As he closed his essay Hayek confessed that since the word liberal had been corrupted, thanks to the French Revolution and other forces, by “overrationalis[m], nationalis[m]” and socialis[m],” it had ceased to a good label for his political outlook, which he shared with Tocqueville and Acton: “What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition. [Emphasis added.]
Who among true liberal advocates of individual liberty and free social evolution — aka libertarians — would deny the truth of that observation?
Hayek had European conservatism in mind when he wrote his essay, and for years, American conservatives, who still had affection for true liberalism, hastened to point this out. As Hayek wrote:
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.
Later in his essay, he elaborated that “in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions. To the liberal they are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes.”
But he noted that “This already existing confusion [over labels] was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character.” The confusion was compounded, Hayek wrote, when socialists began to call themselves liberals.
Many still suffer from this confusion today. But change has been afoot because the illiberals of the left and right increasingly want no part of true liberalism or the label — and in a way, that’s good. Those on the left who call themselves progressives or socialists don’t like the label liberal (or neo-liberal) because they associate it with the current permanent bipartisan prowar regime beholden to special corporate interests (so we liberals still have work to do), and virtually all conservatives eschew the label because they don’t want to be mistaken for libertarians. That’s also good.
So Hayek’s essay has new relevance for America. Would Hayek have been surprised? He would have distinguished national conservatism from neoconservatism because of the latter’s cosmopolitanism. But how could he embrace as bonafide allies people who view imperialist war as a way to create “national greatness” and social solidarity, as the neocons do? Hayek would have agreed with Abraham Bishop who said in 1800 that “a nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom.”
Let’s look at Hayek’s problem with conservatism. For him, the “decisive objection” is that “by its nature,” conservatism can do no more than slow down the change that progressives have initiated. That’s not good enough: “What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move.” He acknowledged that although the liberal’s differences with the “collectivist radical” are greater than his differences with the conservative, the latter “generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time.” Thus “the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.”
The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all,
Remarks inspired by Manfred Kleine-Hartlage’s ‘Invective against Conservatives’
Corona is the latest chapter in a long parade of insanity by Western governments.
I was first summoned from inattentive normie sleep in 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the German borders to mass third-world immigration. It was an intensely strange moment. Weeks upon weeks of clearly manufactured media hysteria culminated in people of all political persuasions donating money and clothes to notional Syrian refugees and joining welcome parties at train stations. There they encountered primarily fighting-age men from across the Middle East and Africa, a far cry from the crowds of Syrian women and children and “doctors” that the media had promised. These refugees, supported by taxpayers and unleashed upon the indigenous population of Europe, behaved after the pattern of invaders across history. The press and government officials studiously hid the details of their conduct until the mass sexual assaults perpetrated at Cologne on Silvesternacht 2015/16 overwhelmed even the propaganda capacities of German state media.
By the end of 2016, an astounding 1.3 million migrants had entered the Federal Republic of Germany – a massive incursion overseen not by a leftist government, but by the nominally conservative Christian Democrats. It was also the CDU, under Merkel’s leadership, who developed the genius plan to phase out nuclear energy and close our coal-fired power plants at the same time, and who masterminded some of the harshest and most destructive Corona containment measures in all of Europe. You elect allegedly prudent, far-sighted centrist conservatives, you get mass immigration, deindustrialisation, and nationwide hygiene house arrests.
How does that happen?
I’ve tried not to make right-wing politics a focus of this blog, mostly because I’m not even sure what it means to be on the right, in a world where there’s no operative political identity beyond establishment leftism. Everyone who opposes the leftist program, whatever his specific views, will find himself bearing the right-wing label. Nor do I consider myself in any real sense a conservative. Nevertheless, the complicity of conservative politicians in enacting lunatic leftist policy prescriptions is a very deep problem, and one that characterises politics not just in Germany but across the West.
The title might be translated Invective against Conservatives, or merely Against Conservatives, but it’s not so much an attack as it is an explanation of conservative complicity in the leftist political program. As such it explains a great deal about our current moment, and in what follows I’ll venture to summarise some of its central ideas.
Today, we get something quite different, a set of beliefs based upon the notion that because something was “American,” it was exceptional by nature. The limits of time and space only applied to other people, not Americans, and that included laws of economics. In fact, there were not real “laws” of economics, according to these conservative historicists, just epochs of history that came and went and set their own rules.
When Ronald Reagan officially announced his candidacy for president of the United States in November 1979, he called for the establishment of a large free trade zone encompassing the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Not surprisingly, the so-called free trade agreement better known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) resembled the usual “managed trade” that falls much more into the category of what Randall Holcombe calls “political capitalism.” Politics has a way of doing that.
For all of the logic of theories of free trade and for all of the prosperity that has come about as international trade has expanded in the past few decades, freedom of exchange over international borders will always have its enemies. On the progressive Left, we have seen the political candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom are hardcore protectionists.
Conservatives, however, have opposed free trade for decades and seem to be impervious to any arguments to the contrary, no matter how logical free trade policies might be. In a recent edition of the American Conservative, Clyde Prestowitz praises President Joe Biden’s proposal to heavily subsidize the US semiconductor industry. He writes:
President Biden has proposed that the U.S. government invest billions of dollars in the pivotal U.S. semiconductor industry as part of an effort to assure continued global leadership. It is a break with 70 years of U.S. free-trade doctrine, as well as a huge step back to America’s future.
