President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a former independent presidential candidate who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories, including about vaccines — to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services. "For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health," Trump said in a statement on Truth Social. "The Safety...

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services. “I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” the president-elect...

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy predicted that President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general would be rejected by the Republican Senate next year. “Gaetz won’t get confirmed, everybody knows that,” McCarthy said in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the Barclays Asia Forum in Singapore on Thursday. Gaetz, a Florida congressman who resigned from the House hours after Trump announced that he would nominate him to run the Justice...

President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks keep getting more outlandish, which may be part of the point. Attorney general? Rep. Matt Gaetz, the right-wing provocateur who is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for allegations of sexual misconduct. Secretary of defense? Pete Hegseth, a weekend Fox News host who served in the Army National Guard. Director of national intelligence? Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who has expressed...

Reality revealed. The post “I’ve never met Courtney Love”: the truth behind Tori Amos song ‘Professional Widow’ first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

On a single day in late November 1943, Winston Churchill addressed two notes from Cairo, one going to both his Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and his Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, and one to Morrison alone.  Hold fast to the heights and together we will make American law great again. Churchill was writing on the extraordinary powers Parliament had granted his government when Britain was in its moment of greatest peril. The Nazi war machine in 1940 seemed invincible. Mighty France had fallen in six weeks. The British army barely escaped, leaving most of its equipment behind. Britain had no allies. The German invasion was expected at any moment. Parliament gave the government emergency powers to lock up without trial or charge anyone they considered a risk to safety. But now in the summer of ’43, on the way to meet Stalin and FDR at Tehran, three years had passed and the tide had turned. The Americans and the Soviets were allied with Britain in the fight. The great turning point battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein had been won and the Germans were in retreat. The direst phase of emergency was past and Churchill was pushing for change in the law. The emergency powers, Churchill wrote to Morrison, “should be completely abolished, as the national emergency no longer justifies abrogation of individual rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury on definite charges.” Writing to both Morrison and Attlee that same day, he wrote further, “On no account should we lend any countenance to the totalitarian idea of the right of the Executive to lockup political opponents or unpopular people.” If, out of caution, they still might oppose giving back these powers until the danger was more completely overcome, Churchill advised that they ought to be “proclaiming your resolve to use [those powers] with the utmost circumspection and humanity. Do not quit the heights.” The heights Churchill referred to were the moral heights that Britain and America commanded. Since the motivation of the people to fight and win that terrible conflict sprang from the stark moral contrast between Nazi tyranny and the liberty-preserving constitutional democracies, these heights were just as important strategically for Churchill as the commanding ground on the battlefield where the armies faced off. Both Obama and Biden chose to remove a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office when they took office (45 had restored the bust to its former position in between, and probably will do so again as 47). In the outbreak of political lawfare that characterized their attempts to destroy the political threat to their power that Trump posed, they showed why the petty case of bust removal was a symbol of their rejection of Churchill’s passionate constitutionalism. The imprisoning of Trump staff and the coordinated attempt to bankrupt, exhaust, and imprison Trump himself represented the exact opposite of the passion animating Churchill’s notes that wartime November. Churchill subordinated party to nation and galvanized all parties, left and right alike, in a sublime and magnificent war effort. He was gracious in defeat, headed a loyal parliamentary opposition for six years, and finally regained the votes of the people to be elected to a second term as prime minister. The key to the trust in the government was that no one faced loss of liberty save for violation of known laws and through a fair process. Obama, by contrast, served as the barely-hidden linch-pin of an opposition to Trump that used the apparatus of government intelligence and of federal law enforcement to put its thumb on the election scales in 2016 and 2020. In the lead-up to 2024, the Biden White House went further under the deep influence of Obama, who had broken precedent to remain in DC after his term of office in order to exercise influence. In a series of law cases that bear the hallmark of active coordination, novel and unprecedented uses of civil and criminal law — laws not known beforehand — were used to try to end forever the ability of Donald Trump to affect American politics. The use of law in these cases exhibited contempt for the attitude Churchill expressed in his plea to his ministers to “resolve to use [their legal powers] with the utmost circumspection and humanity.” All was subordinated to the political goal, in a logic which inevitably led to branding Trump and his 70 million supporters as Nazis and fascists. An immense and sustained media campaign augmented the claim that Trump represented a threat as grave as Hitler’s, a true threat to democracy. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: We Must All Renew the American Covenant) How did that work out? Before the series of trials started about a year ago, Trump’s candidacy was not going well. People sought alternatives. They wanted the political drama to go away. They wanted, as voters did a century earlier, a return to normalcy. And then the court cases hit. Charges that didn’t sit right, weird and strange in their juicing of freshly-minted statute and bizarre twistings of older laws to apply to things never before acted upon as illegal. Trump’s drastic turn of fortune can be pegged precisely to the revulsion that shuddered through America when Trump was hauled into court. At each successive stage of the coordinated prosecutions — mug shot, indictment, gag order, enforced courtroom presence, and on and on — there was a bump upwards. Trump’s enemies believed that pasting on him the label of an indicted man, and finally of a convicted felon, would cause America to reject Trump for good. But each successive advance in the court processes brought out a deeper revulsion. Before their very eyes, people had been ready to leave Trump behind and give credence to his critics who saw what a real threat to democracy looks like.  And they got behind Trump. The political prosecutors and those who coordinated their work at every level lacked Churchill’s reverence for political liberty and the free, if often unpleasant, debate that living constitutional government requires. Equally, they lacked a respect for the intelligence and the good heart of a population whom they were always too ready to dismiss as deplorables, clingers, and garbage.  The people’s heart was with Churchill’s, not with those who demoted his bust and departed from his commitment to liberty. Their hearts have been touched by liberty and they saw through the propaganda and the oh-so-clever arguments of those who wanted Trump off the ballot, off the internet, off the street, bankrupted, and jailed.  Churchill saw the commitment to political liberty as realization of the great civilizational process of the ages. And he was right. It is. America decided it was not going backwards. In the book that did more to make the West literate than any other, the Bible, we see in the Book of Exodus the classic fight for freedom. In Egypt, liberty and knowledge and the protections of law belonged only to a few. It was dangerous to educate slaves; they were to be governed by force. Self-government was only for the powerful few and always at the mercy of someone with more power. Then came the great drama of the Exodus, the escape of a whole nation of slaves from the taskmasters’ control. What followed Israel’s escape from Egypt was even more important — the law was given to the people directly from its Source, a law to which even the most powerful were accountable. Most important, out of love for the One who so empowered them, the people were bidden to take the laws as their own, to place them “upon your heart, to teach them to your children, and to speak of them, whether sitting in your home, walking in your way, lying down or rising up.” The laws are to be known by the people, not by some professional class of experts alone. And because the laws were theirs, the people would cherish them, and most of all, the love that animates them. Pharaohs still lurk. Sometimes they are effective in convincing the people that the business of government is only for elite professionals. They preach Lennonism: turn off your minds, relax, and float downstream. They tell you: this is not dying. Let us do the business of governing. (READ MORE: Unity Is a Common Goal, Often Abused) Americans are trusting. We are willing to listen to challenging thought and even give it a try. But the tale of this last campaign is that in the end, the people’s hearts know the law they love and what constitutes its real threat. Their former leaders deserted the heights of which Churchill spoke. But the hearts of the people remain true and they held the post. It was enough.  It’s now up to Trump and his team to stay worthy of the trust in the smashing electoral victory the people gave them. Hold fast to the heights and together we will make American law great again, a law preserved in the hearts of a wise and understanding people. The post With Trump’s Win, The Law Wins appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

While Christians in America are celebrating an end to the hostile Biden-Harris regime, Christians in Europe witnessed increased persecution and hatred last year, according to a new report. The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe) published its annual report on Friday, examining instances of “intolerance and discrimination against Christians” over the course of 2023. Unfortunately, the report found that religiously-motivated hate crimes against Christians more than doubled last year. “The majority of the attacks … were motivated by radical Islamism, a tragic consequence of mass immigration into Europe.” Relying on data from police and civil society organizations, OIDAC Europe found that there were 2,444 anti-Christian hate crimes, including over 230 “personal attacks,” across 35 different European countries last year alone. France, the United Kingdom, and Germany saw the most drastic increase, with hate crimes against Christians in Germany more than doubling last year. In France, there were nearly 1,000 hate crimes committed against Christians, including acts of vandalism and arson against churches and over 80 physical attacks against priests, preachers, and other persons on the basis of their Christian faith. There were over 700 anti-Christian hate crimes in the U.K. In Germany, there were over 2,000 attacks on churches, cemeteries, and other Christian sites alone. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Catholic Bishops Stumble on Immigration) According to OIDAC Europe’s report, 62 percent of anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe last year consisted of acts of vandalism, 10 percent were arson attacks, 8 percent consisted of threats of violence, 7 percent consisted of actual acts of physical violence, and 2 percent consisted of attempted homicides. Motivations behind anti-Christian hate crimes included radical Islam, anti-religion sentiment, and radical leftism, although OIDAC Europe noted that some crimes were “were linked to the war in Ukraine.” The report also observed that the share of anti-Christian hate crimes motivated by radical Islam nearly doubled in 2023. Some examples of anti-Christian hate crimes cited in the report include at least two instances of Muslims in the U.K. stabbing or attempting to murder converts to Christianity, considering them “infidels.” In Poland, a man intentionally drove his car through a Corpus Christi procession composed of over 100 Catholics, including 60 children. A priest in Spain was stabbed in the neck while distributing Holy Communion; the man responsible for the stabbing reportedly shouted curses at the Catholic Church and said that he “wanted to kill the bishop.” Also in Spain, a jihadist killed a sacristan with a machete and wounded four others, including a priest, as he attacked two churches. In comments to The American Spectator, Arielle Del Turco, Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, said, “This data should cause European political leaders to take seriously the religious freedom concerns of Christians in their countries. No one should be physically attacked for their faith, and that this is happening in the West is particularly alarming.” She continued, “The majority of the attacks which we have data on were motivated by radical Islamism, a tragic consequence of mass immigration into Europe.” Del Turco added, “Rising anti-Christian hate crimes is a shameful and dangerous trend that European leaders should work swiftly to reverse.” OIDAC Europe also reported that instances of “discrimination” against Christians are on the rise, with hearings and surveys finding that some Christians have even lost their jobs because they profess fundamental Christian moral teachings, such as “marriage is a union between one man and one woman” or “human life begins at conception.” A survey conducted in the U.K. found that over half (56 perccent) of Christians polled said that they had been mocked, ridiculed, or ostracized for their Christian faith. Among Christians under the age of 35, 61 percent responded that they had been mocked, ridiculed, or ostracized for their faith. One male survey participant said that any “mention of faith in a CV precludes one from an interview. My yearly assessment was lowered because I spoke of Christ.” A female respondent said that she was “bullied” at her workplace due to her faith, and another Christian coworker was “bullied out of her job for her beliefs and refusing to do shifts on Sundays so she could attend church.” Religious and moral beliefs expressed privately over social media have also become an issue, with one woman profiled in the report having been fired for a Facebook post she made asking why transgenderism was being promoted in her son’s primary school. (READ MORE: Ireland Imposes Draconian ‘Hate’ Laws) In other instances, Christians and Christian organizations have been “debanked.” Two pro-life organizations in Sweden and the Netherlands, for example, had their bank accounts closed due to their pro-life advocacy. The Scandinavian bank Nordea even closed the personal account of Mats Selander, founder of the Christian Center for Bioethical Reform in Sweden. Christians in Europe are also being pressured to resign from political positions due to their religious beliefs. In one egregious example, Councillor Anthony Stevens in the U.K. was arrested at home in front of his children for supporting a Christian colleague’s right to freedom of speech. OIDAC Europe classified colleges and universities as “the most hostile environments” against Christians. The report cited a study of universities in the U.K. which found that Christians were the most likely to report discrimination and harassment for their views. OIDAC Europe noted, “In particular, students with pro-life views across Europe have reported hostility and even death threats.” According to Christian parents cited in the report, “too many teachers express anti-Christian sentiments” at European schools and universities. European media has also been particularly hostile to Christians, including openly excusing anti-Christian hate crimes. Some nations — such as Germany, Spain, and the U.K. — have also enacted “buffer zones” outside of abortion facilities, banning pro-life protest or prayer. In the U.K. especially, a number of individuals have been arrested for praying across the street from abortion facilities, even if the prayer is silent. In Scotland, a “buffer zone” law enacted last year criminalized pro-life activity even within one’s own home, provided that the home was close enough to an abortion facility. The Scottish government even warned residents within the “buffer zones” that “activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area … could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly.” Additionally, OIDAC Europe’s report noted that conscience rights for Christians, especially in the medical field, have been trampled across he continent. In Spain, for example, Christian doctors who do not want to commit abortions are required to publicly register their names in order to even request a religious exemption. Even then, Christian doctors may be forced to commit abortions against their religious convictions depending upon the availability of others who are willing to commit abortions. Parental rights have also been heavily restricted in parts of Europe, with homeschooling being either banned or heavily restricted or regulated, and with governments ensuring children are giving proper “sex education,” including transgenderism propaganda. In Switzerland, a 16-year-old was taken into state custody and separated from her parents because they would not consent to her gender transition attempts. In Germany, a private Christian school was forcibly closed for not adhering to the country’s new educational laws governing private schools. “With increasing secularization leading to growing religious illiteracy among public leaders and the influence of secularist ethics, Christians in Europe continue to face restrictions on the exercise of their religious freedom, including the right to express religious views on various issues relating to human nature and human relationships,” the OIDAC Europe report concluded. “Public awareness and government action are therefore needed more than ever.” The post Hostility Toward Christians Skyrockets Across Europe appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Unlike some other New York college professors who cancelled classes the day after our election, my students had a unique opportunity to celebrate democracy and the system of government created by the Framers of our Constitution in 1787. Another Barnard professor, Marjorie Folkman, made her class optional so students could “sleep for an hour to catch up or take a walk.” Michelle Greene, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who teaches international and public affairs, told her students to not bother showing up because “current events would make it difficult to concentrate.” As a professor of political science, I relish teaching my national government class during presidential election years. It is an opportunity for students to witness history in action as they are learning about our republic created in Philadelphia 237 years ago. (READ MORE: The Amy Wax Inflection Point for ‘Elite’ Higher Education) What could be more educational for students and invigorating for professors genuinely interested in teaching, rather than indoctrinating their students, then going to class the day after a presidential election? I showed the electoral college map for the race as well as the status of the balance of power in the House of Representatives and Senate. In short, we learned. We discussed how even though none of the swing states were called for a candidate until later in the evening, it was clear Trump was on his way to victory because of the trend happening throughout the country in other states. Specifically, the 45th, and now 47th President, was over-performing compared to 2020, and gained support from key demographic groups. Harris was under-performing compared to Biden in 2020. If this was the trend in other states, why would it not hold true in the seven swing states? It did. These are lessons in the moment and allow students to appreciate their course content. Unfortunately, for professors like Michelle Greene who did not like the results, they chose to cancel class and deprive students of lessons during a time they will never have again. After all, for most Americans, you only get to be a college student during a presidential election year once in your life. (READ MORE: We Seek the Truth) Barnard College professor Amelia Simone Herbert, who also cancelled her class, told her students she recognized “that processing the results of a national election can be heavy and having space to breathe and go a bit slower is vital.” On the contrary, the day after a national election is a time for educators, at least those that care about teaching, to rush to class to discuss the process created by our Founding Fathers to elect the President. Another Barnard professor, Marjorie Folkman, made her class optional so students could “sleep for an hour to catch up or take a walk.” We must assume the walk for her was to shake off the results. You do not need to have a Ph.D. in Political Science to know that if Kamala Harris had won the election, these classes would not have been cancelled. They would have met, and these very same professors would have celebrated the results. This is yet another example of the leftist indoctrination that has occurred in many of our higher education facilities. We should not expect the leadership of Barnard or Columbia to offer any critical comments against these professors who cancelled classes. However, with the election results, Americans demonstrated that they are tired of these far-left antics. Let us hope we can return to a time where educators educate, and classes meet during the most consequential days in American life. Bob Capano has been an adjunct professor of political science for almost two decades and has worked in senior level position for Democrat and Republican elected officials in New York. Follow him on twitter @bobcapano The post Professors Cancel Class After Republican Victory appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In his essay explaining why The Washington Post would not be endorsing a presidential candidate this year, Jeff Bezos wrote, “Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately.”  