MCViewPoint

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Woke Joke – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on December 6, 2022

This disinformation campaign about America’s past is no accident. It is a well-thought-out plan to disunite Americans and keep in power those who already wield it: corporate leaders, left-wing politicians, entertainment tycoons, media hustlers, and college czars eager to brainwash our youth. Another ploy is to put Christianity on the back burner, where it belongs, according to the entrenched ones. Once you get religion out of the way, the West becomes a formless entity, with materialism and globalism replacing Christianity.

https://www.takimag.com/article/woke-joke/

Taki

In these willfully ignorant times, the powers that be seem, in their haste to be politically correct, to forget that America fought its bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million men died, yet the Civil War is being refought with fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of great American soldiers, while one group of citizens is robbed of their heritage in order to please another.

About one year ago I found myself in a car with a New York couple, both guests of an ex-headmaster (sorry, head of school; use of the word “headmaster” leads one to a woke gulag) of my prep school who was accompanying me to an unveiling of a wall honoring an ex-classmate of mine who had recently passed away. I had contributed to the memorial wall. The man, whom I had never met before, talked about how when he was on the tennis circuit he was given only ten minutes to shower and dress in certain American country clubs during the grass summer-season tournaments following Wimbledon. The reason was because he was Jewish. The trouble was that I had played the exact same tournaments from 1957 until 1964, as had players like Sidney Schwartz, Herb Flam, Ron Holmberg, Mike Green, and Ed Rubineau, all Jewish and all ranked in the top fifty. Although I was a guest and the man a friend of the headmaster, I told him in no uncertain terms that he was a liar and that I doubted very much if he had ever played in the tournaments he was now denouncing, places like Newport, South Orange, Southampton, and Marion. Like most liars when caught out, he insisted his story was true but then dropped the subject of tennis altogether.

Things got worse when his wife, a Texan Christian lady sitting in the back with me, took umbrage when I said I considered Robert E. Lee among the greatest Americans. “How can you admire a traitor?” she drawled.

See the rest here

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To Avoid Civil War, Learn to Tolerate Different Laws in Different States

Posted by M. C. on July 3, 2022

Moreover, decentralizing abortion policy in this way actually works to defuse national conflict. This is becoming even more important as cultural divides in the United States are clearly accelerating and become more entrenched.

This is not a problem, however, if we relearn that rather than employ federal coercion to “solve” the world’s problems, it’s perhaps better to tolerate others doing things differently in other parts of the world. On the other hand, if Americans can’t shake the idea that the regime must force one way of life on everyone, we can expect national political divides to grow ever more bitter. 

https://mises.org/wire/avoid-civil-war-learn-tolerate-different-laws-different-states

Ryan McMaken

Most commentary on the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—which overturns Roe v. Wade—has focused on the decision’s effect on the legality of abortion in various states. That’s an important issue. It may be, however, that the Dobbs decision’s effect on political decentralization in the United States is a far bigger deal.

After all, the ruling isn’t so much about abortion as it is about the federal government’s role in abortion. State governments are free to make abortion 100 percent legal within their own borders. Some states have already done so. The court’s ruling limits only the federal government’s prerogatives over abortion law, and this has the potential to lead to many other limitations on federal power as well. In this way, Dobbs is a victory for those seeking to limit federal power. 

The decentralization is all to the good, and there’s nothing novel about it. Historically, state laws in the US have varied broadly on a variety of topics from alcohol consumption to divorce. This was also true of abortion before Roe v. Wade. 

Moreover, decentralizing abortion policy in this way actually works to defuse national conflict. This is becoming even more important as cultural divides in the United States are clearly accelerating and become more entrenched. Rather than fight with increasing alarm and aggression over who controls the federal government—and thus who imposes the winner’s preferences on everyone else—people in different states will have more choices in choosing whether to live under proabortion or antiabortion regimes. In other words, decentralization forces policymakers to behave as they should in a confederation of states: they must tolerate people doing things differently across state lines.  This will be essential in avoiding disaster, and laissez-faire liberals (i.e., “classical liberals”) have long supported decentralization as a key in avoiding dangerous political conflicts. Ludwig von Mises, for example, supported decentralization because, as he put it, it “is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil … wars.”

The Impulse to Use Federal Power to Force Policy on Everyone

Law has never been uniform across state lines in the United States, although this was not for a lack of trying on the part of the federal government. As the power of the federal government grew throughout the twentieth century, the central government repeatedly sought to make policy uniform and put it under the control of federal courts and regulatory agencies. Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state and local matter only. Before the drug war, the federal government did not dictate to states what plants they should let their citizens consume. Before the Volstead Act, “dry” states and “wet” states had far different policies on alcohol sales. Some states had lenient divorce laws. Some did not. Some states allowed gambling. Even immigration was once the domain of state government. Although some federal law enforcement agents existed in the nineteenth century, “law and order” was overwhelmingly a state and local matter prior to the rise of agencies like the FBI. 

