September 15, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Prager U and National Review’s David French—Making the
Destruction of Western Civilization Acceptable
Friends,
Every now
and then an acquaintance who reads what I write will ask me: “Boyd, why are you
so critical of writers and commentators—Neoconservatives—like Victor Davis
Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Brian Kilmeade, and those who appear on Fox News? Why do
you seem so condemnatory of articles and essays that show up in, say, National Review or The Wall Street Journal? Aren’t there some good and worthy items
there…aren’t there some good things coming from those folks and from those
publications?”
My answer
is short and in the form of an analogy: Suppose you had a cantaloupe. Part of
it appeared to be just fine and pleasing. But a considerable portion of it—a large
interior portion you could not really see or determine—was rotten. Just as you
say to yourself, “Yum, this is a tasty cantaloupe,” and continue munching away,
before long and before you realize it, you are getting into parts of the fruit
that maybe at first don’t seem so bad. But, in fact, you have begun to digest
decaying fruit. And then it is too late….
Certainly,
this analogy is imperfect. Nevertheless, that is what happens when you embrace
such personalities as Hanson and Shapiro and Guy Benson, or immerse yourself in
such journals as National Review or in
the courses of study in American history at Prager U and Hillsdale College
(under its president Larry Arnn). Every isolated nugget of truth is mixed in
with historical and philosophical rot and falsehood…and for far too many
people, the meagre “good” gotten by such involvement is more than
counter-balanced by the gradual acceptance and infection of what is erroneous
and not good.
Just
recently I heard Congressman Dan Crenshaw (Republican-Texas) tell his Fox News
audience—once again— that America, its foundation, is based on the proposition
of “equality for all” and “spreading the Gospel of Democracy” to all the rest
of the world. Just like for his far less
intelligent compatriot in Congress, Adam Kinzinger (Republican-Illinois), who
never saw a war that he did not want this nation to be in, and most members of
the establishment “Conservative Movement, Inc.,” Crenshaw partakes of a
discernible philosophical foundation which is essentially inimical to the
designs and thinking of the Framers of our Constitution and the Founders of
this country.
Although he and Kinzinger would undoubtedly and strongly deny it,
in fact, their view owes far more to the febrile mental extrapolations and
interpretations of Trotskyite publicists of the 1930s and 1940s than to the resolutely
anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic vision of most of the men who cobbled
together an American confederation in 1787, and who led that confederation in
large part until 1861.
In
effect, such enterprises as Prager U, National
Review, and most of Fox (except Tucker Carlson) are in far too many ways
just a more recent, maybe less noxious branch of the Progressivist revolution
which has been eating away at and infecting Western civilization for well over
100 years.
Harsh
words? Yes. But let me offer just two examples to illustrate. And, as I have
done in past installments in this series in essays about Hanson and Shapiro, I
believe these examples are not only dispositive but highly symbolic of an
ingrained—and very dangerous—mindset about our history. And it is a mindset
that says much about the philosophical foundations of those who mouth such
convictions.
As the
old saying goes: A word to the wise is sufficient. EVERY “good” item you might
read in a magazine like National Review,
or insight that you might pick up in one of Larry Arnn’s “American history courses,”
also contains, eventually, a slow mental infection, a “hook” which if allowed
to fester will pervert and distort.
Two
examples, then, and both are significant and both bracket the major offensive
of unfolding, progressive “conservative movement thought.”
First, Dennis
Prager is seen regularly on Fox, and just recently he appeared on the Mark
Levin program. Levin, characterized by his brash and seemingly uncontrollable
histrionics, lapped up Prager’s insights. Prager is currently featuring a
certain Professor Allen Guelzo (Professor of History, Gettysburg College) to
discuss the War Between the States and Reconstruction. And like Victor Davis Hanson—and,
ironically, like out-and-out Communist Eric Foner—his argument is that: (1) the
War was all about slavery and the fulfilling (by force of arms) of our “national
destiny” of “equality for all,” and (2) the Yankee armies should have remained
as brutal occupiers in the defeated South for a far longer time after the war “until a newer generation learned a newer lesson about race
and rights other than white supremacy.”
The question immediately arises: how does this revisionist
historicism differ from the Marxist vision of a Foner or maybe Eric Hobsbawn?
And the answer is: not much.
Yet this narrative is pushed, and pushed hard by the Neoconservatives
and the Establishment Conservative Movement. So, my question back to my interrogators
is: “Why do you continue soaking up these noxious nostrums, even if there might
be an occasional bit of reason or truth discovered therein, when you can go elsewhere, to other journals and online
sites, to find something which will provide the same information but that is far
less infectious?” [I would offer here as alternatives: Chronicles magazine, The Abbeville Institute, Reckonin.com, The Agonist, New English Review, Takimag.com, VDare.com, Big League Politics,
and several others.]
My second example, the second major offensive involves the
ferocious attack on a major and essentially defining characteristic and
historic quality of Western civilization: our inherited Christian moral
tradition, a tradition and belief system that is inextricably bound up with the
very existence of our culture. It has, thus, been a primary target of the unrelenting
post-Marxist social justice warriors—beginning with divorce-on-demand, paid for
abortion for all women, the destruction of the bonds of matrimony and same sex
marriage, full acceptance of transgenderism and “gender-fluidity” (i.e., on Monday
I “feel” like a woman, but on Tuesday I “feel” like a man), and now even pedophilia.
And its effect is to both deny the laws of nature and the Divine Positive Law.
Without those foundations, our civilization cannot continue, and our enemies
know that full well.
So why do figures such as Jonah Goldberg, George Will, and National Review’s David French (and many
other “conservative” spokesmen) not only accept such aberrations, but actively
support and advance them in our society?
And here it is very instructive to read what major National Review contributor David French
has to say about “Drag Queen Story Hour,” a program now present in some of our
public libraries, and aimed at “grooming” young impressionable pre-schoolers
across the country.
French thinks it’s
not only fine, but a wonderful expression of “the blessings of liberty,”
indeed, he thinks such activities should be widespread. Or, as he says: “There’s this idea that victory is the
natural state of affairs and defeat is the intolerable intrusion,”…demonstrating
the mindset that has caused mainstream conservatism to conserve nothing
throughout the decades. “What I’ve been
trying to tell people is that none of this stuff is fixed. There is not
necessarily an arc to history….”
Just two examples, but two of an increasing number which illustrate
the utter corruption of the Establishment Conservative Movement, and its Fifth
Column use by those on the further Left. Such luminaries as David French and
Dennis Prager, and their ilk rationalize, then normalize and make acceptable
the aberrant behavior and anti-Christian beliefs which are destroying what
remains of our civilization.
They propound a toxic mix which, in the end like every toxic mix,
will be fatal to its recipients. That cantaloupe may seem okay, but in the end rot
and decay will spoil it…and make you sick.
Here below are two pieces by historian Philip Leigh about Prager U’s
“Civil War and Reconstruction” focus, and an article on David French’s latest
antics.
WHO WON RECONSTRUCTION?
By Philip
Leigh (September 10, 2019)
“Conservative” Prager U and the American
Battlefield Trust recently teamed-up to sponsor this six
minute video by Dr. Allen Guelzo who claims that “the North won the Civil
War but the (white) South won Reconstruction.” (....)
Guelzo’s dominant concern is that Reconstruction
failed to fully integrate four million ex-slaves into American society. That,
he claims, was the aim of Republican Reconstruction. Only after it ended
in 1877 did “the South return to . . . economic backwardness.” He
argues that the region should have remained under military occupation “until a
newer generation learned a newer lesson about race and rights other than white
supremacy.”
Additionally, he avers that “we should have gotten
[Southern] land ownership into the hands of the ex-slaves” and thereby brought
the South into a “free market” economy like that of the North. He gives only a
passing nod to the region’s protracted poverty, which he attributes to white
supremacy.
Professor Guelzo’s biggest error is his assertion
that the South’s impoverishment resulted from an end to Republican
Reconstruction in 1877. In reality, it was caused by the wreckage of the Civil
War, twelve to seventeen years earlier. Upon returning home after their
surrender the typical Confederate soldier found his family in a condition of
near, or actual, starvation.