Democrat resistance to something as simple as voter ID raises many people’s suspicions, as do the excuses that black people cannot use the internet. He underscored the main point: “The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.” People must be confident in election integrity. For years we have heard that Donald Trump and his supporters are a “threat to democracy.” Towards the end of the campaign we were told that Trump was akin to Hitler himself, in no small part because of his claims of fraud in the 2020 election. For months Americans were bombarded with assurances that our election system was secure. Anyone who dared to question the security of the election was deemed dangerous, even a Russian saboteur. (READ MORE: Election Integrity and Its Discontents) Yet, many of those loud voices seem to be not the least bit interested in simple reforms that would promote the confidence that Bezos says is crucial.  Trust in American institutions, especially government, has been plummeting in recent years, and elections are no exception. While this divide over elections is supposedly partisan, with Republican rubes distrusting our elections, those of us with memories extending beyond last week’s news cycle can recall the distrust that Democrats have heaped upon the system, especially in the wake of their losses in 2016, where for years mainstream Democrats claimed that Clinton was the rightful winner. Or, recall the case of Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who continued to claim she was the rightful winner long after the election had been decided. In the wake of Trump’s victory one can find numerous Democrats distrusting the results, being unable to fathom such a red victory.  It is clear that, on both sides, there are some people who distrust the system when they lose and, when they win, think it miraculous that they overcame the other side’s perfidy.  Such an outlook is not healthy. It does not matter how many times the media calls in “experts” to assure us that everything is in good order. Trust in the media is even lower than that in Congress. People resent seeing their good-faith concerns dismissed as delusional.         Some people will insist no matter what that their side was cheated when it loses. Yet there are simple steps that can reassure people that their votes do indeed count and in turn help reduce the distrust.   The first way to increase trust in elections is to implement voter ID requirements. Beyond any practical effect that this requirement would have, it would hold symbolic meaning that would increase confidence. Yet, Democrats consistently oppose this simple requirement.  We are told that acquiring an ID is a massive impediment to voting for many people and that therefore such a requirement infringes upon people’s right to vote. We are told that minorities in particular cannot manage to acquire an ID, either because they cannot get to the DMV or are unable to use the internet. Vice President Harris seems to think that rural Americans are unable to get a copy of their ID made because they do not have access to printers, or something. Such claims are absurd, and no one really believes them. An ID is needed to conduct numerous essential aspects of daily life. An ID is necessary for driving a car, buying alcohol and cigarettes, and opening a bank account or cashing a check. (READ MORE: SCOTUS Defends Election Integrity, Dems Panic) Owning a firearm is a constitutionally enumerated right, unlike voting. Yet, there is little protest from Democrats that all these imagined obstacles mean we should do away with showing ID when buying a gun. Democrat resistance to something as simple as voter ID raises many people’s suspicions, as do the excuses that black people cannot use the internet or rural people are unable to access copy machines.  The Democratic opposition to voter ID is not merely rhetorical.  Currently there are 23 Republican trifectas, 17 Democratic trifectas, and 10 states with divided governments. If one examines these trifectas based on their voter ID requirements, the results are rather stunning. The Heritage Foundation produces an election integrity scorecard based on a variety of categories. The voter ID aspect is worth 20 points and is scored based on four factors, including a requirement for ID to vote in person and a photo ID or unique identifier for absentee voting.  The range of Democratic scores is 0 (2) to 13 (2) with an average score of 4.41. In contrast, the Republican range is 6 (1) to 20 (8) with an average score of 16.36. These numbers speak for themselves.  There are other election reforms that could be undertaken to increase security and confidence. These moves would achieve more than journalists and “experts” repeating “Just trust us, bro.”  