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A Modest Proposal – LewRockwell LewRockwell.com

Posted by M. C. on January 10, 2022

The warning lights are blinking red that the failed US empire is going to need similar assistance soon.  The roadmap for the nuclear disarmament of transitioning states is clear.  We know it can be done. We recognize that it should be done before the velvet divorces, gentle secessions or violent civil wars. 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/?post_type=article&p=831102

By Karen Kwiatkowski

Desmond Tutu’s recent passing reminds us of South Africa’s difficult transition away from apartheid as state policy, and into the complications and frustrations of mass democracy.  It reminds us of the De Klerk government’s dismantling their entire inventory of six nuclear weapons (plus one under construction) under the auspices of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

How and why these weapons were developed is another story, or two.  World opinion was happily supportive of South Africa’s 1989 denuclearization, after the fact.  Global decision-makers, long aware of South Africa’s capability in this deadly arena, were actively interested in no nukes for the new South Africa.

De Klerk opposed nuclear weapons, and his opposition was not completely shared by South Africa’s military bureaucracy.  In his own words, he “overrode that opposition” and never doubted that he was doing the right thing.

A country societally and politically divided, in a world similarly divided, is not a good place for nuclear weapons.  What if, instead of a couple of hours of unarmed riot at the Capitol, American tensions and divisions erupted in a far more significant and more pervasive way?  In practical terms, we understand that the US is an oligarchy, but rips and crevasses in the US fabric are far deeper than simply the people against the corporate and political elites.  Red and blue have become not only visual labels, but communication blockades, with each side well informed by their own media sources, unable to understand the language and emotion of the other side, and contemptuous of it to boot.  The side most aligned with a given government (oligarchy of economic elites, as political scientists explain) policy sees those opposed to that policy as domestic terrorists, and worse. And why shouldn’t they?

While the federal system and the literal vastness of the US allows for some conflictual steam to be released, via interstate mobility and self sufficiency, ultimately these two valves are little more than welcome death knells for the centralized power system in the US.

Add to this a political system that rewards fiscal insolvency, and demands a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude that the whole country rises and falls on mystical utterings of the Fed.  The Federal Reserve is the very godhead of the economic oligarchy. It is a creation impossibly bound by its own sins, a lovely whore itself strapped to the mast as it hears the siren call of lie after treacherous lie told to the red and blue people.  When faith in whatever holds the United States together fails, everything Americans take for granted spins out of control.  Uncertainty, risk, unpredictability, and a massive cache of formerly centrally controlled nuclear weapons.

If world leaders perceived the United States as a conflicted country, tending to violence and anger, consolidating along political and cultural lines, poorly-led and increasingly ungovernable, might they be concerned?  As in 1980s South Africa, might they consider that they ought to do something about those nuclear weapons?

What if world leaders saw the United States as a large, incompetent, nuclear-armed country – unable to pay its bills, suffering domestic unrest and facing imminent collapse of the social welfare state upon which 70% of the population depends upon for survival? What if the global consensus was that this troubled and weakened nation might be inclined to use those weapons to suppress secession movements, or as a false flag to consolidate political power or to start another “unifying” war?  What if the United States is not trusted by the rest of the world? What if it is the only country to have used nuclear weapons against a population in the name of winning a war?

What if corruption and desperation led to the illicit trade or sale of these weapons on the world market? What known institution or American value exists to prevent that from happening?  In failed states, this situation with conventional weapons, biological agents and fissionable material is both past and predictable fact. The origin story of South African nukes itself stands in testament to how this works.

When the United States devolves into separate republics, kingdoms or dictatorships, some warlike and others not, some potentially allied with Christian Russia and others with Communist China, others aggressively content to become little North Koreas or even Old European or southern hemisphere acolytes, do we trust these political entities to be able to safely resolve ownership and management of the US nuclear arsenal, and its control system?

This is possibly the most important question of our era, yet we have not been asking it. I suspect the rest of the world sees pretty clearly what may only be just dawning on the average American.

Civil war or civil dissolution here in the US is already happening, but what is more frightening is that this dissolution will happen and has to happen, in order to repudiate the long past payable US federal and private debt.  A conscious write-down of government debt and entitlements is politically impossible, without revolution, devolution, and/or war.   If the US were to wage war abroad, that war would need to go nuclear:  first, because it cannot be won conventionally by the US military; second, it cannot be stopped without it; and thirdly, that extreme level of “reset” is require to truly restart the debt clock.

Such a reset might be achieved by biological agents, as we suspect with the recent exercise of COVID and its various government-mandated final solutions. However, as the Davos crowd and even big Pharma understand, it’s difficult to control the narrative over time without real fear, not just propaganda-driven hysteria. Like bacteria and viruses, the human psyche, individually and collectively, adapts and survives state- and stage-directed fear-mongering to create resilient variants, some of which may be markedly dangerous to the status quo in the future.

