Posted on 07/24/2020 8:50:34 AM PDT by karpov
On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western civilization at Warsaw in 2017.
Trump also ordered a federal project called the Garden of National Heroes, mandating the artwork to be classical and “not abstract or modernist.” On the same day, The Washington Post published an article by a professor urging Americans to consider the global legacy of 1776 as furthering “white supremacy.” The Post wasn’t the only one. While major news outlets focused on the evils of America, Trump vowed to defend America’s positive legacy and save George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, the four icons on Mt. Rushmore.
One recent book saw this split coming. The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past by Jarrett Stepman, published in October 2019, argued that this tipping point was coming sooner than one expected.
Trump might have been an unlikely messenger of cultural conservatism, but structural forces would compel this binary because that is the nature of politics during times of Hobbesian social strife. Incidentally, Stepman points out that it was Trump who warned about the slippery slope and argued that reshaping history won’t stop at Confederate monuments, as revolutionary movements have a momentum of their own.
“Trump’s insinuation that activists would turn their attention to the Founders after they were done with Confederates was mocked by many in the media and even some historians on the premise that the difference between the Founders and the Confederates would be obvious to Americans,” Stepman writes. Yet, in recent weeks, statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt were toppled or desecrated
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
During the Republican primaries, I often posted on various sites that Donald Trump was the right man at the right time for our country. Little did I know just how right this assessment was.
I was not on the Trump train. I thought we needed something different. I was wrong. We needed, and still need a fighter.
Ping
One of the reasons we set up www.wildworldofhistory.com and did not go with youtube basing was so that my site/material cannot be deplatformed.
BTW, for what it’s worth, “A Patriot’s History of the United States” is in its 31st printing, and I’m told that it’s selling so fast we’ll go into a 32nd printing this fall.
We are in the fourth edition (known as the “15th Anniversary Edition.”)
Interesting tidbit: I learned that in his first decade after publication, Howard Zinn sold 300,000 copies and had 27 printings of “A People’s History of the United States.” In our first decade (2004-2014) we sold over 330,000 copies and went through 27 printings. This even though we did not have the leftist college profs requiring the book and in an era when reading as a necessity or as a hobby is declining rapidly.
Tidbits like that make me hopeful we’ve got a chance. Congrats!
And good call on setting up to make deplatforming more difficult. Cancel Culture is real. It’s the new Cultural Revolution, or at least a precursor to one.
As did I. Damn, we’re smart.
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