Wednesday, July 31, 2019

July 31, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

ELIZABETH WARREN and Food Racism—NOW We Know!

Friends,
After watching a portion--but only a portion--of the Democratic "debate" last night (after twenty minutes, I had to go retch!), I discovered when listening to Elizabeth Warren that I was suffering from—Intestinal (Food) Racism!  At last I KNOW what it is that is causing me such systemic problems in my stomach and lower tract!  You see, now I know that historically the lighter colored food that I eat and attempt to digest has dominated and oppressed the darker hued food. Thus, those pieces of white bread and mashed potatoes have systemically oppressed those poor chocolate eclairs and that yummy chocolate pudding!  The intestinal problems I have had and continue to have are clearly due to that white food supremacy! And, thus, all my intestinal discomfort and digestive issues can be resolved simply by an immense government program of restorative reparations!
Thus, I must now go on a strict regimen of drinking only black coffee and eating black beans, imposing alimentary affirmative action on my eating process. And, more, since this intestinal racism is apparently endemic and a product of historic European colonialism, I must begin to restrict and even penalize the lighter and white-colored foods I consume, in the name of equality and alimentary social justice.

And, of course, the major culprit in all of this racism is, you guessed it: milk, which of course is lily white. And the question must then be asked: is not lily white milk an inheritance of Neo-Confederate white supremacy and systemic racism and bigotry? Didn’t Morris Dees at the Southern Poverty Law Center write something about this years ago?

Oh Oh! what then must be the remedy? Well, for one, white milk must be subject to a new and heavily enforced civil rights bill which would require, as part of a new program of affirmative action, that 50 % of all white milk must now be colored by dark syrup. And to secure this goal chocolate syrup is not enough to solve the issue; no, it must be very black licorice syrup, carefully legislated by law.

And, of course, as all of this...these prescriptions...will require proper and ironclad implementation, a whole new agency of the Federal government must be created: the US Department of Alimentary Equality and Justice. And, certainly, there must be a new $500 million Federal building erected in Washington, plus new offices in all fifty states. And, to accomplish this necessary program--which is just as critical to our national well-being as our battle against climate change--my estimate is that it will take over 100,000 new very "woke" and socially-conscious government workers who all have graduated from our premiere universities with degrees in food science or social work, taught by suitably progressive professors.

Budgetarily, I estimate, based on a recent study completed by the Al Sharpton Studies in Historic Obesity and Lingering Emaciation [ASSHOLE] Institute, that a mere $100 trillion would provide for the first ten years of this program.

Obviously, given the pusillanimous, cowardly position of the Republicans, I do not anticipate strong opposition from the GOP, but rather they will on Fox and in Congress do what they usually do, appropriate this idea and soon make it their own, and thus normalize it as American as Lemon meringue pie....Oops! I mean CHOCOLATE PIE

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

July 30, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Secession Column Now Picked Up by LEW ROCKWELL and Other Sites in the US and Europe

Friends,

Readers of these columns may recall that I offered an installment “Is the American Nation Breaking Up?” earlier this month on July 24 where I discussed the possible courses for the future of this country, including the idea of secession or separation of regions and states into individual and self-governing entities. I suggested that such a course of action might well be the best, the optimum, and least painful option as the decrepit and decaying American union flies apart centrifugally in angry, vociferous, and—in my opinion—unbridgeable division.

I substantially reworked and expanded that column and it was picked by THE UNZ REVIEW and published as a feature essay on July 26. I also featured that newer version here in these pages on July 27, with a completely new introduction, titling it: “Nationalism vs. Secession: Should America Break Up?.

 Since then the essay published by UNZ has gone viral and has been picked up by several Web sites and even noticed overseas (in Europe). 

Among the sites thus far (which I know about) that have reproduced it or have quoted it are:

STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC:

VOX POPULI:

And most importantly, LEW ROCKWELL:

Thus, there is conversation about the future going on, and it is not just amongst and by our noted Southern scholars and writers like Drs. Clyde Wilson and Brion McClanahan, who have done so much to keep this topic alive and fertile. It is a conversation that I believe we must have—a conversation that goes back to our very Constitutional founding as a nation and our understanding of how this country can exist and have a future.