While one can write volumes on the meaning of “invest” in that statement, nonetheless there is much more to understanding just how fallacious this latest conservative argument for “managed trade” really is. President Bill Clinton used that term regularly as a euphemism for more spending, and politicians recklessly have used the terminology ever since.
However, what exactly would be Biden’s “investments”? Will the federal government be financing new capital expenditures for US companies and, if so, what are the terms of financing and how will the capital be directed? Government “investments” by definition are political expenditures and require political outcomes, none of which will meet actual needs in the US economy.
Like so many conservatives that call for some forms of autarky, Prestowitz conjures up an American past that in his thinking was made possible only by protective tariffs. He writes:
This is a return to the trail first blazed by Alexander Hamilton in 1791. Hamilton proposed mimicking Britain’s budding industrial revolution by copying its technology, imposing tariffs on imports of manufactures and providing financial incentives for the development of domestic manufacturing.
Hamilton was initially opposed by Thomas Jefferson, who dreamed of an America of yeoman farmers trading produce and raw materials like timber for imported manufactures. The outcome of the debate was determined by the War of 1812, which the U.S. nearly lost for want of manufacturing capability. In its wake, Jefferson yielded to Hamilton, noting that manufactures were “as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.”
The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the State’s intellectuals to weave obscurantist apologia for State rule that would have only met with derision by the populace of a simpler age. A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the “multiplier effect,” it unfortunately carries more conviction. And so the assault on common sense proceeds, each age performing the task in its own ways.
The security walls around the U.S. Capitol may be removed, but the federal response to the January 6 protests has only just begun. The Democrats in Washington are determined to treat the incident as on par with the events of September 11, which may explain a troubling report about the potential use of the famed No Fly List.
Yesterday Nick Fuentes, a right-wing social media pundit who attended the January 6 protests in the capital, alleged that he has been placed on the federal no-fly list, preventing him from traveling to Florida for a political rally. While Mr. Fuentes shared on social media audio of an airline employee suggesting that his flying restriction did come from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), later that night Tucker Carlson informed his audience that his staff could neither confirm nor deny the report. While critics pointed to previous social media posts which documented his being removed from a plane for failing to comply with mask policies, Fuentes has noted that he had no problem flying to Washington in January.
It is unclear whether federal authorities will be in any rush to clarify the situation, but there is no reason not to assume that federal authorities would attempt to use this war on terror tool against political opponents. From its inception, what originally began as sixteen names federal authorities had connected to potential future terrorist attacks quickly grew to over 1 million. As is the case with other surveillance tools handed over to the deep state, there is very little oversight or due process involved in how federal authorities handle potential “terrorist threats.”
Since January there has been a concerted effort by Democrat leaders, former deep state officials, and America’s most despicable neoconservatives to push the Biden administration to utilize the power of the federal government against the supporters of Donald Trump. While the incidents at the Capitol on January 6 are used to justify these calls, the weaponization of federal power against political opponents goes back almost as long as the federal government itself. In more recent years, President Biden’s previous service in the White House saw a Democrat administration that used both the IRS and Department of Homeland Security to target conservatives.
Another reason to expect escalation from the Biden administration against vocal figures like Fuentes is the unique critique of the current regime from the right. The majority of Republican voters do not simply oppose President Biden due to politics, but flatly reject his democratic legitimacy.
The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the State’s intellectuals to weave obscurantist apologia for State rule that would have only met with derision by the populace of a simpler age. A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the “multiplier effect,” it unfortunately carries more conviction. And so the assault on common sense proceeds, each age performing the task in its own ways.
Thus, ideological support being vital to the State, it must unceasingly try to impress the public with its “legitimacy,” to distinguish its activities from those of mere brigands….
The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State’s openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d’être.
This perspective explains the disproportionate treatment that mostly peaceful protesters at the Capitol in January have received in contrast to those arrested during riots in American cities throughout the past year. The state will always treat those who seriously threaten its perceived legitimacy with greater zeal than those guilty of simply destroying the livelihoods of its citizens.
For decades now, the same political party that often gives lip service to “federalism” has often been the party directly responsible for the growth of federal power. As noted earlier, it took exactly one administration before the Department of Homeland Security, created by the Bush administration, began to target the very voters who elected him to office. It was just two election cycles before the PATRIOT Act was used to target a Republican presidential campaign.
The biggest question that now lies in American politics is whether conservatives are capable of learning from these examples. If the American right is capable of fully absorbing the reality that the greatest threat to their lives, liberty, and prosperity lies domestically—and not abroad—perhaps there is potential for a political rollback of the American empire.
If not, American conservatives will come to understand how little constitutional rights truly mean in the face of a hostile state.
Finally, a belief in the Divine is necessary to avoid the omnipresent temptation of being drawn into utopian politics, which at its root, stems from a rejection of God. Support for utopian politics proceeds from disbelief in God, because there is only one true heaven. And, when people do not believe in and cannot aim for this true heaven, as a means of averting psychological anguish, they attempt to institute their own heaven on earth.
Russell Kirk, on page 474 of The Conservative Mind, defines conservatism as the “negation of ideology,” with there being “no simple set of formulas by which all the ills to which flesh is heir may be swept away.”
