The following are remarks as prepared by U. S. Senator Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., on September 2 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. This text was published by the Daily Signal. Commentary, in italics, provided by Dr. Dwight A. Moody (DM).
There’s a special significance to this conference this year. Donald Trump’s victory was not just a victory for his movement, but for the ideas of the people in this room. National conservatism is an idea whose time has arrived.
This opening paragraph unleashes an attack on the America we know (the United States of America) in favor of an idealized vision of white, Christian America led by President Donald Trump. In this way, it (first) ignores the realities of our actual history as a continent and a country, and (second) embraces the increasingly unpopular policies of the current President that are presented here as the primary strategy for returning America to some “greatness” it once enjoyed. DM
The battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even “Right” and “Left,” in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it. For decades, many of those in power—not just here, but across the West—have been locked in a cultural war with their own nations. We see that in many of the countries of Europe today, where the immigration crisis threatens to transform the ancient fabric of those nations—and all who object are menaced by an increasingly totalitarian censorship state.
Here the chief culprit is introduced: immigration. Immigrants are presented as the great and grave threat to the real America. He means, of course, not the immigration of white Europeans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, but the more recent immigration of Asians, Africans, and South Americans. Throughout this piece of propaganda, Schmitt completely ignores the roles played by three important constituents of our great country: the first and original inhabitants (whom we call Indians or Native Americans), the Spanish explorers who settled modern-day Florida and the American peoples of Central America who settled large parts of modern-day Texas and California, and the Africans who were forcibly settled throughout the modern-day Southern states. None of these people count as true Americans, as contributing to American greatness, or as constituting “the nation” as Schmitt understands it. In fact, they are part of the “forces that would erase it.” DM
While our First Amendment has traditionally insulated us from the most extreme forms of censorship, America, too, is threatened by the same elites, driven by the same interests and ambitions. They are the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.
Schmitt now introduces the popular boogie man of conservative politics: elites. Elites are people who lead the corporations, institutions, and organizations of our country (or any country of the Western world). He never names any of these elites but he lets us know that two people who were not, are not elites are Presidents Andrew Jackson and President Donald Trump. These are the true champions of the people. They represent true American values, true American grit and greatness. They are, it seems, the people we are to emulate.
National conservatism is a revolt against this fundamentally post-American ruling class. This revolt is a revolt from the Right—but also, a revolt within the Right. For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They, too, waged foreign wars in the name of global “liberalism” and “democracy.” They, too, rewrote our trade policies in service of the interests of global capital. They, too, supported amnesty and mass migration.
Here, Schmitt could have invoked that great American corporation of the Hinterlands, Walmart. Headquartered still in northwest Arkansas, the Walton family enterprise used NAFTA and China to build the most powerful and successful mercantile operation in modern American history, attracting millions of customers who exist as the counterbalance to the power of “elites.” Why did he not name Bill Walton and his children, his employees, and his customers? DM
But perhaps the best example was on the issue of immigration. The old conservative establishment may have opposed something like illegal immigration on procedural grounds—simply because it was illegal. But they took no issue with it in substance, and if the same thing was achieved through “legal” avenues, many of them would celebrate and support it. At this point, it should be clear that the fact that something is sanctioned by our government does not mean it’s good for our country. That much is obvious with various forms of legal immigration today.
Schmitt’s attack on contemporary immigration pushes back against both our history and our present realities. He takes no effort to explain how and why the immigration to American of his favorite people–white Christian Europeans–is righteous and altogether legitimate (even constituting the essential greatness of our people) while the immigration to America of others is illegitimate and dangerous. He never mentions, for instance, the forced immigration of Chinese workers to build the railroads during and after the very war that American armies were fighting over the freedom of African immigrants. The current immigration of Latinos is a dangerous thing, of course, according to Schmitt. One wonders why.