Despite the initial incredulity that any talk of “secession” brings, the shaking of heads, the response of: “You can’t be serious!”—despite the very real factors and immense forces arrayed against such potential future action—despite a growing, powerful, and jealously intrusive national government—yes, secession, or perhaps better stated, “separation” may just be one way of settling the stark and increasingly violent divisions that oppress and affect the United States.

At the very least, that was my hope—to generate some serious discussion.
And, in some small way, I think that is happening.

As one on the latest of the 330 plus commenters at the UNZ REVIEW site wrote:

Hail says: • Website Next New Comment
Note for posterity:
On July 29, 2019, Lew Rockwell himself reposted this essay (“Is it Time for America to Break Apart” by Boyd Cathey) to his long-running, major libertarian site LewRockwell.com, earning the article, I presume, thousands of more views today, and perhaps cumulatively hundreds of thousands there alone, in due course.
Lew Rockwell@lewrockwell Is It Time for America To Break Apart? Long past time. Article by Boyd D. Cathey. 

LewRockwell.com’s lead article today was the thematically-related “Mises on Secesssion.”

Thousands of readers have now read that essay. And my own site [http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/ ] has since seen more hits and views, not just for this column but for others, too.

And that is gratifying, not because of any financial gain (I get none) or notoriety (I’d prefer not to get any, especially after Morris Dees attacked me by name about sixteen years ago!), but because the future of this country IS at stake and DOES need to be examined, even if it be painful and very difficult to do so.


That is and has been my hope all along; and that was and is my desire with the essay, “Is It Time For America to Break Apart?”

Saturday, July 27, 2019

July 27, 2019


MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

NATIONALISM vs. SECESSION:
Should America Break Up?

Friends,

A couple of weeks ago there was a much-ballyhooed conference in Washington DC (July 14-15, 2019) on what is termed “national conservatism.  Initiated by Israeli “nationalist” scholar Yoram Hazony, the conference was part of an effort to corral the growing and unleashed nationalist tendencies here in the United States and to see if they might be brought under control, that is, into the mainstream of the “conservative movement.”

What was fascinating about the over-priced conference was its list of invitees, or rather the glaring absence of certain significant voices that should have been in attendance but, very pointedly, weren’t invited, including Professor Paul Gottfried, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the decline of democracy and the rise of nationalism and populism globally.

And there was certainly a very good reason for that. For Gottfried represents a discordant note and would have thrown a huge monkey wrench into Hazony’s effort to suborn the unruly nationalist and populist tendencies on the American Right. Gottfried clearly sees through the transparent efforts by figures such as the Zionist scholar and some other members of the establishment to reign in the restive “new Right” which no longer trusts or accepts the failed program of the nugatory and pallid “conservative movement,” what Gottfried has rightly called “the phony right.”

Another acute and on-the-mark critic of the conference and its attempt to neutralize and domesticate the growing reaction of the grass roots against the American Establishment was the brilliant young journalist and critic Christopher De Groot, whose new online journal, The Agonist, is like a breath of fresh air intellectually.

Commenting on the one very fearless conference participant, Professor Amy Wax (University of Pennsylvania Law School), Christopher highlighted her remarks:

Amy, once again, has been an object of controversy. The reason is that in her talk at the nationalism conference she argued, on cultural grounds, that ‘our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites’…. She also thinks that ‘we must ensure that bad habits from the Third World…are not allowed to infect and undermine the First’.”

Apparently, this was not what most of the attendees had come to hear. These remarks were not, clearly, about controlling the unwashed dissident Right and avoiding issues of division like race and gender, issues the “conservative movement” in its effort to stress national unity and “American Exceptionalism” wishes strenuously to downplay (or even incorporate into its program). Rather they spoke to the necessity of homogeneity and organicism as conditions for national survival, aspects that are quickly disappearing in modern American society. Professor Wax, thus, acknowledged the elephant in the room: a culturally-based recognition of the importance of historical ethnicity and certain shared beliefs as a foundation for any successful polity.

Professor Wax’s presentation and the commentaries by Paul Gottfried and Christopher De Groot highlight and bring up another question, a question that, in many ways, is more profound and more basic than whether a newly-resurgent American nationalism may be harnessed to serve the current conservative movement.

And that question is this: Despite the rise of a new nationalism, given the situation in the United States, can this nation actually survive as a nation, as a functioning entity under its 1787 Constitution in a modern world where the centrifugal forces of division and separation now appear overwhelming and unstoppable, without some form of dictatorship?  Has not the disruption and radicalization of polarities advanced too far for even a revived nationalism to put the pieces back together? Is there not another option?

