May 1, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Is It Time to Break Up the American Union, or Will a Real Shooting Civil War Be Unleashed?

Friends,

In 1209, at the siege of Bezier, France, during the Albigensian civil war, when asked how to distinguish the enemies within the captured city from the friends, one of the commanders, Arnaud Amalric, purportedly replied to his troops: “Kill them all; God will recognize His own.”

That saying has come down to us in one form or another, has been utilized more recently by frustrated American soldiers during brutal guerilla-style conflicts (when civilian killers become indistinguishable from outright guerilla fighters), and is now frequently employed in other formats.

And it occurred to me during the aftermath of the latest White House Correspondents’ Dinner, this past Saturday night [April 28] in Washington, D.C. And it was not just because of the gross and profanity-laced political comments of “comic” Michelle Wolf—although they do illustrate supremely the outrageously vile, vicious and venomous mindset and ideology of the large group of Americans that Wolf exemplifies.

The salient and undeniable fact is that Wolf’s “act” is the tiny tip of an immense iceberg, it represents the actual and real condition, the irreparable and unbridgeable chasm that characterizes the American nation today. We live not in “one nation under God” and under a Constitution drafted by wise and prudent Framers, but rather we inhabit at least two evolving, radically different countries, each in a centrifugal manner hurtling at break neck speed in opposite directions, with opposite beliefs, and with nearly diametrically opposite conceptions of reality. In effect, we live in the middle of a real and palpable civil war, intellectually, and increasingly marked by real violence.

Recall the old folk story of the hunter who fell into a pit with a mountain cougar, and who screamed to his friend to fire into the pit with his rifle. His friend replied: “But if I shoot down there, I might hit you!” And the hunter answered: “Please go ahead; one of us has got to get some relief!”

One of us—one group of Americans—has got to get some relief.

Those representatives of the Mainstream Media, most of academia and Hollywood, a goodly portion of the “Silicon Valley” technocrat types, the San Francisco/East Coast establishment, the protected minorities (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQs, illegal immigrants, etc.), most of the political and managerial class that dominates Washington DC, and the globally-connected Wall Street elites—they form one clearly visible “faction” (to use a term employed pejoratively by the Founders of our republic).

Over the years they have established dominance over most of the major cultural and political organs and institutions of our country, attempting to dictate our thinking, how we see ourselves and others, and what we say and how we say it. And in this they have been largely successful.

This strategy was explained many decades ago by Marxist theoreticians like the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who outlined a “long march”—a gradual subversion—through the institutions of the Christian West as the surest way of defeating the traditional West and overturning its beliefs. That infiltration and transformation would take years, and along the way it would require a “replacement strategy,” through which fundamental ingredients of Western thought and judgment would be substituted by newer templates and contrary narratives…and even entire races (e.g., the white race) would eventually be replaced (and extinguished) by mass immigration.

More recently, the particular applications of this assault have been detailed by individuals such as the anti-colonialist Marxist Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) on racism and “white oppression,” French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (on the “deconstruction” of language and meaning), Saul Alinsky (in Rules for Radicals, 1971) on the specific implementation of these ideas socially and politically, and various others. The theories of these minions of Revolution now percolate as the norms for our schools and colleges, imposed on our children—they inform and underlie what Hollywood offers us in cinema and entertainment—they restrict and shape our rhetoric and our political language. And increasingly to oppose them, not to accept their authoritarian demands, will get you exiled from our New World Order society, condemned as a racist, or, perhaps (as in Europe), even jailed for “hate speech.”

The chasm—the widening separation in our society—between this newly-erected and powerful “establishment” and those millions of citizens who had not yet been completely infected with the Revolutionary virus has become clearly visible since the election of outsider Donald Trump…which was not supposed to happen. The gruesome face of eighty years of subversion, the hitherto mostly occult and hidden “rough beast”—the Deep State—has been forced to reveal its rotten but sharp teeth and its unflinching and unbridled hatred for those that its chosen standard bearer, Hillary Clinton labeled the “deplorables,” those who were “irredeemable.”

In its seemingly unstoppable effort to capture and control our institutions and the major organs of our society, the Revolution has counted on those newly-won institutions as vehicles for conversion of the citizenry. One, perhaps two more presidential elections, continued appointment of a Progressivist judiciary, and continued and intensive propagandizing in our schools and colleges and via our entertainment—and in another ten years or so, any real opposition to this strategy would have been neutered, rendered impotent, and made irrelevant, swept away by the “tide of history” and the “forces of Progress.”

