January 29, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Venezuela, the Deep State, and Subversion of the Trump Presidency

Friends,

There he was, right there on the stage to the right side of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who was briefing the press on America’s position concerning the recent coup in Venezuela. I rubbed my eyes—was I seeing what I thought I was seeing?

It was Elliot Abrams. What was HE doing there? After all, back in February 2017, after then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had pushed for his nomination as Deputy Secretary of State, it was President Trump himself who had firmly vetoed his appointment.

Here is how the anodyne account in Wikipedia describes it:

In February 2017, it was reported that Abrams was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's first pick for Deputy Secretary of State, but that Tillerson was subsequently overruled by Trump. Trump aides were supportive of Abrams, but Trump opposed him because of Abrams' opposition during the campaign. [emphasis mine]

Abrams during the 2016 campaign had been a NeverTrumper who vigorously opposed Donald Trump and who had strongly attacked the future president’s “Make America Great Again,” America First foreign policy proposals.

Abrams, a zealous Neoconservative and ardent globalist was—and is—one of those foreign policy “experts” who has never seen a conflict in a faraway country, in a desert or jungle, where he did not want to insert American troops. He was deeply enmeshed in earlier American interventionist miscues and blunders in the Middle East, even incurring charges of malfeasance.

Apparently, President Trump either did not know that or perhaps did not remember Abrams’s activities or stout opposition. In any case, back in 2017 it took an intervention by a well-placed friend with Washington connections who provided that information directly to Laura Ingraham who then, in turn, placed it on the president’s desk  And Abrams’ selection was effectively stopped, torpedoed by Donald Trump.

But here was Abrams on stage with the Secretary of State.

What was that all about?

Again, I went to Wikipedia, and once again, I quote from that source: “On January 25, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed Abrams as the United States' Special Envoy to Venezuela.”

Despite President Trump’s resolute veto back in February 2017, Abrams was back, this time as a Special Envoy, right smack in the department that President Trump had forbade him to serve in. Did the president know? Had he signed off on this specially-created appointment? After all, the very title “Special Envoy on Venezuela” seems something dreamed up bureaucratically by the policy wonks at State, or maybe by Mike Pompeo.

Then there was the widely reported news, accompanied by a convenient camera shot of National Security Adviser John Bolton’s note pad (which may or may not have been engineered by him), with the scribbling “5,000 troops to Colombia.”

What gives here?

Last week suddenly there was a coup d’etat in Venezuela, with the head of the national assembly, Juan Guiado, proclaiming himself as the country’s new and rightful president, and the deposition of then-current President Nicolas Maduro. And we were told that this action was totally “spontaneous” and an “act of the Venezuelan people for democracy,” and that the United States had had nothing to do with it.

And, if you believe that, I have an oil well in my backyard that I am quite willing to sell to you for a few million, or maybe a bit less.

Of course, the United States and our overseas intelligence services were involved.

Let me clarify: like most observers who have kept up with the situation in oil-rich Venezuela, I heartily dislike and find despicable the socialist government of Maduro, just as I did Hugo Chavez when he was in power. I have some good friends there, one of whom was a student of mine when I taught in Argentina many years ago, and he and his family resolutely oppose Maduro. Those socialist leaders in Caracas are tin-pot dictator wannabees who have wrecked the economy of that once wealthy country; and they have ridden roughshod over the constitutional rights of the citizens. My hope has been that the people of Venezuela, perhaps supported by elements in the army, would take action to rid the country of those tyrants.

And, in effect, I wish for the success of Juan Guaido in his struggle with Maduro, and I support American diplomatic and economic pressure on Maduro to step down. After all, Venezuela is in our back yard with huge oil reserves.

But potentially sending American troops—as many as 5,000—to fight in a country which is made up largely of jungle and impassible mountains, appears just one more instance, one more example, of the xenophobic internationalism of men like Bolton and the now state department official, Abrams, who believe American boots on the ground is the answer to every international situation. Experience over the past four decades should indicate the obvious folly of such policies for all but the historically blind and ideologically corrupt.

While we complain that the Russians and Chinese have propped up the Maduro government and invested deeply in Venezuela, a country within our “sphere of influence” in the Western Hemisphere (per the “Monroe Doctrine”)—we have done the very same thing, even more egregiously in regions like Ukraine that were integrally part of historical Russia, and in Crimea, which was never really part of Ukraine (only for about half a century) but historically and ethnically Russian. Did we not solemnly pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev, under George H. W. Bush,  that if the old Soviet Union would dissolve and let its some fourteen socialist “republics” go their own way, leave the Russian Federation, that we, in turn, would not advance NATO up to the borders of Russia? And then we did the exact opposite…almost immediately go back on our word and move our troops and advisers right up to the borders of post-1991 Russia?

