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There is No Future Without Remembering Our Past

What kind of future do we have if we destroy our past?

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We all watched in horror this past summer as radical leftists and anarchists tore down our statues, those monuments that help us remember our past and our history. They are also working overtime to remove true American history from our schools. Why would they do that? What are the ramifications? Simply put, they must destroy our actual past so they can create a fabricated past – one that allows them to use it as a foundation for a radical takeover of America.

PragerU recently released a video by social critic Douglas Murray and he explains what is happening and why in this thought-provoking video (transcript of the video is below). Watch here:

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Transcript:

What kind of future do we have if we destroy our past?

Has anyone who has pulled down a statue of Churchill, Lincoln, or Columbus thought to ask themselves this question?

I doubt it.

The presumption that we can stand in perfect judgment over the lives of historical figures is not merely foolish and unfair, it’s dangerous.

Consider what the statue destroyers are, in effect, saying.

They are saying that people in history should have known what we know.

That’s tantamount to saying, they should have known the future.

This is, of course, absurd.

Yet more and more, people believe it.

Why?

Simple.

It’s what they are taught.

It is the fruit of an education system that long ago prioritized “empathy” over facts; that believes the ultimate point of history is not to learn lessons from it, but to judge it from the pre-ordained left-wing conclusions about such ill-defined concepts as social justice, equity, and tolerance.

Apart from breeding ignorance, this kind of education invites the student (the child, really) to be judge, jury, and executioner over issues that they (and increasingly their teachers) know little or nothing about.

Because no one has bothered to teach them the nuance, complexity, and context that is history.

It also breeds arrogance:

“I know things these people did not know. Therefore, I am better than they were. They have nothing to teach me. In fact, I must teach them.”

And down comes the statue.

A new, “better” history must take the place of the old one.

In America this impulse has culminated in The 1619 Project — an initiative started by The New York Times and now in schools everywhere — which attempts to make the arrival of the first African slaves into the American colonies the foundational date of the American republic.

1776? The American Revolution? In the new history that was just about protecting the Founders’ slave interests. These men — some of the most remarkable humans to have lived at any time — are to be understood simply by their attitude toward this one issue.

The 1619 Project seeks to portray America — the freest, most prosperous nation in world history — as exceptional only in one respect: insofar as being exceptionally bad.

This is a purposefully destructive view of history. It is one intended to pull down rather than build up.

A healthy, humane, and – in the truest sense – liberal mind does not view history as a mere playpen for our moral judgment. It recognizes that people in the past acted on the information they had, just as we do today.

Sure, it would have been nice if the Founders of America had abolished slavery in its Constitution. Some, in fact, tried very hard to do so. But had they been unwilling to compromise, there would be no Constitution and no United States. All the sacrifices of the Revolution would have been lost. So, a compromise balancing the interests of the northern states and the southern states was reached.

It would have been nice if the Japanese had surrendered before atom bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they didn’t. President Truman had to make his decision based on the information he had at the time — that an Allied invasion of the Japanese home island would cost at least a million lives, both American and Japanese.

Of course, the woke mind abhors these subtleties. It knows that it is right and that everybody before our current age — year zero — should have known better. Anyway, they were all bigots. Why should we give them any benefit of the doubt, let alone admire them or learn from them?

Well, maybe because, like everyone else, the great figures of the past did the best they could under the circumstances in which they found themselves. That their efforts largely succeeded is why we are here.

When someone tried to give Sir Isaac Newton credit for his world-changing discoveries in physics, the great man demurred. He said he was only able to achieve what he did by standing on the shoulders of the “giants” who went before him.

Today’s Left rejects Newton’s humility. It doesn’t believe that we stand on anyone’s shoulders. It imagines that if we could only liberate ourselves from the dusty, misguided, and misinformed ideas of the past then we might see further, fly still higher.

This view is wrong.

Divorced from our past we would be utterly lost. We would not rise but plummet. We would be forced to start again with far less insight, and with far poorer examples as our guides.

Ironically, thanks to the statue destroyers, the great figures of the past have never looked greater.

I’m Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds, for Prager University.

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Politics

How Hating White People Became the New National Sport

Anti-white books have been forced upon millions of intimidated white employees and upon vulnerable children

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Reviewing an advanced copy of Ed Brodow’s The War on Whites: How Hating White People Became the New National Sport is a major education. The author makes it abundantly clear that amidst political correctness and the cancel culture, Americans are afraid to discuss the issue of race.

Not Remaining Quiet

Anyone seeking to express honest views on the race problem is labeled a racist if he is white, or an Uncle Tom, if he is black. Most people simply keep quiet.

Ed Brodow has elected not to remain quiet and his new book, The War on Whites, explores the truth about such provocative topics as systemic racism, white supremacy, and diversity.

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The War on Whites unmasks what Brodow calls the “anti-white racial inquisition that is poisoning America.” While we are accustomed to defining racism as discrimination aimed exclusively at black people, Brodow expands the definition to encompass discrimination against whites, which he says is just as onerous as discrimination against blacks or anyone else.

Code Language

What the Left calls “anti-racism” is merely code language for racism against white people. Trashing whites, he says, has become an acceptable part of American life.