To delineate this concept, it is prudent to clarify what the “negation of ideology” does not entail. It does not deny there are superior ways of ordering society which can be procured from a careful analysis of history, prejudice and experience. As Kirk puts it, there exist “general principles of morals and of politics to which thinking men may turn.”
However, conservatism is the negation of ideology to the extent that it rejects ideology–be it communism, progressivism, white nationalism, or pro-vaccination fanaticism–as an enduring political solution or feasible cure to societal ills.
Why conservatives reject ideology
As to why conservatives rejects ideology, there are various good points in support. These include but are not limited to:
1. The impermanence of things:
On page 10 of the White Nationalist Manifesto, Greg Johnson notes that 99.9 % of all recorded animal species have gone extinct. Taking this statistic, Johnson warns:
Simply by virtue of existing, there is a 99.9 % chance that our (white) race will become extinct. If we want to be among the long-term survivors, we certainly can’t just depend upon luck (my emphasis).
There is a significant problem with this hope of being “long-term survivors,” a goal later used by Johnson to justify his vision for ‘whitopia’. Which is, no matter the action or precautionary measures taken, the white race–along with all other races, countries and cultures–will ultimately go extinct.
This is because, to paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, everything which is contingent and comes into being must also go out of existence. If something can go out of existence and enough time is allowed for, it assuredly will go out of existence. There is no reason to believe that a contingent being can defy the fulfillment of its inherent potential for non-existence; as such, the European people cannot and will not persist forever.
To be clear, the preceding remarks are not to dismiss the importance of racial identity or even the novel achievements, inventions and ideas of men. It is to say, however, that as all things are transient, no political ideology or system can be a permanent solution to anything.
2. The limitations of temporal glory:
Ideologues tend to imagine that in the event of attaining their political objectives, they will acquire corresponding feelings of glory and happiness.
Irrespective of the specific ideology, the problem with this expectation is that temporal glory is always fleeting: no matter the greatness of the victory obtained, humans always return back to an ordinary, basal level of happiness.
In the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, E. Michael Jones refers to these inherent limitations on natural human happiness, as became apparent from the emotional hangovers of anti-Vietnam war activists:
By the time the revolutionary Jew got what he wanted it, he no longer wanted it. The Vietnam War was a classic case. In the spring of 1975, Radosh and his new wife attended a victory celebration for the Vietcong in Central Park, where they listened to Joan Baez, “the diva of the antiwar movement,” as well as “the artist who stood alongside the young Bob Dylan and epitomised the union of art and politics,” and Phil Ochs, as they sang Ochs’ anti-war anthem “I declare war is over.” A few months later, Ochs, an alcoholic wreck, committed suicide when Bob Dylan did not include him in the Rolling Thunder revue. Radosh and his wife experienced a milder form of letdown. Instead of a moment of triumph, “the end of the war,” Radosh says, “produced a great void.” It was “an occasion of deep melancholy” because the war and the draft had been “the issue that had given meaning to our lives” and now that issue was “beginning to evaporate,” and when Nixon abolished the draft, it evaporated.
3. Life is always the same:
Closely related to the above point, political circumstances, whether contributing to a moral as well as cohesive society, or an immoral and divided society–do not alter the fundamental nature of human life.
Life always follows the same essential pattern: there are happy times and sad times; there are triumphs and failures; we physically and intellectually blossom in youth, before being afflicted by old age, infirmities and ultimately, death.
For this reason, excessive stock should not be placed in ideology, or for that matter, political outcomes.
4. The true motives of ideologues:
It is well to be sceptical of ideologues, given what truly actuates their political advocacy. On page 382 of The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk captures their frequent underlying motivations, as exampled by a former marxist revolutionary from the late-19th century:
The boy who wrote Workers in the Dawn (1880), brimming with Ruskinian socialism, aspired to be “the mouthpiece of the advanced Radical party.” But social reform went the way of positivism, as Gissing came to maturity and saw the denizens of mean streets for what they were: four years later, Waymark in the The Unclassed dissects Gissing’s own youthful socialism, compounded of sentimentality and egotism. “I often amuse myself with taking to pieces my former self. I was not a conscious hypocrite in those days of violent radicalism, workingman’s-club lecturing, and the like; the fault was that I understood myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal on behalf of the suffering masses was nothing more nor less than disguised zeal on behalf of my own starved passions. I was poor and desperate, life had no pleasures, the future seemed hopeless, yet I was overflowing with vehement desires, every nerve in me was a hunger which cried out to be appeased. I identified myself with the poor and ignorant; I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs. I raved for freedom because I was myself in the bondage of unsatisfiable longing” (my emphasis).
When someone is in a state of sexual restlessness, they will commonly promote utopian politics. As such people are driven by an insatiable appetite and lack satisfaction at the individual level; at the collective level and in lieu of addressing their personal flaws, they often resort to ideology as a purported (and contrived) solution to social problems. In essence, ideologues seek to control others because they cannot control themselves.
Given this, support for ideology does not so much derive from or depend on its actual merits–again, be it communism, progressivism, white nationalism, or pro-vaccination fanaticism. Rather, the attraction to ideology more draws from the disordered psychological state of its adherents.
5. Our fallen nature:
Clearly, our fallen nature has many implications which are utterly inconsistent with the foundation and maintenance of utopias.
To give one such example, our fallen nature means that even when we understand what is right, we will in many cases choose to do evil–for reasons of convenience, selfishness, excitement, pleasure, etc. When we freely choose evil, this necessarily comes at the expense of others and the common good; an outcome which arises regardless of poverty, wealth inequality, political systems, and educational opportunities.
Because humans choose evil of their own volition, no political system can ever incubate itself against these decisions and their ramifications.
6. The human need for disruption and upheaval:
Strongly agitating against societies based on a peaceful (but purposeless) material prosperity, is the human impulse towards disruption and upheaval. Frequently, this impulse expresses itself against societies that have grown mundane and predictable, as martial values and transcendentalism cannot be indefinitely neglected. On page 79 of The True and only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, Christopher Lasch sets out how this impulse shored up popular support for the Third Reich:
In 1940, George Orwell made the same point about fascism. The Western democracies, he observed, had come to think that “human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.” Whatever else could be said about it, fascism was “psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.” Hitler knew that men and women wanted more than “comfort, safety, short-working hours, hygiene, birth control.” “Whereas socialism, and even capitalism … have said to people, ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them, ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”
Religion, conservatism and the negation of ideology
In closing, there are many good arguments in favour of rejecting ideology, which contain persuasive value of themselves. Notwithstanding this, in practical terms, mere unaided reason is an insufficient justification for the conservative negation of ideology. This is because a belief in the Divine is also essential: conservatism cannot (beyond a few exceptions) be sustained in the absence of religious faith.
There are, in the main, three practical reasons forconservatism requiring this added sustenance of religious faith.
In the first place, if understood that we are directed towards a knowledge of and relationship with God–the Divine is our ultimate end–there is no potential for ideology to emerge and displace the primacy of faith.
In the second place, absent religious belief and an understanding of there being an eternal import to our actions, people are incapable of mustering the requisite moral discipline for maintaining a conservative society.
Finally, a belief in the Divine is necessary to avoid the omnipresent temptation of being drawn into utopian politics, which at its root, stems from a rejection of God. Support for utopian politics proceeds from disbelief in God, because there is only one true heaven. And, when people do not believe in and cannot aim for this true heaven, as a means of averting psychological anguish, they attempt to institute their own heaven on earth.
I think we are reaching a stage in the conflict between freedom advocates and collectivist tyrants when many illusions are going to melt away, and all we will be left with is cold hard reality. Now is the time when we find out who is going to stand their ground and fight for what they believe in, and who is going to cower and submit just to save their own skin.
There are many millions of Americans today in the post-election environment that feel uneasy about the fate of the country given the rise of a Biden presidency. And though I understand why this tension exists, I want to offer a possible “silver lining”; a different way of looking at the situation:
With Biden in the White House, there is no longer any ambiguity about what conservatives (and some of the more courageous moderates) need to do and need to accomplish. Now we know where we stand, and now the stakes are clear.
With Trump in office, a lot of liberty minded people became a little too comfortable, to the point that they were inactive. They actually believed the system could be repaired and corruption ended from within, and without much effort on our part beyond our votes. Trump made many conservatives lazy.
Then there was the Q-anon-sense floating around on the web which also misled some freedom activists into thinking that people much higher placed or “smarter” than us were fighting the good fight behind the scenes and that the globalists would be swept up in a grand 4D chess maneuver. This was a fantasy; it was never going to happen. Finally, everyone knows this and we can get on with the business of fighting the real battles ahead.
I think we are reaching a stage in the conflict between freedom advocates and collectivist tyrants when many illusions are going to melt away, and all we will be left with is cold hard reality. Now is the time when we find out who is going to stand their ground and fight for what they believe in, and who is going to cower and submit just to save their own skin. Now is the time when we find out who has balls.
The last four years plus the election of 2020 have revealed that political solutions are out the window. A lot of conservatives should have known better, but maybe it takes a perceived disaster to shock some people out of their waking dreams. Elections, voting, potential third parties; it’s all Kabuki theater. It’s all a facade to keep us docile and under control.
The liberty movement cannot revolve around a single political figure. We cannot bottleneck out efforts into the hands of one man or one political party. The fight is up to us – each of us as individuals. It was ALWAYS up to us.
A different form of organization needs to happen if Americans are going to protect our freedoms; a grassroots approach from the ground up rather than the top down. There will of course be people who stand out as teachers and pioneers, those that lead by example. But overall, the movement will not be acting on orders from on high. Rather, it will be acting according to self motivation. The liberty movement is not driven by personalities, but by shared principles which take on a life of their own.
I’m not worried about Biden. In fact, his presence may be the best thing to happen to conservative unity in well over a decade. The only thing I worry about, as noted, is who is going to stand their ground, and who is going to give in?
Biden may also be a wake up call for any moderate democrats out there who thought that by voting for a hair-sniffing corporate puppet they might put an end to the division and civil unrest in the nation. I think they will discover that Joe will attract even MORE civil unrest. He may even trigger more looting and rioting by Antifa and BLM during his administration than Trump did, by the simple fact these insane people will assume that Biden will be malleable and easier to exploit.
Biden himself is not all that important; he is nothing more than a foil for bigger events and a proxy for more nefarious people. His presence signals that the “Great Reset” agenda is fully greenlit. This agenda has a pretty obvious set of goals, many of them openly admitted to by the World Economic Forum, and some of them strongly implied by the extreme political left and the media. They include:
1) Perpetual pandemic lockdowns and economic controls until the population submits to medical tyranny.
2) Medical passports and contact tracing as a part of everyday life.
3) The censorship and de-platforming of all voices that oppose the agenda.
4) Greatly reduced economic activity in the name of stopping “climate change”.
5) Greatly increased poverty and the loss of private property.
6) The introduction of “Universal Basic Income” in which the government becomes the all-powerful welfare provider and nursemaid for a generation of dependent and desperate people.
7) A cashless society and digital currency system where privacy in trade is completely erased.
8) creation of a “shared economy” in which no one will own anything and independent production is outlawed.
9) The deletion of national borders and the end of sovereignty and self-determination.
10) The centralization of global political power into the hands of a select few elitists.
Now, you would think that most sensible people would be opposed to such a dystopian agenda. It would inevitably lead to mass death in economic terms, as well as war. Unless you are a psychopath that gets a vicarious thrill from the brutal oppression of millions of people, or you are a globalist that stands to gain immense power, there is nothing about the Reset that benefits you.
That said, there will still be millions of useful idiots that support totalitarian policies, and they will act to enforce them. Some of them will be convinced that they are serving the “greater good”, and others will think that they can “earn a place at the table” if they lick the boots of tyrants long enough. Bottom line? It’s not just the globalists we need to worry about, it is also the contingent of zombies they have duped or bribed into serving the Reset.
The information war is about to take a backseat and a new fight is about to begin. But how will it start?
I believe the first test for conservatives will be Biden’s pandemic response. The Reset agenda and the pandemic are closely intertwined. Do not be misled by calls from Democrats to reopen the economy; there are strings attached.
When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated that the state needed to reopen, or there would be “nothing left”, he also consistently hinted that vaccination numbers needed to improve. There are two big lies involved in this narrative – The first is that the vaccination rollout has failed on a technical level.
They want us to believe that only around 60% of the first 2 million vaccine doses have been administered because the state and hospitals failed to get them to citizens fast enough. The truth is, as we’ve seen in numerous polls of Americans and medical staff, millions of people DO NOT WANT to take the vaccine. The situation in New York must be shocking to establishment elites; it’s one of the most leftists states in the US and yet they can’t seem to trick enough people into taking the shot.
The same is true across the country, and it’s not because of bureaucratic failure, it is a propaganda failure.
Second, Cuomo’s statements hint that though lockdowns are destroying the economy, vaccine saturation is paramount. The message is this – “Take the vaccine, or the economy will crash.” The pandemic response is a carrot and stick approach: The lockdowns are the stick, and the reopenings are the carrot.
Of course, even if most people get vaccinated and submit to medical passports and contact tracing like good little slaves, this does not mean life will go back to normal. On the contrary, things will get much worse.
As I have noted in past articles like ‘Waves Of Mutilation: Medical Tyranny And The Cashless Society’, the globalists have admitted that the covid mandates and controls are going to be in place for many years, perhaps forever. Elites at MIT and the Imperial College Of London have written extensively about a strategy I call “Wave Theory”, in which governments constantly batter the public with waves of lockdowns followed by brief windows of partial openings and limited freedom.
The reopenings are a trick, a way to release public tension like a steam valve and make everyone think that the crisis is almost over. Then, the draconian mandates are brought back once again. This will never end. The only way to stop it is to remove the globalists from power and crush the Reset agenda.
A new narrative is already being injected into the mainstream media hinting that even vaccinations will not lead to freedom.
Anthony Fauci and others have argued that those who are vaccinated still need to follow lockdown mandates and wear masks. This policy completely ignores the scientific FACT that the death rate of covid is only 0.26% for anyone outside of a nursing home. It ignores the fact that masks have been consistently proven to do nothing to stop the spread of the virus. It ignores the fact that hospitals across the US have remained mostly empty, with only 15% of capacity in use during Covid . And, it ignores the fact that the vaccines are barely tested experimental cocktails that even the former VP of Pfizer has warned might cause dangerous autoimmune reactions and infertility.
On top of this, more and more stories about “covid mutations” are hitting the news wire. They are supposedly more infectious and more deadly than the original (which runs contrary to the natural evolution of the vast majority of viruses), and the mutation in South Africa is also “possibly” unaffected by existing vaccines. There is no concrete proof to support any of the claims, but I think you see where all of this is headed, right?
My guess is that in about two months the CDC and WHO will announce a new global outbreak of a more deadly strain of Covid. They will say the current vaccines are ineffective, and that lockdowns must continue. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are savvy to the old covid-19 scheme, so the elites are going to introduce covid-20, and covid-21, and covid-22, etc.
Biden will call for Level 4 lockdowns similar to those implemented in Europe and Australia, and this is where conservatives must draw a line in the sand and announce that we are not subject to unconstitutional restrictions, that we are breaking free. This will be our first major test.
It’s not enough to simply say “I won’t submit” when the consequences are minimal. One must be willing to fight back even when the consequences are dire. Being willing to lose everything for what you believe, being willing to possibly die for your values and principles means you are no longer a spectator in history, but an actor that can affect the future. Anything less is not enough to win the war that is coming.
Why does mainstream conservatism engage in this bizarre practice of featuring designated victim minorities to say what they would not allow vanilla-white Christians to utter? The left does not care how many minorities the right boasts of on outlets like Fox News; they will merely mock these guests as sell-outs. When conservatives play the diversity game, they are dealt useless cards.
