February 11, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
The Coming Civil War, Part II: Donald Trump, Conservatism and the
Deep State Effort to Put Us in "Concentration Camps"
Friends,
This
morning I want to pass on two important essays which are, in many ways,
self-explanatory as well as fundamental to our understanding of just what has
been taking place in the American nation since 2016 (and before). Neither one
requires much commentary or introduction (on my part), as both authors very
clearly and succinctly present their observations. And although neither item is
long or involved or hung up in deep philosophical discourse, yet they offer
some of the best commentary on our current political (and cultural) condition
that I’ve read in some time.
The
first is by writer Frank Cannon; it was cited by Pat Buchanan in his column
that I made reference to back on February 9 (see: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/02/february-9-2019-my-corner-coming.html ). And
printing the full column is fully justified as, I think, Cannon really gets it
right.
Cannon
makes the case that President Trump is not a “conservative” in the sense that
we have, for the past several decades, come to understand the meaning of that term
to be. Trump is an anti-Progressive, for certain, and a vigorous “street
fighter,” for sure, and someone who is not afraid to “get outside the box,” so
to speak. In other words, he does not play by “the Marquess of Queensberry
rules” that have so debilitated, even castrated, “movement conservatism” for
the past thirty or forty years.
I
have been making that same point since September 2015 (for those of you on my
mailing list since then).
That
is:
First,
the current “conservatism inc.” movement is in many ways a perversion and
distortion of the older Rightist conservatism that began to present its
intellectual case back in the 1950s.
Second,
that during the late 1970s-1990s various “cold war” Trotskyites and
non-Stalinist Leftists made their pilgrimage into the older conservative
movement, and, after some furious battles with the older Right, basically took dogmatic
control of conservatism, most of its journals and institutions.
Third,
these “Neo”-conservatives shared distinctly leftist viewpoints on subjects like
civil rights, gender issues and feminism, and “open borders” (e.g., see the
most recent comments by George W. Bush at: https://apnews.com/fb98faa8f69b4135a9a866e0b61a6593) with the “farther Left” cultural
Marxists (as the origins of both were on the Left). And in foreign policy,
unlike the older “America First” Right, they were zealous globalists who wished
to send American boys to fight (and die) in every forsaken desert oasis and
jungle on the globe to make “world safe for [American-style] democracy.”
Fourth,
from the Reagan years until 2012 the Neocons dominated the Republican Party,
offering the nation such intellectual pygmies and losers as G. H.W. Bush, Bob
Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney—not a genuine traditional
Rightist amongst them.
Fifth,
enter Donald J. Trump who defeated sixteen “establishment” conservatives,
literally sweeping them into the dustbin of history, and who did so with a much
more populist, tough-minded “America First” agenda…and, most importantly, a
willingness to fight and not to retreat at the first accusations by the
Mainstream Media of “racism” or “sexism,” those shibboleth words used to keep
the Neocon elites in line and on the Deep State “reservation” sucking hind tit.
Sixth,
this has made most of those chest-beating, whining “movement conservatives”—whether
NeverTrumper or quasi-NeverTrumper—pretty unhappy. And they have tried their
damnedest to surround the president with “their people” so as to divert or
soften the worst (for them) aspects of the Trump agenda. The results of this
attempt to neutralize some of the Make America Great Again project are not yet
in; in some ways, the Neocons have succeeded. Yet, the biggest roadblock they
have is Trump, himself, his own instincts and intuition, and his, as they call
it, “unpredictability.” And that is a good thing from the viewpoint of the millions of
“deplorables” who voted for him—those folks who have become totally
disillusioned not only by the ideological monstrosity called the Democratic
Party but also by the fatuous intellectual whores and fat cats who dominate the
GOP.
I
would be the first to declare that there are some things about this presidency
that unsettle me, that I find objectionable—the just-enacted budget, with its
billions of new spending on social and welfare programs, is just one such
example, as is any concession to the Open Borders and amnesty crowd. And, as I wrote last April, the American incursion in Syria violates
campaign promises and could well get us mired in another Middle Eastern war we
neither need nor which supports our national interests.
But
the greater issue here—one about which I continue to remind myself—is that
Trump’s enemies are my…our…enemies. That despite his occasional nods to the
Neocons, he still is largely unharnessed and uncontrolled, that brash
billionaire who very often acts, rightly, on instinct and intuition and thus
infuriates his enemies, who are our enemies. And that, as I said, is a good
thing.