From mid-2015 on I was a strong supporter of Donald Trump, and, in many ways, I still am. In effect, he may be the only thing that stands in the way of a total and complete recouping of power by the Deep State, the only slight glimmer of light—that immovable force who stands up at times to the power-elites and who has perhaps given us a few years of respite as the managerial class zealously attempts to repair the breach he—and we—inflicted on it in 2016.

My major complaint, what I have seen as a kind of Achilles’ Heel in the Trump presidency, has always been in personnel, those whom the president has surrounded himself with. And my criticism is measured and prudential, in the sense that I also understand what happens—and what did happen—when a billionaire businessman, a kind of bull-in-the-china shop (exactly what we needed), comes to Washington and lacks experience with the utterly amoral and oleaginous and obsequious political class that has dominated and continues to dominate our government: both Democrats and, most certainly, Republicans.

The wife of a very dear friend of thirty-five years served in a fairly high post during the Reagan administration. Before her untimely death a few years ago, she recounted to me in stark detail how the minions and acolytes of George H. W. Bush managed to surround President Reagan and subvert large portions of the stated Reagan Agenda. Reagan put his vice-president effectively in charge of White House personnel: and, as they say, that was it, the Reagan Revolution was essentially over.

In 2016 a number of friends and I created something called “Scholars for Trump.” Composed mostly of academics, research professors, and accomplished professionals, and headed by Dr. Walter Block, Professor of Economics at Loyola-New Orleans, and Dr. Paul Gottfried, Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, we attempted to gather real professed believers in the stated Trump agenda. We received scant mention (mostly negative) in the so-called “conservative” press, who proceeded to smear us as “right wingers” and “paleo-conservatives.” And, suddenly, there appeared another pro-Trump list, but this one composed largely of the same kinds of professionals, but many if not most of whom had not supported Donald Trump and his agenda during the primary campaigns.

What was certain was that many of the amoral time-servers and power elitists had decided that it was time for them to attach themselves to Trump, time for them to insinuate themselves into positions of power once again, no matter their distaste and scorn for that brash billionaire upstart from New York.

Remember the (in)famous interview that the President-elect had with Mitt Romney who desperately wanted to be Secretary of State? Recall the others also interviewed—some of whom we remembered as Donald Trump’s opponents in the campaign—who came hat-in-hand to Trump Tower looking for lucrative positions and the opportunity once again to populate an administration and direct policy?  And, yes, work from within to counteract the stated Trump agenda?

It would be too facile to blame the president completely: after all, the professional policy wonks, the touted experts in those along-the-Potomac institutes and foundations, were there already in place. And, indeed, there was a need politically, as best as practical, to bring together the GOP if anything were to get through Congress. (As we have seen, under Paul Ryan practically none of the Trump Agenda was enacted, and Ryan at every moment pushed open borders.)

Our contacts did try; we did have a few associates close to the president.  A few—but only a few—of our real Trump Agenda supporters managed to climb aboard. But in the long run we were no match for the machinations of the power elites and GOP establishment. And we discovered that the president’s major strength—not being a Washington Insider—was also his major weakness, and that everything depended on his instincts, and that somehow if the discredited globalists and power-hungry Neoconservatives (who did not give Trump the time of day before his election) were to go too far, maybe, hopefully, he would react.

And he has, on occasion done just that, as perhaps in the case of Syria, and maybe even Afghanistan, and in a few other situations. But each time he has had to pass the gauntlet of “advisers” whom he has allowed to be in place who vigorously argue against (and even undercut) the policies they are supposed to implement.

Donald Trump, for all that and for his faults and miscues, is in reality the only thing standing in the way of the end of the old republic. The fact that he is so violently and unreservedly hated by the elites, by the media, by academia, and by Hollywood must tell us something. In effect, however, it not just the president they hate, not even his rough-edged personality—it is what he represents, that in 2016 he opened a crack, albeit small, into a world of Deep State putrefaction, a window into sheer Evil, and the resulting falling away of the mask of those “body snatchers” who had for so long exuded confidence that their subversion and control was inevitable and just round the corner.

President Trump will never be forgiven for that. And, so, as much as I become frustrated with some of the self-inflicted wounds, some of the actions which appear at times to go flagrantly against his agenda, as much as I become heartsick when I see the faces of Elliot Abrams—and Mitt Romney—in positions where they can continue their chipping away at that agenda, despite all that, I pray that his instincts will reign and that he will look beyond such men, and just maybe learn that what you see first in Washington is usually not what you’ll get.

In the meantime, I pass on Pat Buchanan’s latest column on Venezuela…an excellent and thoughtful read.

If the Army Stands With Maduro, What Is Plan B?

http://buchanan.org/blog/if-the-army-stands-with-maduro-what-is-plan-b-135899

By Patrick J. Buchanan  Tuesday - January 29, 2019

"Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter." This was the deathbed counsel given to his sons by Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in A.D. 211.

Nicolas Maduro must today appreciate the emperor's insight. For the political survival of this former bus driver and union boss hangs now upon whether Venezuela's armed forces choose to stand by him or to desert him and support National Assembly leader Juan Guaido.