Physical control of people is resource intensive.  It takes money – and the insidious theft by government and its cronies of trillions of dollars from voters and residents (and the rest of the world) is sustainable only when hidden from view. Government debt, at federal, state and local levels, as well as most personal and business debt, is today more often than not, pure junk.  Issuance of new currency, centralized management of money via digital fiat, or MMT, after the coming US death of money, will not even rise to the level of can-kicking.

I modestly propose that in light of the end of the American empire, in preparation for the societal and political collapse of the institutions that control the vast nuclear weapons inventory of the US, and in the interests of global environmentalism, that the major powers begin now to take steps to help facilitate the transition of the US into a non-nuclear nation.

The quality of the US political leadership has been in serious decline, as seen in every election for the duration of our nuclear age.  This imperial decline is not without precedent, but the ability of other world powers to impact global security today is notably different than it was at the end of WWII.  Global treaties and organizations exist under which global security may be served.  New political and economic power centers around the world have emerged to balance and surpass US hegemony. Ensuring the safe and pre-collapse denuclearization of the United States should be their number one priority.

If, we as Americans, observed a nuclear-armed country that was so divided, so badly governed, so unhealthy mentally and physically, so morally and financially broken, and so likely to collapse as a unitary power, would we not be concerned about what to do with those nukes?  Would we not hope for and plan for a non-nuclear transition such that, as new countries emerge from the failed empire, they would not emerge as multiple and hostile nuclear states, persisting in a long-running civil wars that might, as civil wars tend to do, be exceptionally merciless and shortsighted?

The dedicated US concern with handful of North Korean nuclear weapons, or their public obsession with even the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon, demonstrates that Americans are not blind to the issues I’ve mentioned here.  This concern should be turned inward, and diplomatically assisted by well-meaning global leaders.

The danger is real.  But so is the model.  Four countries have voluntarily denuclearized.  South Africa, led by De Klerk, and three former Soviet states.  Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus returned Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia, in some cases for safe dismantlement.  In every case, treaties, international organizations, common sense and global political leadership played an important role.

The warning lights are blinking red that the failed US empire is going to need similar assistance soon.  The roadmap for the nuclear disarmament of transitioning states is clear.  We know it can be done. We recognize that it should be done before the velvet divorces, gentle secessions or violent civil wars.  My modest proposal is offered not to save the world, or the environment, although it would help with both.  It is offered because it occurs to me that we are a bit further along in our devolution as an empire than I previously thought.  Liberty is at hand, there is much to do, and we may very well need outside assistance with this particular project.

Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, farmer and aspiring anarcho-capitalist. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012.

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Biden Unhinged: Voter ID Requirements Worst Threat ‘Since The Civil War!’

Posted by M. C. on July 14, 2021

But the Real ID is OK! January 6 is now small potatoes?

President Biden once again dredged up his “not since the Civil War” hyperbole, this time to describe efforts in Texas and elsewhere to require people to show IDs before casting a vote. Civil War? Really? Also today, Biden allies plan to “fact check” private text messages? And…why is the Post Office spying on you?

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The progressive civil war over Syria and Assad exposes an astonishing lack of intellectual curiosity by some on the American Left — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on July 8, 2021

A detailed forensic analysis of the rocket used in the Ghouta attack – an improvised 330mm-to-350mm rocket equipped with a large receptacle on its nose to hold chemicals—by Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undermined the claims made by the US government assigning culpability for the attack. Not only were the weapons used not included in the arsenal of chemical weapons declared by the Syrian government to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which oversaw the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons capability between 2013-2014, but the short range of the weapon made its being fired from government-held territory impossible.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/528531-progressive-war-syria-american-left/

Scott Ritter

is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

Truth and politics are often mutually exclusive concepts when dealing with the progressive American Left. This unfortunate fact is being driven home in spades in an ongoing spat between two lefty online personalities.

Anyone following Aaron Maté (149K followers on Twitter); The Young Turks (TYT, with 440K followers as an institution, and as many followers each tracking the activity of co-hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian); the comedian Jimmy Dore (274K followers); or any number of other Twitter personalities whose online paths have crossed with any of the above; knows these left-leaning social media stars have been engaged in a vicious feud. Full disclosure, I have appeared on both Maté’s podcast, Pushback, as well as The Young Turks radio show. At issue is Syria and, more pointedly, the contention by both Uygur and Kasparian that Maté is shilling for President Bashar Assad.

A tale of two narratives

The sheer drama and vitriol which has emerged as a result of this feud has been entertaining for those who get a kick out of leftwing internecine warfare. Maté’s use of Jimmy Dore’s popular online program The Jimmy Dore Show as a platform for promoting his arguments has torn the scab off old wounds created when Dore left The Young Turks and struck out on his own, appears to underpin at least some of Uygur and Kasparian’s anti-Maté invective. However, more interesting is the fact that, as Maté pointed out in a recent interview with The Hill, the progressive wing of the American Left has hit a brick wall over the issue of Syria. Criticism of Assad has run up against the lies used to sustain US military hegemony in the Middle East.

“I think,” Maté noted, “that that meltdown reflects just like a general hostility they [The Young Turks] have towards people who are upholding actual progressive values and upholding actual journalism standards.” While the smear campaign waged by Uygur and Kasparian has been as unconscionable as it has been factually wrong, the fact that there is controversy among the progressive wing of the American political Left should not surprise anyone.As Maté observed, “[t]he reason why they slandered me at that time is because I was in Syria and Syria is a, you know, touchy subject for many people on the Left. It has been divisive.”

Syria is a touchy subject, especially for progressives who primarily focus on notions of human rights and democratic values. Maté has come under attack for taking a contrarian stance on two of the most hot-button issues surrounding Assad: allegations of chemical weapons use, and the suppression of political free will through the conduct of elections designed to keep the reins of political power in Syria firmly in his hands. (It should be pointed out that Maté is joined by other outstanding progressive journalists, including Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Rania Khalek, and many others whose informative work predates Maté’s on the issue of Syria.)

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The VMI Controversy – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 22, 2021

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/jacob-hornberger/the-vmi-controversy/

By Jacob G. Hornberger

The Future of Freedom Foundation

Last year, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia, came under scrutiny for alleged acts of racial discrimination against black members of the corps of cadets. The controversy began with an article in the Washington Post, which was followed by a call by the governor of Virginia for an official state investigation into racism at VMI. Under pressure, VMI’s superintendent, who is equivalent to a college president, resigned and was replaced by a temporary superintendent, who is black. Pending the outcome of the state’s investigation, the school removed a statue of Confederate hero Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from the parade ground in front of barracks, where it had stood for many decades.

The controversy raises interesting questions regarding independence, discrimination, state financial support of colleges and universities, and the concept of freedom. The controversy has particular interest for me because I graduated from VMI in 1972.

One of the things that surprised me when I got to VMI was how important the Civil War was to many of the students, especially those from Virginia. They knew all about the war. And having had stories about the war passed on from one generation to the next, they were deeply passionate about it. One of the most popular classes at VMI was a two-semester course on the Civil War in the history department.

VMI is an unusual place. Today, almost 50 years after I graduated, I still have mixed feelings about the school. I received a great liberal arts education, for which I am still very grateful. It enabled me to get into University of Texas law school, one of the best in the country.

VMI also taught me the importance of honor, for which I shall always be grateful. VMI arguably has the strictest student honor code in the country. It’s run entirely by the cadet corps. We elected the members of the honor court, and they had the full authority to accuse cadets of honor violations, put them on trial, and evict them from the school. From the very first day I arrived at VMI and continually thereafter, it was emphasized that no cadet would lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who did. The honor code is a centerpiece of life at the Institute.

It was the military side of VMI about which I still have misgivings. Of course, that was several years before I discovered libertarianism, a philosophy based on individualism, liberty, free markets, and limited government, all of which are opposite to the highly regimented, controlled, and regulated way of life that comes with a military structure.

Whenever people ask me about my four years at VMI, I tell them that I learned what it’s like to live in a harsh socialist and totalitarian system. That type of education, ironically, is invaluable for a libertarian because it actually helps to inculcate a deep love and passion for liberty. At VMI, we were awakened and put to bed at set hours. We assembled in military form for all meals and then marched to the mess hall, singing cadence songs in the process. Daily life was strictly regulated, monitored, and controlled. We all were required to wear uniforms, even when we went into Lexington, the small town in which VMI is located. We were not permitted to have cars before our senior year. We had a Marine Corps superintendent who apparently believed that cadet life should be modeled after boot camp at Paris Island. Justice by the VMI administration, if you can call it that, was usually arbitrary and capricious.

I survived VMI’s harsh military environment, but I wasn’t enamored with it. Many cadets responded positively to the highly regimented and controlled environment and even ended up making the military their career. Others were like me — grateful for the education but all too ready to escape the military environment upon graduation.

Transforming VMI

Founded in 1839, VMI’s mission is to educate and train “citizen-soldiers,” men who will graduate and return to civilian life but who are trained in warfare and are expected to come voluntarily to the assistance of their country in times of peril. It is, of course, a mission that is entirely consistent with the libertarian philosophy and also with the limited-government, anti–standing-army system on which the United States was founded and that remained in existence until after World War II, when the federal government was converted into an all-powerful national-security state consisting of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

When I was at VMI, the Vietnam War was in full swing and I fully expected to be sent there. Luckily, the war was winding down by the time I graduated and so I ended up spending eight years in the Reserves as an infantry officer. During my four years at VMI, the VMI administration aligned itself with the U.S. national-security establishment and its intervention in Vietnam. Thus, when an increasing number of cadets began turning against the war in 1969–1971, including me, administration officials frowned upon us as being “unpatriotic.”

Today there is a plaque on barracks listing VMI cadets who “died in service to the nation” in Vietnam from 1961 to 1975. That’s standard Pentagon-CIA propaganda. The truth is that the more than 58,00 U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam, many of whom were conscripted (i.e., forced to “serve”), died serving their government, not their nation. Or to put it another way, they died for nothing.

