November 9, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Gary Pearce, the Sundering of America, and the Racist Talisman

Friends,

For nearly four decades North Carolinian Gary Pearce has been a major fixture in Tar Heel politics. Beginning during the first administration of Democrat former governor Jim Hunt (1977-1985), Pearce served in various capacities, including speech writer, communications director, and advisor; and later he worked intimately in Hunt’s unsuccessful bid (1984) to unseat Senator Jesse Helms.

In many ways he became something of a power broker in his own right. Indeed, I must confess that back in 1981, when I returned to North Carolina after teaching in Argentina and Connecticut (and I was still registered a Democrat, albeit a very conservative one), it was—I was informed—Pearce who put in a good word to my former supervisors at the North Carolina State Archives to quickly hire me (I had been a regular intern there during the late 1960s and 1970s, but I think it was Pearce’s apparent telephone call that may have helped the hiring process along.)

So, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge and thank him for speeding that process up—I think I would have landed that position anyway, but his word probably helped.

All through the intervening years I have considered Gary Pearce to be one of those more-or-less moderate, rational and thoughtful Democrats, indeed, a kind of throw-back to an earlier time when here in the Tar Heel State Democrats and Republicans could sit down over a meal and discuss issues politely, if vigorously. Indeed, several years ago my good friend, political strategist Carter Wrenn, who was one of the masterminds (along with the late Tom Ellis) of the successful senatorial campaigns of Jesse Helms (and who probably saved Ronald Reagan as a viable candidate for 1980 by managing Reagan’s incredible comeback victory in the North Carolina presidential primary in 1976 against Gerald Ford), got together with Pearce to begin an online bi-partisan Web site, Talking About Politics [www.talkingaboutpolitics.com] whose aim was to engage in civil discourse and debate on major state and national issues.

I had not kept up much with Talking About Politics until this recent election cycle; yes, I had seen a few of Pearce’s short columns, and also a few by Carter Wrenn. But nothing really caught my attention until what I read yesterday [November 8], a piece by Pearce titled, “Good Start, Right Direction. A Lot Left to Do” [https://talkingaboutpolitics.com/good-start-right-direction-lot-left/#.W-SSyy2ZNsM] And this is the paragraph that jumped out and, in reality, is emblematic of what has happened apparently not only to Gary Pearce, but also to the transformed Democratic Party nationally, as well:

Trump’s America is rural, white, nationalistic and, yes, racist. Democrats’ America is urban, increasingly suburban, diverse, open and tolerant [sic!!!]. That augers well for the future of Democrats. We’re growing where America is going. Trump’s America that is passing by, and now the Republican Party’s future is tied to him. 

How does this portrait by Pearce of literally one half of the population of the United States differ in any substantial degree from the most hysterical accusations of the increasingly dominant Leftist extremists who label anyone  who dares utter a mild demurrer against their project of—yes—increasingly radical, even violent national transformation as “racists”? 

Let’s see:

---Oppose affirmative action, you are a racist;

---Oppose gun control and support your local police, you are a racist;

---Oppose illegal immigration and the impending arrival of the caravans of thousands of Honduran illegals (who are being funded by radical Leftist open borders groups including organizations linked to globalist George Soros: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/confirmed-george-soros-funds-the-caravans-parent-group-and-caravan-spokeswomans-employer/), you are a racist;

---Favor voter ID, you are a racist;

---Favor merit-based hiring in the workplace, you are a racist;

---Support President Trump and his agenda, you are a racist;

---Even vote consciously for a conservative or Republican candidate, you are a racist.

According now to Pearce, if you are part of “Trump’s America,” you are a racist, a bigot. And in today’s contemporary culture there is no graver offense, no harsher condemnation, no worse anathema, than that. Pearce is essentially joining fellow Democrats to excommunicate all those millions of mostly white folks living largely in what the late Leftist writer Philip Roth once called “fly-over” country, those of us who live in those benighted smaller towns and rural areas, who did not join with folks in more “enlightened” coastal enclaves and the larger cities to support socialists like the current crop of Democrat candidates such as Stacey Abrams in Georgia, or Andrew Gillum in Georgia, or “Beto” O’Rourke in Texas, or outright Socialist Anita Earls in North Carolina [see my analysis of her Marxist political history: “Who Is Anita Earls…and Why Does Her Election Present a Real Danger to Jurisprudence?” at: https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/10/october-24-2018-my-corner-by-boyd.html]

In the “new” America in which Gary Pearce now apparently partakes it is such candidates as these whose vision we should obligingly and willing accede to without murmur, lest we be as the worthless servant “cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth” (to quote St. Matthew 25).

Ironically, the positions of such candidates, indeed, the tenets of the “new” Democratic Party make the stodgy old Communist bureaucrats of the former Soviet Union look like George Wallace supporters! (Josef Stalin never countenanced anything like same sex marriage or transgenderism—such a display landed you in a Gulag; and despite his long-vaunted support for women in Soviet industry and the military, he would have been utterly appalled by the #MeToo and #Resistance movements and modern-day feminism.)

Yet this progressivist vision is the new totalitarian orthodoxy, and woe be to anyone who even mildly dissents…for the “racist” epithet, that choice term of final excommunication and disauthorization employed so frequently these days, will be applied as a veritable death sentence. This has, in fact, happened to dozens of reputable traditionalist and conservative writers and speakers, not to mention the few college faculty who dare disagree with the dominant Leftist narrative on whatever topic is brought up….Most recently to my friend Dr. Darren Beattie, a former professor at Duke who served briefly in the Trump administration, then was fired.  His offense? He attended a conference of conservative scholars [The Mencken Club] at which another attendee was Peter Brimelow of the VDare.com anti-illegal immigration site. And Brimelow and his Web site have been labeled “racist” by Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Badgered by inflammatory and baseless accusations pushed by CNN, the administration’s cowardly personnel department panicked: Beattie had to go.

And if this praxis of guilt by (distant) association, personal defamation and professional disavowal should not silence you, then, behold there are those mobs, those howling demonstrators who will hound you in restaurants, or at airline terminals, or, most recently, as in the case of fearless Fox commentator Tucker Carlson, bang on your front door (until it is broken off its hinges) and threaten your wife and potentially your children [https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/howard-kurtz-antifa-attack-tucker-carlsons-house-somebody-going-get-hurt]

Oh, yes, such physical threats and assaults bring the accustomed hand-wringing by the Leftists at CNN and a few Democrat spokesmen: such threats cross the line and are wrong, they repeat. But in fact it was those very same solemn voices and many more like them who first unleashed and fomented the present verbal tsunami of vitriol and hate more than two years ago in their vicious response to and unwillingness to accept the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

As I wrote back on October 29 [in the MY CORNER column, “Who is Really Responsible for the Violence We See in Our Society?” at: https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/10/october-29-2018-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html ], the Left blames the president for the “climate of violence” existent in this nation, or, at least, declares President Trump’s language as the major factor in what has occurred. Yet, there is no comparison at all with the supposed response from the president or his supporters, none. They are not responsible; the Left is: 

The difference is this: those folks who have supported the president, those “Deplorables,” are mostly average hard-working, God-fearing, go-to-church-on-Sunday, “normal” people. By nature they are “conservative” in the way they live. They do not get out in the streets; they do not gather in mobs. Even when pleaded with to demonstrate for some truly worthy cause (e.g, pro-life), most of our folks do not. Such action—demonstrations, marches—are not inbred in our DNA. We were not raised that way; we usually have too much going on in our own families, in our work, in our lives. And the idea of spending time ranting and raving or beating on poor auto drivers, or gathering to scream profanity and pull down historic monuments, is foreign to us.

When Donald Trump uses colorful language, we laugh and we smile. It’s imagery we can identify with. We’ve been frustrated for years that the Establishment takes us for granted, abuses us, manipulates us. But our revenge was at the ballot box back in 2016; it is not in sending fatal Ricin to our enemies or attempting to assassinate Democrats, or fantasizing about killing Obama.

That is the difference, and it is what distinguishes us from the unleashed lunatics on the Left and who now dominate the Democratic Party.

I don’t think Gary Pearce—and the thousands of other once-responsible and civil Democrats—understand that. They have bought into the narrative that the divisions we see are caused by the president and his “rural, white, nationalistic and, yes, racist” supporters, when, in fact, it is the connivance of once-reasonable and rational political personalities like Pearce who have enabled the infectious contagion we see spreading around us to fester and grow. When they condemn acts of violence—of which there are a thousand times more coming from the Left than from the Right  [https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/10/october-29-2018-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html]—their words and actions implicitly give a green light to the uncivil climate and the outrages of Antifa or the violent mobs who topple monuments in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina. [Witness the “response” by law enforcement to the toppling of  “Silent Sam” by a Leftist mob on the University of North Carolina campus and the apparent “stand down” order by university administrators which permitted the violence: http://www.wect.com/story/38939711/goolsby-demands-answers-on-police-inaction-during-toppling-of-confederate-monument]

There is one thing that Gary Pearce wrote, however, that is right on the mark: “Across the country [in these elections], we saw the widening divide between two Americas….”  But it is figures like Pearce and his allies, those media, academic, and political mavens on the Left who need to look inward to discover the sources of that division and the viciousness that may well break this nation asunder.

Finally, I pass on Pat Buchanan’s latest column which focuses these issues as no one else can:

The War for the Soul of America

http://buchanan.org/blog/the-war-for-the-soul-of-america-130476

By Patrick J. Buchanan  Friday - November 9, 2018

The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now. This is a fight to the finish.

A postelection truce that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — "I give her a great deal of credit for what she's done and what she's accomplished" — was ancient history by nightfall.

With the forced resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his replacement by his chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, the long-anticipated confrontation with Robert Mueller appears at hand. Sessions had recused himself from the oversight role of the special counsel's investigation into Russiagate. Whitaker has definitely not. Before joining Justice, he said that the Mueller probe was overreaching, going places it had no authority to go, and that it could be leashed by a new attorney general and starved of funds until it passes away.

Whitaker was not chosen to be merely a place holder until a new AG is confirmed. He was picked so he can get the job done.

And about time.

For two years, Trump has been under a cloud of unproven allegations and suspicion that he and top campaign officials colluded with Vladimir Putin's Russia to thieve and publish the emails of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

It is past time for Mueller to prove these charges or concede he has a busted flush, wrap up his investigation and go home. And now, in T.S. Eliot's words, Trump appears to have found "the strength to force the moment to its crisis."

His attitude toward Mueller's probe is taking on the aspect of Andrew Jackson's attitude toward Nicholas Biddle's Second Bank of the United States: It's "trying to kill me, but I will kill it."

Trump has been warned by congressional Democrats that if he in any way impedes the work of Mueller's office, he risks impeachment.

Well, let's find out.

If the House Judiciary Committee of incoming chairman Jerrold Nadler wishes to impeach Trump for forcing Mueller to fish or cut bait, Trump's allies should broaden the debate to the real motivation here of the defeated establishment: It detests the man the American people chose to lead their country and thus wants to use its political and cultural power to effect his removal.

Even before news of Sessions' departure hit Wednesday, Trump was subjected to an Antifa-style hassling by the White House press corps.

One reporter [CNN’s Jim Acosta] berated the president and refused to surrender the microphone. Others shouted support for his antics. A third demanded to know whether Trump's admission that he's a "nationalist" would give aid and comfort to "white nationalists."

By picking up the credentials of CNN's Jim Acosta and booting him out of the White House, Trump has set a good precedent. Freedom of the press does not mean guaranteed immunity of the press from the same kind of abuse the press directs at the president.

John F. Kennedy was beloved by the media elite. Yet JFK canceled all White House subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune and called the publisher of The New York Times to get him to pull reporter David Halberstam out of Vietnam for undermining U.S. morale in a war in which Green Berets were dying.

Some journalists have become Trump haters with press passes. And Trump is right to speak truth to mainstream media power and to accord to the chronically hostile press the same access to the White House to which Robert De Niro is entitled. Since the days of John Adams, the White House has been the president's house, not the press's house.

Pelosi appears the favorite to return as speaker of the House. But she may find her coming days in the post she loves to be less-than-happy times. Some of her incoming committee chairs — namely, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters and Elijah Cummings — seem less interested in legislative compromises than in rummaging through White House files for documents to damage the president, starting with his tax returns.

To a world watching with fascination this death struggle convulsing our capital, one wonders how attractive American democracy appears.

And just how much division can this democracy stand?

We know what the left thinks of Trump's "base." Hillary Clinton told us. Half his supporters, she said, are a "basket of deplorables" who are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it." Lately, America's populist right has been called fascist and neo-Nazi.

How can the left "unite" with people like that? Why should the left not try to drive such "racists" out of power by any means necessary?

This is the thinking that bred Antifa.

As for those on the right — as they watch the left disparage the old heroes, tear down their monuments, purge Christianity from their public schools — they have come to conclude that their enemies are at root anti-Christian and anti-American. How do we unify a nation where the opposing camps believe this?

What the Trump-establishment war is about is the soul of America, a war in which a compromise on principle can be seen as a betrayal.