Wednesday, Guaido declared Maduro's election last May to a second six-year term to be a sham, and had himself inaugurated as acting president.  Thursday, the defense minister and army chief General Vladimir Padrino Lopez, with his top brass, dismissed the 35-year-old Guaido as a U.S. puppet, and pledged allegiance to Maduro.

Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.N. Security Council: "Now it is time for every other nation to pick a side. ... Either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you're in league with Maduro and his mayhem."

By Friday, however, the world had already taken sides. Russia and China stood by Maduro, as did NATO ally Turkey, with President Erdogan phoning his support. Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia were also with Maduro.
Backing Guaido are Venezuela's neighbors Ecuador, Brazil and Colombia, the U.S. and Canada, and the Organization of American States.

Britain, France, Germany and Spain have sent Maduro a diplomatic ultimatum: Agree in eight days to new elections or we back the 35-year-old Guaido, who, until this year, was an unknown.

All options are on the table, says President Donald Trump. But Russia called Guaido's action a "quasi-coup" and warned that intervention could result in "catastrophic consequences." Vladimir Putin also phoned Maduro with his support.The stakes for all sides here are huge. Russia has contractors in Venezuela and has lent the regime billions. In a show of solidarity, Putin recently flew two strategic bombers to Venezuela.

China has loaned Venezuela tens of billions, with Caracas paying Beijing back in oil. Cuba has sent military and intelligence officers to maintain internal security. Hugo Chavez had seen in Fidel Castro a father figure and modeled his new Venezuela on Castro's Cuba — with similar results.

Where hundreds of thousands fled Castro's revolution in the 1960s, three million Venezuelans have fled to Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and other South American countries and the USA.

The economy is in a shambles. Though Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on earth, production is a fraction of what it once was. Cronyism and corruption are endemic. Inflation has destroyed the currency. There is poverty, malnutrition and shortages of every necessity of modern life.

Yet, still, the crucial question: What will the soldiers do? And if the military stands with Maduro, and Maduro refuses to go, what do the Americans do to force him out? Invade? That would invite disaster. Venezuela is not Panama, Haiti or Grenada. Larger than Texas, its population is more than 30 million. And U.S. forces are already committed around the world.

A blockade and sanctions would magnify and deepen the suffering of the people of Venezuela long before they would bring down the regime. Would our allies support a blockade? And if years of suffering by the Venezuelan people have not shaken Maduro's hold on power, what makes us believe more of the same would persuade him?

Maduro and his army are being offered amnesty if they peacefully depart. But what would Maduro's fate be if he flees?

If he gives up power under U.S. threat, he is finished and disgraced as a coward. Would he not prefer to go down fighting?

And if the leadership of the army should abandon Maduro, there are younger ambitious officers who would surely see a rewarding future in fighting to save the regime.

Are we inviting a civil war in Venezuela? Should the shooting start in Caracas, what do we do then?

Did anyone think this through?

Maduro is an incompetent brutal dictator whose ideology has helped to destroy a nation. But if he can change the narrative from a confrontation between a tyrant and his persecuted people to that of an embattled defender of Venezuela being attacked by Yankee imperialists and their domestic lackeys, that could resonate among the masses in Latin America.

And from all indications, Maduro intends to defy the U.S. and rally the radicals and anti-Americans in the hemisphere and the Third World.

Guiado's constitutional claim to the presidency of Venezuela was a scheme cooked up in collusion with Washington, made in the USA, with Secretary of State Pompeo, John Bolton and Sen. Marco Rubio signing on, and President Trump signing off. This was Plan A.

But if Plan A does not succeed, and Maduro, with America's prestige on the line, defies our demand that he yield, what do we do then? What is Plan B?

"Assad must go!" said Barack Obama. Well, Assad is still there — and Obama is gone.

Will the same be said of Maduro?

January 27, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT – Harpies of Hell Who Seek to Destroy Us

Friends,

Buried in much of the Mainstream Media reporting this past week—aired selectively [other than Fox did you see any other substantial reporting?]—was the news that the New York legislature had adopted the most radical abortion legislation in the nation.

That legislation opened wide the door essentially for nearly anyone with a mere completed correspondence course in medicine to perform an abortion—nurse practitioners, a physicians’ assistant, who really knows? A veterinarian? Don’t hold your breath.

The bill also enables abortions up until the very day of the birth of a baby: none of those restrictions about “trimesters,” “viability” or detecting “brain waves” now obtain.  All that—which, let’s face it, was really a subterfuge spewed forth by the women’s movement and the abortion lobby—has now dropped by the wayside. There is even a provision allowing abortionists, when the baby is actually born, to murder the baby as it comes out of the womb. 

This is nothing less than infanticide: “I don’t like the child I see emerging, so crush its head, tear its tiny limbs from its body, wipe up the blood and gather up its body parts and guts, and casually cast them into the incinerator.”

