February 9, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
The Coming American “Civil War,” Glenn Beck and the Kumbaya Moment
Friends,
Usually
I pick one day during the week, if possible, to drive into Raleigh to handle
errands and take care of multiple medical appointments (that older men like me
are forced to endure). And I’ll normally tune into the local conservative talk
radio station en route.
During
the week that station features Glenn Beck from 9 a.m. until noon. Let me
confess upfront: I normally don’t listen to Beck. I consider him something of a
myopic nut case, whose ravings are uninformed and lacking in rational
understanding, who spins out off-the-wall theorization that cannot survive
close examination or careful questioning. He likes to manipulate history, history
as he interprets it.
Back
in 2016 Glenn Beck was a virulent Never, or better said, a vicious,
Anti-Trumper. For him, Trump was a “racist bigot,” an “ultra-nationalist,”
someone who had failed to condemn Duke David; Trump was threatening the
“international democratic order” and potentially was a “new Hitler, who would
undermine ‘our democracy’.” Trump
was—is—“no conservative,” at least, as Beck understands that term.
Let
me suggest that my cocker spaniels have a better understanding than he of what
“conservatism” is or what it once meant.
Back
in 2010 scholar and historian Dr. Paul Gottfried demolished Beck’s claim to be
an historian and to being a “conservative,”
and, in particular, his cavalier attempt to pigeon-hole those of
whatever stripe who disagree with the standard Neoconservative narrative which
it shares with the “farther Left.” (See, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/glenn-becks-myths/ ). According to
Beck anyone who does not believe in universal equality and democracy and refuses
to oppose “racism” and “sexism,” is bound to be dealing in “fascism,” or in
danger of falling for Nazism.
As well,
modern liberals, following National
Review scribbler Jonah Goldberg, are “liberal
fascists,” as Beck labels them.
But
since the rise of Donald Trump he has saved most of his fire for those populist
and nationalist conservatives who reject his brand of egalitarianism and who
dare refuse to join him in denouncing “racism.” For Beck and writers like Kevin
Williamson, David French and National
Review editor Rich Lowry:
Tears glaze
their eyes when they talk about 1960s civil rights laws, which placed entire
regions of the country that once discriminated against black voters under what
is now perpetual federal surveillance. Beck rages against the late Sen. Robert
Byrd for voting against the Civil Rights Act. Byrd believed this legislation
would interfere excessively in commercial relations and plunge the country into
endless suits and investigations over racial and gender discrimination…. Although
this indignation may be Beck’s attempt to woo minorities, it makes one wonder
how serious he is about scaling back public administration.
Beck’s
views of President Trump’s policies
since the election have, so it seems, moderated just a bit. While still
expressing a disdain and condescension for the president, he does admit to
agreeing with some things Trump has done (e.g. Justice Gorsuch, the budget
deal, etc.). But he continues to believe that the president’s “populist
nationalism” is a threat to “the cause of global democracy,” and that he has
stirred up “hatred” and “racial bigotry,” for example regarding
Charlottesville, where President Trump "failed" to forthrightly condemn “those
Nazis and Klansmen.” That failure, the fact that the president condemned both sides for the violence and actually
said that some of those demonstrating
in favor of the Lee statue were decent and good folks, was, said Beck (as did
his stand-in host a few weeks ago, rattle-gums, turd-con Ben Shapiro), “a
dog-whistle to racists.”
So,
with trepidation on the way into Raleigh, I tuned in to Beck’s program, and,
voila! There he was this time constructing a giant web of conspiracy and global
skullduggery, connecting Russian nationalist philosopher, Alexander Dugin, to a
worldwide plot—a “world nationalist conservative union”—whose tentacles were
spreading surreptitiously into Europe with the rise of anti-immigrant,
nationalist and populist conservative political movements (e.g. Marine Le Pen’s
National Front in France, Alternativ fur Deutschland in Germany, Viktor Orban
in Hungary, the Northern League in Italy, and so on), and here in the United States, a spinning web that
encompasses everything from the so-called Alt-Right, the Klan, Jared Taylor
(who writes scholarly articles about race), Breitbart News (!), Roy Moore in
Alabama, and some of those “nefarious nationalist policy advisors (e.g., Stephen Miller) who are
around Trump.” And each time that he named an additional manifestation of this
international rightwing “conspiracy,” his voice became darker and slowed down
with emphasis—“we are back in the 1920s again,” he solemnly intoned, “and we
are facing the rise of a new Hitler in our midst!” And I shuddered, almost
expecting to see some club-wielding Brownshirts blocking US 64 as I sped into
town. Lord, save us from the Fascists!
This
wasn’t the first time that Beck had fingered the Russian professor of
philosophy, Dugin, as the master mind of a global radical right conspiracy.
About a year ago, he had done the same thing on his television program, replete
with charts and connecting lines to indicate where power and authority flowed
from and where it flowed to. Yet, his “history” was replete with errors, faulty
assumptions, and downright falsehood. The implication is that Alexander Dugin
is the court-philosopher for President Vladimir Putin, providing the road map
for Putin’s attempt to dominate the world and “restore the Soviet Union.”