Brodow expounds upon how whites are being demonized, marginalized, stereotyped, denigrated, and suppressed at every turn. “We have reached the point where legions dislike white people,” he says. “It’s not just people of color. Even white people dislike white people. It is open season on whites and, as strange as it might seem, large segments of the white population are all for it.” Many gullible whites are ashamed to be white and apologize at every turn..

The War on Whites exposes the insidious reality of diversity training. These popular trainings are now a multi-billion-dollar industry. They fail, however, to create more diversity, Brodow says. They are all about racial indoctrination, not racial sensitivity. Their actual purpose is to suppress white people.

Undo Who You Are

Training sponsored by the City of Seattle and the Coca-Cola Company are typical of programs that demand white employees “undo their whiteness.” The media do not report this, yet, if black people were required to “undo their blackness,” he says, riots would ensue.

Citing the opinions of leading black thinkers – Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Bob Woodson, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, and John McWhorter – the author offers a convincing argument that systemic racism and white privilege are myths invented to demonize whites and foment racial division. “Systemic racism no longer exists in the United States,” he says. “Individual instances of racism are occurring and always will occur, against both blacks and whites, but to suggest that racism is institutionalized ignores the progress of the past 60 years.”

Rather than exhibiting systemic racism, white Americans have bent over backwards to make life better for blacks and other minorities. With the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, he says, “whites made it possible for blacks and other minorities to become full partners in the American Dream.

For the Good of Everyone

White power was unchallenged up to that time. Yet willingly, unilaterally, they relinquished it. No one forced them. They acted because it was the right thing to do. 58 years later, what are they receiving in return? Contempt, hatred, and intolerance.”

Brodow critiques Joe Biden’s executive order on equity. Biden, he says, is attempting to replace America’s belief in equality with an illegal policy that marginalizes whites. The objective of equity is not equality of opportunity, but rather equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same income, job success, house, neighborhood, etc.

Biden’s policy, Brodow says, will ensure that all new federal employees will be selected based upon their skin color so that preference can be given to non-whites.

Antiracist Literature That is Racist

Brodow analyzes popular racist literature exemplified by Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. These anti-white books have been forced upon millions of intimidated white employees and upon vulnerable children. Brodow says that the purpose of White Fragility is make whites feel guilty about being white.

DiAngelo asserts that if you are white and doubt that you are a racist, it is proof you are a racist. Kendi’s book advocates that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” DiAngelo and Kendi, both of whom hate white people, demand that all whites should confess their racism.

Actually, anyone who is coerced into reading either or both of these books should read The War on Whites.

The Whole Story

At a time when national unity, cooperation, and understanding are needed more than ever, vast segments of our population are doing all they can to demonize white people. The War on Whites tells the whole story.

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News

Mainstream Media: Intentionally and Diabolically Unfair and Unbalanced

All pretense that the mainstream media strives for objectivity is gone

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by Jay DeLancey and Jeff Davidson

The grandest mistake the American populace committed in the last half-century was assuming that our media was even somewhat fair and balanced. Likewise proceeding in the last two decades as if the Internet giants had no dog in the political arena proved to be a mistake of historical proportions.

Today because so many people, still, are conditioned as such, the mere fact that say, a CNN, has a website prompts some people to believe that the network have something of value to offer. Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, whose focus is classics and military history, says that the New York Times is “a shell of what it used to be.”

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Nothing Objective to Offer

The paper always leaned to the left, since it’s founding, but it did an intermittently semi-decent job in reporting the facts. The Times sent their reporters out to the streets to do hard-core reporting. The mission was to gather relevant data, identify sources, talk to people, find eye witnesses, speak to bonafide experts, attain corroboration, and then when they were sure of what they had written, submit the story or feature.

Their articles probably never represented a 50-50 balance – perhaps 55-45 or 60-40 in favor of the left. Today, no rational media observer would contend that the balance is 70-30, or even 80-20. Study after study reveals, say, in the case of covering Donald Trump, that 92% of all features are negative, and that is not to say the remaining 8% are positive. Mostly, they’re neutral.

If you are a Trump or DeSantis supporter, or a Republican running for Senate or the House of Representatives, for governor in your state, or for any other position of prominence, you simply cannot expect a fair shake from the press, nationally, and in most cases locally. Indeed, you’re likely to be demonized, endlessly, over issues for which Democrats receive a free pass.

Compromised to the Breaking Point

The New York Times and The Washington Post of old, as biased as they might’ve been, at least offered some semblance of up-to-date information, with facts and figures when they had them, and timely reporting as situations unfolded. Hansen remarked that today the people who run these newspapers are trading on the decades of hard work and the reputations built up over more than 100 years.

Those who put in the seed work are dead and gone and thus, obviously, have no say about what’s going on today. The Times and the Post, in less than a generation, are destroying their own reputations. The people who currently run these ‘news’ organizations are dragging them down at warp speed and don’t even recognize the damage that they are doing.

By 2030, what is now a shell of an organization will be less so, and it wouldn’t be too wild to predict that the Times could totally morph into something else. The Post is not far behind in devising its own demise.

The Pretense is Gone

Each of the countless newspapers that feed off of these two publishing giants suffer as well. All such pretense that the mainstream media strives for objectivity is gone. The good news, if you could call it that, is everyone on the right is now vitally all aware that this has happened.

Those who strive for integrity in elections, those who are on the right, and those who are routinely demonized by the left, understand what’s occurring to the nth degree. It’s not fair, but to know what you face is a benefit of sorts.

 

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