Already there is a movement in California—“Calexit”—for California to secede, to separate from the Federal union. After all, California is, for all intents and purposes, like a Third World country governed by an hysterical Progressivist junta and embracing every insane and mad nostrum that the loony Left comes up with. Why not let them—along with Oregon and Washington State—go their own separate ways (perhaps with, yes painful, population exchanges for those in disaccord)? Wouldn’t things be better for the rest of us if they were out of the union?

These disquieting questions should be raised, and, in some ways they may be as important or even more important than examining a new American nationalism and how it might (or might not) figure in revitalizing the moribund conservative movement.

*****
Yesterday I had a major essay on this topic published by THE UNZ REVIEW, and I pass it along to you. Certain small portions of this piece I had used in the MY CORNER installment of July 24. But this essay is longer and new, and is now a featured article at UNZ (and I see that another Web site, Vox Day, has already linked to it):

THE UNZ REVIEW
Is It Time for America to Break Apart?
BOYD D. CATHEY • JULY 26, 2019
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/shutterstock_515452171-600x401.jpg
There is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the background like an unchained wild beast:
What has happened—what is happening—to the geographical entity we call the United States, to its people, to its culture? Does it not seem like the country is coming apart at the seams, in just about everything, from its once-established moral base in a more or less historic Christian framework to its very vision of reality, of what is real and what is not?
Millions of “woke” social justice progressives now control the Democratic Party and most of our media; they dominate our entertainment and sports industries; they push for open borders and what amounts to “population replacement” of natives by illegal aliens; and they have a stranglehold on the near entirety of our educational system, from the primary grades to our colleges.
Each year those institutions turn out millions of freshly-minted automatons—intellectual zombies—who think like their unhinged teachers and professors have trained them, and who then take up responsible positions in our society and increasingly support and vote for a type of veritable madness which, like an unstoppable centrifugal force, is tearing this country apart, creating unbridgeable divisions that no amount of misdirected pleading or faux-compromise can repair.
The progressives loudly tout their support for “equality” and what they term “liberation from arbitrary restraints.” They tell us that they are working against historic “racism and sexism.” But, in actuality, their program turns real liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in unrequited passions and desires, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of actual lunacy.
In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?’’ He responds, in part:
“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.
The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return…. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much… But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [bolding added]
The social justice fanatics who demonstrate in the streets, who appear nightly on our news channels broadcasting the ideological virus they call news, who parade before a House or Senate committee (or serve on that committee!), and who indoctrinate gullible and intellectually-abused students in supposed centers of higher education, are, to use Chesterton’s parable, lunatics. They are “already outside the world of reason,” and their unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.
They partake of a virulent cultural post-Marxism that, despite slogans of “defeating racism, sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy,’’ and establishing equality, is ultimately unachievable. Its advocates are, measured by the historical reality of two millennia of Christian civilization and by the laws of nature, insane.
They sloganize about “the fruits of democracy” and “equal rights,” where in some future utopia “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 and more oppressive than anything George Orwell envisioned in his phantasmagoric novel Nineteen Eighty Four.
This element, this force in our country, which now numbers many millions of votaries, works feverishly and tirelessly to achieve its objectives. And, as we have seen, especially since the presidential election of 2016, it will do anything, use any tactic, including defamation, lawsuits, censorship, even violence to achieve its ends, to turn back what it perceives even in the slightest to be “counter-revolutionary.”
The question comes down to this: Is the fragile American experiment in republicanism begun in Philadelphia in 1787, which required a commonly-shared understanding of basic principles, now over, or at the very least is it entering its agonizing death throes?
One can certainly trace a progressively destructive trajectory in American history since the overthrow of the American constitutional system in 1865. And the results of that history are now reaching almost an unimaginable breaking point.
Increasingly, we live in a country that has become de facto little more than a mere geographical entity. True, it is still formally a nation, but a nation where there are in fact at least two very distinct Americas, with radically differing visions of what is real and what is not real, radically differing conceptions of what is moral and what is not, radically differing views about truth and error, and radically differing ideas about using whatever means are available to reach a desired and posited end. For all the talk of equality and racism, the revolutionary side in actuality seeks to replace one oligarchy—which it calls “white supremacist”—with another oligarchy of its own making, in fact, a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia’’ that would make Joseph Stalin’s Communist state seem like a Sandals Retreat in the Bahamas.
At the base of this revolutionary movement is the critical use of language. Ideologically-tinged words—“devil terms”—now occur with amazing regularity and frequency: racism, white privilege, sexism, toxic masculinity, equality, democracy, and so on. These terms have been weaponized and are now employed by those on the Left—but also adopted by many elitist movement conservatives (“conservatism inc.”)—to disauthorize, condemn, and damn anyone who would offer effective opposition to the rapid Leftward perversion of what remains of this nation.
It is not only the frenzied talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, but such “respectable” conservative voices as Bill Kristol, Hew Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Ben Shapiro, the National Review crowd and various Republican types , who have joined in to legitimize each new progressivist conquest (e.g., same sex marriage) and attack any real opposition to the Leftist “long march” through our institutions. Like the hard Left, the establishment conservatives betray a hardly-concealed contempt for Middle America, for those hard-working, gun-owning, church-going, underpaid folks who still try to raise a family morally on a shrinking salary. They see 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.”
We are not supposed to question this arrangement; we are not supposed to get off the “reservation” assigned to us. That, you see, was the way the “new oligarchy” would work. But in 2016, in exasperation, we did question it, and we did so because instinctively we knew that the unelected managerial class—a cosmopolitan and globalist elite—was far more loyal to its own class and more concerned about conserving its power and authority. It did not give a damn about us, despite the endless stream of campaign promises we hear every election season.
We understood that the chances of success were minimal, and even if we were successful—electorally highly unlikely—the establishment and Inside-the-Beltway elites would ground to dust or coopt any opposition, including even Donald Trump.
But the unlikely did occur, and the elites—the media, the entertainment industry, almost the entirety of academia, the progressivist Democrat Left, and also those supposed defenders of our interests, “conservatism inc.”—responded with unleashed and unrestrained anger, contempt and condescension. Those elites feel 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.
No matter that Donald Trump filled much of his administration with establishment figures and GOP standbys (especially in foreign policy). The fact of his election had signaled that the mask of the administrative state, its very authority had been seriously challenged. And what followed was what can only be described as a torrent of lies, fabrications, assaults on our character, attempts to suppress our guaranteed rights of speech and expression, shaming us, and efforts to destroy our livelihoods or get us fired from our jobs or dismissed from our schools.
And, of course, there was the Russia Hoax, involving the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, the Mueller Commission, a compliant media, and the FBI and other intelligence services, and totally false claims that somehow the Russians “had interfered” in our elections. In fact, the “Russia Hoax” was completely political; the Russians were not involved, save for a few double-agents who were actually working for American/FBI interests. It was a massive, unparalleled effort not just to bring down the president, but more significantly, to discredit any opposition to the Deep State establishment’s control.
There are then, palpably, two Americas. They still use the same language, but they are increasingly incapable of communicating with each other. Almost weekly words and terms are redefined beyond comprehension, and those “devil terms” have become the modern equivalents of linguistic hydrogen bombs deployed by the progressivists. They illustrate what political theorist Paul Gottfried has called a “post-Marxist” praxis that has actually moved beyond the assaults of cultural Marxism towards a new and imposed template.
No dissent from this template is permitted in our society. 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 tell you something else, “who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes”?
For “conservatism inc.” this state of affairs poses critical problems: the “movement” is more or less moribund, like a Persian eunuch at court, of little danger to the harem and of doubtful usefulness otherwise. Its stale ideas are not attractive to Millennials and offer no practical solutions to the challenges at hand. Indeed, in too many cases “establishment conservatives” and their Republican cohorts in Congress only serve to normalize each progressivist victory. Creative ideas from the Right only come nowadays from what is termed “the disauthorized Right,” from the nationalist Right (especially in Europe), and the populist and Old Right (here in the United States).
Some “movement conservatives” have recognized this. And there has been recent talk about the “conservative movement” somehow harnessing the newly unleashed nationalism and populism—witness the recent efforts of Zionist scholar Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism, 2018) to incorporate these tendencies into the conservative mainstream. A national conference on “nationalist conservatism” was held in Washington on July 14-16. But such attempts are essentially efforts by a “phony right” (as Paul Gottfried terms it) to once again derail real opposition to the Progressivist project and maintain control over disparate elements (and also deflect criticism of Israel, always a bugaboo for the Neoconservatives).
Such efforts will ultimately fail, just as the creation of a new American nationalism will flounder, as well. Unlike most European nations which possess an organic history and common heritage, the United States has traveled too far down the road of unbridgeable division for a rooted nationalism to be successful. The disparities and extreme differences are far too great.
It is time to look elsewhere for solutions.
America in 2019 faces three possibilities 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; or (2) there must be a separation into independent jurisdictions of large portions of what is presently geographically the United States, including possible massive population exchanges—this separation/secession could be peaceable, although increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst, (3) the devolution of this country would continue into open and vicious civil and guerrilla war, followed by a harsh dictatorship. Disorder always abhors a vacuum, and that vacuum will be filled one way or another.
Given the present state of this nation, are there any other realistic possibilities? After all, despite the pious pining 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.
The modern American madness, the lunacy—and that is certainly what it is—increases exponentially, it seems, on a daily basis. There are so many examples of it, it is so rampant in our society, that our surprise and outrage have become inured: imagine something incredibly and impossibly awful and crazy…and, lo, it actually will happen in our insane society.
There are only a very few things, a few statements by Abraham Lincoln that I can agree with. One of them is this (1858): “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

The time has come; the moment has arrived for us to discuss not only what is wrong with the country, but how we actually might resolve the issues that confront us. And just perhaps the answer is not a new and necessarily-controlled or imposed faux-nationalism, but some sort of national separation, hopefully peaceful, that might be the least disagreeable course. The other options, all of them, bring violence, civil war, and probably dictatorship. And that is something we must hope to avoid.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

July 24, 2019


MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Is the American Nation Breaking Up? What Are the Prospects? Pat Buchanan Writes

Friends,
It’s a question that increasingly arises uncomfortably in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, to our email messages to friends and associates. And to watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the background like an unchained wild beast:

What has happened—what is happening—to the geographical entity we call the United States, to its people, to its culture? Does it not seem like the country is coming apart at its very seams, in just about everything, from its once-established moral base in a more or less historic Christian framework to its very vision of reality, of what is real and what is not?

Millions of “woke” social justice progressivists now control the Democratic Party and most of our media; they dominate our entertainment and sports industries; they push for open borders and what amounts to “population replacement” by illegal aliens; and they have a stranglehold on the near entirety of our educational system, from the primary grades to our colleges.

Each year those institutions turn out millions of freshly-minted automatons—intellectual zombies—who think like their unhinged teachers and professors have trained them, and who then take up responsible positions in our society and increasingly support and vote for a type of verifiable madness which, like an unstoppable centrifugal force, is tearing this country apart, creating unbridgeable divisions that no amount of misdirected pleading or faux-compromise can repair.

Back on June 30, 2017, in the traditionalist Catholic journal, The Remnant, I published an essay which, in some ways, sums up this process:
“The Revolutionaries tell us that they strive for ‘equality’ and ‘liberation from restraints,’ and that they work ‘against racism and sexism.’ But their program—their revolution—turns liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in unrequited passions and desire, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of real lunacy. 
“In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: ‘What exactly is liberty?’ He responds, in part:
‘First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return…. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.’ [Italics added]
“Our modern revolutionaries, whether out in the streets demonstrating like wailing banshees, or nightly broadcasting ideological pablum they call news, or parading before a Senate committee (or on that committee!), or indoctrinating gullible, nearly soulless students in supposed ‘centers of higher education,’ are, to use Chesterton’s parable, lunatics: men ‘already outside the world of reason,’ whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.
“Theirs is the orthodoxy of cultural [post] Marxism that, despite all its farrago of ‘defeating racism, sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy,’ and establishing equality all round, is ultimately unachievable, an exercise in destructive lunacy. And thus its proponents are, measured by the reality of thousands of years of our Christian civilization and by the laws of nature, insane.”
This element, this force in our country, which now numbers many millions of votaries, works feverishly and tirelessly to achieve its goals and objectives. And, as we have seen vividly, especially since the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, it will do anything, use any tactic, including defamation, lawsuits, censorship, even violence to achieve its ends.
I asked in an essay in The Abbeville Institute on February 2, 2019:
“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 at least 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.
“…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’?
“I have come to the conclusion, fitfully and uncomfortably…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.”
I wrote those lines only six months ago, and I believe they are even more on target today.

Without doubt, things have only gotten worse since then. The madness, the lunacy—and that is certainly what it is—has only increased, exponentially. There are so many examples of it, it is so rampant in our society, that our surprise and outrage has become inured: think of something incredibly and impossibly awful and crazy…and, lo, it actually will happen in our mad society.

There are only a very few things, a few statements by Abraham Lincoln that I can agree with. One of them was this (1858): "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

The time has come; the moment has arrived for us to discuss not only what is wrong with the country, but how we actually resolve the issues that confront us. And some sort of separation, hopefully peaceful, might be the least disagreeable course. The other options, all of them, bring violence, civil war, and probably dictatorship. And that is something we should hope to avoid.

*****
Here I offer two recent Pat Buchanan columns, and he examines some of these same themes in brief but very probing comments:

America: An Us vs. Them Country
By Patrick J. Buchanan  Tuesday - July 22, 2019

"Send her back! Send her back!"  The 13 seconds of that chant at the rally in North Carolina, in response to Donald Trump's recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not soon be forgotten, or forgiven.

This phrase will have a long shelf life. T-shirts emblazoned with "Send Her Back!" and Old Glory are already on sale on eBay.  Look for the chant at future Trump rallies, as his followers now realize that the chant drives the elites straight up the wall.  That 13-second chant and Trump's earlier tweet to the four radical congresswomen of "the Squad" to "go back" to where they came from is being taken as the smoking gun that convicts Trump as an irredeemable racist whose "base" is poisoned by the same hate.

Writes The New York Times' Charles Blow in a column that uses "racist" or "racism" more than 30 times: Americans who do not concede that Trump is a racist — are themselves racists: "Make no mistake. Denying racism or refusing to call it out is also racist."

But what is racism?  Is it not a manifest dislike or hatred of people of color because of their color? Trump was not denouncing the ethnicity or race of Ilhan Omar in his rally speech. He was reciting and denouncing what Omar said, just as Nancy Pelosi was denouncing what Omar and the Squad were saying and doing when she mocked their posturing and green agenda.

Clearly, Americans disagree on what racism is. Writes Blow: "A USA Today/Ipsos poll published on July 17 found that more than twice as many Americans believe that people who call others racists do so 'in bad faith' compared with those who do not believe it."

Republicans and conservatives believe "racist" is a term the left employs to stigmatize, smear and silence adversaries. As one wag put it, a racist is a conservative who is winning an argument with a liberal.

In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton famously said of Trump's populist base, "You could put half of them into what I call the basket of deplorables ... racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic."

More than that, "Some ... are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America." To Hillary, Trump supporters were not part of the good America, the enlightened America.

Her defamation of Trump's followers meshes with the media's depiction of the folks laughing, hooting and chanting in North Carolina.

Trump supporters know what the media think of them, which is why in Middle America the media have a crisis of credibility and moral authority. Trump's true believers do not believe them, trust them, like them or respect them. And the feeling is obviously mutual.

While raw and rough, how does the 13-second chant, "Send her back!" compare in viciousness to the chant of 1960s students on Ivy League and other campuses: "Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is going to win!" This was chanted at demonstrations when the NLF, the Viet Cong, was killing hundreds of American soldiers every week.  How does 13 seconds of "Send her back!" compare with the chant of the mob that shut down midtown Manhattan in December 2014: "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!"

This past week revealed anew what we Americans think of each other, which portends trouble ahead for the republic.

For a democracy to endure, there has to be an assumption that the loser in an election holds a promissory note that new elections are only a few years off. And if the losers can persuade a majority to support them, they can reassume positions of authority and realize their agenda.

Trump's 40-45 percent of the nation is not only being constantly castigated and demonized by the establishment media but it is also being told that, in the not far distant future, it will be demographically swamped by the rising numbers of new migrants pouring into the country.  Your time is about up, it hears.

And most of the Democratic candidates have admitted that, if elected, the border wall will never be built, breaking into the country will cease to be a crime, ICE will be abolished, sanctuary cities will be expanded, illegal immigrants will be eligible for free health care and, for millions of people hiding here illegally, amnesty and a path to citizenship will be granted.

America, they are saying, will be so unalterably changed in a few years, your kind will never realize political power again, and your America will vanish in a different America where the Squad and like-minded leftists set the agenda.

Will the deplorables, who number in the scores of millions, accept a future where they and their children and children's children are to submit to permanent rule by people who visibly detest them and see them as racists, sexists and fascists?

Will Middle America go gentle into that good night?

Are Abortion & Gay Rights American Values?
By Patrick J. Buchanan  Tuesday - June 10, 2019
"My religion defines who I am. And I've been a practicing Catholic my whole life," said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. "I accept my church's position on abortion as ... doctrine. Life begins at conception. ... I just refuse to impose that on others."

For four decades, Biden backed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of the tax dollars of Joe's fellow Catholics to pay for what they view as the killing of the innocent unborn. Last week, Joe flipped. He now backs the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America welcomed home the prodigal son: "We're pleased that Joe Biden has joined the rest of the 2020 Democratic field in coalescing around the Party's core values — support for abortion rights."

But when did the right to an abortion — a crime in many states before 1973 — become a "core value" of the Democratic Party?

And what are these "values" of which politicians incessantly talk?  Are they immutable? Or do they change with the changing times?

Last month, Disney CEO Bob Iger said his company may cease filming in Georgia if its new anti-abortion law takes effect: "If (the bill) becomes law, I don't see how it's practical for us to continue to shoot there."

The Georgia law outlaws almost all abortions, once a heartbeat is detected, some six to eight weeks into pregnancy. It reflects the Christian conservative values of millions of Georgians. To Iger and Hollywood, however, Georgia's law radically restricts the "reproductive rights" of women, and is a moral outrage.

What we have here is a clash of values.

What one side believes is preserving the God-given right to life for the unborn, the other regards as an assault on the rights of women.

The clash raises questions that go beyond our culture war to what America should stand for in the world. "American interests and American values are inseparable," Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Claremont Institute: "We have had too little courage to confront regimes squarely opposed to our interests and our values."

Are Pompeo and Mayor Pete talking about the same values? The mayor is proudly gay and in a same-sex marriage. Yet the right to same-sex marriage did not even exist in this country until the Supreme Court discovered it a few years ago. In a 2011 speech to the U.N., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "Gay rights are human rights," and she approved of U.S. embassies flying the rainbow flag during Pride Month.

This year, Mike Pompeo told the U.S. embassy in Brazil not to fly the rainbow flag. He explained his concept of his moral duty to the Christian Broadcasting Network, "The task I have is informed by my understanding of my faith, my belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior."

The Christian values Pompeo espouses on abortion and gay rights are in conflict with what progressives now call human rights.

And the world mirrors the American divide. There are gay pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but none in Riyadh and Mecca. In Brunei, homosexuality can get you killed.

To many Americans, diversity — racial, ethnic, cultural, religious — is our greatest strength.

Yet Poland and Hungary are proudly ethnonationalist. South Korea and Japan fiercely resist the racial and ethnic diversity immigration would bring. Catalans and Scots in this century, like Quebecois in the last, seek to secede from nations to which they have belonged for centuries.

Are ethnonationalist nations less righteous than diverse nations likes ours? And if diversity is an American value, is it really a universal value?

Consider the treasured rights of our First Amendment — freedom of speech, religion and the press.

Saudi Arabia does not permit Christian preachers. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, converts to Christianity face savage reprisals. In Buddhist Myanmar, Muslims are ethnically cleansed. These nations reject an equality of all faiths, believing instead in the primacy of their own majority faith. They reject our wall of separation between religion and state. Our values and their values conflict.

What makes ours right and theirs wrong? Why should our views and values prevail in what are, after all, their countries?

Under our Constitution, many practices are protected — abortion, blasphemy, pornography, flag-burning, trashing religious beliefs — that other nations regard as symptoms of a disintegrating society.

When Hillary Clinton said half of all Trump supporters could be put into a "basket of deplorables" for being "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic," she was conceding that many Trump's supporters detest many progressive values.

True, but in the era of Trump, why should her liberal values be the values America champions abroad?

With secularism's triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral.

Without an agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and irreconcilable.

Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?

  July 3, 2024     MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey   The Real Meaning of July 4th and the Heresy of Lincolnian Interpretation            ...