Yet,
as Putin, himself, has made abundantly clear in
interviews (See, First Person: An Astonishing
Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, New York, 2000), speeches (See, for instance, several
speeches at the Valdai International Forum, http://valdaiclub.com/politics/62880.html and http://valdaiclub.com/opinion/highlights/vladimir-putin-meets-with-members-of-the-valdai-discussion-club-transcript-of-the-final-plenary-sess/ and his annual
broadcasts, “State of the Nation,” including December 12, 2013, in The Daily Telegraph; and various
commentaries, including by Paul
Craig Roberts in 2014, http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/10/paul-craig-roberts/why-is-putin-hated/), and more concretely, in his
actions, the Russian president’s preferred guides historically and
philosophically are figures like Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyev, and Ivan
Ilyin, not to mention the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn (See, The Washington Post, August 5, 2008,
“Towards the End, Solzhenitsyn Embraced Putin’s Russia”)—not a Nazi among them!
Indeed, these thinkers, whom Putin cites frequently, partake of a deeply
Christian and Orthodox spirituality and a profound love for Russian
tradition.
If
Beck had delved into the abundant literature on the topic, not only Putin’s
numerous speeches and commentaries, but scholarly studies by Professors Allen
Lynch (Vladimir Putin and Russian
Statecraft), Michael Stuermer (Putin
and the Rise of Russia), John Garrard (Russian
Orthodoxy Resurgent), and others, he might have comprehended this.
But
that would not have served his purpose. Instead, he has resurfaced the fashionable
Leftist trope about the evil “anti-democratic” Putin and the Russians, but this
time coming from a supposed “conservative” talk radio host: it’s the “reductio
ad Hitlerum”—Everything reduced to Hitler! The explanation for opposition to Beck's views is that the opposition is and represents the rise of a “new Hitler.”
Connect the dots, he says. “Racism” +
“populism” + “nationalism” + “belief in national identity” + “hatred of
immigrants” + “refusal to recognize the ‘good’ and the ‘humanity’ in our
enemies,” and there you have it, a new Nazism!
And that is the tar brush he used to libel each and every one of these targeted groups and individuals.
How,
pray tell, does this narrative differ from that of the most vociferous and vile
Marxist minions on the far Left who would like to unseat and impeach Donald
Trump, the Maxine Waters types who also accuse the president and his supporters
of “racism” and of being “Nazis”?
But,
wait, there’s more: a little later in the program Beck brought in a guest—I did
not catch his full name (I think his last name was “Lu” or “Liu”), but
apparently he has created a national group which, he stated, has as its purpose
to “re-humanize” Americans, to bring together Marxists and Leftists to sit down
with “conservatives” like Beck (but NOT the “extremist Right”) for “dialogue,”
to re-discover our commonalities and what unites us, in what I would call
“kumbaya moments.” Beck’s guest related how those radical Marxists and brain-dead
Leftie soccer moms and brain-empty Millenials would gather together with those
brain-less “conservatives” and “hug each other, and shed tears of
understanding, probing to find and establish bonds of unity.” Together they
would sing those old civil rights songs, and Mr. Lu (Liu) would preach,
although he made it clear that his preaching was not in any way Christian. No; his object, he repeated, was to
“begin the process of ‘re-humanizing’ Americans, bringing us all back together
as one, dedicated to democracy and equality.”
Well,
I felt so much better after hearing that!! In fact, I think the meaning was
that I was to go out and find some brain-washed soccer mom, or perhaps some
brain-washer college professor, and give them a big hug, shed some tears, sing
“We Shall Overcome!” and—repeat what Rodney King said a number of years ago during
the Watts riots—“can’t we all just get along?” And then everything would be
alright….
But that’s not the situation in American today, as
Pat Buchanan has recently written. What we need is a kind of “street fighter” (like maybe Donald Trump), not a fossilized and bought-off-by-the-Deep State conservatism. As Buchanan quotes Frank Cannon, we need leadership that is "at war
with the progressives who have co-opted American civil society …. [and is] willing
to go further than any other previous conservative to defeat them." [http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-middle-american-radical-128704]
Despite
all the touchy-feely emotionalism and intellectual defecation of a Glenn Beck,
we are in the midst of a brutal and vicious cultural war—a war that threatens
to erupt in much more than pundits and politicians screaming threats and
imprecations at us on CNN and NBC, or Deep State attempts to reverse the
verdict of the 2016 election, but in real and palpable violence, pitting the
West and East coasts against the middle and south of this nation, of the
university towns and cities like Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Los
Angeles and Seattle against the rest of America.
I
don’t know about you, but if things continue to worsen, I’m glad of one thing: most
of those cultural Marxists and Leftist-types are gun control fanatics who don’t
believe in possessing weapons. Fine. Most of my “deplorable” friends out here
in rural Carolina do….
Wrapped in the flag and perpetually patting each other on the back in one way or another, decepti-cons like Beck, Shapiro, Levin, Goldberg, etc are trying to co-opt the language and meaning of traditional conservatism and use them in perpetuating Neoconservatism. They taint those who possess anything resembling love and affection for the old world order as extremists worthy of expulsion from the public sphere. I too rarely listen to this braying ass but just last week happened to tune in. He and his co-host were like giggling teenage girls as they interviewed Neocon Goldberg. Simply breathtaking. Later that day I received a video from a friend wherein Beck paint Alexander Dugin (a man possessing an intellectual position Beck couldn't possibly understand) and all European traditionalists as crypto Facists Hell bent on taking over the world. God help his listeners to recognize him for what he is!
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