Historian David L. Cohn writes: “When there was a
shortage of work stock, the few surviving animals were passed from neighbor to
neighbor. [When] there was no work stock [the men] hitched themselves to the
plow. By ingenuity, backbreaking toil, and cruel self-denial thousands of
Southern farmers survived reconstruction . . . They received no aid from any
source, nor any sympathy outside the region.” Despite population growth the
South did not reach its prewar level of economic output until 1900. Not until
1950 did it regain its 73rd-percentile prewar ranking in per capita income,
which was still well below the national average.
Guelzo falsely implies that anti-black racism was
isolated to the South. Horace Greeley, who owned the country’s largest
newspaper and was earlier a leading abolitionist, wanted freedmen to get
Southern lands in order to keep them from migrating North. Similarly,
Massachusetts Congressman George Boutwell proposed that South Carolina and
Florida be reserved exclusively for blacks. President Grant’s largest campaign
contributor owned the Northern Pacific Railroad, which received land grants
equal to the size of Missouri, but his Party did nothing to encourage blacks to
seek free western Homesteads where they were unwanted. In fact, what little
land the freedmen did get came from 46 million acres of Southern Homestead
lands. When a white boxer beat the reigning black heavyweight campion in 1915
the New York Tribune reported
that the roar from New York’s financial district “would have done
credit to a Presidential victory.
. . For a moment the air was filled with hats and newspapers.
Respectable businessmen pounded their unknown neighbors on the back” and acted
like gleeful children.
Although it is often assumed that Republicans
sponsored Southern black suffrage because of a moral impulse to promote racial
equality, the bulk of the evidence suggests the Party was more interested in
retaining political power.
When the Civil War ended the Party was barely ten
years old. Its leaders worried that it might be strangled in its cradle if the
re-admittance of Southern states into the Union failed to be managed in a way
that would prevent Southerners from allying with Northern Democrats to regain
control of the federal government. If all former Confederate states were
admitted to the 39th Congress in December 1865 and each added member was a
Democrat, the Republicans would lose their near veto-proof two-thirds majority
in Congress.
Thus, the infant GOP needed to ensure that most of
the new Southern senators and congressmen be Republicans. That meant that
puppet governments had to be formed in the Southern states. Since there were
few white Republicans in the region the Party needed to create a new
constituency.
Consequently, Republicans settled on two goals.
First was mandatory African-American suffrage in all former Confederate states.
The Party correctly reasoned that such a mostly inexperienced electorate could
be manipulated to consistently support Republican interests by way of
demagoguery and political spoils. Second was to deny political power to the
Southern white classes most likely to oppose Republican policies. This was
achieved through disfranchisement of many former Confederates. Finally, the
typical Carpetbag regime set-up an “election returning board” to count votes.
As a result, the “official” vote outcomes were normally consistent with the
desires of the controlling Party regardless of the actual vote.
Professor Guelzo’s video is vulnerable to many
other criticisms. Some are mentioned in the thirty-five
minute audio of
my July presentation at the Abbeville Institute here. Readers may also read that presentation here.
It is disappointing that Dennis Prager and the
American Battlefield Trust sponsored Professor Guelzo’s corruption of history.
Two of my books provide renderings undistorted by
political correctness:
U. S. Grant’s Failed Presidency by Philip Leigh
DENNIS PRAGER’S
ERRORS
By Philip Leigh (September 12, 2019)
Conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager has
become a YouTube success with his five-minute videos on politics, history,
religion and culture. They’ve been viewed 2.5 billion times and he gets
thousands of emails daily. About eighty percent are hosted by prominent experts
that include prime ministers, Nobel Prize winners, professors and other
credentialed authorities. Prager is an especially effective advocate for free
speech, which has even required that he battle YouTube.
Dennis is proud of Prager
U’s popularity and the quality of hosts it normally attracts. On a recent
YouTube “Prager Fireside Chat” he complained that
when critics denounce the videos as inaccurate, “they never give an example.”
So, I’ll provide some. The recent Prager U video with Dr. Allen Guelzo on Reconstruction is
not only inaccurate but also contains outright falsehoods. Guelzo claims that
although white Southerners lost the War, they “won” Reconstruction by
perpetuating a racist society.