There is another plaque on barracks that states that VMI cadets died in the 2003 war in Iraq as part of the U.S. government’s “global war on terror.” That’s sheer nonsense too. The truth is that the U.S. government’s war on Iraq, a Third World nation that never invaded the United States, was an unprovoked war of aggression, a type of war that was declared a war crime at Nuremberg.

Moreover, the concept of a “global war on terror” itself is nonsensical and has proven more destructive to the liberties and well-being of our nation than even the national-security establishment’s Cold War “global war on communism.”

It is unfortunate that the VMI administration still does not understand these basic truths about what former General and President Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” and its policy of foreign wars, foreign interventions, and an empire of foreign military bases.

See the rest here

This article will appear in the April 2021 edition of Future of Freedom.

Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Do Black Lives Matter in the White Elite’s Civil War?

Posted by M. C. on January 5, 2021

It is not wayward elites who are abusing our democratic public, so much as the public abusing itself, when it chooses to be ruled by antiwhite racists.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/03/do-black-lives-matter-in-the-white-elites-civil-war/

By Paul Gottfried

Sasha Johnson, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist, tweeted the last day of 2020 her highest hope as a black nationalist: “The white man will not be our equal but our slave. History is changing. No peace without justice.” 

I kept this statement in mind as I looked at USA Today and our look-alike local newspaper on the newsstand on December 31. Both featured prominently on their front pages a BLM crusader looking down defiantly at whites in a widening revolt against a racist America. I have no idea what BLM is doing to remove any of the systemic social problems of urban blacks or to improve their material well-being.

Last week, I watched on TV as a black boxer entered the ring, dressed in a BLM robe, and surrounded by a ring staff who also wore BLM advertisements on their clothing. According to the announcer, this politically engaged boxer had lost siblings in what seems to have been gang wars. I am at a loss to see how BLM’s call to defund or abolish the police will engage the worrisome problem of black-on-black crime.

One may also be puzzled about why the black racism featured by BLM, and which comes through most plainly in its refusal to recognize that white lives have the same value as black ones, occasions only scattered objections from whites. This may be the most surprising thing about the rise of BLM to national and even international prominence. Why don’t whites care about being accused of supporting a racist society that is allegedly descended from a bigoted white past? 

In my former home state of Connecticut, Miguel Cardona introduced a critical race studies program into public education, which earned this top educational official nationwide plaudits. Now Cardona is being rewarded for his antiwhite educational crusade by being considered for education secretary in the Biden Administration. The overwhelming majority of those who cast their ballots for Cardona’s Democratic Party in Connecticut, whose popular U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal showcases his relationship to BLM and Antifa, are white and may even include acquaintances. Don’t these voters care that the party they overwhelmingly support, throws dirt at whites as whites? Many white voters seem delighted to have this dirt thrown at them and to have their children coming home and reciting the antiwhite hate-speech they picked up courtesy of Cardona and the teachers’ unions. 

I am not denying others are complicit in this continuing outrage, like woke capitalists, government bureaucrats, black race hustlers, and media ideologues. But let’s not forget the predominantly white electorate in this country, especially the self-important soccer moms, who seemed pleased with the new order. These people do have political choices and they make disastrous ones. It is not wayward elites who are abusing our democratic public, so much as the public abusing itself, when it chooses to be ruled by antiwhite racists. 

Recently someone asked me why I am not a white nationalist. My answer was that we first must address the looming white problem. Then we can share the blame with others for our current madness. There would be no critical race theory being taught anywhere in this country unless whites wanted it taught and in fact insisted that it be taught. 

The question is why this is the case. Something like what I’ve described is going on throughout the Anglosphere and Western Europe. There Islamophilia and anticolonialism have led to the same kind of socially suicidal mentality among the native white populations that we find among our woke elites and their ubiquitous imitators. The closest to an explanation that I can come to after researching this behavior is that there is a white civil war going on, in which racial minorities and, in Europe, Muslims play an ancillary role. Upwardly mobile urban whites hate other whites living in what until recently were traditional, religiously influenced communities. The anti-white, anti-Christian torrents of abuse coming from these elites and would-be elites are never aimed at themselves. Rather they are intended for those other whites whom they despise and want to see degraded. 

In a recent, stirring speech at a Turning Point conference, Fox News host Tucker Carlson observed that the cultural Left is trying to take away our “road map” by cutting us off from any sense of an historical past. The Left is doing this by pulling down statues, renaming buildings, army bases, and even sports teams, and railing against the American past. This, of course, is all true. What we are seeing in the United States has been going on in a slightly different form elsewhere—for example, in Germany, where the government claims to be saving its population from a largely imaginary return to fascism by condemning and extinguishing much of its past. 

But there is another side to this cancel culture that Carlson failed to mention. It is a weapon in a civil war that some whites are wielding against other ones. The elites and their followers are just punishing those they hate. They obviously don’t see they are wreaking havoc on themselves.

About Paul Gottfried

Paul Edward Gottfried is the editor of Chronicles. An American paleoconservative philosopher, historian, and columnist, Gottfried is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim recipient.

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The American History You’re Not Supposed To Know – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 7, 2020

History is often written by the winners.

Until someone with courage comes along.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/thomas-dilorenzo/the-american-history-youre-not-supposed-to-know/

By

Brion McClanahan’s new book, Southern Scribblings, contains sixty scholarly and eloquently-written essays about the American history you are not supposed to know.  The reason you are not supposed to know about it is America’s first cultural war that long preceded the current one and is still ongoing.

That “war” began with the New England Puritans, whose philosophical descendants became the universally despised “Yankees.”  These are people mostly from New England and the upper Mid-West originally who believed that they were superior to all others and therefore had a “right” to govern over them, by force if necessary.  They have a mindset of what Judge Napolitano calls “libido dominandi,” or the lust to dominate.  Today, Hillary Clinton would be what Clyde Wilson has called “a museum-quality specimen” of a Yankee.  Yankees are a component of both political parties, but today’s Democratic party is the home of the most extreme ones, who seem to be part Yankee and part Stalinist totalitarian with their university speech codes, their “cancel culture,” their utopian plans to centrally plan all aspects of everyone’s life with their “Green New Deal,” to confiscate private wealth, communist style, with “wealth taxes,” and so on.

After waging total war on the entire civilian population of the South from 1861-1865, murdering hundreds of thousands, the Yankees commenced a “holy war” against American history and especially Southern history, a major theme of Southern Scribblings.  In war, the victors always write the history to portray themselves in the best light possible, no matter what the truth is.  The Yankees have been doing this for more than 150 years, as McClanahan describes in essay after essay.

Among the things you will learn from this book are why Hamiltonian statism has always been the enemy of American freedom and a poisonous threat to genuine, free-market capitalism.  Most Americans would also be surprised to learn that, after the War to Prevent Southern Independence, there was a monumental effort at reconciliation, lasting for generations, and supported by presidents from McKinley to Bill Clinton.  McClanahan calls Jimmy Carter “the last Jeffersonian president” and discusses how “Memorial Day” began as “Decoration Day” where the sacrifices of soldiers on both sides of the “Civil War” were recognized.  This of course is no longer the case thanks to the stultification of America by the country’s own universities over the past generation.

Prior to the 1960s “Civil War” history was much more honest and truthful than it has become ever since then.  For example, everyone understood that the tariff was the main bone of contention between the Yankees of the North, who wanted a 50% (and higher) protectionist tariff, whereas the South wanted its entire country to be a free-trade zone with minimal “revenue tariffs.”  Republican party newspapers even editorialized in favor of bombarding the Southern ports before the war because they understood that free trade in the South would be devastating to the Northern plutocracy.

Everyone also understood that slavery had nothing to do with why Lincoln launched a military invasion of his own country because they were familiar with his own words and the 1861 war aims resolution of the U.S. Congress. That all changed in the 1960s when Leftist historians like Kenneth Stampp decided that the history of the war and reconstruction should be rewritten so as to portray the New England Yankees as angels of salvation who were willing to die by the hundreds of thousands solely for the benefit of black strangers a thousand miles away.  (McClanahan points out the truth that racism and white supremacy was worse in the North than in the South in the nineteenth century, something that even Toqueville wrote about in Democracy in America).

At the same time the history profession since the 1960s contrasted angelic Northern saviors to the descendants of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and other Southerners as the most evil and decadent human beings to ever inhabit the earth.  This of course is the current politically-correct view of everyone and everything Southern in the eyes of the left-wing political elite.

Southern Scribblings explains what a big, steaming pile of horse manure this all is, along with the incredible hypocrisy of “Northern self righteousness.”  It has fueled the fires of “PC Lunacy,” a section of the book containing nine hard-hitting essays.

You will also learn how insidious the academic history profession is with book after book having been written with false narratives about the “lost cause.”  As the only group of Americans who ever seriously challenged the tyrannical impulses of the central government, Southerners must be demonized for eternity in the eyes of the Puritan/Yankee culture that lords over American academe – and much of the rest of society.

The most interesting chapters to your author are the ones that dissect the Leftist and neo-conservative smearing of such Southern figures as Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun and their never-ending deification of Lincoln.  The chapters on “the real Robert E. Lee” is worth the price of the book.  Addressing the current effort by the ignoramus governor of Virginia, among others, to get the statue of Lee removed from the national Capitol building in Washington, McClanahan writes:  “No one as grand as Lee . . . should be surrounded by such reptiles in Washington” anyway.

Few Southerners have been as vilified as John C. Calhoun, a former secretary of war, secretary of state, vice president, senator, and representative.  The real reason for this vilification has nothing to do with slavery, but with the fact that, philosophically, Calhoun was “too much” of a Jeffersonian and a champion of federalism, states’ rights, and decentralization, deadly poisons to all would-be tyrants and dictators.  His Disquisition on Government is one of the greatest treatises on political philosophy ever written by an American and was a favorite of Murray Rothbard’s, who cited him in many of his writings.

McClanahan discusses many of the key ideas in the Disquisition in several essays  on Calhoun.  After reading them you will understand the evil and dishonesty of his detractors, from neocons like Victor Davis Hanson to just about the entire academic history profession, which after all is dominated by self-described Marxists.

Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His latest book is The Problem with Lincoln.

Be seeing you

 

 

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Did Bankers Foment the “Civil War”? – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on July 25, 2020

The Southern states seceded because the Republicans passed a high tariff.

Slavery was in the mix.

For the North the issue was perserving the empire (saving the Union).

Northern Railroads (Honest Abe was a railroad lawyer), Washington business cronies and of course banksters were all instigators.

I am seeing a lot of Civil War press in the places I frequent. Maybe it has to do with Thomas DiLorenzo’s new book – The Problem With Lincoln.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/07/22/did-bankers-foment-the-civil-war/

Paul Craig Roberts

In my last two columns, sufficient evidence was provided that the Lincoln regime was an unconstitutional war crime regime and that the so-called “civil war” was an act of northern aggression against the South initiated by Lincoln for the  purpose of saving the Union. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/07/20/the-cause-of-the-so-called-civil-war/

and   https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/07/21/how-lincoln-destroyed-the-united-states/ 

Slavery was not an issue.

The Southern states seceded because the Republicans passed a high tariff.

For the North the issue was perserving the empire (saving the Union).

Now comes defense attorney and former public prosecuter John Remington Graham.  Was there a deeper underlying cause, an agenda unbeknown to the southern states and perhaps also to Lincoln?  Graham puts forward an intriguing thesis that bankers spent a decade fomenting hatred between North and South in order to provoke a war that would greatly increase federal debt, which the banks could acquire and use as reserves to support the issuance of money and credit.  Federal debt would become the reserve basis (like gold) for the expansion of the money supply. This power would give bankers control of the government.

Graham states his position:

“The divisive antagonisms between the North and the South, finally erupting in the spring of 1861, were not unfortunate historical accidents, nor the result of some inexorable momentum in events. Those anatagonisms, rather, were deliberately agitated during the 1850s by great international banking houses with a preconceived motive of provoking secession. And secession was to be used as a pretext for a bloody and expensvie war of conquest which was actually launched and carried out. The war was planned as a brutal slaughter, as it tragically became. The war was planned to generate a stupendous national debt, mostly represented by bonds, and such a national debt was in fact generated. The private interests acquiring these bonds successfully plotted to secure the passage of legislation which enabled them to convert the paper by them acquired in financing the war into a new and dominant system of banking and currency under their ownership and control. And those private interests fully succeeded in their sinister program, and set up a huge financial empire centered on Wall Street from which they have ever since governed the United States from behind the scenes.”

Graham is factually correct about the huge increase in US national debt caused by the war. In 1860 US national debt stood at a mere $65 million. By war’s end, US national debt was $2.7 billion–41.5 times larger.

Graham’s evidence that hatred was intentionally fomented in order to stimulate a war is circumstantial, but strong.  Graham focuses on the questions of who financed John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, who financed the marketing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s propagandistic novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and turned it into an international best seller, and who financed the expensive and long drawn out legal case of Dred Scott?  These are honest and important questions.  Graham also stresses the role played in fomenting armed strife in Kansas by Stephen Douglas’ modification or repeal of the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.

Today I reproduce with permission a section, “Inciting Hatred: Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” from Graham’s monograph, Blood Money: The Civil War and the Federal Reserve (https://www.turningthetidepublishing.com/shop/blood-money ).

This will be followed by Graham’s analysis, “Transcontinental Railroads and the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise,” and by “The Case of Dred Scott.”  Once the reader is acquainted with some of the circumstantial evidence, I will attempt a review essay of Graham’s monograph. His intriguing thesis that “in order to stimulate a civil war within the United States, it was necessary to foment hatred between the North and the South” should spark a deeper investigation into the cause of the war.

Inciting Hatred: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

          The opening salvo in the campaign to sow hatred was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first serialized in a newspaper, then as a book in 1852. It was not a reasoned argument against slavery. It had no basis in fact. It was pure fiction, reaching a melodramatic climax in a scene where the sadistic master Simon Lagree murders a kindly slave Uncle Tom who pleads, “Mas’r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I’d give ye my heart’s blood; and, if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I’d give ‘em freely, as the Lord gave his for me. O, Mas’r, don’t bring this great sin on your soul!” After more gaudy sensationalism, the awful moment: “There was one hesitating pause, — one irresolute, relenting thrill, — and the spirit of evil came back, with sevenfold vehemence; and Legree, foaming  with rage, smote his victim to the ground.”      

          This vindictive fabrication was published as a malicious libel against the Old South. It was mass marketed, requiring vast capital which could only have been supplied by the largest banking houses in the United States and Great Britain. This book was promoted lavishly like no other book had ever before been promoted in the history of Western civilization. The King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer aside, ten times more copies were published and sold than of any other work then known in the English-speaking world.

Mrs. Stowe’s corny novel could not have gained a large readership without the kind of advertising and fanfare that only powerful connections and big money could assure. Pushing her work was like selling a low-grade Hollywood film today. It might be tasteless as so many films are, but with enough capital it is possible to sell almost anything. Northerners read Mrs. Stowe’s absurdity, and were outraged because they believed it was true. Southerners read her lie, and were outraged because they knew it was false. There was enough resulting anger in the air to generate the desire in men to kill each other, an essential ingredient of war — exactly what the financiers behind this “literary” production wanted.    

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Why This Election Could be The Most Important Since the US Civil War

Posted by M. C. on July 23, 2020

I suspect the Dems will win in November because they actually have a core of philosophical beliefs—and that counts during chaos. It doesn’t matter that they’re irrational or evil. Then, whenever a really radical group takes over—and these people are serious radicals—they cement themselves in power. And it only takes a small number of people working as a cadre to do it.

https://internationalman.com/articles/why-this-election-could-be-the-most-important-since-the-us-civil-war/

by Doug Casey

International Man: The hysteria surrounding COVID-19 and the government lockdown has completely changed in-person interactions.

How do you think this will impact the way that Americans cast their vote in the presidential election?

Doug Casey: It’s a very bad thing from Trump’s point of view. For one thing, it’s severely limiting the number and size of his rallies, which he relies on to keep enthusiasm up.

More people are staying at home and watching television than ever before. And unless they glue their dial to Fox, they’ll gravitate towards the mainstream media, which is stridently anti-Trump. People who are on the fence hear authoritative-sounding talking heads on television, and it naturally influences them away from Trump.

Furthermore, this virus hysteria is discouraging people from going out—especially older people who are roughly 80% of the casualties of this virus. They’re less likely to go to vote. But older people are most likely to be Trumpers because they’re culturally conservative. I’m assuming that the COVID hysteria will still be with us in November.

Keeping his voters at home is one thing. But the effects that the hysteria is having on the economy are even more important. Presidents always take credit when the economy is good and are berated when it’s bad on their watch, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it. If the economy is still bad in November—and I’ll wager it’s going to be much worse—people will reflexively vote against Trump.

With free money being passed out—the $600 per week in supplementary unemployment—between the state and federal payments, something like 30 million people are making more now than they were before the virus. In February, before the lockdown, there were about 3.2 million people collecting unemployment. Now, there are about 35 million. So, it seems we have over 30 million working-age people who are . . . displaced. That doesn’t count part-time workers, who aren’t eligible for unemployment but are no longer working.

When the supplementary benefits end, so will the artificial good times.

Worse, the public has come to the conclusion that a guaranteed annual income works. This virus hysteria has provided a kind of test for both universal basic income and modern monetary theory—helicopter money. So far, anyway, it seems you really can get something for nothing.

Even Trump supports helicopter money because he knows it’s all over if today’s financial house of cards collapses.

Most people will still be out of work when the free money ends. The recognition that the country is in a depression will sink in. They’ll look for somebody to blame. When things get seriously bad, people want to change the system itself.

There’s now a lot of antagonism toward both free minds and free markets. Polls indicate that a majority of Americans actually support BLM, an openly Marxist movement. Forget about free minds—someone might be offended, and you’ll be pilloried by the mob. Forget about free markets—they’re blamed for all the economic problems, even though it’s the lack of them that caused the problem. The idea of capitalism is now considered undefendable.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the system is obviously bad for the Republicans and good for the Democrats, who promote themselves as the party of change.

The bottom line is that this whole episode with COVID is uniformly bad for whatever Trump or the Republicans represent. It’s bad for the old status quo.

International Man: If people are afraid to go out, will it impact voter turnout?

Doug Casey: Absolutely. As I just said, especially among older people who tend to be conservative Republican voters.

But let’s be candid. This election is going to hinge on who cheats the best. And the Democrats have, over the years, developed far greater expertise in cheating than the Republicans. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” wasn’t written for the kind of people who vote Republican.

For one thing, there’s going to be more emphasis on mail-in votes, which make it easier to cheat. You can register dead people as voters. You can register your dog as a voter. If the fraud is ever even discovered, it won’t be until long after the election.

That’s only part of it, though. A high percentage of voting machines are computerized. Fraud by hacking voting machines is apparently easy to do—and it’s pretty untraceable. It’s just a matter of planning and boldness.

One of the consequences of this widely acknowledged dysfunction is to delegitimize the whole idea of voting. As you know, I don’t believe in mass democracy, because it inevitably degrades into a system where the poorer citizens vote themselves benefits at the expense of the middle class. Basically, mob rule dressed in a coat and tie. But if the populace loses faith in “democracy” during a serious economic crisis—like this one—they’re going to look for a strong man to straighten things out. The US will look more and more like Argentina.

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