The actual intent and bloody desires of the feminists are vividly visible for anyone with a still-functioning conscience to see. But obviously, the women’s movement now feels emboldened, now believes whatever moral conscience this nation once had has been so softened up, so deteriorated and infected by its continuous messaging, that finally its votaries can let drop the mask hiding the face of murderous evil.

As much as we should and must criticize harshly the aberrations and sheer insanity of much of modern Christianity and the despicable disaster it has become—its abject and prostituted collaboration with and support for the enemies of the very civilization that it helped critically to create, we also must acknowledge that without it historically, without its annealing force and its wise and prudent incorporation of the inheritance of Athens and Rome, added to the promises and Hope of the ancient Hebrews and the Christ, we would have no civilization. The great art and culture left to us for safekeeping by our ancestors, the moral pillars of our society, our sense of right and wrong, and, yes, above all, our respect for the dignity of life itself, each one of us with a God-created soul—this is our legacy and would not exist save for the Christian Faith.

And it is precisely these things, this inheritance that those demons out of Hell, the women’s movement and their various pusillanimous allies now seek in frenzied and headless abandon to displace and destroy.

Both the Old Testament and the New, in the midst of alerting us to the “Hope that would Come for Us,” also reminded us that human beings were part of Nature and were ruled by Nature’s Laws.  Men and women were and are different, and not just biologically—as indeed all animals of creation are—but functionally and, yes, psychologically.  

For much of the two millennia after the Birth of the Christ this double truth remained sacrosanct and understood. It was never a question of prejudice or injustice to the fairer sex; it was never a question of what speciously is called “inequality.” No: it was a recognition that differences did exist and that they are real, and that individuals and the sexes had to be viewed and judged on their own merits and by their own natural and specifically physiological characteristics. And not to each other.

The women’s movement and its partisans scream “dignity” and “women’s rights” and “equality” and an end to “toxic masculinity and oppression.”  Yet, it is they who by their hysteria and rebellion advance the destruction of human dignity and actual justice and equity, and invite the onset of totalitarian oppression…and, yes, the murder of infants by the millions in and outside the womb.

Beginning more than a century and a half ago with its “suffragette” demands for entry into the franchise, followed by such zealous feminists as Margaret Sanger (the “Mother” of abortionism), and reaching a frenzy in our own day, the movement rejected both nature and its laws, as well as the essential dignity of humankind in the teachings of Christ and His Church.  And in so doing, they have rejected creation itself, and its biology. They seek the overthrow of our civilization—the only one we have.

They are open enemies of humanity and of God, and they must denounced and be cast down to Hell where they rightly belong.

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

Back on January 19 [ https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2019/01/january-19-2019-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html ] I posted an installment in the MY CORNER series asserting what I believe to be beyond debate: that President Trump is the most pro-life president this nation has ever had. That column, with a few edits, was picked up and was published by the traditionalist national Catholic journal, THE REMNANT (for which I write frequently). As of this writing it has been read 2065 times.  I pass it along today:

Abortion, Balaam’s Donkey, and President Donald Trump

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/4306-abortion-balaam-s-donkey-and-president-donald-trump

by  Dr. Boyd D. Cathey  Tuesday, January 22, 2019

 The more scientific corroboration there is that we are viewing a real human being, the more frenzied, unnatural, and anti-human the arguments of the pro-abortionists become, to the point now that the narrative is simply to declare openly that it is simply okay to “kill” the infant embryo.

On Friday, January 18, 2019, over 100,000 people—families, young adults, children, religious groups—gathered in the freezing cold of Washington DC’s Mall to once again “March for Life,” a national event that has taken place every year since 1974, forty-five years consecutively.

But you wouldn’t have known it had you watched cable channels CNN or MSNBC, or even the coverage on NBC or CBS. The march hardly registered a blip, and then with barely disguised condescending comments about only a few “thousands” or “tens of thousands” of participants. Watching those broadcasting networks, I would have missed their coverage had I blinked more than once.

This is and has been the increasing and ongoing narrative of our mainstream media for decades. Abortion, we are told, is firmly here to stay, is completely normal and even desirable, in fact, a really good thing when a woman makes a “mistake” or simply decides that there is absolutely nothing problematic about getting pregnant and then disposing of the unborn fetus.

It’s just like having a mole removed, you see, a simple “safe” procedure that removes that tiny piece of flesh in the womb, that encumbrance which will prevent the woman from expressing herself fully and enjoying the “full experiences” of womanhood, including total sexual freedom: all without worrying about maternity or any additional responsibilities.

Indeed with the rise of what can only be called a totally unleashed and frenzied “women’s movement” which continues to rush headlong towards the next and most extreme position, with demands that barely five or ten years ago would have been considered loony or insane, the popular narrative presented to American citizens is one of inevitability, that anyone in any way opposing the radical expansion and engorging feminist pro-abortion appetite is standing in the way of “progress” and the rights of women to control their bodies:  a relict from a reactionary past who must be shouted down, banned, or even penalized legally. You cannot stand in the way of the advancing progressivist goalposts, the new norm, whatever that may be.

