Category: Culture

My generation is being raised to hate America — it’s time to stand up for our history.
You can’t love what you don’t know. When young Americans say they aren’t proud of their country, it proves our education system has failed them.

I gathered with the entire student body of Wyoming Catholic College on Sept. 17, 2019, for a mandatory celebration of Constitution Day. We began with the Pledge of Allegiance, witnessed a lively panel discussion between professors on the history and modern relevance of America’s founding principles, and concluded by singing patriotic songs.

If you are a student at a typical American university, that description probably sounds foreign to anything you have experienced. Anti-Americanism has spread across college campuses like a wildfire, igniting rage and resentment against anything perceived as oppressive — even the American flag. As a result, most universities would likely shy away from a celebration of our nation’s founding in favor of more “inclusive” events.

And that’s why university officials have been among the first to lash out at President Donald Trump’s still vague calls for “patriotic education” in our schools.

Ashamed of America?
In a Gallup poll this June, only 63% of U.S. adults say they are either “extremely proud” or “very proud” to be American, the lowest level of patriotism ever recorded since Gallup first asked the question in 2001. Among members of my generation, the youngest surveyed, patriots are in the minority. Only 4 out of 10 respondents ages 18-34 claim to be extremely or very proud of being American. Continue reading “”

Seeing this reminded me:
There I was, in Basic Training at Fort Lost-In-The-Woods Leonard Wood Missouri, with field training areas right in the middle of the Mark Twain National Forest.
The Drill Sergeants already knew I was a ‘local boy’, so they made advantageous use of their assets.
Out on the week long bivouac, my Platoon Sergeant, a near professional grade comedian from Jamaica by the name of Batiste, pulled me aside for a short special assignment.
“You’re the one from around here, right?”
“Yes Sergeant”
“Okay, you take Privates Bronx and Brooklyn out and show them what Poison Ivy is!”
I think to myself that I had the same assignment when I was a Patrol Leader in Boys Scouts years before and took the 1st year kids at summer camp out to show them what nastiness the Ozarks woods had in store for them if they weren’t careful and ran out of toilet paper.
I then realized the only difference between the Boys Scouts and the Army was Scouting had adult supervision.
While showing the two Noo Yawkers that the sick call dealing green leafy  stuff was literally just a few feet away, one pipes up with a very serious
“Are there really bears out in these woods?”
Having a good idea who probably cracked himself up telling them this one, I  simply told them that yes, there had been confirmed reports of bears in this part of Missouri woodlands, but they didn’t need to worry unless the bear was so hungry coming out of hibernation (as it was springtime)  it would see them as food.
Which didn’t help matters one bit.

Missouri black bear hunting framework is approved

A black bear hunting season for 2021 in Jefferson County is one step closer to reality, but for those concerned about bears or hunters here, they probably need not worry about either at this point. If management goals are met, locals may never have to fret about the fate of neighborhood bruins.
Approval of the hunting season for 2021 has been a long process, and it is still pending one more public comment period. Earlier this month the state Conservation Commission approved the framework of a season, and that information will be posted in the public record for comments to be collected from Oct. 16 through Nov. 14.

BLUF:
It is fatuous to dismiss concerns over the rinsing-out of religious freedom as the overwrought fretting of culture warriors. The commitments in the Democratic platform are plain, and there can be no reasonable doubt that those commitments will be given legislative and regulatory effect by a Democratic administration in league with a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives and a Democratically-controlled Senate.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: BLEACHED, BLANCHED, AND RINSED OUT

Father Richard John Neuhaus put two Big Ideas into play in American public life. The first was that the pro-life movement (of which Neuhaus was an intellectual leader) was the natural heir to the moral convictions that had animated the classic civil rights movement (in which Neuhaus was also deeply involved). The second was that the First Amendment to the Constitution did not contain two “religions clauses” but one religion clause, in which “no establishment” (i.e., no official, state-sanctioned Church) was intended to serve the “free exercise” of religion. Neither of those Big Ideas is welcome in today’s Democratic Party, in which Neuhaus (then a Lutheran pastor) was once a congressional candidate, and of which he remained a registered member until his death in January 2009.

Those who point out that the 2020 Democratic platform has the most radical pro-abortion plank in American history, and that the same platform promises to hollow out religious freedom in service to lifestyle libertinism, risk being labeled “culture warriors.” Well, so be it. “Culture warrior” is snark masquerading as thought. Facts are facts. And one of the sad facts of this unhappy political moment is that Neuhaus’s effort to rescue the Democratic Party through two Big Ideas was frustrated because those two ideas got linked—and then rejected, thanks to the corruption of rights-talk that preceded, made possible, and was then accelerated by Roe v. Wade and its abortion license. Continue reading “”

Trump administration announces ‘largest’ historic expansion of hunting, fishing on 2.3 million public acres

SAGINAW, MI – Continuing the Trump Administration’s unprecedented efforts to increase recreational access on public lands, U.S. Secretary of the Interior David L. Bernhardt announced today at the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge the historic opening and expansion of over 850 hunting and fishing opportunities across more than 2.3 million acres at 147 national wildlife refuges and national fish hatcheries. This rule is the single largest expansion of hunting and fishing opportunities by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) in history.

“On the heels of President Trump signing the most significant conservation and recreation funding in US history, providing nearly $20 billion over the next 10 years to fix and conserve the American people’s public lands, the Trump Administration has now made an additional 2.3 million acres accessible to new hunting and fishing opportunities,” said Secretary Bernhardt. “We continue to take significant actions to further conservation initiatives and support sportsmen and women who are America’s true conservationists.”

The final rule opens or expands 859 hunting and fishing opportunities (an opportunity is defined as one species on one field station in one state). On top of last year’s expansion of 1.4 million acres for new or expanded hunting and fishing opportunities, this proposal would bring the Trump Administration’s total expansion to over 4 million acres nationwide. Continue reading “”

Millenarian Mobs
An old and dangerous story.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness. Such confessions, however, have a particular history of tragedy in Christian civilization. Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them. Today’s self-purifiers, arms outstretched in supine submission, who then countenance violence against persons, property, and cultural symbols, are mostly unwitting protagonists in yet another chapter of a hoary history.

Although Judeo-Christianity teaches that perfection is not of this world, nevertheless the Old Testament (see the Book of Daniel) and the New (Revelation, chapter 20) refer tangentially to a final state in human affairs in which all evil will have been defeated and the virtuous will have triumphed over their enemies. In the Book of Revelation, this final stage is to last for a thousand years. Jesus Christ’s warnings notwithstanding, people have hearkened periodically to “false prophets” who brandish the prospect of ultimate vengeance over evil. Between the 11th and 16th centuries, any number of movements of this sort used ritual confessions to cleanse themselves, and energized the mobs that waged Europe’s bloodiest wars of that age. Thereafter, though such movements secularized their terms, they fit into the same moral and intellectual categories. Now as ever, they are about destroying civilization in the name of altering the human condition. Continue reading “”

The humiliation of Western history.
Those who zealously seek to pollute the past are very much devoted to gaining total cultural hegemony in the present.

The most important issue at stake in the culture war is who controls the narrative through which society understands itself. At present, those controlling the narrative appear to be committed to reorganising society’s historical memory, and disputing and delegitimising its ideals, from liberty to equality. Take Netflix, for example. It is dominated by programmes, like Dear White People and Explained: The Racial Wealth Gap, that recast the Western way of life and Western history as irredeemably malevolent……….

Unlike previous initiatives designed to encourage people to look critically at uncomfortable truths about their past, the 1619 Project offers a ‘take it or leave it’ version of history. Its aim is not to criticise existing historical narratives about the US. It is to negate and even morally annihilate the very foundation on which the US was built. As the NYT put it: ‘Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.’

In rejecting the founding ideals of liberty and equality as false, the 1619 Project strips America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, of every shred of moral authority. It also erases the profound contribution the American Revolution made to the development of the Western ideal of freedom.

