VIDEO Dr. Sebastian Gorka Explains How to Fight Cancel Culture: ‘You Must Not Buckle Under’

MATTHEW BOYLE 14 Feb 2021

Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a former senior aide to former President Donald Trump, explained in a wide-ranging interview last week how he has faced cancel culture, how to fight back against it, and why the left and establishment practices it against Trump supporters.

Appearing on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel with editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, Gorka — who now hosts America First on Salem Radio Networks — laid out first the reasoning why the left and political establishment seeks to shut down voices like his.

“We could write a book about this. I don’t kiss and tell, but you’ve been on this issue from the get go. I’ve been very honest about it publicly,” Gorka told Marlow. “It’s the reason I left the White House and it was Breitbart that published my resignation letter. I told the president at the time, you literally have anti-MAGA forces in ascendance. At the time, it was H.R. McMaster and it was General Kelly who were pushing me out of the building. And I told the president, ‘There is no way I am going to pick up a $160,000 pay check from the taxpayer just to be boxed out of meetings by people who hate me and the president. I can better serve you on the outside.’ He agreed and now I have a national radio show, three million listeners, and we’re fighting the good fight. But at the end of the day, this isn’t really a function of any incompetence by the president, it’s a function of the swamp. What is the conclusion that has to be drawn from the experience of people who are pro-MAGA and work for the president? The left, the establishment, the mainstream media, the RINO class, want to make it impossible for good people to represent the forgotten men and women of America. They want to make your life impossible.”

Gorka said that he does not mind attacks against him personally, but when people attack his family, that crosses the line. He cited the example of Disney canceling Gina Carano, the star actress from The Mandalorian, over social media posts that she published commenting on the state of society and noted that similar tactics have been used against any talented people who may want to work for Trump or other effective Republicans.

“Look, I don’t mind being attacked, that’s fine, but when they come after your wife, when they attack my teenage son, it has one purpose: To make sure good people don’t get involved in representing this nation,” Gorka said. “So I’m not involved in choosing the president’s lawyers, but I’ll tell you one thing: How many law firms would actually risk representing Donald Trump? I talk national security, but I woke to this Gina Carano story. Seriously, a woman who speaks the truth — absolutely speaks the truth about the left’s attempts to dehumanize their fellow Americans — is canceled by Disney? It’s the same effect of a lawyer wanting to work for Donald Trump. It is an attempt to attack and create an environment where good people will simply keep their heads down.”

Gorka then recounted a story from his daughter’s time in college and her senior year when he worked for President Trump. “My children who are now grown will admit that the tribulations that we went through as a family during my time in the White House as a supporter of the president have truly made them stronger human beings,” Gorka said. “I am convinced as their father that their value system is all the more robust for what they witnessed happened to us and to them personally. Read the first chapter of my book The War for America’s Soul. What happened to my daughter in her last year in college was simply a function of her last name.”

What happened was leftists on campus made posters with his daughter’s face falsely claiming she was a white supremacist and then plastered them all around campus. When he showed up for her graduation that year, at least one leftist falsely accused Gorka of being a Nazi.

“So because she was a Gorka, because she volunteered to work with some of the professors who created something called the Churchill Institute to propagate the values of western civilization — that’s in their mandate — she had posters with her face put up across the campus and on social media saying this girl is the face of white supremacy,” Gorka said. “That was just weeks before her graduation. Then when I was there for the graduation, I had a girl come up after we had celebrated my daughter getting her diploma and, in front of witnesses, call me an ‘effing Nazi’ because I work for Trump.”

Gorka, who was born in London to parents who fled Hungary after the failed revolution in 1956 against Soviet control but then later served in Hungary as a Ministry of Defence adviser after the fall of communism, compared the bending of America’s will toward cancel culture to efforts of a Soviet dictator in Hungary to slowly break someone’s spine.

“This is the reality, but let me tell you a story which puts it into perspective,” Gorka said. “During the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact had various levels of persecution and sovietization. The harshest were of course the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Romania. Those were the really kind of absolute worst of the worst. Others, like Hungary, kind of dialed back a little on the Stalinist nature of the regime. By the 1970s, Hungary was called the ‘Goulash Communism.’ You weren’t allowed to go to Paris for the holidays, but you could go to Yugoslavia. You still had political prisoners, you still had a one-party state, but they just dialed it back a little bit. There’s a story that’s associated with then-dictator Janos Kadar, where somebody was lambasting him for not having a hard Stalinist line and he said — and who knows whether it happened or not — he said ‘my friend, it is far easier to bend the human spine slowly with time than to try to snap it with one move.’ That, that is what you are giving in to when you say, ‘I’m just going to get my head down, I’m just going to send checks to the local Republican candidate, but I’m not going to say anything and not going to do politics on social media.’ Guess what? You’ve already surrendered, that’s what you’ve done.”

Gorka said establishment media figures and top Democrats from President Joe Biden’s administration like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin are doing the same thing to the general public in the United States right now.

“Look at what is happening right now in America. We have not just Jake Tapper on CNN using the phrase, ‘MAGA terrorism,’ we have the Department of Homeland Security issuing their first terrorism warning memorandum after the election targeting those who disagreed with the results of the election or who questioned them,” Gorka said. “We have the new Secretary of Defense, an absolute disgrace to the uniform he once wore, Lloyd Austin, talking about the ‘enemies’ in the ranks of the military who shut down our military for 60 days while he reviews the level of extremist penetration into our ranks. I guarantee you one thing, none of the extremists that SecDef Austin will find will be members of Antifa or BLM who took the lives of 40 people in the riots last year, half of them black like he is. This is the reality of America today and if you don’t talk out about it — you don’t have to have a national radio show, you don’t need to be editor-in-chief of the most influential conservative website. But if you’re an American and you care about the freedoms upon which it was built and for which Americans died and bled, and you don’t say the truth you are complicit and you are making the dehumanization of your fellow man all the more possible. That’s the crux of the matter.”

Hope is not all lost in America, though, Gorka said. Conservatives and Trump supporters and Americans across the board can fight back against cancel culture in much the same way he did with an example from this past week when a leftist employed at a major law firm in New York City sent him disparaging messages on Twitter.

“This Sunday, on my Twitter feed, my direct messages are open — that means anybody can direct message me if they wish to,” Gorka said. “That’s how you can keep in touch. Sunday, somebody who has a Twitter account in his own name… sent me the following messages, ‘I’m going to piss on your grave and send the photographs to your children.’ We did a little bit of research and found out who this person is and we verified where he works. He’s an accountant for one of the biggest accounting companies in New York and I proceed to message him back. I don’t say I’m going to piss on his grave, but as soon as I respond to him and I make it clear I know who he is, he blocks me from his account, he makes it private, and then he deletes it.”

Then, Gorka reached out to the man’s employer and asked about it. The CEO of the company apologized and disavowed what the man said, and apparently convened an all-hands company meeting to discuss what happened and what to do about it. Gorka said the man is no longer employed.

“I immediately dig up the email for his boss at Marcum LLP in New York and I send him the screenshots of the now-deleted account about what his employee said about me and my children and about wanting to urinate on my grave,” Gorka told Marlow. “To his credit, the CEO immediately emailed me back on a Sunday afternoon, apologized, and then on their social media accounts, they disavowed the words of Joe Wiley. I heard late last night from another follower who knows somebody who knows somebody that there was an all hands meeting at Marcum LLP on Monday morning and this individual has since been fired for his language. Now this isn’t cancel culture. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t do this to people who politically disagree with me. And I don’t tell people I politically disagree with that I want to piss on their graves and send the photographs to their children. But, if you use language like that, if you use vile, abusive language and involve my children, guess what Joe Wiley. I am going to let my voice be heard and I’m going to stand up for the truth. I know that thousands of others also went to the Marcum website and also went to their Instagram feed. That is why all of those feeds have been locked or closed. This is how you fight back — not with the dirty tactics they use because we believe in the truth. But you must not buckle under — it’s not just my voice, it’s everyone who stood for the truth the last four days. You cannot let them get away with it. You don’t have to run for public office although gosh could you imagine if every listener to your radio show decided to run for the local school board?”

Gorka also discussed the incident on his own program, here:

Gorka and Marlow concluded the conversation on cancel culture by discussing the popularity of both Trump and Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart. Of Trump and Breitbart, Gorka said, “there is a massive commonality between them.”

“Donald Trump, for all his mannerisms and style, never starts the fight,” Gorka said. “But if you bring the fight to him, he will finish it. He will fight back just as robustly as those who attack him. The commonality with Andrew is very simply this: Andrew, above all else, in addition to love of country, was motivated by the need, the burning sense of injustice when he witnessed bullies. What you are doing, what I am doing, what the president is doing, is fight back against those who start the abuse first. That is what all of us should be doing every single day. If you see a bully, whether it’s on the playground or on social media — I don’t care where it is — if you see one and you do nothing, I’m sorry you are part of the problem. Just stand up to the bullies and America will be a better place.”

Gorka advised Americans to put a sticky note on their desks that has the number 74 — representing the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020, to signify they are not alone — and think of that anytime they see someone getting canceled or shut down. Instead of staying silent — and being part of the problem — Gorka advises Americans to start using their voices, a powerful tool protected under the First Amendment, to fight back.

“If you do it, you will have people who say, ‘oh my gosh, he spoke the truth. So can I,’” Gorka said. “It is a catalytic effect that you have when you speak up to the bullies and liars.”

LISTEN TO DR. SEBASTIAN GORKA ON BREITBART NEWS DAILY:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/02/14/dr-sebastian-gorka-fight-cancel-culture-not-buckle-under/

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Ep. 1457 The New Rules – The Dan Bongino Show

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SAUL ALINSKY’S 13 RULES FOR RADICALS

Excerpted from Saul Alinsky’s book: Rules For Radicals, published in 1971.

1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.“
   Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.“
   It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.“
   Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.“
   If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.“
   There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.“
   They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.“
   Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.“
   Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.“
   Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
    It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.“
    Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.“
    Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.“
    Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Saul Alinsky – Rules for Radicals

https://archive.org/details/RulesForRadicals

AUDIO SCOTUS LGBT Decision Will ‘Create a Tsunami of New Litigation’ Against Religious Groups

ROBERT KRAYCHIK 15 Jun 2020

The Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) reinterpretation of a federal prohibition against employment discrimination based on sex — which now includes sexual orientation and “gender identity” — will “create a tsunami of new litigation” against religious organizations, explained Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, offering her remarks on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour.

The Supreme Court’s legal redefinition of “sex” to include sexual orientation and “gender identity” opens the door for further left-wing lawfare against religious organizations, Severino noted.

Severino said, “The Supreme Court left a lot of really important issues open, like, how do you balance this with religious freedom? How do you balance it with freedom of speech? If you’ve got a law, for example, saying that using someone’s preferred pronoun is mandatory — or you can be fined [for non-compliance], how do we balance that with some of these other important and even constitutional questions? Those are things that, for the most part, are unfortunately going to be just decided by a whole range of lower courts. and it will be a long time before the Supreme Court even takes up the opportunity to weigh in on that.”

Severino predicted, “These questions are going to create a tsunami of new litigation and create a huge amount of uncertainty going forward.”

LISTEN:

The Supreme Court’s decision to extend prohibitions against employment discrimination to include sexual orientation and “gender identity” will place religious and traditional organizations at a legal disadvantage when they are inevitably sued by left-wing outfits.

“You’re going to see these decisions going overwhelmingly in favor of the litigants [and] the plaintiffs who are challenging any religious organization, or any school, or anyone who wants to maintain a traditional, biologically based, scientific-based understanding of sex,” Severino forecasted.

“The logic that the court embraced” sets in motion a legal momentum for lower courts to render future decisions in favor of plaintiffs suing religious and traditional organizations for their personnel decisions, Severino anticipated.

Mansour asked if religious organizations would surrender to left-wing activist groups filing lawsuits based on the Supreme Court’s decision given their insufficient resources to legally defend themselves.

Severino replied, “That’s part of the strategy of the activists because they know that many of these organizations can’t afford to pay for defense. They can’t afford to risk a negative judgment where they could face crippling fines. If you’re talking about individuals, you’ve seen what’s happened with cases like the Masterpiece Cake Shop case, where someone’s entire business and livelihood could be destroyed and where they can face even personal threats and real concern over their own safety if they are willing to carry on litigation.”

Severino added, “I think the intimidation factor of a lawsuit is huge, and when you’ve got the court almost inviting that, it’s going to present a real challenge for a lot of people. Practically speaking, for the most part, this isn’t even going to be an issue because I think there’s the vast majority of businesses don’t have any reason or desire to discriminate on either of these bases, but there are circumstances where it is either relevant to the job qualifications or where it’s going to be an issue of conscience, and those are the ones where you’re going to have people who are going to be forced to make those tough choices between violating their own conscience and possibly losing their livelihood.”

The Supreme Court’s decision amounted to a rewriting of civil rights legislation, Severino stated.

“This had to do with the court interpreting the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Severino explained. “We’re kind of familiar with this language. It says that no employers can discriminate on the basis of sex, of religion, of natural origin, and other kinds of classic caveats that you have, but what their question was, ‘It says you can’t discriminate ion the basis of sex. Does that also mean you can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity?’”

Severino continued, “It’s kind of a strange question to be asking because in so many states, now, and in many situations in federal law, we already do have laws preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation, but they never phrase it as ‘discrimination based on sex.’ It’s always explicitly written, ‘discrimination based on sexual orientation.’”

“What the Supreme Court did is, in an opinion, they basically just rewrote what that text said because there is a long-standing history where for decades, no politicians [and] no judge said that language meant sexual orientation, as well,” Severino added.

The Supreme Court’s decision usurps the role of legislators, Severino determined.

“That’s really a revisionist reading of the statute dressed up as textualism, and that’s one of the things that is so dangerous because we have laws that courts can effectively rewrite,” Severino concluded. “No legislator who passed [Title VII of the Civil Rights Act] would have thought it meant that.”

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/06/15/carrie-severino-scotus-lgbt-decision-tsunami-litigation-religious-groups/

AUDIO ‘I Think We’re in the Greatest Revival in History’

ROBERT KRAYCHIK 6 Apr 2020

“I think we’re in the greatest revival in history,” said MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, describing adversity as an opportunity for spiritual development. He offered his remarks in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.

Pollak recalled Lindell’s call for Americans to spend time with families during the coronavirus outbreak.  “I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the word, read our Bibles, and spend time with our families,” said Lindell last week at the White House among other company CEOs attending a meeting regarding production of medical supplies.

Lindell said, “I wanted to write a message of hope to the people, not just what our companies are doing to help out. … I give the glory to God.” He explained he was only informed his remarks would be publicly broadcast moments before he delivered them.

Lindell added, “I was attacked by every host out there on the left, and and I don’t know why. I don’t understand it. I didn’t say you have to. I said this is a good time to spend time in the Word, with our bibles, get our country back to prayer, and to spend time with their families. … It just tells me that I’m absolutely giving the right message out there, because millions of people have backed me on that.”

Left-wing hostility to his White House remarks “got the message out even more,” estimated Lindell, “because I think we’re in the greatest revival in history, because people are looking for hope.”

LISTEN:

Lindell recalled instances where he was directed to hide his cross during infomercial presentations by various producers.

“I was attacked all the time for that, and it went on for years,” Lindell stated. “It’s almost like a prejudice against Christians, like if it was anybody else in another religion, it just seems like they don’t get attacked like Christianity does, but anyway, that’s just my opinion. I see it happening all the time. I personally have experienced it, and more than once.”

“I don’t think it was people on the left,” Lindell added. “It was the the narrative of the left-wing media, and I could name them all.”

Hardship can open doors for spiritual growth, determined Lindell, reflecting on his own experience with drug addiction.

Lindell reflected, “I view addiction as an opportunity for the greatest revival, because who’s looking for hope? Addicts and their families, and then along came this pandemic. Who’s looking for hope? There’s people at home, and they’re in fear.”

“With God, all things are possible,” remarked Lindell, describing the coronavirus outbreak as an opportunity to restore American medical and pharmaceutical manufacturing and lessen dependency on China.

Lindell concluded, “We’re in a place we’ve never been before People are scared and they need hope, and I’m telling you there’s no better place to find hope than in the Bible and with your families. Spend that time and spend that time in prayer.”

Breitbart News Sunday broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/04/06/mike-lindell-i-think-were-in-the-greatest-revival-in-history/

AUDIO How Christmas Has Shaped Our History and Values

 

ROBERT KRAYCHIK 25 Dec 2017

“Christmas is essential to our understanding of Western Civilization and our values,” said Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour on Sunday.

“The symbols and celebration of Christmas have shaped our history [and] Western Civilization,” said Mansour.

Reflecting on “the dawn of Christianity,” she noted Christianity’s “transformative” impact on the old pagan world and the culture of Germanic barbarian warrior tribes.

Chivalry — rooted in ethical monotheism — spread the concept of valuing all human life as having dignity, said Mansour:

Chivalry was introduced to Western feudalism [via Christianity]. It made feudalism actually livable and bearable. What chivalry called for, what the concept of chivalry was, it was about the defense of the weak. It said that the strong had to be champions of the right and the good against injustice and evil. That was the code of chivalry.

This only came about because of the Judeo-Christian West, and I say Judeo-Christian for a very specific reason; all of this is rooted in the ancient Jewish scripture, what the Christians would call the Old Testament. You can see it right from the beginning. The God of the Old Testament, the God of Jewish scripture instructs that every single human being has worth and dignity — even the foreigner, even somebody outside of your tribe, even the widow and the orphan. They all have worth and value — the weakest among you as well as the strong. This is a radical concept, and it is from the Jews that we have monotheism, and it is from that that Christianity evolved.

“The idea of protection of the weak and innocent,” said Mansour, entered Western culture via Judeo-Christian ethics, which radically “changed the way that we have looked at the rights of the weakest among us.”

Bannon agreed, noting that the “Rough Roman justice” of the old pagan world had “no sense of you as a person or an individual.”

Christianity’s spread to the Germanic lands on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, noted Mansour, set the stage for the evolution of conceptual human rights and created the foundation for the Western values we cherish today.

Mansour tied this to the symbols and celebration of Christmas by explaining that the “most iconic” and ancient Nativity image is the Madonna and Child.

The ubiquity of depictions of the Madonna and Child as “the highest expression of art” in European countries, said Mansour, vividly illustrates Christianity’s transformation of the “Viking-type” “warrior tribe” cultures that valued only the strong and worshipped war gods. People who once subscribed to an ethos of “might makes right” had transitioned to a civilization that elevated the image of a woman holding a child to preeminence in their artistic expressions.

Christian symbolism — particularly pertaining to the Christmas-themed image of the Madonna and Child — played an indispensable role in rallying Christian forces to victory against Islamic enemies in determinative battles, said Mansour. Pointing to the Battles of Vienna (1683) and Warsaw (1920) as examples, she noted the centrality of Christian symbolism to the war efforts of European nations in defending against Islamic and communist invasions, respectively.

In both battles, Mansour explained, Catholic Poland’s devotion to a depiction of the Madonna and Child known as the Black Madonna of Częstochowa served as a rallying point and source of consolation. It also served as a unifying symbol for Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Movement in their struggles against their communist rulers in the 1980s, she noted. Walesa famously wore a lapel pin bearing the image of Our Lady of Częstochowa.

Mansour and Bannon went into particular detail about the epic Battle Vienna in 1683. As Mansour explained, the Polish King Jan III Sobieski rallied his forces to liberate the besieged city of Vienna from the Islamic army of the Ottoman Turks by encouraging them to fight for “God and Our Lady” and to invoke the Madonna’s help in securing their victory and protecting their homeland, which he had entrusted to her care when he visited the shrine at Częstochowa before departing for battle.

The allied Christian forces, known as the Holy League, under Sobieski’s command knew that if Vienna fell, the Turks would then turn their sights on their ultimate goal which, Mansour explained, was “the greatest city in Christendom — Rome,” and “if Rome fell, Holy Mother Church would fall.” The Christian forces were fighting to preserve their faith, she said.

Sobieski himself led the cavalry charge to liberate Vienna — the largest cavalry charge in history — with 18,000 Polish and allied knights, including 3,000 of the famed “Wing Hussars.” The allied forces of the Holy League smashed the Turkish army and sent them scurrying over the Danube. The victorious Sobieski sent the Pope the Turkish army’s green Islamic banner along with a message paraphrasing the words of Julius Caesar: “Veni, vidi, Deus vicit.” (“I came, I saw, God conquered.”)

“The Christians had turned the tide against the sword of Islam” in the Battle of Vienna, said Mansour, quoting Ludwig Heinrich Dyck. The Turks would never again venture that far into Western Europe.

The Battle of Vienna, oil on canvas, circa 1688, by Martino Altomonte (Wikimedia Commons)

“It was on September 11, 1683 that the conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of Vienna,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens, describing the rationale behind the date selection of the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001.

“The radicalized Muslim world,” said Bannon, views the Battle of Vienna as a symbol of Christian victory that must be overcome. “It was one of the symbols of the September 11 bombing seventeen years ago, this Battle of Vienna.”

“We would all be in mosques today” if not for Christianity and Christmas as galvanizing forces among Western societies against hostile Islamic societies, said Bannon.

Although civilizational conflict between Western and Islamic societies has modified across space and time, it continues through the present day with certain commonalities. Bannon explained:

The Siege of Vienna we’re talking about, with the Ottoman Empire — which is Turkey, and the Muslims — this whole invasion of the West, occurring literally today with the same migrant issues coming up through Syria, through Turkey, and you see the countries of Poland, and Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and Slovakia taking the lead here in trying to reverse this.

“These fights haven’t really changed all that much. It’s still Iran and the West. It’s still Persia and the West,” said Bannon, noting the similar conflictual flash points between Western forces and ISIS of today and the Roman and Persian empires of nearly two thousand years ago.

Christianity and broader Judeo-Christian values, suggested both Bannon and Mansour, reinforce Western Civilization’s sense of purpose in the face of internal and external threats.

The migration of tens of millions of Muslims to Europe in recent decades, said Bannon, is an existential threat to Europe and modern iteration of aforementioned civilization conflict between Western and Islamic societies: “The entire situation with this mass migration and refugee situation, which is really, there is no doubt, is starting to destroy Europe.”

Listen to the full audio of Mansour and Bannon’s discussion on Breitbart News Sunday above.

Breitbart News Sunday airs on SiriusXM Patriot between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern (4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Pacific).

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.

Mansour made her comments while co-hosting Breitbart News Sunday alongside Breitbart Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon during a special Christmas Eve live broadcast on SiriusXM.

 

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/12/25/mansour-how-christmas-is-essential-to-our-understanding-of-our-values/

VIDEO Historian Wilfred McClay: Thanksgiving Established Fundamental American Values Centuries Before 1776

 

ROBERT KRAYCHIK

Fundamental American values manifested in the story of Thanksgiving centuries before the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, explained Wilfred McClay, author of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.

Mansour invited McClay’s assessment of criticisms of the November holiday among left-wing teachers calling for students to “unlearn” a “feel-good” Thanksgiving “myth.”

McClay said of leftist contempt for Thanksgiving, “I think it’s a reflection of what — for some people — is the obsession with the politicization of all aspects of life, and everything has to be brought into conformity with some kind of ideological worldview.”

LISTEN:

McClay continued, “It’s almost like a kind of revolutionary religion, like in the French Revolution, the way they abolished the calendar, and tried to reinvent civilization from the bottom up. It’s the kind of mentality [against] something that really … is one of most admirable holidays imaginable. Of course, we aren’t the only ones that have Thanksgiving in the world, but it is integral to our essential practises, and it’s an expression of gratitude.”

“It has religious roots,” said McClay of the history of Thanksgiving. “In the 1620s — there’s some debate over when the first Thanksgiving was, whether it was in Virginia or whether it was in Plymouth, but it’s in the 17th century — it had religious overtones, particularly with the Pilgrims in 1621.”

McClay added, “It is an amazing story. Of course they had come in pursuit of freedom to practise their religion and raise their children as they saw fit. They had come from the Netherlands, where religious liberty was available to them, but it was a hard place to live for various reasons, and particularly for their children, to have them grow up not speaking English and all of that, so they got on the Mayflower and came on over.”

“It was a terrible, brutal first winter,” stated McClay. “They suffered from disease and exposure, and about half of them died. Many of them never came off the ship because they saw the landing as so dangerous, but they did have favorable contacts with some of the native tribes, the Patuxet Tribe [and] Squanto, and he taught them how to cultivate corn, what plants to eat and what plants not to eat.”

“[Squanto] was an intermediary,” explained McClay. “He helped [the Pilgrims] form relationships with the Wampanoag Tribe. … They had this celebratory feast in November 1621 to celebrate a successful harvest of corn that Squanto had helped show them [how] to cultivate. So that’s seen as the historical origin of it, and it was, by all accounts, by everything we know about it, and we don’t know a lot.”

McClay remarked, “Puritans were great about keeping journals and diaries. They saw success or failure as evidence of the degree to which they were being faithful to God. … That’s what their settlement was all about. They saw this as a mission, this errand into the wilderness.”

“Ten years later, John Winthrop, who led the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which became Boston — he gave this magnificent speech … where the phrase ‘city on a hill’ comes from — makes it very clear this was a religious enterprise, so they’re grateful to God [for] the success in finally getting through — or at least having the materials to get through — the coming winter,” added McClay.

Fundamental American values were being developed by the early colonists, explained McClay.

“What they did was enact social compact theory that had been sort of kicked around in Europe — especially in Britain — for awhile,” McClay noted. “They created a body politic out of the consent of those who were aboard the ship, and they had the foresight to realize they should [and] could do that … two centuries before the Declaration of Independence, the idea that government is based on the consent of the governed, which of course is one of the fundamental American ideas. So all of this is prefigured by the Mayflower Compact.”

McClay said, “There’s a kind of audacity about these [first colonists] that we miss, I think, in the historical accounts. Their journeys were dangerous. The habitats into which they were coming were brutal, and they lost many lives, and yet they had this sense that …. they were on a mission of God, ‘The eyes of all people are upon us.’ … They were so deeply committed to the vision of what they were doing, and that was the germ of what became, ultimately, a great nation.”

The Puritans sought religious restoration via their settlement enterprise, explained McClay.

“[The Puritans] wanted to just have a faithful remnant of a church that they thought had become corrupt in England, and in Europe, in general,” McClay shared. “What they really wanted to do was recreate what [William Bradford] called, ‘the primitive church,’ and that doesn’t mean people running around with spears and that sort of thing. It meant a church that resembled the church of the time of the apostles and Jesus and immediately after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, the early time of the church, when it was simpler, when you didn’t have a lot of pomp and ceremony and popes and bishops running around in fancy robes and the accumulation of wealth and worldly power.”

McClay added, “It’s proper, I think, that we really trace Thanksgiving more to the Puritans, to a kind of reverent Thanksgiving.”

“[Left-wing criticism of Thanksgiving] doesn’t touch the validity of the holiday for us, because we don’t necessarily ground what we value of Thanksgiving in that historical episode. It’s not like the founding is, where it really matters what the language of the [Declaration of Independence] and Constitution was, and we want to try to stay as close as we can to the original intent of those documents. We don’t have that same kind of relationship to the first Thanksgiving, so I think it’s kind of a phony charge, what it does reflect to me is this pervasive politicization of American life, particularly from a left, radical, critical perspective.”

McClay described Thanksgiving as an “aspirational” holiday.

“A myth, properly understood, is not a falsehood,” McClay said. “We say that we believe all men are created equal. In some literal way, of course that’s not true, so what do we mean? Do we mean all men are created equal in the eyes of God? Maybe, although secular people might object to that formulation, but we certainly mean we have a kind of aspiration towards recognition of — in some ultimate way that’s very hard to define — the equal worth of all individual people. That’s really, I think, fundamentally religious. It’ s hard to imagine that existing out of a Juedo-Christian understanding of human beings.”

McClay went on, “We have this day because we aspire to reconciliation to one another and a recognition of just how profoundly indebted we are to those who came before us, to our parents, to our surrounding society, to our neighbors and friends, that there’s so much that we take for granted every single day.”

“How are you going to go through life?” asked McClay. “How are you going to go through the world? Are you going to go through it thinking that everything is your due and everything you don’t get [means] you’re being cheated by the world? Or do you think, ‘Why do I have something rather than nothing? Isn’t that great?’”

McClay continued, “The Christian view — I’m sweeping widely, here — is that we don’t really deserve anything. Our sinful nature is that we don’t really have anything coming to us, that it’s God’s graciousness that is the source of all these good things that we really don’t deserve.”

“It is a time in which we recognize our own insufficiencies, that we are not islands unto ourselves and that we depend on others, and that there are so many people in our lives to whom we owe profound gratitude, and just the bounty of existence,” determined McClay. “These are all reasons for gratitude.”

McClay contrasted gratitude and ingratitude.

“Gratitude is the proper disposition of a healthy human soul, and it’s the proper disposition of a good citizen in a democratic society,” assessed McClay. “If we lose those things and we become, sort of, brats — and I’m not meaning to say all the radical critiques of American society are bratty, most of them are, but not all of them — brattiness is a kind of ingratitude and a feeling that, ‘I deserve it all and whatever I don’t get is a form of expropriation.’ It’s the seed of other good things, other forms of mutual appreciation and reconciliation that can occur, and to take that away atomizes people.it leaves people without a means to reach out to one another.”

Left-wing critiques of Thanksgiving are generally a part of a broader political campaign to undermine America’s founding, concluded McClay.

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2019/11/28/historian-wilfred-mcclay-thanksgiving-established-fundamental-american-values-centuries-before-1776/

AUDIO Medal of Honor Recipient Kyle Carpenter: Don’t Hide Your Scars

ROBERT KRAYCHIK  14 Oct 2019

 

“Scars are a truly beautiful thing,” said Ret. Lance Cpl. William Kyle Carpenter, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the War in Afghanistan and Medal of Honor recipient, in a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Carpenter reflected on the genesis of his forthcoming book You Are Worth It: Building a Life Worth Fighting For, scheduled for release on Wednesday.

“This book started many, many years before I started writing it two years ago,” Carpenter said. “I was injured by an enemy hand grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. I spent three years recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. … And through that three years, I was forced to search for the silver linings during the long dark and painful nights and days in the hospital.”

Carpenter sought to write a book with broad appeal and expansive applicability.

“After leaving my three years at Walter Reed — and just having an amazing recovery thanks to the incredible staff there, my family, and so many loving and supporting people around the country — I immediately drove out of the gate of Walter Reed, and I drove down to Columbia, South Carolina, and moved into my small one-bedroom apartment there to start my freshman year at college,” recalled Carpenter. “I graduated from college December of 2017 and looking ahead and thinking about potentially starting a book, I just kept getting hung up before even starting because I didn’t want to write a book that only people that have served in the military or that have been to combat could understand. I wanted a book that transcended all boundaries and that anyone could pick up and not only understand but take lessons from.”

LISTEN:

The centrality and universality of struggle to the human condition formed the perspective of his book, revealed Carpenter.

“All of these experiences over the years leading up to this book, at the time, they were just that — they were experiences, something that happened,” Carpenter remarked. “There was always the next therapy appointment, next surgery, next college exam, but with time and deep thought, those evolved into life lessons, which then evolved into perspective. And I think we can never have enough perspective. And so, I wrote this book from the angle of struggle because going through these events and these meet and greets, as I was thinking about how I wanted to write this book, people would always come up to me after these events and say, ‘Oh, well, I was never in the military, but,’ and then proceed to tell me their own version of struggle. So that was kind of a light bulb moment for me, like, ‘Oh, of course, I can write about struggle,’ because everyone — physically, mentally, or emotionally — can relate to struggle.”

Carpenter determined, “Struggle is that one common fiber throughout every single person on this Earth, and so, yes, [my book] has a chapter or two about Afghanistan and my injury to give context to my journey, but it’s so much more that. It’s primarily written from the blast on because, like I said, I wanted people to [connect with my story]. … They might have never spent three years in a hospital bed, but they know what pain is.”

Carpenter realized the value of the scars he developed from his injury and subsequent surgeries while trying to minimize their visibility with scar revision therapy.

“While I was at Walter Reed, I couldn’t rush my surgeries anymore than I was, so in between all of those therapy hours and surgeries, a lot of my doctors were addressing … some scars on my face, if I wanted to, I could just come by the clinic and do scar revision therapy,” recalled Carpenter. “At this point in my recovery … I hadn’t really had the deep thought to follow my hospital time and really realize the lessons that I had learned along the way, so I thought, ‘Okay. I’ll try some scar revision therapy.’ I go into the clinic, and not only is it extremely painful, but I come out and my face — I mean, I was unrecognizable. I was swollen. I didn’t even recognize myself in the mirror.”

“At that moment, I had a few epiphanies, one was: I’m trying to buffer out a scratch on a car that has been completely totaled,” quipped Carpenter. “Both my arms are skin grafted, my right one from — it doesn’t function right — so even if I didn’t have the scars, you would be able to [observe my injury]. I have skin grafts and scars from my wrists all the way to the top of my shoulder.”

Carpenter continued, “So there was that, but on a deeper level, I realized: why am I trying to do this when I’m going around the country and speaking to people and trying to share hope that it’s okay — physically, mentally, or emotionally — if you get injured and if you have scars. I kind of felt like a hypocrite almost.

“Scars are truly a beautiful thing,” declared Carpenter. “Yes, they can be a little ugly on the outside, but scars show that you’re a survivor, that you made it through something, and not only did you make it through, but now you’re stronger and wiser and more educated because of that tough time that you went through. It’s my favorite chapter in the book — Don’t Hide Your Scars, Chapter 13 — and this kind of realization how scars connect all of us and how struggle connects all of us.”

Carpenter was awarded the Medal of Honor for using his body as a shield to protect a fellow Marine from an enemy hand grenade. His Medal of Honor citation reads:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as an Automatic Rifleman with Company F, 2d Battalion, 9th Marines, Regimental Combat Team 1, 1st Marine Division (Forward), 1 Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward), in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom on 21 November 2010. Lance Corporal Carpenter was a member of a platoon-sized coalition force, comprised of two reinforced Marine squads partnered with an Afghan National Army squad. The platoon had established Patrol Base Dakota two days earlier in a small village in the Marjah District in order to disrupt enemy activity and provide security for the local Afghan population. Lance Corporal Carpenter and a fellow Marine were manning a rooftop security position on the perimeter of Patrol Base Dakota when the enemy initiated a daylight attack with hand grenades, one of which landed inside their sandbagged position. Without hesitation, and with complete disregard for his own safety, Lance Corporal Carpenter moved toward the grenade in an attempt to shield his fellow Marine from the deadly blast. When the grenade detonated, his body absorbed the brunt of the blast, severely wounding him, but saving the life of his fellow Marine. By his undaunted courage, bold fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of almost certain death, Lance Corporal Carpenter reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2019/10/14/medal-of-honor-recipient-kyle-carpenter-dont-hide-your-scars/