And yet, as each year passes and as medical and scientific research continues apace, it has become and is becoming more undebatable that “the piece of human tissue” conceived in the womb is, in fact, a real and functioning human being and not the equivalent of a skin mole to be so blithely excised and tossed into the incinerator.

This is a fact that the “women’s movement” and the “#MeToo” fanatics do not want you to understand. The more scientific corroboration there is that we are viewing a real human being, the more frenzied, unnatural, and anti-human the arguments of the pro-abortionists become.

To the point that the narrative is simply to declare openly that it is simply okay to “kill” the infant embryo if it in any manner stands in the way of a woman’s free expression of her sexuality and her desires: there must be nothing to impede that, nothing to encumber her.

And implicit in this template is the admission that both the laws of nature, themselves, and effectively Divine Positive Law can be violated with impunity, that they somehow restrict and limit unjustly women, placing the onerous responsibility on the fairer sex of bearing children. In effect it is open rebellion against how nature and nature’s God have sanctioned and defined creation since the beginning of time; it is the denial of creation, a rebellion against that order, an attempt to invert and reverse it.

There could not be any more striking comparison than that between the March for Life and  the “Women’s March” [held the next day, January 19], composed of and directed by some of the most extreme and hysterical elements of the feminist movement—a coalition of activists who live and fester in what can only be termed a type of “counter-reality” that denies biology, or rather, re-defines it and stands it on its head: if nature doesn’t suit you, simply define it differently or deny its being and its consequences.

Is this not as well the origin and result of the movement for same-sex marriage, transgenderism, gender fluidity, and more aberrations on the horizon that we dare not envision? Do not these assaults on the laws of nature and biology emit from the same mindset, the same unquenched desire to become as gods, as complete and absolute masters of ourselves, ignoring our origins and our essential (and undeniable) relationship to creation, itself?

Is this not the triumph of unbridled and uncontrolled passion, unleashed and freed from the natural order of things and the inherent responsibilities that every human creature possesses at birth within society?

Is this not a rebirth of a brute barbarism which leads in the end to destruction and the dissolution of the human race?

Our inherited culture for thousands of years has understood that we as human beings are part of creation and that we exist along with the lower animals within nature and largely are governed by nature’s laws and biology.

Our Christian faith has softened to some degree the harsher aspects of those laws, but without denying them. Indeed, wisely the Church has integrated their meaning and import into its teachings, fully confirming their existence and reality. For it recognized, just as the ancient philosophers did, that we are a special creation, endowed with rationality and special gifts, but within nature. It took the gift of the ancient Hebrew prophets and the Message of the Christ to transform that philosophy into a full understanding of the harmony between nature and mankind’s place and dignity within it.

That comprehension and belief has been essential in the development and flourishing of what we call Western Christian civilization. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome: these are the sources of our inheritance, the expositors of our capabilities, and the founts of our dignity. Without that, without them, and without their deeply thought understanding and recognition of our place in creation and in the universe, without that divine spark uniquely given to us all—without all that, we would be nothing more than slightly higher brutes, devoid of true dignity, devoid of true humanity, wild beasts of the jungle and desert—without God and without Grace.

The “women’s march” is a march of the “new barbarians,” feminists who not only wish to reject three thousand years of human history, but who implicitly reject the laws of nature and deny the lineaments of creation itself.

The interesting fact is that in the past when other groups and movements have attempted to overthrow those laws, they have ended rather badly…whether the Communists who worked feverishly to defy and redefine those laws (recall Trofim Lysenko and his pseudo-biology), or some of the visionary revolutionaries in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries who sought to establish utopias on earth, which inevitably turned out to be failures, and at worst dystopian nightmares.

And with each experiment the cost in human suffering and miserable death has been nearly incalculable. By conservative estimate the deaths as the result of Communism over its eighty year existence amounted to approximately 100 million (cf. The Black Book of Communism, edited by Dr. Stephane Courtois).

Yet unhinged and boastful human pride, disconnected from history and from the laws of nature (and of God), is always, it seems with us. And today, with the precipitous cultural and religious decline in our society, it raises its head again, fearless and ugly, profane and defiant, women wearing “vagina hats” and parading with all the offense they can muster, who once more proclaim open rebellion and that they will replace nature and nature’s God with another utopia, another vision, another reality.

And, yes, it will end just as miserably, probably more so than all those other angry and violent movements of the past…and bring with it more suffering, more death, more disillusionment, and more decay of the only civilization that we have—and millions more infants in the womb slaughtered.

Satan, himself, could not have devised a more effective program of destruction…and without doubt, in this case, he did.