First Falsehood. President Andrew Johnson’s
overruled Reconstruction plan would have permitted the former Confederate
states to rejoin the Union by merely ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment
abolishing slavery.
In reality, the plan
also required them to repudiate Confederate debts, including personal savings
bonds. Thus, nearly all that was left in the war-ravaged region was poverty.
Since Johnson considered Abraham Lincoln the greatest American who ever lived,
he felt duty-bound to implement the martyred President’s plan as nearly as
possible. Arguably he understood it as well as anyone since he was Lincoln’s
Vice President and earlier military governor of Tennessee, which was
re-admitted to the Union before Lincoln died. Additionally, Johnson’s plan was
more stringent than Lincoln’s. Former Confederates with $20,000 in
property or previous political influence, for example, had to apply directly to
him for the pardons that would enable some to vote and hold office.
Second Falsehood. The South returned to “economic
backwardness” after the end of Republican Reconstruction in 1877.
In truth, the
region’s “economic backwardness” began with the wreckage of the Civil War,
which ended in 1865 and started in 1861, some twelve to sixteen years earlier.
After surrendering, Confederate soldiers typically returned to families that
were barely surviving under conditions of near starvation. Historian David
L. Cohn writes: “When there was a
shortage of work stock, the few surviving animals were passed from neighbor to
neighbor. [When] there was no work stock [the men] hitched themselves to the
plow. By ingenuity, backbreaking toil, and cruel self-denial thousands of
Southern farmers survived reconstruction . . . They received no aid from any
source, nor any sympathy outside the region.”
Third Falsehood. When white Southerners regained
control of their state governments between 1872 and 1877 they disfranchised black
voters and imposed a Jim Crow culture.
In reality, those
developments came 20-25 years later when the rise of the Populist Party
threatened to return the Southern states to Republican Carpetbag Rule by
weakening the Democratic Party. Southern aversion to the threat can only be
understood by those informed of the corruption and abuses of the Carpetbag
regimes, which Guelzo fails to mention. An objective teacher might have quoted
the following experts:
Booker T.
Washington: “In many cases it seemed to
me that the ignorance of my race was being used as a tool with which to help
[Republican] white men into office, and that there was an element in the North
which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into
positions over the head of the Southern whites.”
Daniel Chamberlain,
who was the last Carpetbag governor of South Carolina where over half the
population was black, wrote decades later in 1900: “In the mass of colored
voters in South Carolina in 1867, what forces could have existed that made for
good government? Ought it not to have been clear . . . that good government . .
. could not be had from such an aggregation of ignorance, inexperience and
incapacity?” He also admitted that the Carpetbag regimes were chiefly intended
to keep the Republicans in control of the federal government. The welfare of
the ex-slaves was, at best, a distant secondary goal: “Underneath all the avowed [Republican] motives . . . lay a deeper
cause . . . the determination to secure party ascendency and control at the
South and in the nation through the negro vote. If this is hard saying, let
anyone now ask himself . . . if it is possibly credible that the [1867]
reconstruction acts would have passed if the negro vote had been believed to be
Democratic.”
Despite often
harshly criticizing the South, Wilbur Cash’s 1929 The Mind of the South observes: “. . . mark how the Yankee was heaping up the
odds. In his manipulation of the unfortunate black man he was . . . generating
a terrible new hatred for him. Worse, he was inevitably extending this hate to
the quarter where there had been no hate before: to the master class.”
Former Confederate
Vice President Alexander Stephens’ remarks to the all-white Georgia legislature
in February 1866 suggest that President Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan might
have had better results for ex-slaves than did Republican Reconstruction:
Wise and humane provisions should be made for [freedmen] . . . so
that they may stand equal before the law, in the possession and enjoyment of
all rights of person, liberty and property. Many considerations claim this at
your hands. Among these may be stated their fidelity in times past. They
cultivated your fields, ministered to your personal wants and comforts, nursed
and reared your children; and even in the hour of danger and peril they were,
in the main, true to you and yours. To them we owe a debt of gratitude, as well
as acts of kindness.
I speak of them as we know them to be, having no longer the
protection of a master or legal guardian; they now need all the protection
which the shield of law can give. But above all, this protection should be
secured because it is right and just . . . .”
Far more powerful
criticism may be applied to Guelzo’s Prager U video on the basis of his
omissions. This article merely focuses on his outright falsehoods because
Dennis Prager claims few critics provide examples of errors. Those wanting to
learn more about Reconstruction free of political correctness may consider two
of my books:
U. S.
Grant’s Failed Presidency by Philip Leigh
SICK: Never
Trumper David French Calls Drag Queen Story Hour a ‘Blessing of Liberty’
Huh?
On Sep 12, 2019 By
Shane Trejo
Long-time National Review columnist
David French has been one of the most vicious and dishonest Never Trumpers for
many years, but he has hit a new low with an endorsement of drag queen story
hour.
In a profile published in the New Yorker about
the future of conservatism, French gave a full-throated endorsement for
the grooming operation that
has given pedophiles and other cross-dressing perverts intimate
access to young children across the country.
“There’s this idea that victory is the
natural state of affairs and defeat is the intolerable intrusion,” French said,
demonstrating the mindset that has caused mainstream conservatism to conserve
nothing throughout the decades.
“What I’ve been trying to tell people is that
none of this stuff is fixed. There is not necessarily an arc to history, and
you don’t have to surrender first principles to fight over stuff that you care
about. The day is not lost in any way, shape, or form. And, oh, by the way, you
can’t define victory as the exclusion of your enemies from the public square,”
French added.
This is when French went completely off
the deep end, making statements that are an affront to every principle that the
founding-era revolutionaries put their lives on the line to protect.
“There are going to be Drag Queen Story
Hours. They’re going to happen. And, by the way, the fact that a person can get
a room in a library and hold a Drag Queen Story Hour and get people to come?
That’s one of the blessings of liberty,” French said.
French has gone on many Twitter tirades
in favor of drag queen story hour in recent months, making justifications for
the obscene practice at every turn.
May 31,
2019 Replying to @mjs_DC
@DavidAFrench Set aside the broader dispute about
conservatism here—this is about constitutionalism. Is Ahmari so horrified by
Drag Queen Story Hour that he wants the state to suppress free expression?
Apparently so! And does really he trust the state to suppress only expression
he dislikes?
This is the key question. To ban drag queen
story hour, you have to adjust the law, and adjusting the law would involve
intruding upon 1) local control of the library; 2) freedom of association; and
3) freedom of speech -- and that's just to start. 12:44
PM - May 31, 2019
· Aug
21, 2019 Replying to
@albertmohler The original
context for the dispute arose out of a rejection of my approach, which is to
preserve civil liberties for all while also seeking a religious revival.
That was the
context of my dismissive remarks about drag queen reading hour, and I wish
you’d noted that. There is no crisis or emergency or catastrophe necessitating backing
away one bit from the protection of civil liberties. 8:44
PM - Aug 21, 2019
It took only
about 38 years of (mostly-conservative) litigation, but the doctrine of
viewpoint-neutral access to public forums is about as established as a
constitutional principle gets. Toss it away to stop drag queens? Nope: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/viewpoint-neutrality-protects-drag-queens-and-millions-american-christians/ … Viewpoint Neutrality Protects Both Drag Queens and
Millions of American Christians “Free
speech for me but not for thee” cannot be an organizing principle of American
life. It is unjust and unwise. nationalreview.com 6:01 PM -
Sep 9, 2019
French has also defended Hollywood director James
Gunn, who made disgusting remarks in favor of
pedophilia that he tried to pass off as
jokes.
“Disney should rehire James Gunn. We’re
rapidly reaching a point where we’re telling our most creative and interesting
people that they can never, ever speak outside the lines,” he wrote after Gunn
was fired. French eventually got his wish, and Gunn was re-hired to direct
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” despite his vile comments.
Making matters worse, French and his wife adopted a young foreign
child from Ethiopia in 2010. The craven opportunist has frequently used his daughter to virtue signal and
attack the President and his supporters. With his support of a glorified
grooming operation for pedophiles and a man who make remarks in favor of
pedophilia, one can only imagine the horrors this child is subjected to within
this monster’s household.
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