It is true, of course, that all Americans recognize that our current immigration system–not our immigration ideals–is severely problematic. The current regime has chosen a cruel and crude solution; over the long haul, an immigration system more attunted to humane values and American traditions will prevail. DM
For decades, we heard that so-called high-skilled immigration was an urgent necessity. The H-1B visa, for example, was sold as a way to keep America “globally competitive.” Of course, we do have an interest in attracting the truly exceptional few, the very best and brightest in the world. But that’s not how programs like the H-1B have actually functioned. Instead, they’ve imported a vast new labor force from abroad—not to fill jobs Americans can’t or won’t do, but to undercut American wages, replace American workers, and transfer entire industries into the hands of foreign lobbies.
This, of course, is untrue. American universities and research centers have attracted the best and the brightest from around the world. Many remain in the United States as professors, reserach scientists, and professionals of all kinds (including medicine, engineering, law, even ministry). Schmitt largely ignores this honored tradition becauses it validates immigration in general; instead, Schmitt focuses on unskilled workers who, he asserts, “undercut American wages, replace American workers, and transfer entire industries into the hands of foreign lobbies.” One easy way to test this thesis is to travel to Arkansas, Nebraska, and Wisconsin and examine the health of farms and factories after Trump and his cronnies have run off all the immigrant workers.
We have funneled in millions of foreign nationals to take the jobs, salaries, and futures that should belong to our own children—not because the foreign workers are smarter or more talented, but merely because they are cheaper and more compliant, and therefore preferable in the eyes of too many business elites who often see their own countrymen as an inconvenience.
Schmitt rails against corporate and governmental strategies that undercut “blue-collar workers” but never once does he rise to defend unions (and their history of securing better pay and conditions for workers) or minimum wages or governmental regulations that protect workers and their working environments. Never once does he advocate for universal health care or better retirement, things that our white Christian European allies have embraced. Why is this? Is he really concerned for the economic and physical well-being of American workers? DM
For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an “idea”—a vehicle for global liberalism. We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.
I have no idea what Schmitt is writing or talking about here. Have you ever heard it taught that the “entire meaning of America” is found in “a poem on the Statue of Liberty” or “five words about equality” embedded in the Gettysburg Address? Not me. Yes, they express things fundamental to our values, and you would think Schmitt would find ways to affirm these things rather than denigrate them. DM
The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration. In a speech in 1998, Bill Clinton said that the continuous influx of immigrants was—and I quote—a “reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise.”
Now, let me just say: I believe that our Founding Fathers were the most brilliant group of men to ever assemble in one room. Their ideas are central to who we are. You can’t understand America without understanding things like the freedom of speech, the right to self-defense, the ideals of independence, self-governance, and political liberty.
And slavery. Please, Schmitt, remember to include all relevant facts: this “brilliant group of men” were dominated by those in the group who were slave masters who wrote into our founding documents a slave-economy that has cost our country dear over the years. Why does Schmitt not mention slavery once, even in connection to his own slave-supporting state of Missouri (admitted to the Union in 1821 as a slave state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820)? DM
But these principles are not abstractions. They are living, breathing things—rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real. Take a trip out to rural Missouri and spend a little time with the folks out there, and you’ll quickly realize that the Second Amendment isn’t a classroom theory, for them. It’s part of who they are.
Ah, yes, the Second Amendment. No real reason to introduce guns into the argument here, except that it must excite his audience. The “folks out there” in rural Missouri have guns; it is a “part of who they are.” The “five words about liberty” and the “poem on the statue” may be optional, but those guns are the real American thing (even though, I might point out, they are owned by less than a third of the people of our nation and their use constitutes one of the greatest public health threats in our nation–the very danger that the current President is using to justify sending the military into our cities. But I digress….) DM
What makes America exceptional isn’t just that we committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It’s that we, as a people, were actually capable of living them.
Americans, apparently, are the only ones capable of self-government: surely a claim that would astound historians as well as citizens of other democracies around the world. DM
But the Left took these principles and drained them of all underlying substance, turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed. To live up to that American creed, they told us, we had to transform America itself. If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.
Finally, we get to the statues. One of the great injustices of our time, perpetrated by the “elites” no doubt, is the statues that have been pulled down. He means, of course, the statues erected by white Christian women of the American South to celebrate their White American soldiers who fought hard to defend slavery and crush the United States government. “Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains.” Here, Schmitt’s gets to his essential base of support: the white Christian culture that has pushed back against all the advances of freedom and opportunity in the United States: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, accused rights, minority rights, and immigrant rights. This is the coalition that united as early as the 1970s to oppose what America was becoming–a place of opportunity and equality for all of us, of whatever creed, color, or country of origin. This is the reality that threatens Schmitt’s American dream of a White Christian Nation. DM
On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose. In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.
For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”
What this nameless “neoconservative writer” means is precisely what President Clinton meant in the previous quote: the values of America (such as equality, freedom, justice, and opportunity–liberty and justice for all) are values that many countries seek to implement. These are universal values capable of infusing any country, any people with hope and confidence.
That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests. His movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It’s a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country.
Yes, Schmitt asserts, Trump is the leader of all true Americans, motivated by high ideals and selfless sacrifice. Yes, this is the Trump we all know and love, the Trump known for keeping promises and protecting women, the Trump who exemplified all the salt-of-the-earth values of the people of Missouri and all other states in the real American nation, states like Arkansas and Iowa and (the white people of) Alabama and South Carolina. Yes, Trump is one of us. He is the one who embodies all the great and eternal values of our nation. God bless Donald J. Trump. Let’s make him a Christian so he will fulfill all of our longings as White Christian Americans. (Note: I am a member of the National Sarcasm Society and have a tee shirt to prove it!) DM
They were the forgotten men and women, who wrapped themselves in our flag and drove hours to hear a real-estate tycoon from New York speak—because they knew he was speaking for them. They were the Americans whose factories were gutted in the name of “free trade,” whose sons were sent to die in wars that served no American interest, whose neighborhoods were transformed beyond recognition by immigration. They were the ones who worked the jobs, paid the taxes, fought the wars, and followed the rules that upheld the very system that attacked and dispossessed them—that mocked and smeared them as bigots and “deplorables,” even though it needed them to survive.
Schmitt is right to repudiate the use of the word “deplorables” (as Hillary Clinton did in 2016) as a pejorative word about other citizens; but, likewise, Schmitt’s use of the similar word “elites” is unhelpful; both of these words intensify the division of thought and emotion in our country. Such words need to be avoided by speakers and writers.
And yet, in spite of it all, they stubbornly refused to forget who they were. They were, as Barack Obama sneered, the “bitter clingers”—who still held to their guns, their religion and their memory of a country that once belonged to them.
Yes, I think this is right: the MAGA crowd sees a population less white and less Christian than it used to be. They remember “a country that once belonged to them” but now is populated by a more diverse citizenry. This scares them. They don’t think this more diverse America can be as hospitable to them as they want it to be. They realized they will never again have the dominance they have enjoyed for centuries. The America for White Christian people is no more. It is too late to prevent its demise, even though the effort to do so energizes many of the Trump voters and supporters.
These Americans had come to realize that their true adversary did not live in the faraway sands of some foreign nation, but in the halls of their own government. And in 2016, they discovered that millions of their fellow citizens had arrived at the same conclusion. In Donald Trump’s defiance, they recognized an echo of their own. It is their interests that Trump spoke to in 2016, and it is their interests that he remains loyal to today. And it is their interests, their values, their lives that the American Right must defend, without apology or remorse, if it wants to have a viable future.
Yes, indeed! Schmitt appears to be saying that Donald J. Trump has genuine and lasting interest is the spiritual and economic flourishing of the people of rural Missouri. Yes, we might be tempted to say, all of his life, Trump has espoused the values and virtues of ordinary common folk, and now, finally, his true character and true aspirations are being recognized. Which is why we must keep those Epstein files secret. Those papers are forgeries and are telling lies about the One True American. DM
The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”
It is noteworthy that Schmitt calls as witnesses to the greatness of America only the energies and activities of his White Christian cohort. He conveniently ignores Black Americans and Brown Americans and Asia Americans. These Americans, evidently, constitute part of the “them” that is keeping the “us” from retaining our control over the national character and agenda. That “proposition” Schmitt so despises is written in the Gettysburg Address, that “all men are created equal.” Schmitt represents that tradition of America that rejects this proposition. Equality and opportunity and freedom and fairness are set aside only for “us” and not for “them” (and by “them” he means any person who immigrated to the United States other than White Christian European people). DM
They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true.
Here is the core of the speech: “They built this country for us…. It belongs to us…” Schmitt has a very narrow and dangerous idea of America: it is for us and our children, our white children, our Christian children. It is hard to express how contrary this is to both the American dream and the Christian gospel (which says, “to your and to your children and to those who are far off”). Many “far off” people have found hope in the American dream and also in the Christian gospel. Both are for me and for you, which is why we are called to welcome the stranger. Or as Bob Dylan put it, “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” DM
America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind. Western civilization was defined by its restless, relentless, dynamic spirit—a drive to create, explore and discover that spurred the West to heights of political, intellectual and technological achievement unmatched by any other civilization in human history. America was settled, founded and built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West.
Our country is, in this important sense, the most essentially Western nation. For our settler ancestors, the American frontier stretched out as a horizon of infinite possibility. It was here, on this continent, that the West realized its destiny. This, my friends, is why every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints.
This is a mixture of ignorance and arrogance in the extreme.
This is who we are. We’re a nation of settlers, explorers, and pioneers—born on the ocean waters that carried the first ships to our shores and forged in the crucible of a wild frontier. Our people tamed a continent, built a civilization from the wilderness, and wrote our nation’s name in history.
All nations die; most are quickly forgotten, confined to footnotes for the ages. But thousands of years from now, when we and our country are long gone, people will still know the name “America” because of what these Americans achieved. The people who built our country were not villains. They were heroes. We can no longer apologize for who we are. I’m a Missouri boy, born and raised. I’m from the state where Lewis and Clark launched their expedition. Where Jesse James lived and Daniel Boone died. The state that launched a thousand wagon trails, carrying American pioneers west to find their destiny. They called St. Louis the “Gateway to the West.”
I also lived in Missouri, graduated from high school there, and have traveled there many times, including just weeks ago to introduce my grandson to Cardinal baseball, Gateway Arch, and the Mississippi River. I am proud to have spent some of life in the Show Me State, as did Bill Bradley, Jayson Tatum, Cliff Hagan, Dred Scott, George Washington Carver, Scott Joplin, Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, Chuck Berry, Traci Blackmon, Valerie Bridgeman, James Milton Turner, Samuel Clemmons, Kate Capshaw, and Augustus Tolton. Schmitt could have mentioned by name any of these noteworthy people. DM
The frontier wasn’t a “legend” or a “myth” for folks where I’m from. It was real. It was in the names, the deeds, the land itself. My ancestors arrived there from Germany in the 1840s, during the first real wave of new European settlers since Missouri became a state in 1821. Back then, Missouri was as far west as you could go.
Think about the kinds of people it takes to do that—to build a home at the edge of the known world. Those were the kinds of people our ancestors were. The first settlers in my state were mostly Scots-Irish—a hard, proud, fiercely independent people, forged in the hills of Ulster and the backwoods of Appalachia, ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization. They were the ancestors—as it just so happens—of my friend and our vice president, JD Vance.
Here again Schmitt fails to name the original Americans living in Missouri: Osage, Missouria, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Delaware and Otoe. Like Schmitt’s German ancestors, they also had to migrate into Missouri, settle the territory, raise families, and sustain community and culture. It is worth noting here that my grandson Sam had, in preparation for our trip, researched the city of Cahokia, a community of 10,000 people in the year 1000, larger than the city of London at the time and the largest city in all of central and north Americs. DM
As the historian David McCullough writes, the Scots-Irish families that first settled Missouri “saw themselves as the true Americans”:
Their idol was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory of Tennessee, ‘One-man-with-courage-makes-majority’ Jackson, the first president from west of the Alleghenies …
Their trust was in the Lord and common sense. That they and their forebears had survived at all in backwoods Kentucky—or earlier in upland Virginia and the Carolinas—was due primarily to ‘good, hard sense,’ as they said, and no end of hard work.
It is worth noting that it was Andrew Jackson who forced hundreds of thousands of native Americans to abandon their homes and regions and relocate further west. This is now considered a national embarrassment, which is precisely the sort of history that Schmitt refers to when he says in the paragraph below that “we’ve been taught to be ashamed of these things that defined us.” I wonder how Schmitt wishes this particular story to be told to young students. DM
For some time now, we’ve been taught to be ashamed of these things that defined us—to treat our curiosity, adventurousness, and ambition as a stain on our moral conscience. We’ve been taught that, by settling this continent and building our home here, we committed a world-historical sin, and that we should rue the day that our forefathers arrived in North America, and condemn their vision, their strength, and their will as an expression of something perverse and evil.
We saw a funny little example of this just the other month. The Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account posted an image of the famous painting “American Progress”—one of the most iconic illustrations of Manifest Destiny, depicting settlers striding outward to the frontier, with Lady Columbia watching over them from above.
I might add that I saw this painting for the first time in the museum at the Gateway National Park in downtown St. Louis, on the banks of the Mississippi River. DM
The reaction from the Left was swift and hysterical. In the Washington Post, a Princeton history professor declared that the painting glorified “an American invasion of other people’s homelands.” The Independent reported that—according to the “experts”—the painting advanced a “mythic narrative” that “erased the reality” of American westward expansion. The LA Times speculated that it “might be… Nazi propaganda.”
Now, just as a matter of historical record, the Indians were perfectly capable of invading, killing and enslaving each other all on their own for centuries before we got here. They attacked, tortured, and brutalized our settlers, just as our settlers surely did the same to them.
Schmitt conveniently omits the fact that the “Indians” also fell in love, married, raised children, farmed land, built cities, explored rivers and mountains, and time and again helped White Christian Immigrants navigate danger, plant crops, survive weather, and find their way to the Pacific ocean under the leadership of Lewis and Clark. DM
When we carved out our Manifest Destiny on this continent, it was not because we were less morally righteous, but only because we had more sophisticated tools and methods. But that’s really beside the point.
For whatever human flaws one might point to, the American settling of the frontier was an expression of something deeper in the soul of our people. Most people in most places and times in human history lived by the laws of necessity—their thoughts and actions were all governed by mere utility, and nothing more. The value of a thing, for them, lay in what kind of immediate material benefit it could provide.
This description of “most people … in human history” as “governed by mere utility, and nothing more” is among the most arrogant and ignorant–even stupid–things this U. S. Senator has written. It ignores millenia of culture and creativity in every part of planet earth. Everywhere and at all times, people wrote poetry, worshiped deity, built monuments, invented dances, and speculated about the night sky. DM
Men worked, fought, built and acted for purposes as narrow as the walls of their own towns and villages: to eat, to reproduce, to survive. They were not interested in knowing what might lie beyond the sunset. They lived, more or less, the exact same way as their ancestors had lived a thousand years before them.
Last year, I took my first trip to Portugal. From here, and from neighboring Spain and other European countries, people did precisely what Schmitt asserts they did not: sought to know “what might lie beyond the sunset.” The history of exploration and discovery is the history of the world, not just of White Christian Americans. Was it not the Russians who sent into space the first satellite, the first animal, the first man, and the first woman? DM
That has never been true for us.
The American heritage is not a narrative of oppression and evil, but the unfolding story of our people’s pioneer spirit—a spirit that drives us to expand beyond limits, to assert ourselves upon the world. It is a spirit that began on the frontier, but it would soon go on to raise up great cities, cure diseases, discover distant galaxies, create marvels of technology and art, and forge new worlds in its image.
Only White Christian Americans could assert that ours “is not a narrative of oppression and evil….” On the contrary, there is a great deal of oppression and evil in our history, and we should research it, confess it, teach it, and make restitution for it. To do these things is not to deny the greatness of our country or the goodness of many of our people; it is to acknowledge what is true and right, it is to tell the truth, it is to confess our sins, which is at the core of what our Lord Jesus Christ taught us to do. DM
We’re not sorry. Why would we be sorry? America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man. On July 4, 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged across our nation, President Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore to address the nation. On our nation’s anniversary, as anarchists looted and defaced and tore down statues and monuments all across the country, the president stood before the granite cliff face and declared: “This monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed.
Most Americans are proud of the four white men whose faces are carved into the South Dakota rock. Many are also proud of the emerging carving of the great Lakota chief Crazy Horse just a few miles south of Rushmore. Further, most Americans are grateful that those who killed George Floyd were brought to justice and are serving time for their actions. All of these illustrate the greatness of America. DM
If you want to know who we are, look no further than the monument that stood behind him. Mount Rushmore took 14 years and hundreds of men to build. They climbed 700 stairs every day to be lowered down on ropes over the cliff face—sometimes in the blazing heat, sometimes in the bitter cold—to carve the faces of our heroes into the side of the great mountain. There was no practical need for any of it. It’s just who we were. We were Americans. We did it because we could.
For decades, the people in power sought to turn our past into a repressed memory—something so awful that we would prefer to forget it altogether. They made self-hatred and shame our new civic religion. Let me say this today, as clearly as I can: We are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it.
Let me say this today, as clearly as I can: I am proud to be an American. I love the land, the history, the achievements, the music, and the culture of America. But I am also aware of our failures, and they are many. We can be grateful and remorseful at the same time; we can be thankful for our ancestors while being embarrassed by some of what they did. I can say the same about myself and about my children, even about my friends. We understand and embrace the good, the bad, and the ugly; it is all part of who we are and who we have been and who we are becoming. DM
To transform a nation, you have to transform the way it understands itself. In the French Revolution, the radicals abolished the old calendar and began the clock back over at Year One. The radicals of our time want to do the same. It’s why they’re obsessed with controlling speech. They want to rewrite our language itself. When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people.
But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.
The recurring attention to “our ancestors” implies a blood lineage. It is a not-so-subtle way to push back on immigrants who are not part of our blood line and embrace only those people who have the blood of White Christian Europeans. It is historically and spiritually wrong. When we change the stories we tell about ourselves, we do so to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For years, some among us have had their stories ignored and denied. We want to hear everyone’s story. Our story is strengthened by your story and my story and the story of the neighbor next door and the story of the stranger coming into town. America belongs to all of us. When Schmitt says, “American does not belong to them” he is including me and my neighbor and my friends in the “them.” America is our home, is it your home, it is my home. I reject this racist screed of Senator Schmitt seeking to limit America to us and those like us. DM
The sculptor who designed Mount Rushmore intentionally left three extra inches of granite on the surface, so that natural erosion would gradually shape it into its final form over the next 30,000 years. What a confident testament to America. He built it so that Americans thousands of years from now would still look in awe at the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.
This fight is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: The apex and the vanguard of Western civilization. A strong, sovereign nation—not just an idea, but a home, belonging to a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.
Yes, it is a fight, and yes, it is about what kind of America we want and need. I want an America that is open to the world, that lifts a true and sure welcome to people from any and all “ancient lands,” that shines a light on the “golden door” that opens to freedom, opportunity, safety, and justice for everyone. Even Eric Schmitt! DM
Thank you.
God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