*****

This past week I had supper with a dear friend of over thirty-five years, a prominent conservative individual who has over the decades made a real difference in American politics. On most every political issue we have been on the same side; but in 2015 and 2016 my friend, although he ended up voting for Donald Trump, supported in the Republican primaries, “anybody but Trump.”  His view—and I think I sum it up correctly—is that President Trump is morally and personally unfit, a womanizer, an opportunist, and although he supports many of the president’s initiatives, he earnestly wishes that someone else occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

We have disagreed very strenuously about Donald Trump and his role in American politics.

As I have described it in various essays, Trump’s role has been that of a “bull-in-a-china shop,” a veritable battering ram to begin breaking up the viscous Deep State elitist stranglehold over American politics (and, indeed, culture).

It would take, in my view, someone like that, with all the rough bluster, brashness and vigor, to make a real difference.  And that is why he is hated by those elites: he was one of them and is seen as a dangerous traitor to his class.

My friend asked me to name one thing that Trump had done that was actually beneficial to America, and after attempting to rebut the answers I gave, I offered the example of abortion and protecting the lives of infants in the womb.

“But how can a man who is morally defective, a sexual cheat [his words], produce moral and good results?” My response, only briefly made, was to offer the most extreme of examples, an example taken from the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament [Numbers 22:21-34], the story of Balaam’s ass: God spoke through the donkey to Balaam, just as God may select and employ any vehicle He so chooses, even the morally imperfect, to make His wishes known or to achieve His designs.

And I stated that Donald Trump had been and was the most pro-life president this nation had ever had, more so than Reagan, and far more so than the calculating Bushes.

And that if his election had saved just the lives of a few unborn infants, slowed down the abortion mills, had put a crimp in the industry of death for pay, nationally and internationally, then it was fully worth it to have elected a man of a debatable moral background. God, indeed, works in mysterious ways.

And that is a major reason—indeed, maybe reason enough—to give thanks to God for Donald Trump.

January 25, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The REAL War is Here and Now – It Cannot be            Avoided, It Cannot be Ignored 

                 

Plus a Newly-Published Article at Reckonin.com

Friends,

The uniquely unparalleled and eerily bizarre case of the Kentucky Catholic boys who made national and international headlines last weekend continues to mushroom volcanically totally out of control. Despite the palpable facts—completely visible and there for anyone to see and hear—the mainstream media (and their political allies) have doubled down viciously, with the NBC network and its news anchors leading the pack in utter contempt and condescension for viewers.

In the old days—just a few decades ago—there was some pretense of objectivity, some conveyed impression that our media were being or trying to be “fair,” even if they weren’t. 

Remember David Brinkley, or “uncle” Walter Cronkite, or Eric Severeid? Many of us knew that they were on the Left politically and culturally, but at least they presented the appearance of equanimity. They wanted us to think they were fair.

That image—that chimera—has disappeared, the bloody mask occluding falsehood and deception now torn away. Yes, the media still wants us to believe what they tell us; they still demand obeisance and consent; they engineer censorship against us online and via Facebook and Twitter; they scream loudly about “threats to democracy” and “extremism” when we remark factually that what is being foisted off on us is, in fact, fake, unreal, and manipulated for an ideological end.

And that is why the confrontation this past weekend with those Covington Catholic high schoolers is so very significant. As nothing else, no previous event, it indicated starkly and critically a true watershed moment in the waning life of this republic. For it demonstrated for anyone whose eyes have not been blinded and whose thinking has not been totally warped and perverted, what has happened and is happening in and to this country.

After interviewing Covington Catholic student Nick Sandman on Wednesday, and imperiously demanding to know if he wished to “apologize” for “his” actions, for his smile (AKA “smirk”), and for wearing that now-famous MAGA hat, NBC‘s Susannah Guthrie, interviewed on Thursday the Indian activist and revolutionary Nathan Phillips (who has a record of civil disturbances). Instead of questioning his on-the-record lies about his Vietnam War military service and other falsehoods, Guthrie daintily offered him soft-balls, essentially agreeing with him on every, now proven false statement he had made. Asked Guthrie: “Can you forgive those students for their taunting and attitude?”

The essential issue here remains what it always was: at its very base it is not just about race [“white privilege”] or gender [“toxic masculinity”], it is about power and the unbridled desire of our elites in the Deep State to keep it at all costs, and with all methods licit and illicit, including defamation, shaming, suppression, legal sanctions, even calls for murder.

That is where we are, that is where our society is today. Too many of our fellow citizens still don’t understand, still don’t get it. Many, it is true, are too busy with family, jobs, mortgages…or getting ready for the Super Bowl (or, maybe arguing over a badly-made referee non-call). But if they would pay any attention, just a bit, to what happened with the Covington Catholic students, if they would spend just a few minutes to examine what actually occurred—the perpetrated, visible and despicable falsehood and the very obvious role of our mainstream media anchors, maybe they might begin to see and comprehend the heating cauldron we find ourselves in.

Whether they do or don’t, an inevitable cataclysm stares us squarely in the face.  It’s coming, and in many ways it is already here. Ignoring it, avoiding it, won’t make it go away.

