There is a school of thought that the neo-conservative movement (actually hardly true conservative) originated with Trotskyites, Irving and son William Krystal a prime examples.
Hitchens was an excellent debater and unapologetic atheist.
Paleoconservatives also believe the U.S. was founded as a “constitutional republic,” not as a “liberal democracy.” Perhaps most controversially, they stress lines of continuity extending from the civil rights and immigration legislation of the 1960s to the cultural and political transformation of our country that is now going on.
In a recent Townhall commentary, the young author Michael Malarkey marvels over “the resurgence of refined paleoconservatism.” Supposedly Donald Trump has absorbed quintessential paleoconservative positions and is now putting them into practice. This now triumphant creed is “a political stance that posits the importance of strong borders, economic protectionism, and vehement anti-interventionism.” According to Malarkey, “[Trump’s] political orientation resembles that of Patrick J. Buchanan, a wildly influential former Nixon aide…and lifelong ‘Paleocon.’”
As the person who invented or co-invented the term under consideration, it seems to me that Malarkey doesn’t know much about the “stance” or movement that he claims is now surging. Exactly how many self-described paleocons are serving in Trump’s administration? Except for the editorial board of this magazine, how many conservative or Republican publications have identifiably paleoconservative names on their mastheads? How many paleos are on the executive boards of foundations, or even invited to participate in conservative movement events? I can’t think of a single name—certainly not mine.
In 2016, I teamed up with another paleoconservative, Boyd Cathey, and a paleo-libertarian, Walter Block, in collecting the names of academics for a declaration of support for then-candidate Trump. Our list was taken over by the West Coast Straussian website American Greatness, whose editorial board proceeded to delete our names before posting the document. The vanished names were hardly an oversight, any more than when the anti-clericalist French command after the Dreyfus Affair removed from consideration for promotion the name of every officer seen walking into a church on Sunday. The West Coast Straussians undoubtedly remembered which side we took when Southern conservative literary scholar M.E. Bradford tangled with their mentor Harry V. Jaffa. They, not we, were in a position to make their displeasure known.
Malarkey speaks of a “refined” paleoconservatism that has taken the place of the older kind and which now seems to be ascendant. Paleoconservatism, we are told, has captured the mind and imagination of the president partly because it “lacks the religious sanctimony and fundamentalist undertones of prior decades.” Curiously enough, I have no recollection of these qualities being present in the movement in question when I was part of it in the 1980s. But then I’m not sure that Malarkey understands the paleocon movement, the return of which he’s celebrating. I bet he couldn’t name a single paleoconservative other than Pat Buchanan, who, by the way, was not yet a paleoconservative, when he was Richard Nixon’s speechwriter.
Malarkey is correct that paleoconservatism is, or was—among other things—a “political stance.” Its representatives resisted neoconservatism and assumed positions that were in opposition to those of its influential opponents. But they also drew on older conservative thought, going back into the interwar period, which incorporated both European and American traditions of thought. Paleoconservatism was the last recognizably rightist form of the conservative movement, if we exclude some Alt-Right bloggers who, although occasionally worth reading, hardly form a coherent movement. It was precisely this rightist gestalt that has made the paleoconservatives and their efforts to represent the Old Right so profoundly distasteful to Conservatism, Inc.
These holdouts have never accepted equality as a “conservative” principle; they continue to believe in traditional gender distinctions and are not especially bothered by the hierarchies that existed in pre-modern communities. They also make faces when they hear the vague platitude “human rights”—what Richard Weaver called a “god term”—thrown into a conversation. Although paleos believe in universally applicable moral standards, they insist that rights are historic and attached to particular societies with their own histories. Paleoconservatives also believe the U.S. was founded as a “constitutional republic,” not as a “liberal democracy.” Perhaps most controversially, they stress lines of continuity extending from the civil rights and immigration legislation of the 1960s to the cultural and political transformation of our country that is now going on. Often attacked as racists or xenophobes, the Cassandra-like paleos are neither. They have boldly pointed out developmental connections that others choose to ignore.
The latest restrictions seem to point not only to a larger decoupling of the US and China, but it could also create rifts in the US relationship with aligned countries with significant chipmaking industries. The new US restrictions are set to create scarcity, not abundance. As is the case with so many restrictive trade policies, consumers and firms alike will see fewer choices among products that use silicon chips and businesses will experience a fall in the production of those products that have so elevated the overall standard of living in modernity.
Virtually all aspects of modern, interconnected, and digitized life rely on the processing and memory capabilities of advanced semiconductor computer chips. Electronic devices including smartphones, game consoles, cars, televisions, household appliances, military hardware, and medical equipment rely on these minute, flat wafers of silicon made, astoundingly, from melted sand. The United States has focused its efforts upon this essential good to put pressure on China as tensions precipitate between the rival superpowers. Yet from the start, the US measures will harm American consumers and businesses.