The 1619 Project does not offer any new insights into the past. Rather, it seeks to contaminate the past and render it toxic. Indeed, one of the main contributors to the project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, admits that its principal objective is not to shed light on the past, but to undermine the moral authority of the present. ‘I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not history’, she writes. ‘It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and

Unconfirmed picture appears to show workers welding door of warehouse filled with chemical; report says authorities warned of dangers for years.

ImageImage

This photo is making the rounds this evening on Telegram. Appears to show numerous parcels of bagged Ammonium Nitrate. Was going to write this off , but those are the exact same warehouse windows.

and also why they store explosives next to a shopping area with no regard for the possible ‘negative’ results.

Why Arabs Lose Wars

Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era….

It is a truism of military life that an army fights as it trains, and so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs in training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat…………

Indifference to Safety

In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly) safety-conscious Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to casualties and show a seemingly lackadaisical approach to training safety.

AUGUST IS NATIONAL SHOOTING SPORTS MONTH

While many of us practice our Second Amendment right through regular shooting, hunting, reloading and other gun-related fun each month, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) established August as National Shooting Sports Month in 2016.

Originally created as a promotion for retailers and ranges to attract new customers during the traditional summer slump, it’s become a celebration among gun owners with an emphasis on introducing new shooters to the industry, teaching firearms safety and sharing a collective love of shooting sports. Continue reading “”

The long way home: a 2,000-mile road trip in an untested ’79 Pontiac Trans Am

All photos by Mike Musto

The Great American Road Trip is a wonderful thing. It allows you to meet people you’d never otherwise encounter, see things you’d never otherwise see, and experience this great country of ours in ways that only open-road travel can provide.

Today’s new cars are forgettable. They’re roving jellybeans connected to the world via technology that most owners will never understand. They’re tracked by all manner of computer, recording our every moment and location. In short, new vehicles remove the one thing that the automobile was meant to provide from its inception: Freedom. Some will say it’s foolish to run 2,000 miles in an untested classic, but I disagree. In my mind, it’s about the adventure of doing something few are willing to attempt and getting lost in a vehicle that can’t be found.

Antifa Is the Natural Product of Our Educational System.

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Antifa is an excruciating public manifestation of a very deep infection that has metastasized throughout our society from the schools.

It will only get worse if we don’t change our educational system—pronto.

Ironically, the beginnings of this change are one of the few, perhaps the only, good things to emanate from the pandemic.

With schools shut or online, many are evaluating whether the system serves our young people, practically (in terms of careers) or ideologically.

What kind of education is it when 95 percent of college professors vote Democrat, and mostly left Democrat at that?

Viewpoint diversity, anyone? Shall I home school my child? Shall I send him or her to college so they can come back Thanksgiving in an Antifa t-shirt and accuse me of being a capitalist pig when I just spent fifty grand for their tuition?

Something is wrong with this picture.

Change is undoubtedly coming. As a wise man once said, “Faster, please.” I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of mush brains throwing fire bombs at police stations.

 

Read the whole thing at your convenience

4 French Revolution Trends That Have Started In The United States
The bloody and terrible French Revolution featured attacks on religion, rewriting history, toppling statues, and abandoning tradition. Sound familiar?

Many recently celebrated Bastille Day, the day French radical revolutionaries stormed a prison, released its prisoners, and brutally murdered the warden. That fateful day, now more than 200 years ago, set in motion a revolution that led to bloodshed and a devastating loss of liberty in France. It also set the precedent for many future revolutions that took an unbelievable toll on human life.

Contemporary British politician Edmund Burke lamented that French Revolutionaries could have repaired the walls of their government and society instead of tearing them down. In an attempt to found an egalitarian utopia, the French Revolutionaries tore down almost everything that was traditionally French. An eerily similar purge is taking place in America.

To found their society anew, the French Revolutionaries created a new education system, a new calendar, a new system of measurement, and a series of new public symbols and festivals. Most forebodingly, they did their best to cleanse France of religion in all of its forms, opting instead to pay homage to the god of Reason.

1. Taking Control of the Calendar and Holidays
…….Now, there are calls to cancel Independence Day, change the name of Thanksgiving to “Thanks-taking,” and eliminate Columbus Day. Presidents Day, which is George Washington’s birthday, may also be on life-support. But don’t worry, new holidays such as “Non-Binary Day“ are being ginned up………….

2. Tearing Down Statues
All across the country statues of American historical figures have lost their heads. In Boston, a statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded, as were four Confederate statues in Portsmouth Virginia……….

3. Seizing Language and Education
It’s a dark omen when language itself starts to be canceled. Classic children’s books are being banned because some on the left don’t like their language………….

4. Violent Hostility Towards Religion
Traditional religion in the United States has also come under attack by the modern radical left. And, while things haven’t yet got to the level of the French Revolution, the current anti-Christian climate does not bode well for the future……………..

If the problem was all of those ‘out of state guns’ you have to wonder why those states aren’t as violent as Chicago is (and they aren’t).
As Bill Whittle said 5 years ago. “Maybe it’s the people holding the guns” and …’because the place has been a poorly run criminal mecca for decades.’

The Chicago Gun Myth

Politicians blame out-of-state sellers, but the real problem lies at home.
The tragically incompetent mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union this weekend to deflect attention from the horror show unfolding in her city by blaming interlopers for its spiking murder rate: “We are being inundated with guns from states that have virtually no gun control, no background checks, no ban on assault weapons — that is hurting cities like Chicago.”

Although these accusations have leveled by Chicago politicians for decades now, they are a myth.

For one thing, there is no state in the nation with “virtually no gun control” or “no background checks.” Every time anyone in the United States purchases a gun from a federal firearms licensee (FFL) — a gun store, a gun show, it doesn’t matter — the seller runs a background check on the buyer through the NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) database. In some cases, the FFL checks to see if the buyer has passed a background check via a state-issued concealed-carry permit. In states that allow individual private sales, it is illegal to knowingly sell to anyone who you believe is obtaining a firearm for criminal purposes.

Those who cross state lines to buy guns undergo the same background check, and the sale is processed by an FFL in the buyer’s home state. The exact same laws apply to all online sales.

Studies of those imprisoned on firearms charges show that most often they obtain their weapons by stealing them or buying them in black markets. A smaller percentage get them from family members or friends. Continue reading “”

No victory is secured by kneeling to the Enemy. 

JULY 26, 2020
FROM THE PASTOR
As a psychosis, “self-mutilation syndrome” is rooted in self-loathing and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Whole cultures can be afflicted with a similar compulsion to injure themselves. Nowadays it is called a “cancel culture.” To topple statues and burn churches is a metaphor for self-loathing rather than reason.

In their modern aesthetic recklessness, nations begin to disdain what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” Even people who do not read much still can see much, and they can see that destruction of great buildings is the grammar of self-mutilation.

There was a sigh of relief when the French government announced that the cathedral of Paris would be restored exactly as it had been. But you need only look at some recent architectural horrors, like the Centre Pompidou, to appreciate that the preservation of Notre Dame was a close call. Consider the 1925 Plan Voisin of Le Corbusier for replacing central Paris with buildings that looked like refrigerators, to see the fabric of a society without a soul.

The burning of the cathedral of Nantes was reported with practically no mention of the winter of 1793-1794, when over 14,000 Catholic counterrevolutionaries were slaughtered in that region. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the sadistic officer of the Revolution, mocked his own name by drowning more than four thousand priests, nuns, mothers and infants in boats designed for what he called “Revolutionary Baptisms.”

At the same time, another Jean-Baptiste, Gobel, was made Archbishop of Paris in place of Antoine de Juigné, provided he “take the knee” to the Revolution.
All atheistic revolutionaries kill their fomenters: Just as the architect of the Terror, Robespierre, was guillotined by his Terror, so were Carrier and Gobel. In a kind of cultural doppelganger today, writers for our most “liberal” periodicals are being fired for not being pure enough for the anarchists who have made their moral impurity into a religion.

Since the late 1960s, disciples of Le Corbusier among the liturgical “wreckovaters” denuded churches as arrogantly as the cults of theanthropy in the French Revolution. Convents subscribing to ephemeral “renewal” have now become nursing homes for women who once thought that labyrinths could be stairways to Heaven.

We are now in a spiritual combat as monumental as World II. In 1944, when the Nazis demanded that the Americans surrender during the Battle of the Bulge, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe replied, “Nuts!” The vernacularism was unfamiliar to the Germans, and so another message was sent: “Du kannst zum Teufel gehen.”—You can go to the Devil.

No victory is secured by kneeling to the Enemy. Those who do, will be the next in line for the guillotine. The Holy Church has the best translation for “Nuts” when proclaimed in defiance of the Anti-Christ: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty…”

Faithfully yours in Christ,
Father George W. Rutler

It’s a problem if they bring along their big city proggie politics

Big City Exodus: What That May Mean For Gun Rights

As things currently stand, there are assumptions you can make about people’s gun politics based on where they live. For example, if they live in a large city, they’re more likely to be anti-gun. By contrast, those in rural American tend to support the Second Amendment.

This is a generalization, of course. There are pro-gun folks in big cities and anti-gun folks in small communities. However, for the most part, these generalizations are accurate based on how people tend to vote in these places.

Yet something odd is taking place. It seems many in our large cities are bailing for the country life.

Continue reading “”

TRUMP PRESSES ATTACK ON BIDEN’S WAR ON THE SUBURBS

Yesterday, we asked whether President Trump will make Joe Biden’s war on the suburbs an issue in this campaign. Today, Stanley Kurtz reports that Trump already has.

In a speech Wednesday in Atlanta on “Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure,” the president emphasized his determination to eliminate President Obama’s radical and legally baseless rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). Trump stressed Biden’s determination to “hold hostage billions in federal Surface Transportation Grants for states and localities unless the states and local suburban communities abolish single-family zoning rules.”

Holding this money hostage is Biden’s special contribution to the war on the suburbs. It goes beyond the already oppressive AFFH rule. As Stanley explains:

Under the original rule, localities could at least opt out of their HUD grants — and thus out of federal control — even if at the cost of millions of dollars. But what suburb can afford to cut itself off from state road repairs? With that addition, Biden’s plan truly constitutes a war on suburban independence.

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Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Detroit, plus Seattle and Portland.
Again, what is the common denominator? demoncrap administration

Amid spike in crime, a question of who owns the streets.
Atlanta and several other U.S. cities are seeing a spike in violent crime as police activity declines. In communities where trust in police has collapsed, how is public safety maintained?

The barricades were set up within sight of the Wendy’s where an Atlanta police officer killed Rayshard Brooks last month. According to local reports, they had been there before, set up by civilians armed with semiautomatic weapons, deciding who would be allowed to pass. Residents had asked the vigilantes to leave but were ignored. A member of the City Council had been trying for days to defuse the situation.

When Secoriea Turner’s mother encountered the blockade on her way home, she decided to do a U-turn. That’s when the men opened fire, fatally wounding the 8-year-old girl.

Thirty-one people were shot across the city over that July Fourth weekend, as the homicide rate doubled over the previous year. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency in the city. But similar spikes have been seen in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit.

Continue reading “”

6 Ways Leftism Acts Like A Religion
Leftism has transformed from an obscure cult into a dominant religion in our country. The progressive promised land is here now.

Conservative commentators have been mocked for years for describing leftism as a new religion of sorts. Since 2016, it has become clear that the modern left was determined to prove us right.

What we have witnessed unfold in this country over the last few years, and have seen increase exponentially as the 2020 election comes near, especially with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement, is an expression of religious zealotry so widespread, unforgiving, and violent that it might have made the Puritan governors of 17th-century Massachusetts worry they were being outdone.

Leftism is not a political ideology anymore. It is a full-fledged religion complete with tithing, penance, forced confessions, iconoclasm, internet inquisitions, public rituals, excommunication, heavily policed virtues, sacred texts, seminaries, and online auto-de-fes.

The proof is too plentiful to ignore. Here are the signs that we’re truly confronting a theocracy of totalitarian religious extremists.

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