Let
me put it another way: Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Hollywood, the Mainstream
Media, the dominant foaming-at-the-mouth academic Left, the Democrats and
Clintonistas, those wild-and-wooly shrieking #Resist demonstrators and #MeToo
womyn, and the Deep State establishment (including our infiltrated intel
agencies) literally hate and despise Donald Trump and will do anything,
including murder, to stop him, maybe impeach him.
The
president, therefore, must be doing something
right to have earned such enmity and unhinged and frenzied venom.
And
more: That he threatens to take the Republican Party, or at least part of it,
in another direction—that he threatens to undercut those lucrative perches of
power that “movement conservatives” have occupied, as the kept whores and
eunuchs of the Deep State for the past three or four decades, must be
applauded.
Like
the late Phyllis Schlafly (in her posthumous The Conservative Case for Trump), I would suggest that while the
president is definitely not a conservative as those who watch Fox News or get
their intellectual mead from Rich Lowry’s National
Review might understand it, he does reach back in some ways to an earlier,
deeply American Rightist tradition. So, while I agree with Frank Cannon that
Trump is “not a conservative,” but an “anti-progressive,” I would amend that
just a bit, historically.
The
second item is a recent essay/column by Ilana Mercer (“Whodunit? Who ‘Meddled’
With ‘Our Democracy’?” February 9, 2018, at: http://www.wnd.com/2018/02/whodunit-who-meddled-with-our-democracy/#L1IjpBSSX0FdmU9c.99), and it is an
excellent discussion of the rampant guilt of both political parties in the hollowing-out and destruction of our
Constitution and, specifically, the protections of the all-important 10th
Amendment. For far too many years Americans—those farmers in Iowa and
Wisconsin, those hard-pressed families (like my formerly Democratic-voting
neighbor) who have seen their liberties disappear as their taxes went up and
their jobs disappeared to Mexico and China, those small businessmen everywhere—have
understood this, if not exactly able to express it in long, footnoted essays in
prestigious journals. The frustration
was there, just below the surface, but rising…until along came that
non-conformist bull-in-a-china-shop, who telegraphed to millions of
“deplorables”: “I’m not going to put up with it anymore!”
And
what has happened since November 2016 has been a result of you-know-what
hitting that proverbial fan, so to speak—the frantic and hysterical reaction of
the Deep State elites, unprecedented because the election was unprecedented—and
with a totally unexpected and unplanned
result.
So,
that is where we are today…but more and more of the folks on our side, those
whom I have called the “normals,” who seek only to lead their lives with some
semblance of order, raise their families, worship God in their churches, and
get along (to quote St. Thomas More, to “do none harm”), are being forced to
recognize that the frenzied Left and all those forces and minions vomited up,
it seems, out of the bowels of Hell itself, will not permit, not let us live
our normal lives. Those epigones of the Deep State not only want to eliminate
the president and throttle his announced agenda, they want, at the very least,
to put us back in chains, back in our place, so to speak (all in the name of
their viciously totalitarian totem of “equality”).
They
may succeed, but for the first time in my nearly seven decades I see real
resistance and opposition. There is even hushed talk of…civil war. It may well
be too little, too late. But little essays by writers like Pat Buchanan, Ilana
Mercer, Frank Cannon, Jack Kerwick, Paul Gottfried and Peter Brimelow, now
online for all to read, are signs of contradiction and signs of hope.
Here
is Cannon’s essay, and a link to Ilana Mercer’s column follows. Please access
these items:
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Trump Isn’t A Conservative—And That’s A Good Thing
As the
president’s actions have shown, he is at war with the progressives who have
co-opted American society — and is willing to go further than any previous
conservative to defeat them.
President Trump is
often criticized by detractors on both sides of the political spectrum for his
willingness to attack our nation’s institutions. Whether it be the FBI, the
NFL, or even CNN, no “nonpartisan” institution has been spared. This has
bothered many, especially elite conservatives, who have great respect for these
long-standing institutions and believe them to be the bedrock of our republic.
This betrays a
fundamental naïveté — that these institutions are somehow above reproach and
not subject to the same infectious politicization to which the rest of society
has succumbed. That assertion, of course, is ridiculous on its face.
As most
conservatives outside the beltway understand, and as President Trump’s voters
surely understood in the 2016 election, progressives have successfully captured
the vast majority of our nation’s institutions, distorting them to serve their
own ends. Although many of these institutions — academia, the media,
entertainment, legal and judicial — once stood above politics in serving all
Americans, most have now surrendered to progressives’ relentless push to turn
every area of civil society into a propaganda arm for their politics.
Prior to Trump,
elite conservative leaders generally accommodated to this progressive
framework. Because of their reverence for our nation’s institutions and the
traditional sense of the appropriateness of the constitutional system,
conservatives largely limited their attacks against institutions to the
rhetorical and the ideological. The idea of calling the entire legitimacy of
specific institutions into question, however, was beyond the pale.
An Anti-Progressive, Not a Conservative
In this respect,
Trump is no conservative. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump never claimed
to be a student of Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. But as the president’s
actions have shown, he is at war with the progressives who have co-opted
American civil society — and is willing to go further than any previous
conservative to defeat them.
Instead of
“conservative,” the president would be more accurately described as a radical
“anti-progressive.” The difference? Conservatives are willing to attack progressives
— to a point — but never to the detriment of the institutions they cherish and
respect. Playing by these rules, conservatives are doomed to fail as
progressives, who do not share the same respect for institutions, capture and
dominate every American institution with the full intention of using and
abusing them.
But, like the
progressives, Trump doesn’t play by these ridiculous rules designed to keep
conservatives stuck in a perpetual state of losing — a made-for-CNN version of
the undefeated Harlem Globetrotters versus the winless Washington Generals.
Trump instead seeks to fight and delegitimize any institution the Left has
captured, and rebuild it from the ground up.
It should be
stressed, though, that contrary to the contentions of some #NeverTrump
conservatives, Trump’s attacks are not intended specifically for our nation’s
bedrock institutions themselves. Rather, Trump is attacking the progressive capture of those institutions and the
distortion of their true purposes. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
The News Media and Sports
Consider the
president’s war on “fake news.” This is perhaps the most prominent example of
this attempted delegitimization. Although the president has been frequently
accused by elites of both parties of attempting to undermine the freedom of the
press, he is not targeting the concept of free press itself but rather the
systematic bias that has emerged as a result of progressive media dominance.
For years, groups
like the Media Research Center and others have pointed out the mainstream
media’s prejudicial treatment of conservative ideas and leaders. However, Trump
has been the first president — indeed, the first significant political leader
on the Right — to take on the media directly for this bias (and win).
Or consider Trump’s attacks on the NFL, easily America’s most
successful and popular sports league. “Why is the NFL getting massive tax
breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag, and Country?”
Trump tweeted back in October amidst the anthem
kneeling controversy.
Many conservative
pundits speculated that battling the NFL might be too big a fight, even for
Trump. Others argued it was beneath the office of the presidency. They were, of
course, wrong. Picking a fight with the NFL was exactly the right tactic at
exactly the right time, especially as corporate boardrooms across the country
were drifting more and more to the Left.
Despite its fan
base including a large portion of conservatives, in 2016, the NFL effectively
acted as a campaign arm for the radical transgender movement, threatening North
Carolina and other states with punitive economic action if they didn’t adopt
the leftist social policies. In 2017, the NFL went even further, refusing to
discipline (and even implicitly supporting) player protests of the American
flag and national anthem.
In this context
Trump’s aggression against the NFL ought to be read not as an assault on the
league itself but rather on its misguided attempts to prop up the progressive
agenda.
The Judicial System
Finally, there are Trump’s attacks on the legal and judicial
system, in the form of comments against the FBI, the Department of Justice, and
various activist judges who have obstructed his agenda. As I wrote recently at Townhall, recent revelations have called into question the trustworthiness
of the FBI and other legal enforcement institutions, suggesting the presence of
a “deep state” that has attempted to undermine Trump since the 2016 campaign.
Meanwhile, the
judicial system has also increasingly overstepped and abused its authority,
inserting itself into the policymaking process that ought to be the purview of
the other branches of government. While Trump’s pushback against this has been
often imprecise, the concerns he raises are valid. They are not attacks on the
legal system itself or judicial independence, as some of his critics argue, but
rather on the manipulation of these institutions by progressives attempting to
accomplish their own ends.
For decades,
progressives have sought to capture America’s institutions to marginalize
conservatives and shut down conservative ideas. Prior to Trump, they were
largely successful in doing that. Now they are facing an existential threat to
the future of their movement — a Republican president who is willing to get in
the mud, break a few rules (that previously only applied to Republicans
anyway), and do whatever it takes to win.
Anti-progressivism
is taking root in both Trump’s judicial and political appointments and his
policies. Progressives intuitively understand this, which is why they feel so
compelled to “resist.” Indeed, if they fail to defeat Trump, they may find
themselves on the wrong side of history after all.
Frank
Cannon is the president of American Principles Project.
And
here is the link to the Mercer column:
(“Whodunit? Who ‘Meddled’ With ‘Our
Democracy’?” February 9, 2018, at: http://www.wnd.com/2018/02/whodunit-who-meddled-with-our-democracy/#L1IjpBSSX0FdmU9c.99
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