing of George Floyd and resulting protests have led white Americans to reckon with racism more vigorously than at any moment in recent history. https://t.co/tpRqGetRha
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 28, 2020

GUALALA, Calif. — Mike Sexton is white and a Republican who lives in an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, where many neighbors back President Trump and some work in law enforcement. Rage wells up in his voice as he says that George Floyd, a Black man, was “basically lynched.”

Shawn Ashmore is an independent who lives nearby in east Dallas. He’s using Floyd’s killing to teach his young sons uncomfortable lessons about the privileges their family enjoys because they’re white — how, for instance, they’ll never fear for their lives during an encounter with the police the way some Black men do.

Lisa Joakimides lives in rural Northern California and considers herself a well-meaning Democrat. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Joakimides, who is white, convinced herself that America was finally making amends for its history of mistreating Black people.

As Joakimides got down on both knees to honor Floyd at a roadside demonstration in early June, she wondered how she could have been so naive.

Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, captured in witness videos showing then-Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, has led white Americans to call out racism against Black Americans more vigorously than at any moment in recent memory. And it’s prompting many white people to think more deeply about the color of their own skin.

Why now? Chicago-based sociology professor Jacqueline Battalora believes that after three wearying months of social isolation and economic upheaval brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Floyd’s killing was yet another blow to the illusions of safety, security and equality that many white people harbor about America.

“The police are fair; institutions are fair — white people have been so happy to believe those things,” said Battalora, a former police officer and author of “Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today.” “What this signals is that a good chunk of white people now have some recognition that something’s not right.”

For Sexton, Ashmore and Joakimides, the killing of Floyd and outpourings of rage have forced them to see that expressions of sympathy and displays of solidarity with Black people are only the beginning. America won’t change its racist ways, they say, unless white people use this period of protest and reflection to change, too.

What’s different this time, Sexton said, is that white people have gained a better sense of where that outrage comes from, and how insulated they are from the racial injustices that provoke it.

Sexton, 45, said he can’t sit on the sidelines of the protest movement, or shy away from the national conversation about racism and police brutality, simply because he votes red instead of blue.

“It’s not right versus left,” he said. “It’s right versus wrong.”

Sexton said he wasn’t oblivious to racial discrimination. Every Black person he knows has shared stories of being followed and stopped for no reason by police.

But the video of Floyd’s killing, which captured him crying out “I can’t breathe” and calling out for his dead mother, made Sexton realize the powerlessness and sheer panic that Black people often experience in the presence of officers.

He said it’s crazy that it took so long for him and other white people to fully grasp that horror of police brutality, “but for us, we wouldn’t have understood were it not for the video.”

“Now,” he said, “we’re listening.”

Sexton, a salesman, recently organized a rally for police accountability in a high school parking lot near where he lives in Grapevine, Texas. It drew about 200 demonstrators, most of them white.

Members of the clergy and Grapevine Police Chief Mike Hamlin attended. One of the speakers was a Trump supporter.

A Black teen told the crowd that she was afraid to bring children into the world because she feared she wouldn’t be able to protect them from law enforcement or the country’s racism.

“That broke my heart into a thousand pieces,” Sexton said.

After weeks of protest, opinions about police violence appear to be shifting, but there’s still a large gap between white and Black people about whether it represents a national crisis.

In an AP-NORC poll taken in mid-June, fewer than half of white respondents — 39% — believe that police violence against the public is either an extreme or very serious problem, compared with 80% of Black respondents.

Those numbers did show a shrinking of the gulf between the way white and Black Americans view the issue. The same poll was taken in the early stages of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015, and then only 19% of white people said police violence was an extreme or serious problem, compared with 73% of Black people.

“It created this opening for white people,” Battalora said of Floyd‘s killing. “But that’s different from saying we ‘get it.’ That will be more of a process.”

It remains to be seen whether the spectacle in recent days of white people locking hands to protect Black demonstrators from riot police, or taking part in the toppling of monuments to Confederate soldiers and slaveholders, represents a turning point...

Still more.

Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis, Defying Hitler

At Amazon, Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis, Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule.

Monday, June 29, 2020

America's Jacobin Moment

At WSJ, "The cultural putsch in America’s institutions strikes at liberal values":

The Editorial Board: If liberals won’t stop the Jacobin left, expect a political backlash and social fracture that will make Donald Trump’s Presidency look like a tea party. https://t.co/O0A91qmF9f
— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) June 23, 2020

Anger at the killing of George Floyd has spurred useful reflection about race and perhaps some important police reform. But the political and cultural forces have transformed in recent weeks into something far less healthy—a ferocious campaign of political conformity sweeping across American artistic, educational, business and entertainment institutions.

This coercive cultural turn threatens to devour what remains of America’s civic comity and push durable social progress on race and politics out of reach.

***

We describe this as a Jacobin moment because it has the fervor and indiscriminate judgment of the revolutionary mind. The guillotine isn’t in use, but the impulse is the same to destroy careers, livelihoods and reputations. The wave of resignations, firings, disavowals and forced apologies at institutions large and small is moving so fast it is difficult to keep track...

Social comity in a polarized society will not be achieved through coercion and struggle sessions. If liberals won’t stop the Jacobin left, expect a political backlash and social fracture that will make Donald Trump’s Presidency look like a tea party.

RTWT.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Ryan James Girdusky and Harlan Hill, They're Not Listening

At Amazon, Ryan James Girdusky and Harlan Hill, They're Not Listening: How The Elites Created the National Populist Revolution.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Richard Wright, Native Son

At Amazon, Native Son.

Interactive Cover

Click through, at the New Yorker:

An early look at next week’s cover, "Say Their Names," by @KadirNelson: https://t.co/Nj3q09OrOL pic.twitter.com/a3w3l1XESb
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 14, 2020

Also:

Like men who saw the scroll of #MeToo testimonies & interrogated women, asking “Is it really that bad?,” the shock of Floyd’s death is itself a barometer of inequality, evidence of who has moved through life free of the burden of such terrible knowledge. https://t.co/7Ci2bv3ToO
— jelani cobb (@jelani9) June 14, 2020

It's performative journalism.