Jonathan Chechile

@andyschmitt99 @annielcrawford That sounds worth checking out. I'm intrigued to here what he said!

I'm not sure the good true and beautiful can be found everywhere. The frustrations with Nolans Odyssey are legitimate and do contribute to the total downfall of the West. I thought the movie was good, then I talked with Patrick Deneen (Notre Dame scholar) and he explained what Nolan missed - which is much of the entire point of the story -- and I lost a lot of respect for the film. At some point, we have to recognize that we aren't in a situation as a society where people have the intellectual capacity and information to sift through the stories and analyze them on the basis of their original intent. Younger generations can't even read anymore. The new stories, the Nolans version of the Odyssey, are the new mythologies of younger generations. What they represent and what they point us towards is what younger generations are going to build their lives on.

I grew up with a Cluster B lib parent, so I know weaponized compassion from the inside out as well as anyone. I, too, hate the woke shredder that destroys all our good stories and all that is strong and noble in our culture. But, if we let our fight against wokism make us bitter and blind to all that is Good and True and Beautiful - which by God's grace and mercy can be found everywhere, even in the strangest places - then we have let them win in the end. If you let the fight destroy your soul, the enemy still wins.

@aaron_renn They should include a small part in a normal pro account. It’s a nice product.

This is good

Two thoughts. First, if anybody’s gonna get protection, it should be Christianity. Christianity is the faith of our founders. Islam is an invader, one that we’ve been to war with, a fact, commemorated in the great line, “to the shores of Tripoli” Second, I don’t think that this would have a prayer of withstanding a trip to the Supreme Court.

Insane. Islam is a religion, not a race. In a free society, it should be open to criticism as well as Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and any other. There are respectful ways to criticism religion, and gutter ways. All should be legal. We don't have blasphemy laws in America.

@JustinPetersMin The most predictable event imaginable. Female pastor apostatizes. It's not even news. It's what was always going to happen.

Wow. Who could’ve seen this coming? Shocked. Shocked I tell you.

This from a man who once called us to be deeper and to understand the liturgies of the culture and how the culture shapes us? Uggh... It seems he didn't pay attention to how he was being shaped. It's sad that he has been dealing with depression. But even sadder is that he's been apostate for a while.

Oh my. @FeserEdward reviews James K.A. Smith's latest book. A review for the ages. firstthings.com/breaking-the-m…

@Quelldecker @grok Which one has the highest level of intellectual credibility?

Hey @grok, if you were human, which religion would you follow?

@BMcGrewvy I was very excited when I first saw the preview, but upon seeing what they did with the cast, my son and I decided to pass. Go work, go broke. Making Achilles a former female is a non-starter.

Not a novel take I realize, but for Chris Nolan to participate in Ellen Page's delusion really is appalling, and I fully understand why it makes some people disinclined to buy an Odyssey ticket. It certainly discourages me.

@SovMichael Is this the feds or a group funded by the southern poverty law center? Either way, it’s ridiculous. At this point nobody believes it’s anything but cosplay.

These Feds glow with the brilliance of a million suns.

Proverbs 28:12 When the righteous triumph, there is great glory, but when the wicked rise, people hide themselves. Right now, the wicked have taken over England.

There have been 4 major revolutions in the past 250 years: American, French, Russian, and Chinese. Only one led to individual rights and prosperity. The others led to mass death and tyranny. The US revolution was unique because it said two things: 1. Our rights come from God not from the govt. 2. Humans are power -hungry so we need to limit govt power. So the next time someone attacks the nation of one revolution that succeeded and recycles the the idea of those that miserably failed, you can ask them: are you ignorant, or malicious?

I asked Anthropic's most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani's speech as if it were George Washington... To the Mayor of the City of New-York Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026. Sir, Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands. Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there. For having borrowed my desk, my city, and the memory of my retreat, you proceeded to employ them in the service of the very doctrine against which I spent the labour of my publick life. Your address divides the People of America into two nations: the many, whom you flatter, and the few, whom you teach the many to abhor. You speak of soft hands and calloused hands, of men of immense fortune who have taken what the multitude have made. I have seen this rhetorick before; it was old when I was young. It is the eternal grammar of the demagogue, under every government and in every age; and I warned my Countrymen, in the last address I ever gave them, that the disorders and miseries of faction gradually incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would ride that spirit to their own elevation upon the ruins of Publick Liberty. I ask you plainly, Sir: when you teach the labourer that his prosperous neighbour is his enemy, whose elevation do you serve? You will answer that you speak for the poor, the sick, the tenant beneath the leaking ceiling; and the condition of that man commands my sympathy as it commands yours. But the remedy you propose has been tried, in the centuries since my time, with a thoroughness I could never have imagined. Wherever men have been persuaded that property is plunder, property has fled, and want has remained; wherever the State has been made the master of industry, it has soon made itself the master of the men who labour in it. An hereditary aristocracy I opposed, and I hold no tenderness for privilege; but the security of property is among the first objects of Government, and the man who would make one class of Citizens the spoil of another has abandoned republicanism for a science older and darker, whatever new name the age may fix upon it. Nor can I pass over the manner of the thing. To greet new Citizens, upon the very day of their adoption, with an inventory of their Country's crimes, is to give them a most unhappy first lesson in the duties of citizenship; and I know of no household, no army, and no Republic that was ever held together by such instruction. Permit me, before I close, one observation upon the desk itself. It was at such a desk, in Annapolis, in December of 1783, that I performed the only act of my life in which I take an unmixed pride: I returned my commission to the Congress, and with it every power the war had gathered into my hands, and went home to my farm. The desk of a republican officer is a place for the laying down of power; the men of my generation understood this, and it is the whole of what we added to the history of government. I observe in your address a great fluency concerning what the People are owed, and a great silence concerning what their Magistrates must surrender. When you have sat at my desk long enough to learn its principal lesson, Sir, you will be welcome to it. I do not question your talents, which are considerable, nor the sincerity of your attachments, which is no defence; the most dangerous errours have ever been sincerely held. I tell you, with the freedom of a man who has nothing further to seek from any publick, that he who kindles the jealousy of Citizen against Citizen, though he kindle it in the name of Liberty, is burning the timbers of the ship he claims to steer. May Providence grant you the discernment to know it, the firmness to act upon it, and the candour to acknowledge it; and may the Union, purchased by so much sacrifice, never be surrendered to those who would divide it in the name of saving it. I have the honour to be, with due respect, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant, Go: Washington

Mamdani got the whole American dream in eight years. Came here as a kid, got citizenship in 2018, now he runs the biggest city in the country. And on America's 250th birthday he sat down at George Washington's desk and told us everything wrong with the place. I'm not even angry. I'm disappointed. Here's the picture he painted: He mocked the people who supposedly think America "becomes less the more people it welcomes." Said it belongs "only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin." Called our streets a place where "masked agents" are "terrorizing" people. Said the country's wealth was built by "calloused, dirt-streaked hands" and then left to rot. Looked out from Washington's desk and called the Americans who built this economy "small" and "weak." Okay Mamdani. You hate it so much, why'd you come here? Let's put that picture up against the actual country. He's a Muslim kid born in Uganda and he's the mayor of New York. A guy back in his own birthplace said it plainly: over there he'd have had to claw his way in. Here we held the door open. We've got the most diverse Congress in our history. It was never about skin color, no matter how many years the left spent forcing that story onto a country that kept proving them wrong. A machine that grinds immigrants down? Nearly half the Fortune 500 was started by immigrants or their kids. 231 companies. Apple, son of a Syrian. Google, a kid who came over from the Soviet Union. Amazon, son of a Cuban. Put them together and they out-earn Japan, out-earn Germany. That's not a country grinding people into the dirt. That's a country handing them the keys. It's been and always will be the land of opportunity. And more people want in here than anywhere else alive. 53 million immigrants live here, the most of any nation on earth. We're 4% of the world's people and we hold 17% of the world's migrants. Every year since 2007 you ask the whole planet where it'd go if it could go anywhere, the answer comes back the same. America. Number one. The line to get in wraps around the globe. Here's the line he won't draw. I will. Legal immigration built this country. The strivers. That's the front door working the way it's supposed to, and I'll defend it all day. You need to earn your spot, respect our laws and customs. But that's not what we're running anymore. Four years of Biden's open border blew the doors off. The foreign-born share of this country just hit 15.8%. An all-time high. Higher than Ellis Island, more than triple what it was in 1970. The Census Bureau didn't expect that number until 2042 and we smashed past it. And on top of it, a record 14 million people here illegally, who cut in front of every single person who did it the right way. The front door built America from Ellis Island to today. The fence is a different thing. Pretending they're the same is how you end up calling every American who wants a secure border a bigot. And we've earned the right to standards. This is the most wanted country on the planet. We get to choose who walks in. You want in? Build something. Contribute. Earn it. Nobody's owed anything. You come illegally, you commit crimes, you steal from taxpayers, you should get deported. That's not terrorizing the streets. Mamdani walked through that front door in 2018. He of all people should be defending it. Instead he stood at Washington's desk and spent his speech blurring the line between the people who came the right way and the ones who broke in. The man even admitted out loud that America is exceptional. Then spent the rest explaining why it isn't. On the one day the whole country stops to celebrate itself, he reached for the darkest story he could find. That's not a man who's lost about America. That's a man who's angry at the country that gave him everything he has. You don't like it here? Nobody made you come. Nobody's stopping you from leaving. But you won't. They never do. Because there's nowhere else on earth that hands a person this much of a shot. This country took him in and made him a mayor. He owes it. It doesn't owe him a thing. We're not perfect. We're the best odds a human being has ever been handed. 250 years old, the richest and freest country alive, and the whole world is still clawing to get in while nobody's trying to leave. They hold America to a standard they'd never hold anyone else to, then act shocked it falls short. It's nonsense. Respect the country. Especially when it's the reason you're standing at that desk at all.

"But the greatest danger to American order is not produced by our fractious politics. No, this danger has produced our political perils. The greatest danger to the American order is the subversion of order itself." — @albertmohler on the 250th. wng.org/opinions/the-g…

Washington seeing Zohran Mamdani at his desk defining what an American is

Everything he said is steeped in the language of critical theory and socialism. This is a man slanders this nation and is clearly bent under destroying the country that he has immigrated to. To make this statement from behind Washington’s desk is a desecration.

Mamdani: The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.  At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again-including 250 years ago-those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted-but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum. As we mark 250 years, what do we see?  We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world— one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands —those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone —and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.

55 years ago, Rhodesia was a crown jewel of civilization in Africa. Today, it is squalid and destitute, having been "liberated" by violent Marxists. Everywhere, Marxists have chosen squalor, calling it freedom. That is what they are trying to do here.

Just took the kids to see Young Washington. Awesome. This weekend, you should take the kids and celebrate America! youtu.be/-s8mqW03geo?is…