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Tonight's the night Joe Biden couldn't wait for. Probably because he knows his only way of getting out of this election is for Trump to completely crush him in real time. Believe it!
Post your memes as well!
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BREAKING: Biden Reportedly Refusing to Allow Search for Electronic Earpiece Before Debate
On Tuesday morning the Trump campaign requested a new rule for the first
presidential debate: that a third party inspect both candidates for
electronic devices or transmitters. President Trump had already
consented to such an inspection, and the Biden campaign had reportedly
agreed to this days ago, but, Ebony Bowden of the New York Post reported moments ago that they are now declining.
NEW: Joe Biden’s campaign agreed to an inspection for electronic ear pieces at tonight’s debate several days ago but are now declining, a source familiar tells me.
The Trump campaign has since confirmed this flip-flop.
“Joe Biden’s handlers several days ago agreed to a pre-debate
inspection for electronic earpieces but today abruptly reversed
themselves and declined,” Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the
Trump campaign, said in a statement. “Biden’s handlers have asked for
multiple breaks during the debate, which President Trump doesn’t need,
so we have rejected that request. On top of the refusal to take a drug
test, it seems pretty obvious that the Biden team is looking for any
safety net they can find in the hours leading up to the debate.”
Joe Biden’s handlers several days ago agreed to a pre-debate inspection for electronic earpieces but today abruptly reversed themselves & declined. Biden asked for multiple breaks during the debate, which President Trump doesn’t need, so we have rejected that request.
The story takes place, inevitably, in
Italy. On Monday, Deutsche Bank agreed to lend 27.5 million euros to
Ambrosi, a cheese producer from Lombardy, by accepting as a bank
guarantee a stock of 125,000 Parmesan and Grana Padano cheeses. This is a
first in the history of the German bank. On the other hand, such loan
guarantees have been in place for a long time on the other side of the
Alps.
«As the largest foreign bank in Italy, we have close relationships with many export companies in the country, explained a spokesperson for Deutsche Bank whose remarks were reported by the daily Handelsblatt . We want to help our customers to secure and develop their business, especially during the current coronavirus crisis. ”
90 million euros of cheese
Deutsche Bank has therefore granted a
loan of almost 30 million euros which should allow Giuseppe Ambrosi, the
director of the cheese group, to build a new maturation plant for the
production of Parmesan and Grana Padano. It is no coincidence that the
bank accepted these cooked Italian pressed cheeses as collateral.
Indeed, according to the Handelsblatt, they are valued between
550 and 740 euros per unit, for a total stock of 70 to 90 million euros.
In addition, recalls the German daily, Parmesan is a standardized food,
easy to sell and its conservation is long.
Certainly, for Deutsche Bank such a
guarantee is a first. But for others, it’s a business model. Indeed, the
Italian regional bank Credito Emiliano has followed a similar system
since 1953. In addition to the bank guarantee, Credito Emiliano even
takes care of the storage and control of the refining process on behalf
of its clients. The Parmesans which serve as collateral thus age in two
of the bank’s warehouses.
OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 10:44 AM PT – Tuesday, September 29, 2020
The Trump administration announced its latest step to reopen the country amid nationwide coronavirus shutdowns.
During
a White House press briefing Monday, President Trump said he’s sending
out millions of rapid COVID-19 tests to the states. The President
stressed, governors should use the point-of-care tests to help schools
and economies in their states reopen as soon as possible.
“100
million rapid point of care tests will be given to states and
territories to support efforts to reopen their economies and schools
immediately, and fast as they can,” he stated.
President Trump also noted an additional 50 million will be sent to more vulnerable populations.
“50
million tests will go to protect the most vulnerable communities, which
we’ve always promised to do,” he continued. “Including 18 million for
nursing homes, 15 million for assisted living facilities, 10 million for
home health and hospice care, hospice care agencies, and nearly 1
million for historically black colleges and universities and also tribal
nation colleges.”
The move comes as coronavirus cases are expected to rise in coming
months as the weather starts to cool down. However, Vice President Mike
Pence said Americans shouldn’t be worried because of the U.S.’s advanced
testing capabilities. The tests are being supplied by Abbott
Laboratories and return results within about 15-minutes.
“This
generally will be done by a healthcare provider, but it can be done
supervised — its this easy,” stated Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant
secretary of Health and Human Services. “…the adhesive is pulled off and
you wait 15-minutes and that is the test.”
According to reports, it’s likely to take a few months to get the rapid tests in the hands of all governors.
While the media indulges fantasies about right-wing electoral foul play, the truth reveals numerous left-wing attempts to subvert the electoral process.
Among Democrats and their media allies, it is an article of faith that Donald Trump is plotting to steal the 2020 election. In August, Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate that Trump was planning to subvert the U.S. Postal Service to prevent ballots from reaching their destinations in time. Amanda Marcotte has a lengthy essay in Salon, detailing all the nefarious means Trump and his supporters will employ to this end.
Vanity Fair recently detailed the planning Democrats are undertaking to thwart Trump’s plots. The Washington Post even ran a news article entitled “Here’s One Way Trump Could Try to Steal the Election, Voting Experts Say.” As with anything the left says about conservatives and Republicans, it’s always useful to bear in mind one important thing: Almost every allegation the left makes against the right is projection.
“Accuse your enemies of what you are doing.” Some variation of this quote has been attributed to leftists from Karl Marx to Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Goebbels to Saul Alinsky. The quote’s origin may be unknowable, but the substance is perfectly accurate.
While the media indulges the left’s paranoid fantasies about right-wing electoral subversion, the actual history of 2020 reveals a vast array of attempts by Democrats and left-wing activists to undermine the electoral process. Democrats got the ball rolling in March when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D. Calif., attempted to force her 1,400-page coronavirus bill on the country. Buried beneath all the pork spending were provisions that would have mandated a national system of vote-by-mail — with all the fraud, corruption, and sheer incompetence that would entail.
Pelosi sought to combine this with legalized “ballot harvesting,” allowing third parties to collect ballots, fill them out, and deliver them to polling places — essentially, an invitation to corruption. House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., called the crisis “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” While, thankfully, the bill went nowhere, it was a foretaste of what unfolded in the months to come.
Three months before the November election, and without any input from the state’s chief election official, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) and the Democrat-controlled legislature enacted a law mandating ballots to be mailed to every voter. The legislation also legalizes ballot harvesting in the state. Democrats and Republicans on the North Carolina Board of Elections reached an agreement to loosen mail-in ballot restrictions, only to have both board Republicans resign in protest, claiming they had been deceived about the agreement by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein (D).
In Texas, Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins, a Democrat, went to court to win permission to mail ballots to every voter in the county (Houston is located in Harris County). A lower court granted the request, but the Texas Supreme Court has stayed the order, and the case is now pending before that court. Also in Texas, Mi Familia Vota and the Texas NAACP have filed a lawsuit alleging that Texas election law violates the voting right of non-whites during a pandemic.
In Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit seeking to loosen provisions of Alabama law designed to prevent election fraud in absentee ballots, such as the requirements that absentee ballots are notarized or signed in the presence of two witnesses and that absentee voters include a copy of their photo ID.
Florida law stipulates that convicted felons can regain voting rights, but they must pay various fees, fines, and restitution first as part of discharging their obligations to society. The American Civil Liberties Union, Florida NAACP, and the League of Women Voters of Florida challenged this law. To date, both the Florida Supreme Court and the federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have upheld it.
In response, failed Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg raised millions to pay these fees for tens of thousands of felons, a move that has prompted the Florida attorney general to request an investigation of whether Bloomberg violated Florida election law.
Pennsylvania was already facing election chaos after the legalization of “no-excuse” mail-in voting triggered a wave of resignations of election officials. Democrat lawsuits will only make it worse. Under Pennsylvania law, mailed ballots must be received by election day in order to be counted. The Pennsylvania Democratic Party sued to relax this provision.
Ultimately, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with the Democratic Party on loosening the deadline restrictions. Also, while they failed in a similar attempt to legalize ballot harvesting, Democratic operatives are now focused on another state Supreme Court ruling: ballots received without the proper privacy envelope (so-called “naked ballots”) must be thrown out. Similarly, in Wisconsin, the state Democratic Party is suing to relax state election laws.
Finally, my home state of Michigan has not been immune to Democratic election shenanigans. In 2018, Michiganders elected Wayne State University Law School Dean Jocelyn Benson as our secretary of state. Benson literally wrote the book on the importance of state-level chief elections officials.
Citing coronavirus concerns, Benson ordered the mailing of absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in Michigan. Although the move was upheld in court, it remains dubious, as the “Michigan Election Officials’ Manual” stipulates that absentee ballot applications should only be mailed upon the oral or written request of the voter. A similar move by county-level election officials a few years earlier was rejected by a Michigan court.
In a Sept. 6 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Benson warned, “We should be prepared for this to be closer to an election week as opposed to an election day.” Twelve days later, the other shoe dropped. Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens undertook a massive, unilateral rewriting of Michigan election law.
Stephens struck down the law requiring mailed ballots to be received by election day. Instead, she announced any ballots postmarked by Nov. 2 and received up to 14 days after the election would be counted. Stephens’s ruling also legalizes ballot harvesting, previously banned under Michigan law.
Neither Benson, a named defendant in the suit, nor Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), plan to appeal the decision. One day earlier, in response to a lawsuit from leftist super-PAC Priorities USA, a federal district judge overturned Michigan’s 125-year-old ban on hiring drivers to transport voters to the polls.
Forget about the fevered dreams of “blue-check” journalists and Democratic party operatives. While they conjure and propagate conspiracy theories, they and their friends are guilty of a vast array of efforts to subvert the will of the people and their elected representatives, create chaos and confusion on election day, and facilitate massive election irregularities in critical swing states all over the country. Never forget: nearly everything the left says about the right is projection.
The nomination of Judge Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court is likely to set off the ugliest political fight we’ve seen since, well, the last Supreme Court confirmation battle.
The Democrats are poised to show America who they really are. Despite the promises of the Biden campaign, the Democrats are not the party of moderation, decency, and respect. The nomination of Judge Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court is likely to set off the ugliest political fight we’ve seen since, well, the last Supreme Court confirmation battle, in which Senate Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a high school gang-rape mastermind.
The gang-rape fantasies are probably off the table this time, but Barrett’s confirmation fight is still expected to be brutal. Left-wing activists and media are launching personal attacks on Barrett’s faith and family, including calls to investigate her adoption of two children from Haiti. Politico has already run an error-filled piece arguing that “Barrett’s religious beliefs…need to be front and center” and a Yahoo News headline screamed, “This Is Amy Coney Barrett, The Potential RBG Replacement Who Hates Your Uterus”—those mothers of seven, with their hatred of uteruses.
This will not be the first time Democrats have gone after Barrett’s religion. When she was nominated to her current seat on the 7th Circuit, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Barrett, “I think in your case…the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” Some Democrats realize that this assault on Barrett’s faith was a mistake, but others, such as Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, are ready to resume the attack.
Recall that Hirono, along with the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, recently suggested that a Catholic nominee should be rejected because of his membership in the Knights of Columbus. These scorched-earth tactics are unlikely to stop Barrett’s confirmation, but they will alienate moderates and energize Republicans, thereby damaging Democratic hopes of retaking the Senate and the presidency. But left-wing activists and their media allies apparently cannot restrain themselves, and many Democrats seem inclined to join in.
It is not just that they are desperate to keep President Trump from filling another Supreme Court seat. It is also that Barrett is culturally alien to the increasingly insular class of people running the Democratic Party and its media and activist allies. The persistent references and boguslinksto “The Handmaid’s Tale” reveal less about Barrett than they do about those whose only point of reference for a fecund religious woman is dystopian feminist fiction.
This is emblematic of the increasing divide between the left’s leadership class and many of the voters the Democratic Party relies on. Educated white progressives—the class that dominates the institutions of the left—have become culturally separated and radicalized, not only compared to conservatives but also compared to most minority Democratic voters.
Statistically, white Democrats now constitute the left wing of their party. With regard to religion, they are far more secular than nonwhite Democrats. As the Pew Research Center noted in 2018, “In their beliefs about God, nonwhite Democrats more closely resemble Republicans than white Democrats.”
This radicalization extends beyond religion. For example, surveys show that, on average, white liberals are now to the left of even black voters on racial issues.
The data confirm what is obvious via observation: the Democratic Party and its allied organizations have been captured by radical, mostly white, progressives, many of whom have made politics into a substitute religion. Furthermore, their control of crucial institutions allows them to advance their agenda even when they are out of political power, or after their favored candidates lose.
Thus, although Democrats’ moderate, more traditionally religious minority voters gave Biden the nomination, they could not stop the leftward stampede of the Democratic leadership class. Biden, who can’t even keep up with his minimal campaign schedule, will not be able to restrain the radicals, who will be led by his own vice-president. Moderation for the Democrats these days consists of cozying up to Wall Street, big business, and China, not easing up on the culture war.
Therefore, although Biden is nominally Catholic, he has been forced to renounce Catholic teachings that are at odds with the Democratic platform. He has promised to once again have the federal government try to force nuns to fund and facilitate the distribution of contraception. He has abandoned the last shreds of abortion moderation and now supports taxpayer-funded abortion on demand until birth. This position is more extreme than that of many, perhaps most, Democratic voters, but it is unquestioned among the party elite.
This cultural radicalism requires control of the courts in order to invent new rights as well as suppressing those actually included in the Constitution. Establishing and sustaining a national regime of abortion on demand has therefore required the left to keep the people and their representatives from having a say in the matter. Hence the ugly fights to maintain control of the Supreme Court.
But it is not just that Barrett’s jurisprudence will be an obstacle to the left’s ideological goals. Left-wing activists see her as a personal affront, for she is a living rebuke to the ideology they live by. She has achieved more than they ever will and done it while living a life filled with faith and family. Instead of a career spent writing for a feminist website from an apartment filled with cats, she is about to join the Supreme Court from a house full of children.
Her faith challenges those who insist that religious belief is only for the weak and stupid. Her children are a rebuke to those who insist that female empowerment is incompatible with fertility and that the disabled should be systematically eliminated in utero. The left-wing radicals running the Democratic Party are going to do their worst to Amy Barrett because she reveals, by contrast, the worst in them.
The monument, which stands across from the Massachusetts State House,
is currently surrounded in plywood to protect it while it undergoes
restoration to reinforce the sword held by Robert Gould Shaw.
After Sunday's demonstrations turned violent and destructive, the plywood was left covered in obscene graffiti.
"A
thousand men signed up just after President Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation, just think about that," said Liz Vizza,
executive director of Friends of the Public Garden. "These are men who,
if they were captured in the south, would be enslaved or murdered. But
this cause was so important to them, they signed up to go fight for
their freedom."
The memorial has been vandalized before – with paint in 2012, and the sword was broken off in 2015 and 2017.
During a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Friday, Joe Biden fabricated an emotional story about pinning a medal on a reluctant Navy captain in honor of his daring attempt to rescue a downed comrade in Afghanistan.
Addressing a crowd of over 400, Biden recalled how the captain rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire to rescue the body of a fallen American soldier only to resist when then-vice president Biden tried to pin a Silver Star on his chest to honor his efforts.
“He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!’ ” Biden shouted, recounting the apocryphal event. “’Do not pin it on me, sir! Please, sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!’”
“This is the God’s truth,” he added. “My word as a Biden.”
Rather, Biden conflated three separate stories: a daring rescue by a 20-year-old Army specialist who never received a Silver Star; a visit he made to Kunar province in 2008 as a U.S. senator; and a medal ceremony he presided over for an Army staff sergeant who felt he was undeserving of the award.
“The upshot: In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony,” reads the Post‘s report.
Biden also employed the story of the fictitious Navy captain during a World War II memorial event in Australia in 2016. In that telling, the captain “climbed down about 200 feet” into a ravine in Afghanistan to rescue a comrade. Then, while stumping for Hillary Clinton that same year, Biden told the story of an Army captain who pulled a soldier out of a burning vehicle in Iraq but resisted the resulting medal.
“He died. He died, Mr. Vice President,” Biden recalled the officer saying. “I don’t want the medal.”
As the Post report notes, the Pentagon has no record of a U.S. Army captain receiving a Silver Star during the period Biden describes.
During a 2008 trip to Afghanistan, Biden did, in fact, watch Major General David Rodriguez pin a Bronze Star on a young soldier who tried to pull a wounded comrade out of a burning vehicle. He did not, however, preside over the ceremony.
Armenia
says one of its fighter jets was shot down by a Turkey jet, in a major
escalation of a conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The
Armenian foreign ministry said the pilot of the Soviet-made SU-25 died
after being hit by the Turkish F-16 in Armenian air space.
Turkey, which is backing Azerbaijan in the conflict, has denied the claim.
Nearly 100 people, including civilians, have died in three days of fighting over the disputed mountainous region.
The mountainous enclave is officially part of Azerbaijan, but has been run by ethnic Armenians since 1994.
The fighting that started three days ago now appears to be spilling out of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenia
and Azerbaijan - which have already mobilised more soldiers and
declared martial law in some areas - blame each other for starting the
fighting.
There are growing concerns that other countries may get directly involved in the conflict in the strategic Caucasus region.
While Turkey is backing Azerbaijan, Russia - which has a military base in Armenia - has called for an immediate ceasefire.
You know something’s up when the media bury a story that would have been a no-brainer for Page One if the subject was a Republican.
A new Senate report exposes shocking corruption involving Hunter Biden, who made millions in Ukraine at the natural gas company Burisma Holdings when his father, Vice President Joe Biden, was President Obama’s Ukraine point man.
We’ve long known some of this, but the sheer scope of the influence peddling and sums involved are stunning. The 87-page document also exposes Hunter’s Russian connections, including a $3.5 million payment from the wife of a former Moscow mayor embroiled in scandal.
A section on China details a web of lucrative ties between Hunter Biden’s firms and companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. It also documents many trips he took to China with Secret Service protection and to dozens of other countries.
The deals involve millions of dollars and at least one contract involving China’s acquisition of an American firm that makes sensitive military technology.
Oh, almost forgot. There’s this, which apparently is not particularly newsworthy:
“Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an ‘Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.’”
Nothing to see here, folks.
In a Democratic rebuttal, Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon ignore the wealth of documentation and charge that the report is “based on conspiracy theories with roots in Russian disinformation.” Even before its release, the Democrats in July attacked the report as solely partisan.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, say that if the Democrats are going to point a finger, it should be at a mirror.
“The Democrats’ July 14 letter relied on foreign disinformation to create a false and harmful innuendo about the chairmen’s oversight work. Many of the allegations Democrats have made against Republicans … reflect the very patterns of behavior that Democrats themselves have engaged in.”
You know, like the fake Russian “collusion” charge while the Dems themselves paid for the phony Steele dossier full of Russian disinformation that led to the FBI spying on the Trump campaign.
In January and February 2017, the FBI was told that much of the dossier came from Russian sources, and yet the “collusion” narrative lost steam only after the Mueller report’s release in April 2019.
Democrats then ginned up hysteria over the phone call Mr. Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. They impeached Mr. Trump while ignoring the massive Biden/Ukraine corruption.
It’s clear this report terrifies them. The Washington Post, for instance, wrote very little, buried it inside and focused on Democrat talking points, not the findings.
The document unveils a 10-year record of corruption with possibly actionable criminality and a coverup at the highest levels. It’s stunning. Here are just a few findings:
Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer, joined the board of Burisma Holdings in 2014. Hunter was paid $50,000 a month, though he had no expertise in the field. He and Mr. Archer, who had met with Vice President Biden at the White House just before Mr. Biden went to Ukraine on a diplomatic mission, eventually made millions.
Hunter was on Burisma’s board when firm owner Mykola Zlochevsky allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to “shut” a corruption case against him. In 2016, Ukraine prosecutor Victor Shokin had another active investigation into Burisma and Mr. Zlochevsky.
“According to news reports, then-Vice President Biden ‘threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss [Shokin].’ After that threat, Ukraine’s Parliament fired Shokin.”
Indeed, in a video that every American deserves to see, Mr. Biden boasts at a Council on Foreign Relations gathering in 2018 that as vice president, he shook down Ukraine’s leaders:
“I said, you’re not getting the billion I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. (Laughter.) He got fired.”
In China, “Hunter Biden had business associations with Ye Jianming, Gongwen Dong and other Chinese nationals linked to the Communist government and the People’s Liberation Army. Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in cash flow.”
Hunter opened a bank account with Gongwen Dong to “fund a $100,000 spending spree” with his uncle and aunt, James and Sara Biden, who also received $1.4 million from Hunter’s firm.
Henniges, an American maker of anti-vibration technologies with military applications, was turned over in 2015 to two Chinese companies with ties to the Communist government. One of the companies was a billion-dollar investment fund, Bohai Harvest (BHR), which was formed in 2013 by a merger of Bohai Capital and Rosemont Seneca Partners.
The latter firm was founded in 2009 by investors including Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
The conflicts of interest are so glaring they don’t require unpacking.
Any fair-minded person who reads the report might be asking, “And Trump got impeached for a phone call? Seriously?”
Why American Exceptionalism Is Different From Other Countries’ ‘Nationalisms’
Mobs are toppling statues of American heroes. America and America’s
past are on trial. People are protesting and rioting over the very ideas
of what America stands for.
The future of the country depends on what Americans do next.
It depends on how Americans answer some direct, but not so simple,
questions: Who are we as Americans? What does it mean to be American?
The Meaning of the American Founding
To answer these questions, we have to start with the American
founding. It gave America its ethos, its characteristic spirit and
culture.
The American ethos has a firm philosophical foundation. It comprises a
set of philosophical ideas on which the American Founders relied to
create the system of government that we enjoy to this day.
The Founders had a very distinct idea of the moral order. They
believed that morality and government should be in accordance with what
they called “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Natural law is
universal and thus morally binding on all mankind.
Since natural law was universal, to go against it was to go against
human nature itself. The purpose or “end state” of nature was what the
Founders broadly understood as happiness, and in order to be truly
happy, one had to be good. Happiness was understood as living a virtuous
life.
Washington, Adams, and other Founders said repeatedly that freedom
could not be enjoyed without virtue. Without it, one would get nothing
but tyranny based on power and selfishness. Governments must be
instituted to protect the natural rights and liberties of their people.
This is where the idea of limited government comes from. Governments
must be limited, and their powers constitutionally enumerated, as they
are in the Constitution, to protect liberties and rights.
That’s why the Founders used checks and balances in government—to stave off tyranny.
Also key is the American idea of equality before the law. They did
not think about social equality as we often do today, where everyone is
supposed to be equal in income and in social status. The Founders
assumed that individuals had different talents and opportunities, and
wanted to ensure that, to the extent possible, the law treated everyone
equally.
What, Then, Is American Exceptionalism?
That brings me to the idea of American exceptionalism, which is, I
believe, the answer to the question of what America’s national identity
is and should remain.
It’s grounded in America’s founding principles: natural law, liberty,
limited government, individual rights, the checks and balances of
government, popular sovereignty, the civilizing role of religion in
society, and the crucial role of civil society and civil institutions in
grounding and mediating our democracy and our freedom.
We as Americans believe these principles are right and true for all peoples, not just for us.
But if the principles are universal, how are Americans different? How are we exceptional?
We believe that Americans are different because our creed is both
universal and exceptional at the same time. We are exceptional in the
unique way we apply these universal principles.
There is no other country in the world that embodied the blend of
classical philosophy, Christianity, and even Enlightenment ideas in the
unique way America did in the founding of the republic from 1776 to
1789. It was an exceptional (meaning uncommon) mix of liberty, limited
government, natural rights, and religious liberty that made the American
founding unique.
America is the only country in the world that derives its legitimacy from natural rights and natural law.
I really do not mean “exceptional” in a normative sense, but in a descriptive sense, of what was different and unique.
Some people doubt the importance of the American creed in defining
America. Wanting to make America fit into the larger narrative of
nationalism, a celebration of the nation and the nation-state as a
general matter, they downplay the creed as mere words, supposedly not
strong enough to carry the patriotic history of the American nation.
If the creed does not matter to Americans, what, then, is so special about America, really?
Is it our ethnicity? Well, that does not work, because there is no
such thing as a common American ethnicity. Even in the beginning,
Americans were a mixture of English, Scots-Irish, Highland Scot, German,
African, Native American, French, Dutch, and other ethnicities.
Is it a specific religion? We are indeed a religious country, but no, we have freedom of religion, not one official religion.
Is it our culture? Yes, but how does one understand American culture without the American creed and the founding principles?
To understand what makes America unique, just look at the immigrant
experience. People from all over the world come here and become
Americans not just by learning English, or by buying land, but by living
the American creed and the American dream. By adopting our history.
Another benefit of American exceptionalism is that it’s
self-correcting. When we fail to live up to our ideals, as we did with
slavery before the Civil War, and during the era of Jim Crow, we can
appeal as Lincoln did to our “better nature” to correct our flaws.
There is no American identity without the American creed. But the
creed is more than a set of abstract ideas. It’s shared cultural
experience, based on living out the creed, across space and historical
time in a specific place called America.
Is American Exceptionalism a Form of Nationalism?
There is a push afoot to ground American conservatism in the concept of “Nationalism”—with a capital N.
It implies that as a “nation,” America is just like any other nation.
There is nothing particularly exceptional about America because, in
this way of thinking, America derives its legitimacy not from the people
or from its form of government, but from that the fact that it’s
a mere nation like any other.
The whole point of American exceptionalism is to provide moral and
political legitimacy to the very idea of “America First”—to keep the
moral legitimacy of the specialness that the nationalists hope to claim,
without all the terrible historical baggage of the idea.
The problem is that adopting the mantle of Nationalism would weaken
America’s claim to being an exceptional nation. It would make us just a
nation like any other. But most importantly, it would undermine our
claim to belonging to a nation that is grounded in principles that are
universal—that is, true not just for Americans, but for all human
beings.
American exceptionalism is built on our founding principles, not
cultural and ethnic differences. Americans recognize their varied ethnic
and cultural origins, but come together as Americans.
Nationalism is often defined by a sole cultural or ethnic reference,
regardless of the form of government. The democratic nation-state, on
the other hand, grounds its legitimacy and its sovereignty in democratic
governance, and in the American experience, in a government that
reflects the principles of natural law.
The American founding was grounded in natural law, not in the idea of the nation-state.
It’s not language, ethnicity, or even ideology that makes us great
and good. It’s our creed and how we have woven it into our culture, way
of life, and our form of government.
The Two-Front War on America
As powerful as this idea of America is, it’s under threat from two
very different directions—the progressive left and certain circles of
the New Right.
The left has been making war on America for decades. It’s the
familiar charge that America is irredeemably tainted by racism and that
our Founding Fathers were slave-owning hypocrites. Our written
Constitution is outdated and needs to be “living,” which means its text
and original intent cannot only be ignored, but intentionally
overthrown. Natural rights have been replaced by the group rights of
gender and other identity groups. The left is culturally Marxist and
socialist in its economics.
The philosophical ideas behind this war on America are these: (1)
Natural law is a myth—there are no fixed truths (relativism); (2) rights
are not fixed by natural law but invented and change over time, defined
as seeking ever new forms of individual expression based on appetites,
desires, and preferences; (3) history is progressive, always marching
toward some undefined goal of ever greater personal liberation
(historicism); and, finally, (4) individual freedom is a radical
undertaking, completely devoid of personal responsibility and the
founding notion of virtue, and always focused on personal pleasures,
needs, desires, and experiences.
Meanwhile, on the right, there’s a movement that is questioning and
even rejecting the very notion of the American founding. And some of its
ideas—especially the outright rejection of liberty and the principle of
freedom—are finding their way into the “new Nationalism” of
conservatism.
Robert Reilly refers to this as the “poison pill” thesis of the
American founding. The American founding was doomed from the very
beginning because the Founders, under the nefarious influence of John
Locke, imported the poison pill of liberalism (liberty) into our
founding documents and our mindset. Over time, this original idea of
liberty morphed into the progressive liberalism of today. The evil
philosophers are Locke and his ilk from the Enlightenment.
But the history is all wrong. The Founders borrowed from Locke’s
ideas of rights. They had little or no interest in his theories of
knowledge that so bother some conservatives today. The New Right is
reading its particular interpretation of Locke back into history and
erroneously applying it to Founders like Madison and Jefferson.
This is worse than just bad history—making up something that did not happen.
It’s precisely the mistake made by all historical revisionists. It’s
reading current ideology back into history and pretending the true
meaning then is only what we think it is now.
Atheistic philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Marxists like
Herbert Marcuse were widely influential in the American academy for the
past 60 years—far more so than Locke was—and it’s from their influence
that we can see the strange striving of the left for personal liberation
as a goal of the social collective.
Whether from the left or the right, all the bad ideas of the modern age are at play here—relativism, historicism, and bad faith.
I cannot conceive of a conservative American cause without the
patriotic cause of liberty. It would literally be rejecting one of the
central ideas of the American Revolution. Without liberty, the country
would lose its moorings and eventually drift into authoritarianism. The
radical individualism and libertinism of today is derived not from the
founding, but from cultural Marxism and the radical individualism of
identity politics.
If we turn on our own founding, we will lose the very principles and convictions needed to defeat radical progressivism.
That’s why these debates matter. They’re about the American identity.
They’re about American liberty. They’re at the very heart of what it
means to be an American.