The great English Catholic critic and author, Hilaire Belloc, observed such people, many well-intentioned or supinely oblivious, over a century ago. He could see the barbarians who were coming after them (and us). He witnessed the insouciance and lack of concern, and the failure to react:

“...We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”  [This and That and the Other (1912) (p. 282)]

We no longer have the luxury or the time to sit back and wait: we are in this moment of our history called to the barricades. It is that simple: defend our civilization and the reality of three millennia of our history, and of our Faith; or watch it disappear, and along with it, us and our children. We don’t get a second chance.

I pass on to you a newly-published article today [bel0w], and it incorporates much of what I wrote back in MY CORNER on January 22. It is my clarion call:

RECKONIN'

The “Smirk,” and the Death of America

https://www.reckonin.com/boyd-cathey/the-smirk-and-the-death-of-america

1/24/2019

Watching NBC’s TODAY program on Tuesday, January 23, 2019, there was anchor Savannah Guthrie demanding to know if Covington, Kentucky, Catholic High School student, Nick Sandmann, wished to “apologize” for his “actions” in front of the Lincoln Memorial when confronted by Indian activist, Nathan Phillips, on January 19. The scarcely-concealed bias that characterized Guthrie’s question and the continuing media narrative—proven to be built on a lie but still perpetrated by the Progressivist Left, was compounded by her next question: was Sandman’s now famous smile in reality a disrespectful “smirk,” a kind of “racist dog-whistle,” a symbol of “white privilege”?

Something had snapped: this small, what probably should have been insignificant event, brought everything, all that is occurring in our sick society, into stark perspective as little else had.

Is America finished? Is the fragile “experiment in republicanism” begun in Philadelphia in 1787 finally over, or at the very least experiencing its noisy death throes?

Certainly, since the defeat of the American constitutional system in 1865 there has been a pernicious and seriously destructive trajectory in our history which, now reaching unimagined and unparalleled frenzy, seems to indicate so.

Are we not living in a geographical entity officially called the United States of America where verifiably there are TWO Americas, TWO conceptions of what is real and what is not real, TWO ideas of what is moral and what is not, TWO views about Truth and Error, TWO visions about using whatever means is available to reach a desired and posited end (which for one of these groups is the creation of a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia” that would make Joe Stalin’s Communism seem like Disneyland in comparison)?

Words—“devil terms”—now pop up with amazing regularity and frequency: “racism,” “white privilege,” “sexism,” “toxic masculinity,” “equality,” “democracy,” and so on. And these terms have been weaponized and are now employed by those on the Left—but also by many elitist movement conservatives (“conservatism inc.”)—to disauthorize, condemn, and damn anyone who would actually oppose the rapid Leftward spiral of what remains of this nation.

Not just the wide-eyed unhinged talking heads on CNN and MSNBC and on Twitter, but such “respectable” conservative voices as Bill Kristol, Hew Hewitt, and National Review and various Republican types, have joined in with the baying mob. Their hardly-concealed hatred for “middle America,” for that lumpenproletariat of hard-working, gun-­owning, church-going, underpaid folks who still try to raise a family morally on a shrinking salary, knows no bounds.
Perhaps as many as one half of our citizens, those who over the decades have become the identifiable elites and financial, political and cultural “upper crust,” look upon the rest of us as mere rubes, a servile class who are not supposed to have a voice—this, you see, is now “American democracy.”

Those folks—our folks—were not supposed to get restive, not supposed to get off the “reservation” assigned to us. But in 2016 we did, we did because instinctively we knew that the old promises of this nation had fallen by the wayside, that an unelected managerial class—an elite more connected globally and more loyal to its own class and more concerned about conserving its power and authority—guided our destiny and did not give a damn about us, despite the constant stream of vomited campaign promises and solemn avowals we hear every election season.

Many of us were stunned at the unleashed and vile hatred directed at us. All we had done was ask—in the normal way at the voting booth—that the long-forgotten promises of the Framers be fulfilled. All we had done was ask that our elected leaders in Congress and in government (and those elites) finally acknowledge our just requests.

But those elites—the media, the entertainment industry, almost the entirety of academia, and not just the Progressivist Democrat Left, but also those supposed defenders of our interests, “conservatism inc.”—responded not only with undisguised and unrestrained anger, but with disdain, contempt and condescension…and with a steady diet of what, charitably, can only be described as lies, fabrications, assaults on our character, attempts to suppress our guaranteed rights to speech and expression, shaming us, and efforts (many successful) to destroy our livelihoods or get us fired from our jobs or dismissed from our schools.

