American Return

During the past 20 years in America, a great contest has been waged over what the nation will become in the twenty-first century. Those on the political Left - progressives, statists, academics, and secularists - insist that America was always fundamentally flawed...

Metanoia is a forward-looking change - a recognition that one’s past way of life was flawed in some fundamental way. Regret precipitates a self-rejection that drives the transformation, which is a deliberate turning away from one’s previous identity. In contrast, epistrophe is a backward-looking change - a realization that at some point one betrayed the true self and embraced a false mode of being. Epistrophic transformation, then, is a return to one’s essential identity - a return to a previous (and more authentic) way of life...

Voters have given the new administration a mandate to return to who and what we were. In a great negation of the Left’s promise that “we are not going back,” Americans have replied, “Oh, yes we are.”...

... the final wound inflicted by 9/11 was a crisis of American confidence...

That crisis fueled the rise of Barack Obama. He was undeniably a leftist - a community organizer molded by some of the most radical thinkers of the ‘60s revolution... His covert aim was to overcome the constitutional limits on power, to encourage Americans to embrace a notion of "global citizenship," and to liberate the nation’s consciousness from the shackles of tradition...

By fixating on the country’s flaws and failures, he prepared citizens for a reinvention of national identity. From now on, America would "lead from behind."...

Trump’s candidacy was an invitation for people to disavow Obama’s metanoic fundamental transformation and work to recover the national identity that had been lost along the way...

Americans... were tired of... pretending that we don’t live in one of the fairest, most tolerant, most decent nations in the history of the world...

In the end, 2024 was a referendum on identity... Which nation do you prefer? The one that we inherited from our American ancestors?...

We will make America great again.

The Work to Restore Our Republic is Just Beginning, by Bruce Thornton, Front Page Magazine, 6 November 2024

Obama was the turning point, by New Neo, 8 November 2024.

Barack Obama: The Political Genius That Wasn't, by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann, American Greatness, 14 November 2024.

How Trump Crushed Obama's Legacy, by David Samuels, UnHerd, 8 November 2024.

The Obamas Get Their Comeuppance, by Jack Cashill, American Thinker, 18 November 2024.

Obama and Russiagate: The Untold Story, by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News, 15 November 2024.

Obama's Middle East Destabilization: Part 4 of our series on how Barack Obama undermined U.S. democracy, by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News, 1 December 2024: