Tuesday, January 30, 2018


January 30, 2018




MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey



Russiagate: A Summary of the Attempt to Overthrow the President, the Connivance of the GOP, and Trump’s Immigration Gambit



Friends,

Several friends have inquired why I have not commented recently, that is, within the past couple of weeks, on the “Russians Did It!” canard and the Mueller investigation, and all the recent details that have seeped out of the grimy hothouses of the Deep State into public view. There is a reason for that: as those of you who’ve been reading my columns know, I spent an inordinate amount of time during 2017 on that topic, long before Fox or even Rush Limbaugh really got into the deep weeds of the matter. I still have dozens of stories and files on the subject, but by far, many of the facts and views that I wrote about have now become rather current. New details are now not just confined to obscure, fearless web sites and intrepid reporters. 

About this topic, in summary, here is what we do know:

We do know now that we’ve been witnessing a very real, attempted coup d’etat, an attempted revolutionary putsch against the American presidency unheard of in American history.

We do know that not just under Obama, but also under Republican presidents as well (G. W. Bush), our intelligence agencies, most notably the FBI, but also the CIA and the NSA, had become in their highest levels completely politicized and weaponized cabals of the New World Order, and now dedicated to destroying the president and his agenda.

We do know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, working hand-and-glove with Obama and his underlings, attempted to, first, compromise and undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, using surveillance (acquired via a fake “Steele Dossier,” paid for by the Clinton campaign via the firm FusionGPS), submitted to a  FISA secret court judge; and then, using the same fake material, continuing the operation after Trump’s election to engineer the creation of an Office of Special Counsel, with virtually unlimited powers, to investigate the non-existent “Russian collusion” between Trump and the Russians (and now the possibility of obstruction of justice).

We do know that almost immediately after the Clinton defeat the leaders of her campaign, working with  operatives in the FBI and Obama administration, decided to employ the “Steele Dossier” (with its fake data) as one aspect of a multifaceted effort to “get” the new president, hopefully force his impeachment, or at the very least, impair his ability to govern, thus enabling the Washington DC establishment Deep State to continue on its merry way of ruling and dispensing goodies to its chosen ones (and damning those who would oppose it).

We do know that the investigation, the whole Robert Mueller operation, is based on a fraud, on fraudulent and largely made up “data,” created by that rogue British intel agent, who was on the DNC payroll.

We do know that much of the GOP establishment have gone along with this charade, especially embraced by such culture traitor Republican Deep State denizens as Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Jeff Flake.

And on a more general level:

We do know that the Washington DC establishment Republican Party is just as mired and enmeshed in the Deep State fetid detritus as the Democrats, but perhaps more insidiously as it makes pretense to be our defender and champion.  Yet its leaders act as brazen enablers of nearly every piece of Progressivist legislation, from Obamacare to same sex marriage to pushing for new wars in every country, every desert oasis or jungle in the world (of course, with thousands of dead Americans as the result). And its so-called “ideological brain trust”—those Neocon pundits and scribblers at The Weekly  Standard and National Review who churn out piles of putrid screed that reads like leftover Leftist sloganeering from a few years back—only compound the disaster in their attempts to give such views intellectual respectability.

We do know that these GOP establishmentarians and some of the Neocons (the ones still not resolutely “#NeverTrump) have attempted to surround President Trump and fill his administration with their serpent-like advisors and office holders, and that, to a degree, they have had some success. Indeed, it was inevitable after November 2016, given the dearth of real America First candidates then ready for the Washington bureaucracy…and given the admitted naivete’ of the president, himself, regarding the various and deeply-defining philosophical varieties on what is called “the political Right.”

Where does that leave us?

Despite some serious failings and bad decisions (e.g., Syria) and the naming of some administration officials who do their damnedest to undo the America First agenda, I continue to believe that the president’s instincts, his intuition, may be his saving grace.

Like many others, I was appalled that he would offer as part of a compromise, “a pathway to citizenship” to the “Dreamers.” This, at first glance, appeared to be a reneging on a—if not the—fundamental cornerstone of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. As such it was and is completely unacceptable. Yet, I am also cognizant that in presenting his proposal, the president (with the assistance of his hardcore anti-illegal immigration advisor Stephen Miller) may have calculated that while his proposal seemed to give the Dems everything they ever wanted about the Dreamers, it also contained provisions (i.e., real money for a border wall, limits on chain migration, increased ICE funding, cutting legal immigration, an end to the visa lottery system) that the Congressional Democrats (as well as GOPers like Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake, and John McCain—if he is still alive!) could not accept, for abject fear of their looney Leftist base, who will accept nothing less than complete open borders and eventual population replacement as fundamental elements of their cultural Marxist program to transform and remake America.