By now, however, the strategy has run its course and begun to look silly.
Characteristic of Conservatism Inc. for several decades now has been the practice of having politically correct spokespersons expressing its talking points. Fox News is full of black guests who are encouraged to say what the white hosts are terrified of stating lest they be accused of racism or sexism. Candace Owens, a very attractive black conservative woman, was allowed to observe what scared, white, self-styled conservatives would never say, namely that George Floyd had a long criminal record and may have been high on drugs when a policeman pressed down on his neck with a knee.
There is also an assortment of gays and lesbians on Fox News to comment on LGBT affairs and to create a properly diverse environment. When Fox News all-star Guy Benson, a self-identified gay, announced that he was entering a gay marriage, his colleagues swooned with joy and approval. Benson’s progressive union undoubtedly enhanced his credibility as a critic of extreme transgenderism, which the conservative movement is presently attacking as detrimental to gay identities and particularly upsetting to lesbians. Bruce (Caitlyn) Jenner was also presented on Fox News as a proud transgendered Republican. This came after the channel showed initial reservations about embracing the transgendered Jenner as one of its own.
Why does mainstream conservatism engage in this bizarre practice of featuring designated victim minorities to say what they would not allow vanilla-white Christians to utter? The left does not care how many minorities the right boasts of on outlets like Fox News; they will merely mock these guests as sell-outs. When conservatives play the diversity game, they are dealt useless cards.
There are historical reasons conservatives continue to persist in this delusion. In 1993, a widely publicized incident occurred at the University of Pennsylvania, thereafter, known as the “Water Buffalo affair.” An Orthodox Jewish student named Eden Jacobowitz grew irritated when 15 black girls outside his room began to make noise. Jacobowitz, who was trying to study, became so annoyed that he darted out of his dorm room and told the girls to be quiet. He also fatefully called them “water buffaloes,” which may have been a very loose translation for the Yiddish word “bahemah,” meaning a dumb beast. His remark was genuinely offensive, although those at whom he shouted may have been more mystified than insulted by what he said.
The girls complained to the administration and Jacobowitz was expelled from the university. Keep in mind that if a minority had said something far worse to a white student, in all probability nothing would have befallen the offender. Jacobowitz or his supporters, led by Professor Allan Kors, a known defender of free speech at the university, threatened to bring legal action against the school. After some wrangling, Jacobowitz was let back in on the condition that he apologize to those he had offended.
Some observers have noticed salient aspects of this affair. A sizable segment of the Jewish journalistic community, from the neoconservative magazine Commentary to the leftist magazine Daily Forward rallied to the “Yeshiva boy” (meaning a student at an Orthodox Jewish school) pushed around by unfriendly gentiles. Jacobowitz attracted favorable attention because of his background from those who felt a demonstrable ethnic attachment to his cause.
Around this time, another student named Greg Pavlik—a white, Christian, male—had also been pushed around by UPenn and threatened with expulsion after he wrote critically about Martin Luther King, Jr., in the student newspaper. Although Kors went to bat for Pavlik, this student clearly did not have the support community that rushed to Jacobowitz’s defense. One could easily imagine that those who ignored him might have acted differently if Pavlik belonged to an ethnic, racial, or sexual minority group. Then the conservative establishment, by championing Pavlik, could have made it appear that it was championing an historic media-certified victim of discrimination.
It might also have helped the image of Pavlik if he had not identified himself as a paleoconservative and admirer of Patrick J. Buchanan. There is after all the right and then there is Conservatism Inc., which holds the cards. Pavlik chose his allies imprudently.
It appears that establishment conservatives took from the Pavlik incident a critical idea, namely that they needed more fashionable representatives. If the movement identified with groups claiming a history of discrimination, the public might view them more sympathetically. It is also probable that the Water Buffalo incident suggested how the conservative media could develop their own outreach strategy to minority audiences.
They could feature minorities as spokespersons for their talking points, and as they came up with ever more daring forms of diversity, their standing even on the left would improve. Since then conservative elites have offered as examples of diversity Jewish homosexuals, lesbian feminists, and transgendered Republicans, and this list continues to grow.
By now, however, the strategy has run its course and begun to look silly.
Paul Gottfried is Editor in Chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is also the Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents.
Over my life, I have supposedly gone from “liberal” to” libertarian” to “conservative” to “deplorable” to “conspiracy theorist” to “racist”. Yet my worldview had never changed.
As a young high school then college student in the 1960’s, I was told I was a “liberal”. (OK, a classical liberal.) I was for a color-blind society, valuing individuals by merit, from my own experience. I was for freedom of association, freedom to choose, and personal responsibiity. Sound and stable money, charity by choice from personal passion, upward mobility and equal rights under the law were my ideals. I was opposed to a military draft and foreign wars for the benefit of connected corporations and client governments. Peace & Love.
I questioned authority.
As a young entrepreneur in the 1970s & 80s, I was told that I was not a liberal anymore. I was a “libertarian”, accused of not having a heart for the “disadvantaged”. Working hard while taking care of my own and those known was not enough shown. Advocating the lowering or termination of taxes in favor of user fees, volitional financing and competitive privatization threatened the “liberal” agendas, those of the political class who wanted me to pay for intervention programs to enact their social ideals. I still believed in owning one’s own body and what you put in it, as well as the right to be wise or unwise, and live with and learn from the consequences. Leave us alone, and a market would arise for most anything.
