America First And Stewardship

 I recently wrote about Rich Lowry--a political columnist at the New York Post--and his attempt to write off the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. I discussed the facts of the attack, but in "America First Is Not Hatred—It’s Stewardship", Virgil Walker discusses the larger significance of the attack for us today. Commenting about how the issue blew up at a Turning Point USA event. Walker writes:

    The first serious challenge bypassed the personality drama altogether and went straight to the core dispute. Shapiro was asked about Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty—a moment that forces a question many try to forbid: Are American lives and American interests ever allowed to come first?

    That question was not accidental. It did not arise from gossip or internet theatrics. It came from someone who understood the real conflict at hand.

    And before the predictable smear is deployed, let’s be clear: this argument is not ethnic, and it is not religious. It is civic. It is moral. It asks whether any foreign nation has the right to demand American money, American silence, and American sacrifice without question. Labeling that inquiry “antisemitism” is not a rebuttal. It is an attempt to shut down debate.

    That moment on stage was not a detour. It was a signal. Beneath the noise, the movement has moved past personality drama. It is now interrogating moral obligation.

He continues:

     At the center of this divide are two competing frameworks.

    One side holds to an America First position. It maintains that a government’s primary responsibility is to its own citizens, its own borders, its own cohesion, and its own future. This view does not deny alliances or shared interests. It simply insists that stewardship begins at home.

    The other side treats certain foreign obligations as unquestionable. In practice, restraint is framed as betrayal. Prudence becomes moral failure. Even asking where the line exists is treated as suspect.

    This is why the exchange felt so tense. This was not a policy disagreement. It was a collision between ordered responsibility and absolute obligation.

 Read the whole thing.