As such, measuring consistent polling, the president would have placed the Democrats in an untenable position, politically, and gained the proverbial “high ground.” And that deal, once it fell apart for lack of support, would bring us back to square one: the president could then say: “Well, look, I tried, I gave you what you wanted, and only asked that you accept items that most American citizens also want. You rejected it, so now…the fact that the Dreamers no longer have legal status, that is your problem.”

This may well read too much into White House strategy, and I admit that this view is precariously perched atop a slender thread of hope. Yet, the president’s promises from 2016 are consistent and quite clear. And we know he is “the master of the deal.” I am not happy with what I see; I continue to be nervous about such a high stakes poker game. But I am also willing to see this round a bit further.

Tonight we’ll see and hear the State of the Union address, and perhaps more information will come forth, more clarity. 

In the meantime, I share the view of my friend Peter Brimelow, whose essay on this topic  from his excellent VDare.com  web site is a superb analysis. We must be vigilant, yes. But like my ancestor who served in the North Carolina legislature in 1861, I am not prepared to support secession until Abe Lincoln calls for troops to suppress my brothers in South Carolina. Then, with conviction and certitude, I, too, will go to war….

Here is Peter’s excellent essay:

____________________________________________________________________________

Contemplating Charlottesville: Why I Still Think (OK, Hope) That Trump’s DACA Dalliance Will Self-Destruct



Peter Brimelow  January 28, 2018, 4:59 am



It is a truth universally acknowledged that the American Left believes its own propaganda. That’s a major reason the #SchumerShutdown was routed—it tuned out, despite Main Stream Media mewling and pervasive pollaganda, that Americans really didn’t want their government paralyzed in order to Amnesty a bunch of undocumented Democrats. But the most dramatic recent example: the extraordinary success of Michael Wolff’s book Fire And Fury, purportedly an expose of the Trump White House after it trustingly (and inexplicably) granted him access. With blatant calculation, Wolff tells the Left, and America’s entire Ruling Class, exactly what it wants to hear about Trump—that he’s a moron, buffoon, ignoramus, etc.  An accident! Go back to sleep! (Similarly, my old friend David Frum has ensured that he and his social-climbing wife will continue to be invited to Georgetown dinner parties, despite being nominal Republicans, by dismissing, in his just-released TrumpocracyTrump’s 2016 triumph as an “Electoral College fluke.”)



Still, although Wolff’s slick novelistic style deliberately makes it hard to say where fact ends and fiction begins, I do think his account of Trump’s reaction to the scandalous Democrat repression of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally “rings true” (as the saying goes). And it’s one reason I continue to be (guardedly) hopeful that Trump’s latest DACA dalliance could end well.

But first, a couple of caveats.

·         Wolff professes to be shocked! SHOCKED! by Trump’s hyperactive management style—not reading memos, emotional reactions to personalities, over-influenced by the last person he spoke to, etc. etc.

My reaction: I’m sure this is persuasive to readers who (unlike Wolff) have not worked closely with men at the apex of their professions. But it’s actually very common.  It’s how they tend to respond to stress, impossible multitasking demands, intense time pressure, clashing aggressive subordinates, incessant deadlines etc. etc.

In fact, Wolff’s description of Trump in action reminds me very much of my time with a specimen from a very different American—Mormon—subculture: Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).Precisely because Orrin could not be relied upon/ did not have time to read memos, aides had to spend a great of time trying to lobby him on the hoof while he galloped down the echoing Senate Office Building corridors—and then onto the train, Senators have an underground train to the Capitol! —on his way to a vote. (It’s a weird system).

One exceptionally able Hatch aide spent a great deal of time lobbying to get an assistant simply because she knew Senators’ offices have two doors, one permitting the Senator to leave though the anteroom and another directly into the corridor—and both had to be covered if you wanted to grab him.



Once, probably to persuade him to become President by opposing Affirmative Action, I went out to his McMansion in McLean VA and drove him into to Capitol Hill. It obviously didn’t work, but I remember him saying, as we passed though DuPont Circle, “This is where all the HOMOsexuals live.” When I admitted I lived there, there was a short silence, after which he said: “We have to get you married.”

As I say, America has subcultures.

I did subsequently marry, and was a little sorry (foolishly, see above) that he did not think to wow my Canadian in-laws by sending congratulations. But he did later tell me (sincerely): “Your wife in a beautiful woman.”

Second caveat:

·         Wolff repeatedly claims that Trump’s associates view him as “moron”—something Leftists are preternaturally eager to believe about all their opponents.

Of course, this requires us to accept that

1.       Trump’s career in the nightmare world of New York real estate

2.       His career in the even nastier world of New York celebrityhood

3.       His defeating 16 other contenders for the GOP Presidential nomination

4.       His winning the Presidency, despite being massively outspent and in the teeth of overwhelming MSM opposition

were all, in David Frum’s words, a “fluke.”

Yeah.

VDARE.com had nothing whatever to do with the August 12 Unite The Right rally in defense of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville—we were not invited and we did not (for no particular reason) publicize it—but nevertheless we still lost our PayPal facility and were cancelled out of a conference. Quite obviously, this was a coordinated Leftist pogrom, very similar to the Trayvon Martin hysteria in 2012, although this time directed against the Dissident Right in general rather than that year’s Republican office-seekers in particular.

Wolff’s account of this is characteristically dishonest:

[a]lmost no one paid attention to the announcement by the Trump supporter and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that he was organizing a protest at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. “Unite the Right,” the theme of the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link Trump’s politics with white nationalism.

In fact, Spencer, who has certainly never acknowledged that he is a neo-Nazi, had by then long broken with Trump over his tolerance of the Deep State’s war in Syria, and was clearly continuing his campaign to build an independent movement.

Wolff does admit that

Opposing the demonstrators was a hardened, militant left called to the barricades. You could hardly have better set an end-times scene, no matter the limited numbers of protesters. Much of the morning involved a series of charges and countercharges—a rocks-and-bottles combat, with a seemingly hands-off police force standing by.

This is not, in fact, the worst description of Charlottesville I’ve seen— David Frum emotes [Chapter 5 of Trumpocracy] that it was “Nazis and white supremacists on the rampage”—but it does evade the fact that a demonstration that a federal judge had ruled legal was suppressed by electeduniformed, civilian and paramilitary Democrats. Subsequently, of course, the  independent Heaphy Report has confirmed what VDARE.com reported at the time: that Charlottesville police were complicit in Leftist violence.



The Orwellian Two-Minute Hate that followed Charlottesville was extraordinary even to veterans of American Moral Panics. It represented the most extraordinary inversion of reality by Fake News since the MSM/ Ruling Class convinced of Americans that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11— a deception, come to think of it, in which David Frum was deeply involved. A Joint Resolution of Congress condemned—unanimously—“White nationalists, White supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups” for “violence and domestic terrorist attack,” an action that might well have serious  legal import, even before the Heaphy Report had confirmed Leftist violence or, for that matter, the actual trial of alleged car murderer James Alex Fields, who might well turn out to be the next George Zimmerman.



Significantly, however, President Trump defied this Resolution in a small way. He signed it, but attached a “signing statement,” a tool that Presidents have increasingly used to place an interpretation on legislation that might influence its implementation. Trump’s statement said that Americans “oppose hatred, bigotry, and racism in all its forms,” but did not condemn a specific group, obstinately sticking with his much-denounced contention that there was blame on both sides [Faced with an up-or-down choice on Charlottesville resolution, Trump chooses third optionby Gregory Korte, USA Today, September 15, 2017]



Why did Trump take this extraordinarily contrarian step—in the teeth of overwhelming Establishment opinion, outside and inside the White House? (Right, John Kelly’s visible cringing at the press conference became a meme.) It wasn’t the much-maligned Steve Bannon. Trump was at his Bedminster golf club when Charlottesville blew and Bannon, apparently a symptom of his weakening status, had not been invited. Wolff writes:



The main event in Bedminster that day was the ceremonial signing of an act extending the funding of a program that let veterans obtain medical care outside VA hospitals. The signing was held in a big ballroom at the Clubhouse two hours after Alex Field’s attack.

During the signing, Trump took a moment to condemn the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” in Charlottesville. Almost immediately, the president came under attack for the distinction he had appeared to refuse to draw between avowed racists and the other side. As Richard Spencer had correctly understood, the president’s sympathies were muddled. However easy and obvious it was to condemn white racists—even self-styled neo-Nazis—he instinctively resisted. [Emphases added].



(I must say that I don’t think Spencer cared one way or the other about Trump, who had already denounced him and the Alt Right after Hailgate. But of course Spencer knew that his value to the Main Stream Media was that they could use him to smear Trump).

Trump then did call Bannon:

…Trump sought help making his case: “Where does this all end? Are they going to take down the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, Mount Vernon?” Bannon—still not receiving his summons to Bedminster—urged this to be the line: the president should condemn violence and misfits and also defend history (even with Trump’s weak grasp of it). Stressing the literal issue of monuments would bedevil the left and comfort the right.

Note that Trump already knew his stand:  Bannon was simply advising him to move the debate into areas where he knew Trump had overwhelming public support.



“In contrast, Jared and Ivanka wanted Trump to issue a forceful censure of hate groups and racial politics Bannon sensibly said that that this would backfire: It will be clear his heart’s not in it.” (This is exactly what I said in the Wall Street Journal when I was interviewed by Scott Calvert. [August 14, 2017] )



As [Trump] got back on Marine One to head to Andrews Air Force Base and on to JFK and then into Manhattan and Trump Tower, his mood was dark and I-told-you-so. Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK—that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believed, and the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really knows what the KKK believes now? In fact, he said, his own father was accused of being involved with the KKK—not true. (In fact, yes, true.)

Putting aside the smear (as far as I know unproven, and anyway this would have been the basically non-violent Second Klan), what this shows is a Trump far more judicious and intellectually curious than the fundamentally hysterical MSM/ Ruling Class. And of course, he was right: for example, Unite The Right contained peaceful Southern heritage groups like the League of the South.

Wolff continues:

The next day, Tuesday, August 15, the White House had a news conference scheduled at Trump Tower. Bannon urged Kelly to cancel it. It was a nothing conference anyway. Its premise was about infrastructure—about undoing an environmental regulation that could help get projects started faster—but it was really just another effort to show that Trump was working and not just on a holiday. So why bother? What’s more, Bannon told Kelly, he could see the signs: the arrow on the Trump pressure cooker was climbing, and before long he’d blow.

The news conference went ahead anyway. Standing at the lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, the president stayed on script for mere minutes. Defensive and self-justifying, he staked out a contrition-is-bunk, the-fault-lies-everywhere-else position and then dug in deep. He went on without an evident ability to adjust his emotions to political circumstance or, really, even to make an effort to save himself. It was yet one more example, among his many now, of the comic-absurd, movielike politician who just says whatever is on his mind. Unmediated. Crazylike.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, altright? Do they have any semblance of guilt? What about the fact they came charging with clubs in their hands? As far as I’m concerned that was a horrible, horrible day…. I think there’s blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it, you don’t have any doubt about it. If you reported it accurately, you would see.”



Steve Bannon, still waiting in his temporary office in the EOB, thought, Oh my god, there he goes. I told you so. (Emphasis added).



Wolff regards this as proof that Trump is “without an evident ability to adjust his emotions to political circumstance” because he is a conventional Leftist bigot who will not look at the facts. Trump, in contrast, had actually seen the “Alt Left…charging with clubs in their hands” when his campaign rallies in California and Chicago were disrupted and cancelled. (The photo at right was taken at Charlottesville.) He knew first-hand the “political circumstance” that there is a Totalitarian Left in the U.S. And in fact opinion polls found his stand was popular, although it caused an elite opinion meltdown.

Of course, Trump’s reaction was not perfect. What he should have done is denounce Virginia Democratic officials for abrogating Unite The Rights’s First Amendment rights and cause the Justice Department to bring charges of Civil Rights violations. This would, at a stroke, have revolutionized the debate.



Nevertheless, Trump’s raw instincts were remarkable. Clearly, he had absolutely no support in the White House, let alone in the political class, and certainly not on cable television upon which he is allegedly dependent. Somehow, he found the insight and strength to defy them.

Which brings me Trump’s latest DACA dalliance. For some reason, he has long apparently felt the need to appear to propitiate elite opinion that the DACAns should be allowed to keep the fruits of their parent’s crimes—unlike the children of burglars. And of course his current offer to the Democrats is appalling.

But Trump has wobbled before on immigration. He’s always come back. (See hereherehere). The instincts that erupted in Sh*tholegate must still be seething below the surface.



Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disasteris now available in Kindle format. Follow Peter Brimelow on Twitter.

Friday, January 26, 2018


January 26, 2018



MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey



First Thoughts on the President’s DACA Immigration Proposal


                        *********************************************

Friends,

The news this morning highlights President Trump’s latest gambit regarding immigration reform and the so-called “DACA kids,” most of whom now are into their 20s and 30s. What has caught the attention of many conservatives, including those who have supported the president fairly consistently (as I have), is the proposal to offer approximately 1.8 million illegals who fall into that category what is called a “pathway to citizenship.” Of course, that offer was made to sweeten the idea and make it more attractive to the open borders crowd, balancing the fundamental border enforcement measures that the president has also proposed—a secure Wall and appropriated funding, an end to chain migration, an end to the Visa lottery system, greatly reduced levels of legal immigration, and a sharp increase in funding and manpower for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, with many more agents on the ground.

Over the next few weeks debate will rage; editorials will be written; additional studies will be released. The Open Borders crowd will insist that the president has not gone far enough, that this proposal—to quote Leftist Senator Elizabeth Warren—is an “insult to the DACA kids” (and their families). Indeed, it is clear that nothing short of totally open borders and full and immediate citizenship (or the equivalent thereof) will satisfy those people who in reality advocate the replacement of America’s traditional population with new, “third world” immigrants, whom, let us add, they believe they will be able to manipulate and thus use to secure their eventual complete control over every aspect of American life. This revolutionary process is far along in California, with measurably devastating effects economically, socially, and culturally. And in Europe, most especially in Germany and France and Sweden, the result is the impending extinction of traditional European society and culture, the abolition of its history and the submerging of its historic ethnicity in what can only be termed the very worst aspects of “third world” barbarism, fanaticism and economic collapse.

This eventuality, let me suggest, is something that no Trump supporter, no “deplorable,” is ready to accept, nor can he accept. Indeed, even those shaped and biased Mainstream Media polls consistently reveal that most Americans are not receptive to such a possibility…and, this fact on the ground is the major reason that the leaders of the Open Borders crowd have hitherto proceeded cautiously, if progressively over the years. The idea that the United States could become the “dumping ground” for millions of illiterate, unskilled immigrants from Africa or Latin America, presented in all its rude and crude reality, is not a winning issue politically, at least not at the moment (despite the puffed-up outrage of the Left and brain-dead Republicans over the president’s supposed “s---hole” comment.)

Yet, this is precisely the underlying goal, the objective, of the Open Borders zealots, including tag-a-long GOP senators like culture traitors Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake (who also envisage such an influx as a boon to their Big Capitalist donors and a salve to their warped idea of anti-racist “conservatism”).

One-hundred and seventy years ago Henry Clay was called the “great compromiser,” the congressional leader who through various efforts at compromise attempted to head off conflicts that would eventually result in the War Between the States. Clay’s efforts, as well-intentioned and politically pragmatic as they might have been, failed, and failed largely because he did not understand that constitutional right and reason were largely on the side of leaders like “Old Republican” Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina and Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who argued, correctly, that the original intent of the Constitution and the application of the 9th and 10th amendments, which guaranteed states’ rights, were critical to the survival of the republican experiment as envisaged by the Framers. The violation of this original understanding and meaning, and the usurpation of the Lincoln administration, led to bloody war.

President Trump can rightly be called the “great deal maker.” He has the deserved reputation, garnered over the years and expressed in his volume The Art of the Deal, as one of the most skillful “deal-makers” in American history. In examining the White House proposal, certainly it is the opening salvo in future negotiations. While it includes some very much needed proposals for border security—and avoiding the culturally suicidal policies now operative in much Western Europe—the floated idea of a “pathway to citizenship” for the “dreamers” is a non-starter for immigration patriots. Even with the stipulation that attaining citizenship for them would necessarily be ten or twelve years distant after the initial “coming in from the cold,” such a proposal discriminates against those potential new citizens who have been patiently waiting in line, obeying all the laws and rules, for years.

Let me offer a personal story: The lady who has been cutting my hair for the past twelve years is from Panama. She and her husband are American citizens, proud of their heritage but even prouder of their US citizenship. As she sums it up to me: “Why do they get special consideration and favors, while my husband and I had to stand in line for years, spend our money and time and pass all the hurdles? Sure, many of them came as children, but they are still illegal. I played by the rules, why can’t they? They claim it would be a hardship, but when we came we experienced hardship also, but we were legal and followed the law.”

Additionally, the suggested restriction on chain migration to immediate family, while sounding reasonable at first, is limited and could well offer a template to the Left and GOP immigration wimps for an overall expansion of immigration for all illegals (and family members). Bringing in parents and children is one thing; but once here, what then about the claims of those new arrivals that they should be able to bring in additional, close family members? Can you imagine Republicans arguing against that “inhumanity”? Ending chain migration, if it is to mean anything, must be exactly that.

In North Carolina my own congressman, George Holding, offers a more rational view. In an interview with The [Raleigh] News & Observer, January 11, Representative Holding declared that “he would not vote for any immigration bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.” [http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/under-the-dome/article194163054.html ]

“If there is a pathway to citizenship put into the law, I would not be in favor of it. It doesn’t mean they can’t stay here. It doesn’t mean they can’t have some status here. We could find a way for that….

“I’d be willing to look for a way for them to have a status so they stay. But becoming a citizen? I don’t believe so. I think people need to understand that breaking the law has consequences. So an adult who brings a child in and all of a sudden they say, ‘Oh, it was a child. They didn’t know.’ You are a parent. You are an adult. Breaking the law has consequences and that will flow down to your children.”

Congressman Holding echoes the position of conservatives in the House of Representatives who, on January 10, introduced a measure that would allow DACA recipients to obtain renewable temporary work permits, but would not offer a path to citizenship [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/us/politics/house-republicans-hard-line-immigration-trump.html?_r=0].

And, certainly, I would add, that any such illegals granted legal work status should also be specifically needed, with a job position available that no American citizen will or can fill. In competition between a qualified American citizen and a non-citizen, the citizen should always be favored.

Understandably, the president’s proposal is a first shot; there are parts of it that traditional conservatives who are “America First” immigration patriots can support. There are other aspects that would be unacceptable. Of course, that is what negotiations and deal-making are all about. But it is up to us, to those grassroots Americans who supported the president in November 2016, to make sure that in the process our American birthright, what is left of our nation and our culture, is not deeded away. We do not wish to end up as Sweden or Germany, soon to be only memories as historical entities where their distinct cultures, religious traditions, and ethnicity have disappeared.

President Trump has been a successful negotiator in the past. He simply must be so now; the very future of our country is at stake.




Thursday, January 25, 2018

January 25, 2018



MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey


Newest Essay - Published by  THE REMNANT 

Friends,

I pass on to you today my latest published essay from THE REMNANT, a very traditionalist Catholic journal (January 22). It is a slightly edited version of the MY CORNER installment of January 21, titled, "Celebrating Robert E. Lee Day, While Thousands of Women Go Marching Off to Hell." It's gotten a number of views and has been picked up widely.

Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
___________________________________________________

THE REMNANT 

January 22, 2018

Celebrating Lee Day, While Thousands of Women Go Marching Off to Hell


https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/3676-celebrating-lee-day-while-thousands-of-women-go-marching-off-to-hell

Written by  Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, on January 20th to join over 350 North Carolinians gathered in the old House of Representative chamber of the historic 1840 State Capitol to celebrate North Carolina’s 29th annual celebration of Robert E. Lee Day. It was an impressive ceremony that reminded the attendees of the precious historical legacy and cultural inheritance that we have received and that is so gravely endangered these days. I came away encouraged: there were men, women, and children, various members of the military and surviving veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm, with their families, all joined in memory of veterans—not just Confederate soldiers but all veterans—who went before us, those who selflessly defended their homes, their land, and their faith, so that we might enjoy and experience those gifts…and pass them on to our children.
When I walked the short distance from a crowded parking lot to the State Capitol, I noticed that my car was surrounded by dozens of other cars emblazoned with bumper stickers with such messages as: “Dump Trump, Keep Your Hands Off My Vagina,” “Abortion Free and Legal,” “Open Immigration NOW!,” “Lesbians Unite to Smash the Right,” “Resist!”—those are just the ones I noticed. And I wondered if, when I returned, my little Kia (with a Confederate license plate) would be scarred or damaged by those latter-day liberated amazons. As I walked up the sidewalk to the Capitol I noticed hundreds of women—most of whom I would have certainly avoided had I met them at a social gathering—headed for a rally, an event concurrent with our event, just a few blocks away on what is called the Bicentennial Plaza, a much larger event for certain, but in no way comparable in quality or merit.
It was the Raleigh extension of the “Women’s Resist” movement, a grab bag manifestation of a whole motley crew of what is best described as an expression of “feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, Marxist and anti-Trump sentiment,” which was held on the one year anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States.
Despite a mammoth Pro-Life Rally in Washington the day prior—perhaps as many as 200,000 participants and the president addressing them (the first president to do that)—it was the women’s  march that was practically the only thing the media could or wished to concentrate on, those hundreds of thousands of #Resist movement women (with some of their poor, bedraggled husbands and brainwashing-in-process young daughters and sons in tow), now supplemented by the supposedly-sexually-abused #MeToo militants, out in the streets demonstrating for a variety of feminist and civil rights causes.
If there was and is anything that should convince us of the absolutely deleterious and poisonous effects of modern public schooling and university education and the effects of our entertainment Behemoth, it was to behold those women (and their menfolk) heading to their rally. Most carried signs, bearing expressions which, when not just foul-mouthed or profane, partook of what I would call “illiterate-speak.” That is, sloganeering based on fiercely weaponized and half-baked nuggets of thought; those bits of ideas spread throughout our dominant culture, which for them are in fact unquestioned and which under normal circumstances would not bear up under any close analysis or scrutiny.
Those women live their lives based on Progressivist slogans, incorporating a deconstructed—or, rather, reconstructed—language of short catch-all phrases and terminologies, buttressed by pseudo-scientific gobbledegook: “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “voting rights,” “gender equality,” “transgender rights,” the list is interminable. Their explanations and definitions are usually circuitous, and generally all come back to a foundation in what they call “equality” and “liberation” from traditional—and thus “oppressive”—rules and moral (and natural) law, which they almost always misunderstand or simply ignore. In other words, those foundations that have created our civilization and given it life over the past more than twenty centuries are discarded, become mere impediments in the way of Progress that must be overthrown, or at least radically altered, transformed or re-interpreted.
One thing you can be sure of is that tomorrow we shall see another “right” invented for whatever new barbarity will be intuited to have been miraculously found in the “penumbra of the Constitution,” and that there will be some federal judge or judges out there who will confirm that that is exactly what the Founders and Framers of the Republic truly intended, whether it be for some dehumanized “metrosexual” male who all of a sudden “declares” that he “feels” like a woman and demands that he be allowed to use a lady’s restroom, or for some husky female who decides that she should be a tackle on the Minnesota Vikings football team so she can run up against a player who weighs in a 320 pounds (and has three convictions for wife abuse).
Now it is transgender rights and gender fluidity, but tomorrow it will be incest and polygamy, no doubt.  And there will be a series of “experts” and assembled PhDs in psychiatry and counseling brought in to testify that such practices are indeed just fine and—shall we even use the word?—normal.
Yes, that is most assuredly what James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and other fathers of this republic envisioned! 
I have argued previously that what we see presently in our society, and not just with the so-called “women’s movement,” is a form of collective madness, the existence of an artificial counter-reality; a condition in which certain broad strata of our population, ingesting decades and, yes, centuries of both intellectual and spiritual disinformation, have constructed around themselves a pseudo-reality to match their ideological indoctrination. Reality for them must match what they have been told and instructed to believe. So, instead of accepting the God-given reality and the natural order as created, instead of accepting their own creaturehood and an understanding of the flawed nature and limitations of humanity, itself, they construct a revolutionary counter-existence to explain things and events, what German philosophers might call “gestalt,” as a way of justifying their beliefs and resulting actions.
And thus there is the need to diagnose and explain why the rest of us—those who reject their worldview—do not accept the new template and the new reality they propound. Whether it be the attempts of historic liberalism of the 19th century to define traditionalist, religious and royalist thinking as “reactionary,” “anti-democratic,” and “opposed to the inevitability of Progress,” or more recent efforts in the old Soviet Union, when not exiling dissenters to the Gulag, to send those who opposed the new orthodoxy to mental and psychiatric hospitals for treatment and “re-education,”—no matter what the example—those who advance the counter-reality (which in essence is a rebellion against God and His creation) seek to deauthorize and delegitimize their opponents.
Just recently a veritable gaggle of “expert” psychiatrists and non-medical pundits spent an inordinate amount of time on air, “diagnosing” Donald Trump as “mentally unfit” for office. Obviously his physical examination tests were skewed, obviously his doctor (who was also Obama’s) was lying…this is what we were told. Even as I caught a bit of NPR riding in my car to Raleigh (the program “What! What! Don’t Tell Me”) and later that night (Jimmy Fallon), the unhumorous attempts at humor, characterizing Trump as “mentally abnormal”, were shot through with bitter scorn and hatred, a drippingly vile condescension exhibited not just toward the president, but at anyone who would not follow the new dogmatism and accept the new reality.  (Remember FBI agent Peter Strzok’s description of being able “to smell Trump supporters at Walmart”?)
The Progressivist syllogism goes as follows:
Premise #1: What we in the media, academia and the dominant culture dictate and proclaim as true cannot be legitimately contested;
Premise #2: But Donald Trump and millions of those “deplorables” in the despised “fly-over country” (to quote the condescending pornographic novelist Philip Roth) deny and refuse to accept what we demand they accept;
Conclusion: Therefore, Donald Trump (and all those unwashed deplorables) are “mentally sick” and “unadjusted,” requiring counseling and correction, and if that doesn’t work, condemnation and exiling from the public square.
(And, let me point out, that one doesn’t have to agree with the president on every issue to fall victim of this new dogmatism —I certainly have my disagreements on some issues.)
And thus we see the broadly erupting epidemic, which becomes fiercer as the days pass, of suppression of  “dissident” speech on college campuses in the name of protecting students from racism, sexism and homophobia; of firing or penalizing employees who question the Progressivist narratives on race and sex; the censoring of those on Facebook or Google who question the new totalitarian templates; the abject fear of any politician (Democrat orRepublican) or any public personality of transgressing the steadily-moving-to-the-Left goal posts on race or sexual “liberation.” To do so will result in overwhelming demands for a complete and groveling apology—and perhaps a handsome donation to the NAACP or Planned Parenthood, to help make up for the “sin” committed against the new dogmas.
I have termed the counter-reality that produces this palpable intellectual and spiritual totalitarianism as a form of lunacy, a kind of madness that inverts and attempts to pervert creation and nature itself, so as to match a synthetic and imposed, essentially anti-human, ideology. To protect itself from dissent and probing questions, it must continually be on the offensive, continually convulsed and convulsive like all fanaticisms, and always on guard that some “reactionary,” in some place, will speak up and notice its intellectual vacuity and artificiality…and its horrid and genocidal effects.
Those women yesterday professed that they were marching for “equality,” for the expansion of something they called liberty. But they have no idea of what genuine liberty is or entails.  
In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), G. K. Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:
“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.
The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return…. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added]
True liberty, and its exercise, requires that it have an object and a terminus. In our European and Christian civilization, with its fundamental inheritances from the three great historic centers of learning and wisdom—Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem—that means we are entrusted with essential rights and liberties that are both inherited and defined by who we are as a people and by our relationship to our Creator and to those institutions that give us existence and life. This is our inheritance; we have no other. To attempt to overthrow or pervert it is to open the doors to self-destruction.
Those women I saw yesterday, and the millions of other Americans like them, are modern revolutionaries, and, to use Chesterton’s parable, are lunatics, “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.
And thus that smaller crowd at Lee Day at the State Capitol, while overshadowed in numbers (and by media coverage), represented hope and recovery, and the blessed assurance that our battle goes on…and that numbers and fame, while significant and certainly important, are as nothing if we are on God’s side.

Published in Fetzen Fliegen
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Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

Boyd D. Cathey, a native North Carolina, received an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and served as assistant to conservative author, Dr. Russell Kirk, in Mecosta, Michigan. Recipient of a Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, he completed his doctoral studies at the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Then, after additional studies in philosophy and theology, he taught in both Connecticut and in Argentina, before returning to the United States. He served as State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives, retiring in 2011. He is the author of various articles and studies published in several different languages about political matters, religion, and culture and the arts.

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