I questioned the use of force.
As a long hours family man & businessman in the 1980s & 90s, I was told I must be a “conservative” because I did not subscribe to special quotas for politically fashionable “minorities” nor taxation and redistribution through social engineering agencies and organizations working against my own values and sovereignty. I still believed in live and let live. But for the social critics, that was not enough. Worse, I was a “gold bug” – saving, rather than borrowing to make the economy more prosperous (for banks and cooperating corporations), nor donating to make the connected more powerful. I practiced defense, not tribute.
I questioned the political class.
As an innocent bystander to the media propaganda wars of the 2000s, the corruption of information, education, public administration and the business world left me reluctant to participate. Apparently my silence or refusal to join the cultural Marxist social engineers and their globalist corporate puppeteers in expressing postured outrage at selected “misdeeds” was my disgrace. I was now a “deplorable”. For being knowledgeably skeptical as to political agendas, soundbites & stunts, identity politics, government decrees, false science, scamdemics, planned chaos and misleading or fake “news”, I was labeled a “conspiracy theorist”. It is how the enlightened are discredited. It is how any spotlight on or resistance to the deep state is deplatformed.
I questioned the official narratives.
As a witness to the social chaos of June 2020, I am told that I am part of the problem. My failure to offer vocal and financial support to the racial racketeers, my failure to “confess” and ask for “forgiveness” for things I have not done nor condone, for attitudes that are not of my own mind nor application, are somehow acts of “enabling”. For not “excusing” the rioters and looters, for pointing out the real statistics of crime and policing, for observation that the problems with law enforcement are less racial, but more structural, I must be a “white supremist racist”. (Actually that puts me in the good company of accomplished black Americans as Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, Herman Cain, Ben Carson and Allen West).
I questioned the new normal.
Funny thing. Over my life, I have supposedly gone from “liberal” to” libertarian” to “conservative” to “deplorable” to “conspiracy theorist” to “racist”. Yet my worldview had never changed.
I see that all manner of conservatives are saying in response to the draconian lockdowns across the country that an unconstitutional law is no law. They are praising district attorneys, sheriffs, and local police for saying that they won’t enforce the decrees of state governors. Some conservatives are advocating rebellion and civil disobedience. Their focus, of course, is mainly on states with Democratic governors. But it is typical of conservatives not to criticize Republicans too much.
But do conservatives really believe that an unconstitutional law is no law? Do they really believe that district attorneys, sheriffs, and local police should not enforce unconstitutional laws?
Of course they don’t.
Now, I am glad to see that conservatives are actually talking about civil liberties. But the greatest violation of civil liberties, private property, individual liberty, personal freedom, and free enterprise is the federal government’s war on drugs.
Possession of marijuana is punishable by up to one year in jail and a minimum fine of $1,000 for a first conviction. For a second conviction, the penalties increase to a 15-day mandatory minimum sentence with a maximum of two years in prison and a fine of up to $2,500. Subsequent convictions carry a 90-day mandatory minimum sentence and a maximum of up to three years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
And that is just possession.
Manufacture or distribution carries tougher penalties. The sale of paraphernalia is punishable by up to three years in prison. And “the sentence of death can be carried out on a defendant who has been found guilty of manufacturing, importing or distributing a controlled substance if the act was committed as part of a continuing criminal enterprise.”
And that is just marijuana.
Woe unto the American who possesses, manufactures, or distributes cocaine, heroin, meth, or fentanyl.
Drug laws are certainly unconstitutional laws.
Does the Constitution authorize the national government to regulate, criminalize, or prohibit the manufacture, sale, or use of any drug?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to intrude itself into the personal eating, drinking, or smoking habits of Americans?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to restrict or monitor any harmful or mood-altering substances that any American wants to consume?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a drug war?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to concern itself with the nature and quantity of any substance Americans inhale or otherwise take into their body?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government regulate, monitor, or restrict the consumption, medical, or recreational habits of Americans?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have an Office of National Drug Control Policy?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a Drug Enforcement Administration?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a drug czar?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a Controlled Substances Act?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a National Survey on Drug Use and Health?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have any federal crimes other than treason, piracy, and counterfeiting?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a National Drug Control Strategy?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to institute drug prohibition without a constitutional amendment?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to have a Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to wage war on a plant?
Does the Constitution authorize the federal government to ban anything?
Of course it doesn’t.
Since an unconstitutional law is no law, shouldn’t conservatives be opposed root and branch to the federal government’s war on drugs instead of being its biggest supporters?
If, for example, you don’t think that Martin Luther King was a “moral saint,” as more than one eminent philosopher has termed him, the Left will not try to show that your arguments for your view are mistaken. It will deny you a forum to express your arguments at all and then try to destroy you personally.
Paul Gottfried’s excellent anthology of essays on American conservatives chronicles a key phenomenon of our times. Understanding it is important not only for those, like Gottfried and his contributors, who are traditionalist conservatives, but for anyone concerned with freedom. The phenomenon in question is the takeover of American conservatism by neoconservatives.
Why should this development concern us? In brief, the neocons, interested in their own agenda, have joined with the left in enforcing a public orthodoxy that excludes certain views from discussion. As Gottfried explains: “We might note some of the offenses for which an older Right was read out of the movement by the 1990s. Such presumed enormities included opposing the First Gulf War, supporting Patrick Buchanan’s presidential bid in 1992, and complaining about the influence of the American Israeli lobby. Some of the same people had also been critical of the cultural effects of Third World immigration, the extensions of the Voting Rights Act that would increase the electoral strength of the Left and bring the electoral process almost totally under federal administrative control, and the elevation of Martin Luther King — a controversial figure of the Left in his own time — to iconic status with a national holiday.”
Obviously, those who favor the suppressed positions should be concerned, but others should be as well. The Left, joined by the neocons, not only insists on its agenda but will not allow dissent. If, for example, you don’t think that Martin Luther King was a “moral saint,” as more than one eminent philosopher has termed him, the Left will not try to show that your arguments for your view are mistaken. It will deny you a forum to express your arguments at all and then try to destroy you personally. Even if you admire King or accept other tenets of the public orthodoxy, you should be troubled by the suppression of free speech.
Two of the contributors, Keith Preston and Boyd D. Cathey, discuss in detail one such smear campaign against a dissenter from the Official Truth. This was directed at Mel Bradford, a literary scholar and historian, who criticized Abraham Lincoln. In 1981, Ronald Reagan intended to nominate Bradford to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Bradford’s opinions about Lincoln would on the surface seem irrelevant to his fitness for the post. But Lincoln’s role as the savior of the Union and scourge of slavery is a key part of our public orthodoxy. The Left joined forces with the neocons to strike at Bradford. Preston writes: “As a legal scholar, Bradford was an advocate of a ‘strict constructionist’ approach to interpreting the Constitution, his view of the American founding as a conservative revolution, and his defense of the South against what he considered to be the usurpations of state sovereignty by President Lincoln during the Civil War [aroused neocon ire].”
Because he had attacked Lincoln, Bradford had to be denied the nomination. “Among the prominent neoconservatives who expressed opposition to Bradford were Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyite and the coeditor of The Public Interest, who is credited with having coined the term ‘neoconservative.’ The neoconservative movement’s other leading intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, another former leftist and the publisher of Commentary magazine, also expressed opposition to Bradford’s nomination.”
Why are the neocons willing to join forces with the Left? Doing so permits them to advance more effectively their own goals, strong support for Israel and for an interventionist foreign policy. Marjorie Jeffrey gets at the heart of the matter: “In what may be considered one of the founding documents of what became Bush-era neoconservatism, [William] Kristol and [Robert] Kagan wrote in ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’ that instead of either Clinton’s ‘Wilsonian multilateralism’ or Buchanan’s ‘neo-isolationism’, America should seek a policy of ‘benevolent global hegemony.’” Those who opposed this policy were assailed: “Against these efforts [opposing war], David Frum penned his famous ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ essay in the pages of National Review, charging antiwar conservatives and libertarians with being anti- American: ‘They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.’” As Jeffrey accurately notes, Ron Paul has with characteristic insight brought into question whether an interventionist foreign policy is in America’s interests, and for this he has been vilified.
Preston in his excellent essay makes the same criticism of neocon foreign policy, but he wrongly traces interventionism to the Jacobins: “A former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, has described the foreign policy views of the neoconservatives as emanating from the fanaticism that emerged during the French Revolution, observing ‘there is nothing conservative about neoconservatives. Neocons hide behind ‘conservative’ but they are in fact Jacobins. Jacobins were the 18th century French revolutionaries whose intention to remake Europe in revolutionary France’s image launched the Napoleonic Wars.” A similar critique of the neoconservatives has been offered by the conservative scholar Claes Ryn.” The Jacobins in fact were mainly concerned with internal reform: it was the Gironde that wished to spread the Revolution abroad.
But this minor error pales into insignificance when put beside Preston’s indispensable point, also drawn from Ryn: ”The ongoing project of the neoconservatives has been to purge from the American Right any tendency that is suspected of opposing aggressive military interventionism, the revolutionary spread of ‘democratic capitalism’ on an international level, the geopolitical agenda of Israel’s Likud Party, or the cultural values of urban cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, the neoconservatives will make common cause with anyone on the left they deem aggressively militarist enough.”
Some of the contributors find an epistemological source that in their opinion accounts at least in part for the errors of the neocons. The neocons favor principles that are universally true, regardless of historical time and circumstance. This contention seems to me mistaken. Isn’t the problem rather that the neocons favor the wrong universal principles? If like Murray Rothbard we support self-ownership, property rights, and peace, we would not fall victim to neocon delusions.
Mention of Rothbard of course brings to mind that he too was the victim of smear campaigns by both Buckley’s National Review and the neocons. As Gottfried remarks: “In some cases, however, those thrown off the bus were subject to at least intermittent abuse intended to justify their fall. This happened in a particularly bizarre way to Murray Rothbard, in the form of an obituary that Buckley inserted into National Review shortly after Rothbard’s death. Here Buckley offered a comparison between Rothbard and cult leader David Koresh. Neither apparently had more than a handful of followers: Rothbard had ‘as many disciples as David Koresh had in his redoubt in Waco.’ ‘Yes, Rothbard believed in freedom; David Koresh believed in God.’ It had not been enough for National Review’s founder to scold Rothbard during his lifetime.”
Fortunately, neither Buckley nor the neocons succeeded in suppressing Rothbard. His teaching continues to guide and inspire us.
by Tyler Durden
MCViewPoint 