Trump and Reagan

It wasn’t enough for the left to cheat Donald Trump out of a second term in the Oval Office. He still poses such a threat to the Democrat Party that they are mobilized to prevent him from ever being allowed to seek political office again. But it won’t stop there. They want to erase Trump and his legacy from public memory entirely by any means possible: everything from banning him from social media, to denying him a Presidential library, to barring his name from federally funded monuments, street names, and park benches, to such petty measures as cutting his cameo appearance from Home Alone 2. If it were within their power – and it very nearly is – the Democrats would not hesitate to “vaporize” Trump (to use George Orwell’s term) and obliterate every trace of his existence from history. They would make him what Orwell called, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, an unperson.

Conservative commentator, speaker, and writer Nick Adams is determined to thwart this Democrat mission, single-handedly if necessary, and to cement the former President’s place as – in Adams’ view – the greatest in American history. Sometimes referred to as Trump’s favorite author (for having tweeted recommendations of some of his articles and books), Adams published a book last year titled Trump and Churchill, in which he expounded upon a list of ten points of similarity between the two leaders and argued that they were history’s greatest defenders of Western civilization (I reviewed that book for FrontPage Mag here).

In the same vein, Adams’ latest book, fresh off the press (Post Hill Press, to be precise), is Trump and Reagan: Defenders of America, in which he declares Trump to be “the second coming” of Ronald Reagan, only greater – a bold claim, considering the reverence in which conservatives generally hold our 40^th President. But Adams argues respectfully, without diminishing Reagan’s achievements at all, that Trump accomplished more in one term than Reagan did in two. In any case, in the course of his new book, Adams illuminates the characteristics, political successes, and even the subversive enemies they faced that make these two Presidents more alike than first glance might suggest.

Cancel Culture Comes for Chaucer

Another week, another Dead White Male toppled off his perch in the classics canon by university administration milquetoasts pandering to the woke, anti-intellectual mob. This time the DWM in question is medieval literary giant Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, courses on whom are being eliminated at the University of Leicester in England because the man often called the Father of English Literature doesn’t match the current “enthusiasms” of students there.

Last month, the University announced its intention to remove courses in The Canterbury Tales and replace them with courses centered on – what else? – sexuality, diversity, race, and ethnicity. “We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing,” a university spokesperson explained to MailOnline. Students’ “interests and enthusiasms” apparently now are dominated by an obsession with the power dynamics of skin color and genitalia, and thus Chaucer is no longer relevant.

And not just Chaucer’s works, but anything written prior to the year 1500. Also potentially on the chopping block, reportedly, are courses on: Beowulf, the heroic epic considered to be the earliest work of English literature; John Milton’s magisterial Paradise Lost; the works of poet John Donne and playwright Christopher Marlowe; the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the 15^th-century chronicle of the legend of King Arthur.

Leicester University management emailed the English department to notify them of these changes, stating, “The aim of our proposals [is] to offer a suite of undergraduate degrees that provide modules which students expect of an English degree.” Apparently a familiarity with Chaucer and other medieval authors is no longer what students expect of an English degree, but race-mongering identity politics is.

The new “modules” promised to be “excitingly innovative” and would cover “a chronological literary history, a selection of modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonised curriculum, and new employability modules,” the email continued. Sri Lankan-born Vice Chancellor Nishan Canagarajah, reportedly at the center of the diversity push, said it was part of a long-term strategy “to compete on a global level.” And how is such wokeness, which has been in progress for some time now, working out for Leicester University? In just ten years, the school has plunged from 17th on the Guardian University Guide’s ranking of English universities to 77th.

Talking Cancel Culture on the 'God and Government' Podcast

This Wednesday marks the launch of the God and Government podcast, hosted by my friends John Steinreich and Marc Richardson. I'm honored to be their guest for the episode as we talk about the importance of the culture: engaging in it, understanding it, and pushing back against "cancel culture."

Check out the details below:

Trump's '1776 Report' Goes Down the Memory Hole

 

On his very first afternoon in office, newly-installed President Joe Biden showed exactly where his priorities lie – he scrubbed from the White House website the report from the 1776 Commission his predecessor Donald Trump had established to counter the New York Times’ mendacious, anti-American 1619 Project, and abolished the Commission itself.

“Look,” Biden stated during his recent remarks on his “racial equity” agenda,

in the weeks ahead I’ll be reaffirming the federal government’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility, building on the work we started in the Obama-Biden administration. That’s why I’m rescinding the previous administration’s harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training and abolish the offensive counterfactual 1776 commission. Unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth, not ignorance, and lies.

Indeed, unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth, and with rejecting ignorance and lies. That is precisely what the 1776 Commission set out to do in its report summarizing “the principles of the American founding and how those principles have shaped our nation,” and that is precisely why the Biden administration wasted no time burying it and dissolving the Commission: because it targeted the ignorance and lies promoted in the 1619 Project, which has been slammed by hundreds of scholars for its attempt to establish the country’s founding not in 1776, but in the year that African slaves first arrived on the North American continent. The 1619 Project’s goal was to reinforce and propagate the subversive leftist worldview that the United States was founded in slavery and that, as Barack Obama put it, racism is in our very DNA.

The 40-page 1776 Report, issued on January 18, notes that the purpose of President Trump’s Advisory 1776 Commission was to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.” The 16-member Commission, led by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn and vice chair Dr. Carol Swain, retired professor of political science, urges a restoration of “authentic” American education through which we can rediscover “our shared identity rooted in our founding principles”: “It is our mission – all of us – to restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.”

Sounds innocuous enough, unless you believe American identity is rooted in white supremacy and requires a “fundamental transformation.” Scholar/historian Victor Davis Hanson, one of the Commission members, noted that “at any other age than the divisive present, the report would not have been seen as controversial.” But because it promotes the belief that being an American “means something noble and good” and that “America is the most just and glorious country in all of human history,” and because it rightfully condemns Progressivism, communism, racism and identity politics as challenges to American principles, angry leftists swiftly rose to de-legitimize it.