A Pyrrhic Victory?
Over the years, both countries have layered policies on these advanced semiconductors as part of their larger economic competition. Although US measures target China, American and Western-aligned companies have ironically been feeling the pressure mount, as China makes up a major part of their market and manufacturing.
The share prices of American companies Intel, Micron, Nvidia, AMD, Applied Materials, and Lam Research all have fallen between 50 and 70 percent from their fifty-two-week highs. ASML of the Netherlands and Tokyo Electron of Japan have also experienced such drops in share prices. It may not yet be the bottom yet with the emergence of further trade restrictions from Washington as the chip war heats up.
On October 7, the US Department of Commerce expanded licensing requirements for exports of advanced semiconductors and the equipment used to make them. Unlike the previous ban on shipments to particular companies in China, the new policy covers all shipments related to the chip industry to China. It is estimated that cutting off China’s access to foreign chip related imports would set back the Chinese chip industry by years. Especially in the area of the most advanced chips, China has lagged behind US aligned countries as the highly technical methods remain out of reach without imports.
However, some have quickly noted the broader unintended consequences for the US due to the new regulations against China. Willy Shih, a professor at the Harvard Business School who specializes in technology and manufacturing, describes this kind of export control as “a bit of a blunt instrument,” noting that cutting off China from the capability to make the highest-end chips could push companies there to resort to producing more low-end chips which would in turn drive down prices for that segment of the market and make it harder for US and Western factories to compete. It would then come back to make Western buyers of those chips dependent upon Chinese suppliers. These less advanced chips are commonly used in simpler devices, but also as part of automobiles and even some military hardware.
This escalation of US restrictions in the chip market, while destabilizing in the short term for their rival, may act as fuel to accelerate China’s drive to achieve self-sufficiency in chip manufacturing in the long run. This has been the case with many technologies such as with the development of high-speed rail in China after Japan’s initial edge. Only a couple of months prior to the latest US measures, it was reported that China’s top chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) had reached a key technological breakthrough that made it possible to produce seven-nanometer chips on par with the best manufacturers in the world. Can the US actually win a chip war with this kind of restrictive policy or will it end up backfiring?
Recently leaked information obtained by The Intercept has validated the fact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in illegal activities designed to censor and deny the basic human right of free speech. DHS is engaged in an operation to influence social media to remove and censor content that runs contrary to its views. Facebook even created a direct portal to allow DHS to pull down truthful information, that would be information the DHS deems false. Censorship targeted information related to the Afghanistan withdrawal, election integrity, and information related to the apparent Covid 19 bioweapon, and Covid gene therapy shots, which also appear a biological weapon unleashed on humanity.
As The Intercept points out even Tom Ridge, former head of DHS, has stated that the United States government routinely lies whether it is about the Vietnam or Iraq wars, or the origination of Covid 19. DHS coordinated with Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking platforms. It is unclear of the level of interaction between DHS and other government agencies, and other private sector companies, although, based on the sudden engagement in politics and censorship by corporations, it is a safe bet that the DHS and other agencies are integrated with them.
Late on an October morning in a quiet neighborhood near Daytona Beach, Florida. FBI agent Steve Friend sits in his kitchen, fidgeting. He’s a wiry, energetic man, built like a marathoner, not muscled up but exuding fitness, not a sitter. This is not a person meant for desk work, much less staying home all day. But as a whistleblower whose name has been all over media after a complaint about statistical manipulation and other problems in the January 6th investigations, this will be his lot for a while.
By that morning, the first rush of news stories about Friend’s case already passed. CNN and MSNBC demonized him, Fox hailed him as a hero, but the furor was beginning to die down. What a whistleblower talks about in this inevitable moment will say a lot about his or her motivation. Looking out a window into the stillness of his suburban neighborhood, Friend shook his head.
“I love my job,” he said, sighing. “I was living my best life as an FBI agent. I was coming home every day, and my kids were my biggest fan club. Like, ‘Daddy, did you put the bad guy in jail?’ And I thought, ‘Man, this is it.’”
It’s not the tone of a disgruntled malcontent, but someone who made a reluctant journey to whistleblower status, beginning with a whirlwind series of events that brought him and his family out of the Midwest to north Florida less than two years ago. He worked a child pornography detail before being transferred to the assignment that would upend his life: investigating J6. The FBI not only took Friend off vital work chasing child predators to pursue questionable investigations of people maybe connected with the Capitol riots (often in some misdemeanor fashion), they used dubious bureaucratic methods he felt put him in an impossible spot.
Essentially, the FBI made Friend a supervisory agent in cases actually being run by the Washington field office, a trick replicated across the country that made domestic terrorism numbers appear to balloon overnight. Instead of one investigation run out of Washington, the Bureau now had hundreds of “terrorism” cases “opening” in every field office in the country. As a way to manipulate statistics, it was ingenious, but Friend could see it was also trouble.