However, implementing stricter voter ID requirements is a simple reform that would provide an easy first step to restoring trust. Democratic opposition, and their excuses for this opposition, is itself suspect and only further undermines trust in the system. Zachary Yost is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh. Daniel Klein is professor of economics at George Mason University. The post Democrat Opposition to Voter ID Foments Distrust appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The president-elect has set an ambitious agenda for his first day in office: planning to cut federal funding for “gender-affirming” health care, deport illegal immigrants, impose tariffs, and expand oil drilling. I would like to add one more to the list — change our national anthem. Remember that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” published in 1814, has been our official anthem for less than a century, having been signed into law by Pres. Herbert Hoover on March 4, 1931. Since then, proposed alternatives include, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” and “Hail, Columbia.” The former has been rejected because of its melody (it is nearly identical to “God Save the King”), and we only hear the latter when the vice president walks onto the stage. “America the Beautiful” has been proposed several times and is undoubtedly the best candidate. First of all, it’s easier to sing. Before Game 1 of the World Series, country music singer Brad Paisley scaled the anthem down to the key of A from the traditional B flat, and with good reason, since most baritones (I’m one of them) top out at E above middle C. Spanning only fourteen semitones, “America the Beautiful” is much easier on the vocal chords (and eardrums) than “The Star-Spangled Banner’s” nineteen. In fact, if you listened closely to the anthems played during the Olympics, you probably noticed that the best boast the narrowest range. “Het Wilhelmus” of the Netherlands matches that of “America the Beautiful.” The French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” covers a mere octave, as does Germany’s “Das Lied der Deutschen.” Secondly, the poetry of “America the Beautiful” is superior to that of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The latter employs barely memorable metaphors, while the former begs God to “crown” America’s “good” and “refine” her “gold.” The consonance of “purple mountain majesties” only gets better with age. Perhaps her experience of severe discrimination and her witness of dire poverty put the song’s lyricist, Katharine Lee Bates, in a better position than Francis Scott Key to write such polished verse. There are even deeper reasons to adopt “America the Beautiful.” Most notably, it’s a hymn, as every good anthem should be. Not until the last verse, which we never hear or sing, does Key ask that our nation be “blest,” invoke us to “praise the Power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation,” and propose “In God is our Trust” as our motto. “America the Beautiful,” on the other hand, is a thoroughgoing hymn from beginning to end. It embodies a divine trust that in our current anthem seems but an afterthought. Even more to the point, whereas we are the primary addressee of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the primary addressee of “America the Beautiful” is our land. Why is this important? Because it releases us from the self-centeredness currently plaguing our nation. Francis Scott Key asks whether we can see the flag still standing. Bates prays that God “shed His grace on thee.” Like many anthems, we might take our cue from the Book of Psalms. In her most extreme moments of crisis, Israel addresses songs not to God, but to herself. Oppressed by seemingly endless captivity in Babylon, the Psalmist cries out, “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.” The Psalmist also addresses Jerusalem directly in her most ecstatic moments of joy. Ascending the temple mount, the Psalmist sings, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ And now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.”  This is the kind of voice our country needs: an anthem that sings to our nation as a union (“America, America!”) rather than to the individuals that make it up (“O say can you see?”). That might help us take up the well-being of our nation as a collective duty rather than the duty of an elite few. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the lines, “God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law!”  Our nation indeed has a soul, but, as Bates’s hymn reminds us, her soul is vulnerable to the citizens’ lack of self-control. The point of “America the Beautiful” is that it is our responsibility to acquire the virtues necessary to sustain this great experiment. Those virtues are indebted to the gift of reason, without which a republic like ours would be utterly impossible. “The freedom of men,” writes John Locke, “and liberty of acting according to his own will is grounded on his having reason, which is able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will.” Similarly, the “law” referred to in “America the Beautiful” is a much wider concept than bills passed by a freely elected, representative legislature. It is the “law” conceived precisely as the right and wrong accessible to human reason and apprehended by it as something not of its own device. “True law is reason,” writes Cicero, “right and natural, commanding people to fulfill their obligation and prohibiting and deterring them from doing wrong.” I’m old enough to remember when baseball fans were led to sing the national anthem rather than subjected to a solo performance. A more sober hymn like “America the Beautiful” is less prone to usurpation. Mr. President-elect, it’s time for a new anthem, one that recapitulates the fundamental principles upon which a liberal democracy depends. Given the choice between witnessing “bombs bursting in air” over Fort McHenry and taking in the panoramic view from Pikes Peak that inspired Bates’s “America the Beautiful,” I’d choose the latter. A new national anthem would bring in a breath of fresh air and clear out the sterile smoke of self-centeredness.  Daniel B. Gallagher is a Lecturer in Literature and Philosophy at Ralston College. READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Trump’s Cabinet Picks Are a Political Sea Change What Trump’s Cabinet Picks All Have in Common: They Don’t Give a ____ Tracing Our Problems to the 1960s The post Time for a New National Anthem appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.