February 13, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Two Significant Essays by Paul Gottfried

 

Friends,

Since I began this series of short commentaries (in early 2017) one of the authors I have quoted most frequently has been my friend and mentor, Dr. Paul Gottfried. Along with Pat Buchanan, Ilana Mercer, “The Dissident Mama,” Clyde Wilson, Jack Kerwick, and a few others, Professor Gottfried’s occasional pieces (and his always on-target commentary at Chronicles magazine where he is editor-in-chief) make him one of the most—if not the most—perceptive of writers currently defending the heritage of Western civilization against the cultural barbarians now inside the gates and now on the verge of ending our two millennia-old inheritance once and for all.

What is fascinating is that the observations he has made in early 2021 would have been generally considered unexceptional, completely within the standard canon of scholarship and discussion as late as thirty years ago. But how the times have changed! What was considered normative and reasonable back then is now dogmatically denounced by “woke” academia and the media—including much of “conservative” media—as “right wing extremist” or “white supremacist” or “racist.”  Increasingly we cannot, even with the utmost detachment and care, challenge the shibboleths of the Progressivists who now run rampant like crazed Banshees  in our culture, totally dominate our educational system, operate the media as a private fiefdom, and cajole practically all politicians to do their will, without bringing down upon ourselves the ire and severe punishment of the Establishment. And that “punishment” includes routinely banning from all social media, job firing, destruction of a person’s reputation, harassment at work and at home, and increasingly demands that anyone who dissents, anyone who openly supported Donald Trump, be considered a potential “domestic terrorist.”

Gottfried stands stoutly and fearlessly against that mindless “woke” hysteria and continues to write and publish commentaries that draw from the wellsprings of our Western culture.

I pass on today two recent essays which he published. The first one is a piece written immediately after the January 6 events at the Capitol in Washington DC. Unlike so many of our “conservative” leaders, Professor Gottfried does not wring his hands, do a “Jimmy Swaggart,” and get down on his knees and beg the DC Elites for forgiveness and apologize abjectly for everything that we “Deplorables” supposedly have done. Instead, he pinpoints the utter hypocrisy of not only the Left but also of establishment conservatives and the GOP, who in effect serve essentially as enablers for the always-advancing Left.

The words of the post-War Between the States Southern author Robert Lewis Dabney on the “conservatism” of his day, penned 140 years ago, are entirely apposite here:

“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader…. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom.”

Professor Gottfried will have none of it.

The second essay examines the broadened use of the accusations of “racism” and “white supremacy” to explain how some non-whites (shall we call them “Uncle Toms?”) share in the guilt that the rest of us share. Some on the Left have begun to employ the concept of “multiracial whiteness” to explain this, indeed that “whiteness” as a societal evil goes beyond skin color. It signifies a supremacist attitude which “dehumanizes” and discriminates against others—the “oppressed”—in society. And is essentially a political tactic which uses race to its advantage.

Ashamed of What?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/08/ashamed-of-what/

Let’s stop fixating on Wednesday’s events. We can deplore them once the Left repents of its far, far greater sins.

By Paul Gottfried    January 8, 2021

People ask me if I feel “ashamed” about what Miranda Devine describes as “the clueless insurrection” in the Capitol on Wednesday. My response? I am about as ashamed as Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Juan Williams of Fox News were about the riots and shootings that the Democratic Party subsidized and even justified last summer.

Unlike those violent riots, which the Democrats and national media attributed to white racism, and which came from Democratic voters, the turmoil in the Capitol on Wednesday did not result in burning and looting. There were no white or black policemen shot and the only shooting victim (which the media don’t seem to care about since white Republican lives don’t matter) was a female protestor, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, by a Capitol police officer.

I also heard our Democratic constitutional expert on Fox News, Jonathan Turley, telling us Wednesday evening that pro-Trump thugs had “lost their faith” in our constitutional system. It was for this reason that they “desecrated” our sacred space. I don’t recall similar talk about desecration when the “peaceful protesters” tried to burn down St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House last summer. 

Of course, there was a storm of media abuse afterwards when President Trump spoke before the historical site that had been saved from “peaceful protestors.” Nor do I remember anything more than whispered protest, even on Fox News, when the Democratic Party got howling banshees to invade the Senate chamber to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice and to hassle his supporters. It seems that there are big-time desecrations, for example, when people with MAGA hats commit them, and then there are the entirely excusable ones that transpire when feminist Democrats invade the sacred precinct. 

No, I am not giving a stamp of approval to what occurred in the Capitol. On balance, the actions by pro-Trump forces were not particularly useful for our side, and the death of the lady veteran was nothing short of disastrous. But let’s not pretend, like Rod Dreher, John Podhoretz, George Will, Erick Erickson, and most of the usual suspects that Wednesday’s occupation of the Capitol after an impulsive speech by the president was a horrible black mark on the Right. 

According to these media celebrities, we should be impeaching Trump right now, less than two weeks before the presidency falls to a corrupt, senile political hack, on its way to being turned over to Kamala Harris. We have a duty to punish our side because unlike the other side, we should be especially virtuous and shun any conflict, except of course with the American Right. Erickson went so far as to call on the police to “shoot the protestors.”

I must also take exception with Miranda Devine, who asserts that Trump’s supporters and Trump himself have now given the Left “a free pass to persecute their ideological enemies while enacting their pet cultural Marxist projects and changing this country irrevocably for the worst.” This is inevitably just what the one-party Left will do, but not because of what happened Wednesday. 

Devine also provides the real reason—namely, that the Senate is now “in Democratic control, thanks to Tuesday’s runoff debacle.” Because of the vote counting in that race, which looked every bit as suspect as what occurred in the same state in November, our wacky cultural Marxist Left will soon be able to do what it wants with the federal government. The media will cover for any outrage this Left unleashes, and Conservatism, Inc. will predictably do its part as gatekeeper for the politically correct Right.

What happened Wednesday is comparable to the way other would-be totalitarians take over. They manufacture crises that justify their unchecked power. The Nazi regime used the attempted burning of the Reichstag in March 1933 to marginalize opposition. If a Reichstag fire had not come along, some other pretext would have been devised to justify the Third Reich’s tightening grip. The Left, once in charge of the federal government, will unroll with media cooperation multiple examples of “prejudice” and “discrimination” that it will then proceed to address—e.g., imposed gender roles at birth, distinctions between citizens and illegal aliens (read: future Democratic voters), and the unsettling effects of gender-specific pronouns. There will also be more lockdowns, probably long after the COVID-19 infection rate plummets because of the vaccine, and green deals in abundance. 

None of this will happen because of what overly combative Trump demonstrators did Wednesday. It will take place because the Left is maniacal and power-driven and those on the other side are led by wusses and nonstop apologists. But let’s stop fixating on Wednesday’s events. We can deplore them once the Left repents of its far, far greater sins.

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‘Multiracial Whiteness’ Is the Latest Leftist Branding Iron

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/multiracial-whiteness-is-the-latest-leftist-branding-iron/

“White nationalist” and “white supremacist” serve the same function in our denatured republic as “running dog of capitalism” did in Maoist China or “parasitic capitalist” did in the Third Reich.

By Paul Gottfried   January 26, 2021

Fraser Myers recently asked at Spiked how blacks and Latinos could vote for Donald Trump and in some cases enthusiastically join demonstrations for him, given the supposedly obvious fact that that Trump is a white supremacist. According to Myers, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán answered this troubling question in the Washington Post in a memorable gloss on “whiteness”:

Whiteness is the politics of aggression, exclusion, and domination. And multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political colour and not simply a racial identity. It is a ‘discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanisation of others.’

And so now we understand. “Whiteness,” or what Beltrán elsewhere designates as “multiracial whiteness,” does not refer exclusively to Caucasians as opposed to black people or to some other race. It is holding a “discriminatory worldview” that causes someone to engage in the “dehumanization” of others. This may be what President Biden (or his speechwriter) had in mind when he went after “white nationalists” but conveniently forgot to mention Black Lives Matter and Antifa as persistent hellraisers. And white supremacists are people we should ostracize and strip of their rights because they practice dehumanization. Moreover, the disease of “whiteness” has befallen nonwhites as well as biological whites, and we would do well to reeducate these bigoted nonwhites, particularly the ones who wore MAGA hats and voted for Trump.

Allow me to make another point that may strike some readers as strange. The main struggle in which we are now engaged as a society and civilization has little to do with race. Blacks, like Muslims in Europe, have an assigned function that comes from those higher up in the food chain. Their job is to aid the cultural Left as an auxiliary force. They are there to help predominantly white elites crush and humiliate other whites, a.k.a. the Deplorables or les Ploucs in France. Therefore, minority members who misbehave should be severely disciplined, lest others in their ranks insist on their own thoughts.

This is not to say that those minority groups recruited by the Left don’t have issues, e.g., dysfunctional societies, unjustified or exaggerated resentments against police, or atavistic tribal prejudices. As the young West Indian economist Lipton Matthews points out on the Chronicles blog, a black upper class controls the black underclass by engaging shamelessly in race hustling. There is a gaping financial disparity between these race hustlers and those whom they manipulate, and so the attacks on whites launched by such notables as U.S. Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Reverend Al Sharpton may be intended to hide an otherwise embarrassing truth. 

But such problems are not the main causes for the upheaval in our society or the disintegration of civilizational norms. Even if all the radicalized minorities departed, we would still be faced with the challenge of affluent, and influential whites who are promoting and paying for the derailment in progress. The usual suspects would go on causing mischief, including the financing of rioters, unless we found some way of replacing them or drastically limiting their influence. 

The focus on critical race theory is not really meant to make blacks feel good about themselves. It is an enterprise pushed by those whites who run our cultural and educational institutions. It is designed to degrade other whites, whom our leaders profoundly despise. The same is true for the pulling down of monuments, starting with Confederate Memorial statues and then going on to those of Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Jesus, and so on. This too is being done to humiliate ordinary, patriotic, God-fearing Americans, and white vandals are often on the forefront of the destruction. 

The cat is finally out of the bag about the identity of supposed “white supremacists.” We are not speaking here about white people who set out to do harm to nonwhites. We are describing those whom financially secure leftists are out to debase and ruin. And they don’t have to be white to become targets of these leftists, since “whiteness” is not primarily about skin color. It refers to those whom the powerful classify as “dehumanizers,” and therefore set out to dehumanize. Terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” serve the same function in our denatured republic as “running dog of capitalism” did in Maoist China or “parasitic capitalist” did in the Third Reich. They are terms that the powerful apply to those whom they deem enemies of their “unified” regime. 

Presumably, Joe Biden in his newest incarnation opposes “whiteness” in the same way as Professor Beltrán and Spiked. This branding iron is reserved for the opponents of an advancing leftist agenda. And this new form of denigration couldn’t have come at a better time, or so our rulers might imagine. Since American whites have been beleaguered with talk about white privilege and systemic racism, it may be easy to frighten them into submission by condemning them as white supremacists. Members of other races will naturally avoid contact with carriers of the whiteness bacillus, which has now spread even to nonwhites. Beltrán’s “multiracial whiteness” will soon find a place in the rhetoric of our socially radical rulers.