As a member of a dying breed of agent raised to focus on making cases and securing convictions, Friend knew putting him nominally in charge of a case he wasn’t really running was a gift to any good defense attorney, should a J6 case ever get to trial.
“They’re gonna see my name as being the case agent, yet not a single document has my name as doing any work,” Friend says. “Now a defense lawyer can say, ‘Hey, the case agent for this case didn’t perform any work.’ Labeling the case this way would be a big hit to our prosecution.”
Friend ended up refusing the arrangement, which led to his suspension. He followed procedure, making protected disclosures to superiors and the FBI’s Office of Special Counsel (OSG). He then reported his suspension to Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and whistleblower-whisperer Chuck Grassley of Iowa. They sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, detailing Friend’s procedural objections, including that “agents are being required to perform investigative actions” they “would not otherwise pursue,” at the direction of the Washington Field Office (WFO).
When Friend first complained to his Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASACs — the FBI is an acronym hell worse than the military), he told them, with regard to J6 suspects: “I’m not a Trump voter. I’m not sympathetic to those people.” The message didn’t get through, however, and leaks from the Bureau have almost universally painted him as an insubordinate MAGA conspiracist.
In fact, most of the press Friend attracted reduced his story to a referendum on the Capitol riots, as if his only complaint was being asked to investigate J6 at all. Big guns were brought out to sell the idea. Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence-turned-talking-head Frank Figliuzzi blasted Friend on MSNBC as a “self-styled FBI whistleblower” (Figliuzzi, a lawyer, should know better: Friend made protected disclosures by the book and is legally a whistleblower), implying he simply didn’t follow “valid” orders, instead “running to Trump-loving Congressmen” to complain.
But Friend’s complaint is only partially about J6. His concerns began in his first days in Quantico, and continued across years of watching the Bureau collect intelligence or open cases for non-operational reasons. Whether they involve J6 or not, a consistent theme of his stories is the FBI using its authority to “disrupt” or intimidate targets as an end in itself, as opposed to collecting evidence with the aim of prosecuting.
One example involved a British doctor who’d been at J6. The suspect was not exactly Pablo Escobar. He did enter the Capitol, but surveillance showed he meekly stayed behind velvet ropes once inside, and under questioning was practically shaking with guilt over having taken a free Capitol tourist brochure as a souvenir. Though he seemed unlikely to be charged, he was booted from his medical practice after being interviewed, and Friend wondered if this even indirectly had been the point.
“I worried about the process being the punishment,” Friend says. “He lost his job. What does he get from us, if we don’t charge him? ‘Hey, you’re clear? The FBI found no wrongdoing, go pick up the pieces’?”
In the incident that led to Friend’s suspension, the FBI wanted to execute a SWAT raid on a subject who’d been communicating with the Bureau through an attorney and almost certainly would have come in voluntarily. Or, Friend thought, he could have been picked up in another, less dangerous way. The FBI however wanted a show.
“We’re gonna hit this house at six o’clock in the morning and throw flash-bangs and knock the door down and drive a Bearcat up on the front lawn,” recalls Friend, who had extensive SWAT experience and even worked the raid of Michigan militia members suspected of plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to look back with clarity on 2022 and realize that they were lied to, yet again.
War criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy. The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting US proxy war efforts in Ukraine.
Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.
The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.
“Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,” David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. “President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.”
The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.
The US government announced that it’s sending half a billion dollars worth of guided multiple launch rocket systems near Finland’s border with Russia. The escalation and out-of-control spending continues. The Pentagon argues that the move will “support the foreign policy and national security of the United States.” Also today, US HIMARS missiles are said to have hit a major dam in Ukraine and US progressives have found a new foreign policy home…with the neocons!
Historically, the natural tendency in the industrial market economy under a commodity money such as gold has been for general prices to persistently decline as ongoing capital accumulation and advances in industrial techniques led to a continual expansion in the supplies of goods. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century and up until the First World War, a mild deflationary trend prevailed in the industrialized nations as rapid growth in the supplies of goods outpaced the gradual growth in the money supply that occurred under the classical gold standard.
The Fed obviously doesn’t understand this. Congress is equally at a loss.
Most economists believe that a general decline in the prices of goods and services is bad news because it is associated with major economic slumps such as the Great Depression. In July 1932, the yearly growth rate of US industrial production stood at –31 percent whilst in September 1932 the yearly growth rate of the US Consumer Price Index (CPI) stood at –10.7 percent.
Many economic commentators claim that a general fall in prices is always harmful, since it postpones people’s buying of goods and services, which in turn, they believe, undermines investment in plant and machinery, setting an economic slump into motion. Moreover, as the slump further depresses the prices of goods, the pace of economic decline intensifies.