What happened to those Catholic high school students from Kentucky who had been to the March for Life, who wore those MAGA hats, is only the latest—and perhaps the most scandalous and searing—example of this climate of venom and unconcealed hatred. And it is not a hatred that emits from our folks, not from the “deplorables,” but from that “other America” that feels threatened by the “natives”—threatened by those of us on the giant fly-over plantation between the million dollar mansions surrounded by walls in Silicon Valley and the paneled million dollar board rooms on Wall Street where the international globalists gather to plot the future of the world: a world enmeshed in slogans about “the fruits of democracy” and “equal rights,” where “racism” and “sexism” will finally be banished….but where, in fact, the very contrary will exist, where democracy will have become a totalitarian dystopia a thousand times worse than what George Orwell envisioned in his phantasmagoric novel Nineteen Eighty Four.

Even if these two Americas still use the same language they are increasingly incapable of communicating with each other, as almost weekly words and terms are redefined beyond comprehension. The new “devil terms” are fierce and nearly unstoppable weapons used to destroy and humiliate; they are the modern version of hydrogen bombs deployed by the Progressivists. They illustrate what political theorist Paul Gottfried calls a “post-Marxist” praxis that has actually moved beyond the assaults of cultural Marxism towards a new imposed narrative and what German philosophers might call a “gestalt.”

You cannot dissent from it, you cannot deny it. If it demands you call black, white; then you must comply, or suffer the consequences. If your eyes tell you one thing, but the collective media and elites tells you something else, “who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes”?

Thus, the egregiously false and unspeakably evil reportage concerning those Catholic students in Washington this past weekend, the foul, even satanic attacks upon them…and upon that “smirk” that so provoked Susannah Guthrie. It was just a relatively small incident in the overall scheme of things, yet it became on nearly every news channel, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere, an archetypal case of “racism,” “sexism,” “white privilege,” “toxic masculinity.” Those boys were white, Christian, wearing those MAGA hats, and from a Southern state—obviously, they were guilty, no need to examine the facts.

The incident rapidly became a major cudgel not just for the Progressivists but also for the mainline conservative movement types, who are little more than eager foot soldiers doing the bidding of their bedfellows on the farther Left, and who see such opportunities as a chance to eagerly “virtue-signal” to their Progressivist buddies that, “hey, look, we aren’t like those bad uncouth right wing racists—we actually share your essential premises about America!” Hello Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, National Review, Bill Kristol, and company.

The immediate condemnations of those students came quickly and in the thousands via social media—death threats, demands to publish names and addresses, appeals to have them expelled from their school, encouragement to kill them, and worse…And all based on a totally and blatantly fake narrative, and the openly false statement of a Native American activist and revolutionary. No matter—it served the template, it served the created “gestalt,” it projected the vision and the thinking of that one half of America that is living in a counter-reality, lunatics who have turned much of this country into their own private asylum. But where the rest of us are now seen as the crazies. Is this not G. K. Chesterton’s definition of lunacy in all its aching misery, of being truly outside the realm of reality itself?

Back in 2015 ago I published an essay at Communities Digital News [“Pat Buchanan and the End of America,” in which I suggested, echoing on from writer Patrick Buchanan’s warning from the 1990s, that America—the American nation—was on the brink of fracturing irredeemably, broken apart on the then-still-not-clearly-seen rocks of political correctness,  extreme multiculturalism, and the Hydra-headed monsters from Hell, accusations of racism (AKA, “white supremacy”) and sexism (AKA, “toxic masculinity”).

At the time I had a couple of friends whom I would call “regular” or establishment conservatives who approached me and informed me that I was simply exaggerating, that Buchanan was the extremist and fear monger. Later, when I began to write favorably of Donald Trump’s presidential run, and its potentially profound meaning for American (and international) politics and culture, some of these same friends again just shook their collective heads and, with deep concern, wondered how I could “deviate” from what they termed “conservative orthodoxy.”

I was not exaggerating; indeed, what I wrote back then was far too timid, far too mild.

In fact, I have come to the conclusion, fitfully and uncomfortably, and after witnessing the far, far greater meaning revealed by what occurred with those Kentucky pro-life students, that America in 2019 faces three choices for its future:

(1) Either there must be some large mass conversion of one side or the other (a “Road to Damascus” conversion?), probably occasioned by some immense and earth-shaking event, war, depression, disaster; (2) the secession of large portions of what is presently geographically the United States, including possibly enclaves within some states that would basically exit those jurisdictions—this secession could be peaceable, although increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst, (3) the devolution of this country into open and vicious civil and guerrilla war.

I am not at all comforted by this vision, but, frankly, given the present state of this nation, is there any other possibility? After all, despite the pious pinning of the Neoconservative publicists that America is the world’s “exceptional” nation, the new Utopia, God did not grant us national eternity, did not guarantee our future. And our leaders and many of our citizens have done their damnedest to undo and undermine all those original hopes and promises.

​At present the last scenario looks like the one that is coming, and it will not most likely be what any of us expect. Our enemies, the Progressivists and their allies it is true, are growing in number and have demographics on their side. But we do have one advantage: they believe in gun control. We don’t.

This piece was originally published on My Corner on January 22, 2019.

Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations.