'He was suffering from mental illness'

'There will be news sometime'

'They just don't get it'

'They are buying somebody who is willing to be bought...'

'Look how good God is'

They say that no good deed goes unpunished. There’s even a song called “No Good Deed” in a hit Broadway musical. If anyone ever had a reason to say that, it would be the Little Sisters of the Poor. Free exercise of religion may be a fundamental right in America, but they’ve been fighting for theirs for more than a dozen years—and counting. Founded in 1839 by Jeanne Jugan, whom Pope Benedict XVI canonized in 2006, the Little Sisters serve the elderly poor all over the world. In addition to chastity, poverty, and obedience, the Little Sisters vow hospitality, and their work includes operating homes for the elderly in nearly a dozen countries, including the U.S. Then came Obamacare. Signed into law in March 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act required that employers provide group health insurance plans with “minimum essential coverage,” including “preventive care.” By regulation, the Department of Health and Human Services said this includes not only contraceptives, which prevent pregnancy, but also abortifacients, which terminate it. The Obama administration threatened massive fines for noncompliance with this part of its “reproductive freedom” agenda. The administration employed several strategies to further push this on society. First, birth control coverage was to be free to employees; employers had to bear the full cost. Second, to shield its agenda, the Obama administration imposed the birth control mandate without going through the normal process of notifying the public and inviting comment. Third, it adopted a religious exemption not even worthy of the name. That exemption applied only to a narrow category of churches and the “exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”  If any other religious employer sought to avoid the mandate, they had to certify the religious nature of their work and their objection to the mandate. Religious freedom in America has always meant far more than going to church—so religious employers soon began challenging the birth control mandate. First up were employers who wished to operate their companies according to religious principles. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the Supreme Court in 2014 held that the mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires the federal government to have a “compelling” reason to substantially burden religious exercise, and says it may do so no more than necessary. Educational institutions and religious nonprofits—including the Little Sisters—and educational institutions also challenged the birth control mandate. While the certification process allowed them to avoid the mandate itself, they argued, it still violated RFRA by making them complicit in facilitating birth control and abortion. The Supreme Court consolidated seven of these lawsuits but, in Zubik v. Burwell, postponed a decision on the merits, giving the Obama administration another chance to craft an appropriate religious exemption. In May 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for new regulations “to address conscience-based objections to the preventive-care mandate.” In November 2018, HHS finalized rules extending the automatic exemption beyond churches to employers who objected based on sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions. Religious employers had challenged Obamacare because the religious exemption was too narrow. But following HHS’s changes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, later joined by New Jersey, sued to get rid of the religious exemption altogether, making both procedural and substantive arguments. Procedurally, they said that the Obamacare statute did not authorize making any religious exemption and that HHS had unlawfully sidestepped the normal rulemaking process. Substantively, the states argued that the broader religious exemption was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating a legal standard for all agency rulemaking imposed by the Administrative Procedure Act. The Little Sisters stepped into this litigation to defend the exemption, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled against them on both sets of issues. Both the Trump administration and the Little Sisters appealed and, in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court in 2020 reversed the Third Circuit’s procedural ruling but did not address substance. The court held that the “plain language of the statute clearly allows the Departments to create the preventive care standards as well as the religious and moral exemptions….We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.” On Aug. 13, 2025, after an inexplicable five years, a U.S. district judge in Pennsylvania issued a nationwide injunction against enforcing the religious exemption, concluding that it violated the APA. Now, following that decision, the Little Sisters may once again be headed to the Supreme Court. All the Little Sisters of the Poor want to do is serve the elderly with kindness and dignity. If the Obama administration had even minimal regard for religious freedom, it would not have tried to force nuns to pay for birth control. And if states had any such regard, they would not be trying to make birth control and abortion crush religious freedom. But that’s where we are in America today. The Little Sisters show us what it means to fully, and humbly, commit to their faith. And by insisting that the government honor what’s supposed to be an inalienable right to practice that faith, they defend not just their freedom, but ours as well. The post The Little Sisters Continue Their Big Fight for Religious Freedom appeared first on The Daily Signal.

While the expression is “a picture is worth a thousand words,” as the race for Virginia’s next governor heats up, could it be worth only 15? That’s not due to inflation. It’s just that sometimes, 15 words may be all that are needed to change the course of history. >>> Sign up for our Virginia email newsletter But before we discuss those 15 words, for some perspective, let’s look at how just 14 words changed history in Virginia’s last governor’s race exactly four years ago. The 14 words I refer to are those that former Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe used in his ill-fated debate answer on Sept. 28, 2021, as he was running for a second term as governor: “I don’t think parents have the right to tell schools what they should teach.” Those 14 words cost him the 2021 election (which polls had him leading by a larger margin than Democrat gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger is currently leading Republican nominee Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by). Those words might have cost him more than that, because it’s not a stretch to imagine that a two-term Democrat governor of a “purple” state with a Bill and Hillary Clinton pedigree—not to mention a ton of campaign cash—could have been the frontrunner in the race to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2028. That was all done in by just 14 words—and McAuliffe’s insistence that he could not, or would not, walk away from them.   Today, the picture we refer to as being worth 15 words is the photograph of a pro-“transgender” activist protesting outside of an Arlington County School Board meeting where Sears was speaking out against the school system allowing boys in girls bathrooms. The sign the protester was carrying said: “Hey Winsome! If trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain!” Was just sent a picture of this person with this sign outside of Arlington’s school board meeting. pic.twitter.com/Ie0UC84jxR— Brandon Jarvis (@Jaaavis) August 21, 2025 That image is still circling social media a week and a half later. Though not wearing any Spanberger campaign identification, her shirt was emblazoned on the front with the acronym “WofA,” which stands for  We of Action, a group that has canvassed for Spanberger and is promoting a September canvassing event in support of the Democrat on its website. The protester’s white hair indicated that she might be old enough to at least have been taught about the segregation that was rampant in Virginia that led to the Democrat-led “Massive Resistance” in 1956. That was what it was called when the state closed schools in Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Front Royal rather than desegregate them in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling declaring segregation was against the law. Since the photograph of the sign became public, Spanberger’s lead in recent polls has been cut in half, even though she strongly criticized it. One recent poll has Sears now only trailing by just 5% and within the margin of error. Spanberger posted to her X account Aug. 23: “The sign displayed in Arlington last night was racist and abhorrent. Many Virginians remember the segregated water fountains (and buses and schools and neighborhoods) of Virginia’s recent history. And no matter the intended purpose or tone and no matter how much one might find someone else’s beliefs objectionable, to threaten a return of Jim Crow and segregation to a Black woman is unacceptable. Full stop.” She has not addressed it since, but it puts her ahead of McAuliffe, who kept doubling down on his feelings about parents in 2021. Since the incident, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has begun weighing more into the election, sending out campaign fundraising tweets and emails and appearing at joint events with the Republican candidates. Additionally, Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, did what few have been willing to do for the Sears campaign: contribute money—$500,000 to be exact—the lifeblood of any campaign. Will that lead to more? Since then, Sears’ campaign coffers have swollen to $11miilion, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. It’s still less than half of the Spanberger war chest but growing. Is this incident enough for Sears to turn things around, or is it too late? It occurred a month earlier than McAuliffe’s ill-fated statement in September 2021, and his polling lead was larger at the time. Taken together, that means this race may be closer than people think. The post One Picture Worth Just 15 Words Could Change the Entire Virginia Governor’s Race appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I recently wrote a letter to my alma mater urging the school to embrace ideological diversity rather than pushing their liberal agenda on students. It fell on deaf ears.   I graduated from Davidson College in May 2025 with a B.S. in biology and a plan to pursue physician assistant school. But during the fall of my senior year, I got involved in Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student group, and began an internship with Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, an alumni group focused on promoting free speech and ideological balance on the Davidson College campus.   I’ve always been conservative. While it’s true that Davidson College isn’t widely known for conservative voices, many of my peers quietly shared my convictions. But they hesitated to speak up or challenge professors’ perspectives, fearing grave consequences like getting lower grades or being ostracized by classmates and professors.   My college experience is not uncommon.   For years, liberal arts institutions were known for providing a diverse education offering students a multitude of learning opportunities. But a liberal arts education no longer holds the same value it once did. Now, students who attend liberal arts schools end up with leftist propaganda shoved down their throats. Once known for critical thinking, liberal arts institutions have become breeding grounds for liberal ideology—making them a dangerous place for vulnerable students.   At Davidson College, professors are overwhelmingly liberal. According to the most recent information I could find, only 6% are registered Republicans—compared to 40% registered as Democrats. That’s a ratio of more than 7 to 1.    And Davidson pushes its liberal agenda very aggressively.   To name a few examples from my time there:  In 2024, Davidson forced all student athletes to watch a movie called, “I’m Not Racist… Am I?” and randomly called students to the microphone to discuss it in front of everyone.   After President Donald Trump’s election, many classes were canceled. In those not canceled, time was given to “grieve,” as if we had lost a loved one.  My biology professor told our class that a woman’s research was important because of her sexual identity rather than her ideas.   During an introductory biology course, another professor told us that if any of us got pregnant, we should talk to her, and she would help us “handle” the situation.   The campus features a “Wellness Wendy”—a vending machine for sex items—with a poster attached informing students that student health insurance will cover the cost of and assist with transportation to an abortion. The poster says to avoid pregnancy help centers, which counsel women against having abortions.   A coalition of students and faculty accused Young Americans for Freedom of harassment for distributing pamphlets that dispelled myths about Palestine. Those that brought this accusation against YAF refused to share their identity. The so-called harassment pamphlets simply sat on a table. No one was forced to pick them up, open them, or read them. But the consequences of the accusation included sitting in front of a Code of Responsibility panel—sure to be biased—who would decide the fate of the club.   These are just a few of a long list of examples. It saddens me to think of the many stories conservative students across the country could share. Because—let’s face it—liberal arts schools are just liberal. Instead of fostering open debate and teaching students how to think, professors push their own views, causing division and discouraging genuine learning.  In my letter to Davidson, I urged my college professors to encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue and help ensure that all students feel free to speak, question, and engage without fear of their grades suffering or facing rejection. That’s the American way—respecting fundamental rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution. I hope that when professors read my letter they will humbly wrestle with difficult questions, modeling the very curiosity and analytical rigor that higher education claims to foster. The classes that I grew in most were the classes in which the professors played devil’s advocate—challenging arguments and demanding reasoning behind students’ positions. Though these courses were undoubtedly the most rigorous, that very rigor defines the challenging, growth-focused experience liberal arts students deserve.   Some of my most meaningful conversations at Davidson were with people whose perspectives differed from mine. These discussions stretched me to defend my beliefs thoughtfully, not only strengthening my convictions but also deepening my understanding of other points of view.   Thoughtful inquiry must begin with professors. When faculty consistently question assumptions, it signals to students that intellectual exploration isn’t just encouraged—it’s nonnegotiable. I didn’t receive a response to my letter, but when I asked for comment before publishing this op-ed, Jay Pfeiffer, director of media relations at Davidson, said, “Davidson College is founded on the principle of free inquiry and a commitment to the dignity of every person. We work every day to make sure our students engage with ideas that challenge the assumptions and beliefs they carried on to campus.”    I encourage other students who are fed up with liberal institutions to write letters like mine to their professors and presidents. We cannot stand for indoctrination.   Liberal arts professors have been dictators over their students’ beliefs for far too long. Students and their parents are the ones paying for this education, so they have the responsibility to hold educators to a higher standard—true freedom of thought.  Despite my professors stifling ideology, I loved my time in college. I made lifelong friends, I found a passion for politics, I played sports, and I deepened my Christian faith. I hope that future students at Davidson and elsewhere love college too, but I hope they get to experience what I mostly did not—true discussion, not an ideological echo chamber.   The post I Wrote to My Alma Mater Seeking Tolerance for Conservatives. I’m Still Waiting for a Reply.  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The following are remarks as prepared by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., on Sept. 2 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. There’s a special significance to this conference this year. Donald Trump’s victory was not just a victory for his movement, but for the ideas of the people in this room. National conservatism is an idea whose time has arrived. The battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even “Right” and “Left,” in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it. For decades, many of those in power—not just here, but across the West—have been locked in a cultural war with their own nations. We see that in many of the countries of Europe today, where the immigration crisis threatens to transform the ancient fabric of those nations—and all who object are menaced by an increasingly totalitarian censorship state. While our First Amendment has traditionally insulated us from the most extreme forms of censorship, America, too, is threatened by the same elites, driven by the same interests and ambitions. They are the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere. National conservatism is a revolt against this fundamentally post-American ruling class. This revolt is a revolt from the Right—but also, a revolt within the Right. For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They, too, waged foreign wars in the name of global “liberalism” and “democracy.” They, too, rewrote our trade policies in service of the interests of global capital. They, too, supported amnesty and mass migration. The Washington Consensus was a thoroughly bipartisan affair. It required the support of both party establishments to survive. Until President Trump, the mainstream Right quibbled over the Left’s means, but hardly ever challenged its ends. Conservatives cheered foreign intervention after foreign intervention—not to defend America’s actual national interests, but to pursue the same fantasy of a “world safe for democracy” that the Wilsonian liberals have peddled for a century. They backed NAFTA and welcomed China into the WTO—not because it was good for American workers, but because it served the same vision of a borderless marketplace championed by the Left, differing only over whether to trim a regulation here or tack on a labor standard there. But perhaps the best example was on the issue of immigration. The old conservative establishment may have opposed something like illegal immigration on procedural grounds—simply because it was illegal. But they took no issue with it in substance, and if the same thing was achieved through “legal” avenues, many of them would celebrate and support it. At this point, it should be clear that the fact that something is sanctioned by our government does not mean it’s good for our country. That much is obvious with various forms of legal immigration today. For decades, we heard that so-called “high-skilled immigration” was an urgent necessity. The H-1B visa, for example, was sold as a way to keep America “globally competitive.” Of course, we do have an interest in attracting the truly exceptional few, the very best and brightest in the world. But that’s not how programs like the H-1B have actually functioned. Instead, they’ve imported a vast new labor force from abroad—not to fill jobs Americans can’t or won’t do, but to undercut American wages, replace American workers, and transfer entire industries into the hands of foreign lobbies. We have funneled in millions of foreign nationals to take the jobs, salaries, and futures that should belong to our own children—not because the foreign workers are smarter or more talented, but merely because they are cheaper and more compliant, and therefore preferable in the eyes of too many business elites who often see their own countrymen as an inconvenience. While our trade agreements kneecapped blue-collar workers—a slow-moving disaster, decades in the making—abuse of the H-1B is kneecapping white-collar workers right before our eyes. For the tens of thousands of Americans who were forced to train their foreign H-1B replacements just to get their severance package, the fact that it was “legal” is little comfort. For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an “idea”—a vehicle for global liberalism. We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration. In a speech in 1998, Bill Clinton said that the continuous influx of immigrants was—and I quote—a “reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise.” Now, let me just say: I believe that our Founding Fathers were the most brilliant group of men to ever assemble in one room. Their ideas are central to who we are. You can’t understand America without understanding things like the freedom of speech, the right to self-defense, the ideals of independence, self-governance, and political liberty. But these principles are not abstractions. They are living, breathing things—rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real. Take a trip out to rural Missouri and spend a little time with the folks out there, and you’ll quickly realize that the Second Amendment isn’t a classroom theory, for them. It’s part of who they are. If you imposed a carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow, Kazakhstan wouldn’t magically become America. Because Kazakhstan isn’t filled with Americans. It’s filled with Kazakhstanis! What makes America exceptional isn’t just that we committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It’s that we, as a people, were actually capable of living them. But the Left took these principles and drained them of all underlying substance, turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed. To live up to that American creed, they told us, we had to transform America itself. If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed. On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose. In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world. For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.” That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests. His movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It’s a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country. They were the forgotten men and women, who wrapped themselves in our flag and drove hours to hear a real-estate tycoon from New York speak—because they knew he was speaking for them. They were the Americans whose factories were gutted in the name of “free trade,” whose sons were sent to die in wars that served no American interest, whose neighborhoods were transformed beyond recognition by immigration. They were the ones who worked the jobs, paid the taxes, fought the wars, and followed the rules that upheld the very system that attacked and dispossessed them—that mocked and smeared them as bigots and “deplorables,” even though it needed them to survive. And yet, in spite of it all, they stubbornly refused to forget who they were. They were, as Barack Obama sneered, the “bitter clingers”—who still held to their guns, their religion and their memory of a country that once belonged to them. These Americans had come to realize that their true adversary did not live in the faraway sands of some foreign nation, but in the halls of their own government. And in 2016, they discovered that millions of their fellow citizens had arrived at the same conclusion. In Donald Trump’s defiance, they recognized an echo of their own. It is their interests that Trump spoke to in 2016, and it is their interests that he remains loyal to today. And it is their interests, their values, their lives that the American Right must defend, without apology or remorse, if it wants to have a viable future. The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.” They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true. America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind. Western civilization was defined by its restless, relentless, dynamic spirit—a drive to create, explore and discover that spurred the West to heights of political, intellectual and technological achievement unmatched by any other civilization in human history. America was settled, founded and built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West. Our country is, in this important sense, the most essentially Western nation. For our settler ancestors, the American frontier stretched out as a horizon of infinite possibility. It was here, on this continent, that the West realized its destiny. This, my friends, is why every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints. It was an American who created the Morse telegraph—and later, the telephone—collapsing vast distances into a single instant. It was an American who mapped the human genome, cracking the code of life itself. It was an American who invented the microchip, the modern computer, and the internet, ushering in the digital age. It was an American who gave the world the airplane. And 24 years later, it was an American (from Missouri, I might add) who first traversed the Atlantic Ocean in a single solo flight—a feat the world had dismissed as suicidal. It was an American who broke the sound barrier, who split the atom, who built the first skyscraper. It was an American who shattered all Earthly limits and planted the first human footprints on the moon. It was an American—from Missouri, I might add again—who devised the Hubble Telescope and mapped the heavens. This is who we are. We’re a nation of settlers, explorers, and pioneers—born on the ocean waters that carried the first ships to our shores and forged in the crucible of a wild frontier. Our people tamed a continent, built a civilization from the wilderness, and wrote our nation’s name in history. We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God. All nations die; most are quickly forgotten, confined to footnotes for the ages. But thousands of years from now, when we and our country are long gone, people will still know the name “America” because of what these Americans achieved. The people who built our country were not villains. They were heroes. We can no longer apologize for who we are. I’m a Missouri boy, born and raised. I’m from the state where Lewis and Clark launched their expedition. Where Jesse James lived and Daniel Boone died. The state that launched a thousand wagon trails, carrying American pioneers west to find their destiny. They called St. Louis the “Gateway to the West.” The frontier wasn’t a “legend” or a “myth” for folks where I’m from. It was real. It was in the names, the deeds, the land itself. My ancestors arrived there from Germany in the 1840s, during the first real wave of new European settlers since Missouri became a state in 1821. Back then, Missouri was as far west as you could go. Think about the kinds of people it takes to do that—to build a home at the edge of the known world. Those were the kinds of people our ancestors were. The first settlers in my state were mostly Scots-Irish—a hard, proud, fiercely independent people, forged in the hills of Ulster and the backwoods of Appalachia, ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization. They were the ancestors—as it just so happens—of my friend and our vice president, JD Vance. As the historian David McCullough writes, the Scots-Irish families that first settled Missouri “saw themselves as the true Americans”: Their idol was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory of Tennessee, ‘One-man-­with-­courage-­makes-­majority’ Jackson, the first president from west of the Alleghenies… Their trust was in the Lord and common sense. That they and their forebears had survived at all in backwoods Kentucky—or earlier in upland Virginia and the Carolinas—was due primarily to ‘good, hard sense,’ as they said, and no end of hard work. For some time now, we’ve been taught to be ashamed of these things that defined us—to treat our curiosity, adventurousness, and ambition as a stain on our moral conscience. We’ve been taught that, by settling this continent and building our home here, we committed a world-historical sin, and that we should rue the day that our forefathers arrived in North America, and condemn their vision, their strength, and their will as an expression of something perverse and evil. We saw a funny little example of this just the other month. The Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account posted an image of the famous painting “American Progress”—one of the most iconic illustrations of Manifest Destiny, depicting settlers striding outward to the frontier, with Lady Columbia watching over them from above. The reaction from the Left was swift and hysterical. In the Washington Post, a Princeton history professor declared that the painting glorified “an American invasion of other people’s homelands.” The Independent reported that—according to the “experts”—the painting advanced a “mythic narrative” that “erased the reality” of American westward expansion. The LA Times speculated that it “might be… Nazi propaganda.” Now, just as a matter of historical record, the Indians were perfectly capable of invading, killing and enslaving each other all on their own for centuries before we got here. They attacked, tortured, and brutalized our settlers, just as our settlers surely did the same to them. When we carved out our Manifest Destiny on this continent, it was not because we were less morally righteous, but only because we had more sophisticated tools and methods. But that’s really beside the point. For whatever human flaws one might point to, the American settling of the frontier was an expression of something deeper in the soul of our people. Most people in most places and times in human history lived by the laws of necessity—their thoughts and actions were all governed by mere utility, and nothing more. The value of a thing, for them, lay in what kind of immediate material benefit it could provide. Men worked, fought, built and acted for purposes as narrow as the walls of their own towns and villages: to eat, to reproduce, to survive. They were not interested in knowing what might lie beyond the sunset. They lived, more or less, the exact same way as their ancestors had lived a thousand years before them. That has never been true for us. The American heritage is not a narrative of oppression and evil, but the unfolding story of our people’s pioneer spirit—a spirit that drives us to expand beyond limits, to assert ourselves upon the world. It is a spirit that began on the frontier, but it would soon go on to raise up great cities, cure diseases, discover distant galaxies, create marvels of technology and art, and forge new worlds in its image. We’re not sorry. Why would we be sorry? America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man. On July 4, 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged across our nation, President Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore to address the nation. On our nation’s anniversary, as anarchists looted and defaced and tore down statues and monuments all across the country, the president stood before the granite cliff face and declared: “This monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed.” If you want to know who we are, look no further than the monument that stood behind him. Mount Rushmore took 14 years and hundreds of men to build. They climbed 700 stairs every day to be lowered down on ropes over the cliff face—sometimes in the blazing heat, sometimes in the bitter cold—to carve the faces of our heroes into the side of the great mountain. There was no practical need for any of it. It’s just who we were. We were Americans. We did it because we could. For decades, the people in power sought to turn our past into a repressed memory—something so awful that we would prefer to forget it altogether. They made self-hatred and shame our new civic religion. Let me say this today, as clearly as I can: We are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it. To transform a nation, you have to transform the way it understands itself. In the French Revolution, the radicals abolished the old calendar and began the clock back over at Year One. The radicals of our time want to do the same. It’s why they’re obsessed with controlling speech. They want to rewrite our language itself. When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist. The sculptor who designed Mt. Rushmore intentionally left three extra inches of granite on the surface, so that natural erosion would gradually shape it into its final form over the next 30,000 years. What a confident testament to America. He built it so that Americans thousands of years from now would still look in awe at the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. This fight is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: The apex and the vanguard of Western civilization. A strong, sovereign nation—not just an idea, but a home, belonging to a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny. Thank you. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post SCHMITT: What Is an American? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

UK Totalitarianism Update