But the slight window that opened in November 2016 has at the very least delayed these plans, forcing those multifaceted forces of Revolution to reveal themselves as never before.  Donald Trump for them has become a symbol—it is not really just “the Donald” that they hate…and fear. Like many of us who supported his candidacy, they also understand what he represents and has unleashed, which is potentially far more significant than the one brash New York billionaire coming down to the Potomac with the slogan of “making American great again.”

They can attempt unseat him or impeach him (as the farther Left attempts to do), or to surround him with their advisors and consultants (as the anti-Trump Neoconservatives do). But a breach, albeit a small one, has been opened: the Web is filled with those who no longer accept the tutelage and correction of the Elites and chastisement of the go-along-to-get-along “conservative movement,” which has become more or less the feeble “right wing” of the Revolution, with shared basic principles on issues like race, democracy and equality. The demands that we vote Republican, no matter who the GOP candidate is, ring increasingly hollow—that old-fashioned triangulation no longer works like it once did: voters—“deplorables”—are demanding more than party loyalty and fealty to the dictates of Mitch McConnell.

The Revolution tries mightily to “put the genie back into the magic lamp.”  Yes, the Revolution has been around, in effect, since the serpent first tempted Adam and since Satan, himself, tempted Our Lord. Its many-headed Hydra rises in each age, and like the bloodthirsty “sans-culottes” of the French Revolution (to quote Russell Kirk) asks: “What think ye of me?”

Tragically, we seem to be reaching a breaking point, a point at which the citizens of what is left of the old republic, the “bitter clingers” left in the American heartland, witnessing the phalanxes of Evil arrayed against them, cry out in righteous anger for relief against those who not only pervert our culture but steal our children, and destroy our birthright and our faith…that maybe it is time to undo the American union once so hopefully formed in Philadelphia 231 years ago? That may be our stark choice: separation, or “kill them all, and let God sort them out.” 

Three essays I append today to this column: two by Pat Buchanan and one by Jack Kerwick. Buchanan discusses the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and its significance, and then looks at the recent visit of French President Emmanuel Macron to Washington and what that means in the continuing globalist efforts to overcome any scintilla of American reluctance to support the New World Order (Note: remember that Marc Thiessen and most of the Neocons on Fox News supported Macron over Marine Le Pen, who was they asserted a “far right” nationalist and populist—you could almost smell whiffs of “fascism” coming from her!).

Lastly, I append my friend Jack Kerwick’s essay on “America as Idea,” that is, the zealous vision of both the farther Left and the Neoconservative Left that America is or represents an ideology, and that ideology is, let us identify it, just one more head of that many-headed Hydra of Revolution—universal egalitarianism and imposed liberal democracy—that leads to the final enslavement of the human race, barbarism, denatured and corrupted, without God and without salvation.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Smut Night at the Press Dinner

http://buchanan.org/blog/smut-night-at-the-press-dinner-129213

By Patrick J. Buchanan  Tuesday - May 1, 2018

Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, billed as a celebration of the First Amendment and a tribute to journalists who "speak truth to power," has to be the worst advertisement in memory for our national press corps.

Comedian Michelle Wolf, the guest speaker, recited one filthy joke after another at the expense of President Trump and his people, using words that would have gotten her kicked out of school not so long ago. Media critic Howard Kurtz said he had "never seen a performance like that," adding that Wolf "was not only nasty but dropping F-bombs on live television." Some of her stuff was grungier than that.

The anti-Trump media at the black-tie dinner laughed and whooped it up, and occasionally "oohed" as Wolf went too far even for them, lending confirmation to Trump's depiction of who and what they are.

While the journalistic elite at the black-tie dinner was reveling in the raw sewage served up by Wolf, Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Michigan. The contrast between the two assemblies could not have been more stark. We are truly two Americas now.

"Why would I want to be stuck in a room with a bunch of fake-news liberals who hate me?" said Trump in an email to supporters, adding that he would much rather "spend the evening with my favorite deplorables who love our movement and love America."

Her objective in arranging this year's dinner, said WHCA president Margaret Talev, was "in unifying the country," but "we may have fallen a little bit short on that goal." The lady has a gift for understatement.

With revulsion at Wolf's performance coming in strong on Sunday, journalists began to call for a halt to inviting comedians, with some urging an end to the annual dinner that Trump has twice boycotted. These dinners are becoming "close to suicidal for the press's credibility," writes Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post.

How did the White House Correspondents' Association descend to this depth?  In 1962, along with friends at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, this writer hung out outside the dinner, as we talked to legendary Pulitzer Prize-wining investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff.
A memorable evening and though most of the press there had probably been JFK voters in 1960, these journalists would never have sat still for Saturday night's festival of contempt.

Nor has the older Gridiron dinner descended to this depth.  A white-tie affair at the Statler Hilton, it is put on by the Gridiron Club, one of whose rules is, "Women are always present." Nothing is to be said from the podium that might affront a lady. And the jokes from the rival party speakers are to "singe, but not burn."

What happened to the WHCA dinner? The evening has become less a celebration of the First Amendment than a celebration of the press themselves, how wonderful they are and how indispensable they are to our democracy.  Yet in the eyes of tens of millions of their countrymen, they are seen not as "speaking truth to power," but as using their immense power over American communications to punish their enemies, advance their own agendas, and, today, bring down a president.

The press denounces Trump for calling the media "the enemy of the people." But is there any doubt that the mainstream media are, by and large, enemies of Trump and looking to Robert Mueller to solve their problem?

Saturday's White House Correspondents' dinner recalls to mind T.S. Eliot's insight that, "Things reveal themselves passing away."

It was saturated with detestation of Trump, his people, and what they represent.

How did we get here? Like our cultural elite in Hollywood and the arts, and our academic elite in the Ivy League, our media elite is a different breed than we knew in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Our institutions passed through the great cultural, social and moral revolution of the late 20th century, and they have emerged different on the other side.

Most of the Washington press corps at that dinner have next to nothing in common with the folks who voted for Trump and cheered him in Michigan. And Hillary Clinton surely spoke for many of the Beltway media laughing at Wolf's jokes when she said:

"(Y)ou could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. ... The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic ... (Trump) tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."

It's good to know what folks really think of you.

Perhaps, rather than seeking to create a synthetic unity, those who so deeply and viscerally disagree — on politics, morality, culture and even good and evil — ought peacefully to go their separate ways.

We both live in the USA, but we inhabit different countries.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Macron: The Last Multilateralist

http://buchanan.org/blog/macron-the-last-multilateralist-129200

By Patrick J. Buchanan   Friday - April 27, 2018

"Together," President Macron instructed President Trump, "we can resist the rise of aggressive nationalisms that deny our history and divide the world."  Before Congress he denounced "extreme nationalism," invoked the U.N., NATO, WTO, and Paris climate accord, and implored Trump's America to come home to the New World Order. "The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism," Macron went on, "you are the one now who has to help preserve and reinvent it."

His visit was hailed and his views cheered, but, on reflection, the ideas of Emmanuel Macron seem to be less about tomorrow than yesterday.  For the world he celebrates is receding into history.

The America of 2018 is coming to see NATO as having evolved into an endless U.S. commitment to go to war with Russia on behalf of a rich Europe that resolutely refuses to provide for its own defense.  Since the WTO was created in the mid-'90s, the U.S. has run $12 trillion in trade deficits; and among the biggest beneficiaries — the EU.  Under the Paris climate accord, environmental restrictions are put upon the United States from which China is exempt.  As for the U.N., is that sinkhole of anti-Americanism, the General Assembly, really worth the scores of billions we have plunged into it?

"Aggressive nationalism" is a term that might well fit Napoleon Bonaparte whose Arc de Triomphe sits on the Champs-Elysees. But does it really fit the Hungarians, Poles, Brits, Scots, Catalans and other indigenous peoples of Europe who are now using democratic methods and means to preserve a national home for the unique peoples to whom they belong?

And the United States would seem an odd place to go about venting on "aggressive nationalisms that deny our history."

Did Macron not learn at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris or the Ecole Nationale d'Administration how the Americans acquired all that land?  General Washington, at whose Mount Vernon home Macron dined, was a nationalist who fought for six years to sever America's ties to the nation under which he was born. How does Macron think Andrew Jackson acquired Florida from Spain, Sam Houston acquired Texas from Mexico, and Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor acquired the Southwest? By bartering?

Aggressive nationalism is a good synonym for the Manifest Destiny of a republic that went about relieving Spain of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.

How does Macron think the "New World" was conquered and colonized if not by aggressive British, French and Spanish nationalists determined to impose their rule upon weaker indigenous tribes?   Was it not nationalism that broke up the USSR into 15 nations?

