07/12/2017
President Trump’s Warsaw speech remains a subject for debate in the media. Most reaction from the public has been very upbeat, but the usual suspects in zones like CNN and MSNBC are naysayers regarding the positive remarks about our cultural heritage.Tucker Carlson found the left’s objections to appreciation of our shared civilization to be profoundly destructive: if they can’t win, then would rather destroy everything.
TUCKER CARLSON: President Trump’s speech in Poland last week may have been the single best thing he has said out loud since entering politics, and for one reason, it was a rousing defense of Western civilization. You wouldn’t think a speech is doing that would be unusual — the only reason you hire leaders in the first place is to defend your civilization, especially ours which is the foundation of pretty much everything we have: our history, our language, our art, science, law — our entire culture — America itself — is the product of Western civilization, so you’d think the people running the West would want to defend all of that, but no, it was left to Donald Trump to do it.It is bizarre for the MSNBC complainers to condemn symphonies as a racist expression, that merely mentioning the musical form is a dog whistle for white nationalism. Good grief. As if KKK types sit around debating the merits of Bach versus Mozart.PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We write symphonies, we pursue innovation, we celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs and always seek to explore and discover brand new frontiers … The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?
CARLSON: Now admittedly President Trump is a polarizing figure, but the words you just heard him speak shouldn’t be controversial. The West is indisputably the freest, the cleanest, the fairest civilization in history; that’s why so many immigrants want to move here. It’s definitely under attack: that’s what ISIS and the Berkeley riots were about, and of course it will fall if we don’t guard it. Everything undefended eventually does.
Even Trump haters ought to be able to admit all of that because it’s true, but they can’t admit it. Instead they’re calling the speech bigoted, the line about symphonies especially bigoted.
MSNBC TALKER 1: He threw in there — “we write symphonies” — and that’s what triggered the alarm bells for me. Am I wrong in making this parallel between Steve King, President Trump and white nationalism?
MSNBC TALKER 2: Trump seemed to embody and enshrine that belief that the West should steal itself for a clash of civilizations with other cultures, other beliefs, which pretty much spelled out you know, the Muslim world.
CNN TALKER: So this is not a speech he could have given really any place else, and this is a white America, America-first kind of speech.
CARLSON: So extolling the virtues of symphonies is now racist. Slate.com called it quote white nationalist rhetoric. According to the Atlantic, it is racial and religious paranoia. Okay, let’s pause for a second, tone it down and consider the argument that president’s critics are making here. Trump actually didn’t say a word about race, not one. He talked instead about art, innovation, science, free speech, democracy — those are not racial categories; they’re statements about belief, the beliefs that in fact created this country and have sustained it for centuries since.
The question is: has the left actually rejected those beliefs, those values? Can we no longer agree that free speech, for example, is better than censorship, that representative government is superior to dictatorship, that our civil code is preferable to Sharia law? And if we can’t agree on those things, what are we all doing in the same country? How can we keep living together? What is the point of all of this?
There was a time when the American left grappled with questions like those — those are the real questions by the way. That was a time before the progressive movement became governed by a reactionary almost oedipal impulse to destroy the institutions that made it possible purely for the joy of destroying them, for tearing it all down. The Left used to have ideas: they believed in culture. Now they think symphonies are a sign of white privilege. What happened and can the purges be far behind?
President Trump was being a gracious guest in Poland by complementing Europe on its symphonies which were a major art form for a couple centuries, creating the classical music tradition that remains popular around the world today. It’s not like the US has a great history of symphony creation — no, that’s a European accomplishment.
In addition, Europe has its own anthem, and it is derived from a symphony. At European Union events, big soccer tournaments and other continental proceedings, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is played with new lyrics different from the traditional ones written by Friedrich Schiller.
So when MSNBC dimwits trash symphonies, they are insulting more than 700,000 Europeans.
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