In contrast, Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard have believed that in a free market the rising purchasing power of money—i.e., declining prices—is the mechanism that makes the great variety of goods produced accessible to many people. Rothbard wrote:
Improved standards of living come to the public from the fruits of capital investment. Increased productivity tends to lower prices (and costs) and thereby distribute the fruits of free enterprise to all the public, raising the standard of living of all consumers. Forcible propping up of the price level prevents this spread of higher living standards.
Historically, the natural tendency in the industrial market economy under a commodity money such as gold has been for general prices to persistently decline as ongoing capital accumulation and advances in industrial techniques led to a continual expansion in the supplies of goods. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century and up until the First World War, a mild deflationary trend prevailed in the industrialized nations as rapid growth in the supplies of goods outpaced the gradual growth in the money supply that occurred under the classical gold standard. For example, in the US from 1880 to 1896, the wholesale price level fell by about 30 percent, or by 1.75 percent per year, while real income rose by about 85 percent, or around 5 percent per year.
Countering Falling Prices with Money Pumping Weakens the Economy
Whenever a central bank pumps money into the economy to counter a general decline in the prices, this policy benefits those engaged in activities tied to loose monetary policy, but at the expense of wealth generators. Through loose monetary policy, some individuals become consumers without the prerequisite of contributing to the pool of real saving. Their consumption is made possible by diverting real savings from wealth producers.
If the pool of real savings still is growing, goods and services patronized by non–wealth producers appear to be profitable. However, once the central bank reverses its loose monetary stance, diversion of real savings from wealth producers to non–wealth producers is arrested, undermining the demand of non–wealth producers for goods, and exerting downward pressure on their prices.
While the pool of real savings expands, monetary pumping generates the illusion that loose monetary policy is the right remedy to counter a general decline in consumer prices. This is because the loose monetary stance, which renews the flow of real savings to non–wealth producers, props up their demand, arresting or even reversing general decline in prices.
Because the pool of real savings is still growing, the pace of economic growth stays positive. Hence the mistaken belief that a loose monetary stance that reverses a fall in prices is the key to reviving economic activity. The illusion that through monetary pumping it is possible to keep the economy going is shattered once the pool of real savings begins to decline.
Lending Out of “Thin Air” Encourages Unproductive Activities
When loaned money is fully backed by savings on the day of the loan’s maturity, it is returned to the original lender. For instance, Bob—the borrower of $5—will pay back on the maturity date the borrowed sum and interest to the bank. The bank in turn will pass to Joe the lender his $5 plus interest adjusted for bank fees. The money makes a full circle and goes back to the original lender. In contrast, when the lending originates out of “thin air” and the borrowed money is returned on the maturity date to the bank, this leads to a withdrawal of money from the economy, decreasing the money supply.
Because there was no saver/lender, this lending emerged out of “thin air.” When Bob repays the $5, the money leaves the economy, since there is no original lender to whom the loaned money should be returned. Observe that the $5 loan involves an exchange of nothing for something, providing a platform for unproductive activities that prior to the loan would not have emerged.
While banks continue to expand credit, various unproductive activities will prosper. At some point, however, a structure of production emerges that ties up more consumer goods than are released. (The consumption of final goods exceeds the production of these goods.) The positive flow of savings is arrested and a decline in the pool of real savings is set into motion.
Consequently, productive activities deteriorate, and bad loans accumulate. In response, banks curtail their lending out of “thin air,” triggering a decline in the money supply.
The U.S. government is still waging war on America’s military veterans.
Especially veterans who exercise their First Amendment right to speak out against government wrongdoing.
Consider: we raise our young people on a steady diet of militarism and war, sell them on the idea that defending freedom abroad by serving in the military is their patriotic duty, then when they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and committed to defending their freedoms at home, we often treat them like criminals merely for exercising those rights they risked their lives to defend.
As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the government even has a name for its war on America’s veterans: Operation Vigilant Eagle.
This Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program tracks military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and characterizes them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”
Coupled with the DHS’ dual reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism,” which broadly define extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.
Yet the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is taking aim at individuals trained in military warfare.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that the DHS has gone extremely quiet about Operation Vigilant Eagle.
Where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire.
And the government’s efforts to target military veterans whose views may be perceived as “anti-government” make clear that something is afoot.
In recent years, military servicemen and women have found themselves increasingly targeted for surveillance, censorship, threatened with incarceration or involuntary commitment, labeled as extremists and/or mentally ill, and stripped of their Second Amendment rights.
In light of the government’s efforts to lay the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data and predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors), encounters with the police could get even more deadly, especially if those involved have a mental illness or disability coupled with a military background.
Incredibly, as part of a proposal introduced under the Trump Administration, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.
These tactics are not really new.
Many times throughout history in totalitarian regimes, such governments have declared dissidents mentally ill and unfit for society as a means of rendering them disempowering them.