Was not the Zionist movement that resurrected Israel in 1948, and, in 1967, captured the West Bank, and then annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a manifestation of aggressive nationalism?

Macron is an echo of that George H.W. Bush who, in Kiev in 1991, warned Ukrainians against the "suicidal nationalism" of declaring independence from the Russian Federation.

"Aggressive nationalisms ... divide the world," warns Macron.  Well, yes, they do, which is why we have now 194 members of the U.N., rather than the original 50. Is this a problem? "Together," said Macron, "we will build a new, strong multilateralism that defends pluralism and democracy in the face of ill winds."

Macron belongs to a political class that sees open borders and free trade thickening and tightening the ties of dependency, and eventually creating a One Europe, whose destiny his crowd will forever control. But if his idea of pluralism is multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nations, with a multilateral EU overlord, he is describing a future that tens millions of Europeans believe means the death of the nations that give meaning to their lives.  And they will not go gentle into that good night.

In America, too, millions have come to recognize that there is a method to the seeming madness of open borders. Name of the game: dispossessing the deplorables of the country they love.

With open borders and mass migration of over a million people a year into the USA, almost all of them peoples of color from Third World countries who vote 70-90 percent Democratic, the left is foreclosing the future. The left is converting the greatest country of the West into what Teddy Roosevelt called a "polyglot boarding house for the world." And in that boarding house the left will have a lock on the presidency.

With the collaboration of co-conspirators in the media, progressives throw a cloak of altruism over the cynical seizure of permanent power.  For, as the millions of immigrants, here legally and illegally, register, and the vote is extended to prison inmates, ex-cons and 16-year-olds, the political complexion of America will come to resemble San Francisco.

End goal: Ensure that what happened in 2016, when the nation rose up and threw out a despised establishment, never happens again.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
America-as-Idea: A Fiction With Many Uses

http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/attheintersectionoffaithandculture/2018/03/america-idea-fiction-many-uses.html#kapcP7ghYgV8WKl4.99

Posted by     Jack Kerwick          March 14, 2018

Your average American generally and your average flag-waving, parade-attending American specifically, is likely to be unaware of two facts.

First, when Republicans and Democrats, “liberals” and “conservatives,” in government and Big Media reference America, they have something very different in mind than that entertained by everyday Americans when the latter refer to their country.

Secondly, Republicans and Democrats, “liberals” and “conservatives,” in government and Big Media, despite the appearance of consistent disagreement, actually endorse one and the same conception of America.  It is the conception of America that, for reasons that will later be disclosed, is championed by the Mono-Party, the Regime, or, as I call it, the Big GAME (Government-Academic-Media-Entertainment complex).

From this stance, America is an Idea.

America is depicted as the first and only nation in all of human history to have been “founded” upon a “principle” or “proposition.”

Thus, like any other idea, like any other mental phenomenon, it is fundamentally immaterial. What this in turn means is that while America is typically identified with certain particulars like a landmass, a government, a legal order, etc., ultimately it is a trans-historical, trans-cultural Idea that just happens to be instantiated—imperfectly instantiated—in such contingent, material forms.

In the last analysis, then, America is an Idea that, as such, is borderless.

As to the exact character of this Idea, proponents differ amongst themselves. Usually, however, America is conceived as a creed affirming “human rights,” “Democracy,” ideals of Freedom and Equality, or something along the lines of these abstractions.  But however its proponents decide to construe the Idea, they agree that America’s identity is anchored in this timeless, immutable Essence.

This Idea or Essence is also normative.  It is ethical: The Idea is something to which all human beings the planet over should aspire.

In this vision of America-as-Idea, we see ontology and ethics converge seamlessly: America, ultimately, is a moral reality.

America-as-Idea also implicates its own peculiar epistemology.  Because the Idea purports to be a timeless object of discovery, it is said, as Jefferson says of our “unalienable rights,” that it is “self-evident.”

That is, the epistemology is unmistakably and inevitably rationalist.  Knowledge of the Idea is a priori, independent of experience. Hence, in theory, it is accessible to all rational creatures in all places and at all times.

This conception of America is the official, contemporary understanding promoted by The Big GAME, the Regime.  It is the vision of leftist ideologues and the Deputized Right, of “progressivism” and Big Conservatism (the Big Con) alike.

The question as to why or how it is that partisans of seemingly different stripes have managed to coalesce around the same conception of America can be answered easily enough even on the dubious assumption that such partisans really are of different stripes:

From the vantage of America-as-Idea, America is an ideological or creedal nation.

In other words, America so conceived is an ideology.

Admittedly, America-as-Idea—an idea that is racially, culturally, ethnically, and theologically-neutral—is a potentially (but by no means necessarily) conciliatory device in the increasingly multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious America of 2018.  Nevertheless, it isn’t likely for the sake of reconciling rival racial and other interests that the movers and shakers of the GAME labor tirelessly to depict America as an ideological nation.

America-as-Idea serves purposes that are at once political and economic.

America-as-Idea, given its character as an ideology, can be concisely reduced to a small handful of propositions that, with minimal effort, virtually any person can learn by rote. Given that it consists of abstractions, and abstractions, by their nature, are general and vague, America-as-Idea readily lends itself to conscription in the service of virtually any agenda that its proponents seek to advance.

By annexing to itself the Nation of Immigrants myth, America-as-Idea not only permits endless immigration from everywhere on the planet; it positively encourages it.  While it’s true that relatively few of its proponents explicitly advocate on behalf of a literally borderless America, and while it’s undoubtedly true that most proponents of this vision of America recognize the undesirability, or at least the impracticality, of welcoming the world’s population into their country, it’s no less true that any restrictions they seek to impose on immigration can’t but appear as arbitrary and, therefore, unfair:

If America is an Idea that, like every other mental entity, is literally borderless, comprised as it is of a principle or small set of principles that can effortlessly be confined to memory and affirmed by anyone with the inclination to do so, then any person in any location of the world in effect becomes an American the moment he or she pledges allegiance to these principles.  Immigration law designed to impose caps and quotas, to say nothing of bans on immigrants from certain countries, can only appear as, at best, a practical and temporary expedient.  Or maybe it will strike observers as a necessary evil.

At worst, restrictions on immigration will be viewed as unjustified, the expression of “discrimination,” “racism,” “xenophobia,” and so forth.

Even legislation regarding the steps for citizenship must appear morally suspect from the perspective of the champions of America-as-Idea, for, to reiterate, a person becomes an American the moment that he or she embraces the Principle that is America. The bipartisan chorus regarding the “brokenness” of America’s immigration system, I submit, reflects this belief. After all, it is virtually always and only those who want more immigration and amnesty (by some euphemistic name or other) who most loudly bemoan our “broken” system.

So, America-as-Idea, vis-à-vis endless, Third World immigration, serves the economic interests of Big Business and the Chamber of Commerce by way of supplying cheap labor, and it serves the political interests of Democrats and leftists by supplying votes.

Yet there is also an ideological interest advanced on this front: The “Anti-Racism/Diversity” offensive of the GAME requires America-as-Idea.

Since America is an Idea, it no more belongs to a person or exclusive set of people than do Plato’s Forms, Augustine’s Divine Ideas, or any other ontological or moral propositions purporting to be timeless, universal, and objective.

America-as-Idea, that is, is not a creation; it’s an object of discovery.

America-as-Idea, by way of the massive planetary immigration that it encourages, serves the ideological end of combatting “White Privilege” and “institutional racism” and promoting Diversity, Tolerance, and Inclusion.  It as well facilitates “free trade” and “capitalism.”

On the foreign policy front, America-as-Idea provides the ideological underpinning for limitless military interventionism. If proponents deem that governments have insufficiently affirmed the Idea that is America—the ideal of Democracy, say, or Human Rights—then “regime change” is a moral necessity and the regime’s subjects ripe for “liberation.”

The policy of interventionism, like immigration, speaks to the ideological, economic, and political ambitions of the agents of the GAME.

Ideologically, the ideals of Freedom, Equality, human rights, and Democracy get an assist from the enterprise of going to war in their name.

Economically speaking, the Military-Industrial-Complex against which President Eisenhower long ago warned his fellow Americans is enriched.  Not only do military contractors profit enormously, but so too do those in the media profit via ratings and circulation.

Politically, those in government can use the occasion of war to drum up fear and impress upon their constituents a sense of national “crisis,” which is a Godsend for politicians in that a crisis is always pregnant with possibilities for the consolidation of power, further centralization of government authority, and, of course, reelection.

And there is no crisis like that of war, the penultimate call for the mobilization and collectivization of human resources.

So, your garden-variety, patriotic American will do himself a good turn to bear in mind the many uses and interests that this ahistorical fiction of America serves the next time he hears a politician or pundit refer to America as an Idea.

==============================================================================