May 1, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Is It Time to Break Up the American Union, or Will a Real Shooting
Civil War Be Unleashed?
Friends,
In
1209, at the siege of Bezier, France, during the Albigensian civil war, when
asked how to distinguish the enemies within the captured city from the friends,
one of the commanders, Arnaud Amalric, purportedly replied to his troops: “Kill
them all; God will recognize His own.”
That
saying has come down to us in one form or another, has been utilized more
recently by frustrated American soldiers during brutal guerilla-style conflicts
(when civilian killers become indistinguishable from outright guerilla
fighters), and is now frequently employed in other formats.
And
it occurred to me during the aftermath of the latest White House
Correspondents’ Dinner, this past Saturday night [April 28] in Washington, D.C.
And it was not just because of the gross and profanity-laced political comments
of “comic” Michelle Wolf—although they do illustrate supremely the outrageously
vile, vicious and venomous mindset and ideology of the large group of Americans
that Wolf exemplifies.
The
salient and undeniable fact is that Wolf’s “act” is the tiny tip of an immense
iceberg, it represents the actual and real condition, the irreparable and
unbridgeable chasm that characterizes the American nation today. We live not in
“one nation under God” and under a Constitution drafted by wise and prudent
Framers, but rather we inhabit at least two evolving, radically different
countries, each in a centrifugal manner hurtling at break neck speed in
opposite directions, with opposite beliefs, and with nearly diametrically
opposite conceptions of reality. In effect, we live in the middle of a real and
palpable civil war, intellectually, and increasingly marked by real violence.
Recall
the old folk story of the hunter who fell into a pit with a mountain cougar,
and who screamed to his friend to fire into the pit with his rifle. His friend
replied: “But if I shoot down there, I might hit you!” And the hunter answered:
“Please go ahead; one of us has got to get some relief!”
One
of us—one group of Americans—has got to get some relief.
Those
representatives of the Mainstream Media, most of academia and Hollywood, a
goodly portion of the “Silicon Valley” technocrat types, the San Francisco/East
Coast establishment, the protected minorities (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQs,
illegal immigrants, etc.), most of the political and managerial class that
dominates Washington DC, and the globally-connected Wall Street elites—they
form one clearly visible “faction” (to use a term employed pejoratively by the
Founders of our republic).
Over
the years they have established dominance over most of the major cultural and political
organs and institutions of our country, attempting to dictate our thinking, how
we see ourselves and others, and what we say and how we say it. And in this
they have been largely successful.
This
strategy was explained many decades ago by Marxist theoreticians like the
Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who outlined a “long march”—a gradual subversion—through
the institutions of the Christian West as the surest way of defeating the
traditional West and overturning its beliefs. That infiltration and
transformation would take years, and along the way it would require a
“replacement strategy,” through which fundamental ingredients of Western
thought and judgment would be substituted by newer templates and contrary
narratives…and even entire races (e.g., the white race) would eventually be
replaced (and extinguished) by mass immigration.
More
recently, the particular applications of this assault have been detailed by
individuals such as the anti-colonialist Marxist Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) on racism
and “white oppression,” French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault
(on the “deconstruction” of language and meaning), Saul Alinsky (in Rules for Radicals, 1971) on the
specific implementation of these ideas socially and politically, and various
others. The theories of these minions of Revolution now percolate as the norms
for our schools and colleges, imposed on our children—they inform and underlie
what Hollywood offers us in cinema and entertainment—they restrict and shape
our rhetoric and our political language. And increasingly to oppose them, not
to accept their authoritarian demands, will get you exiled from our New World
Order society, condemned as a racist, or, perhaps (as in Europe), even jailed
for “hate speech.”
The
chasm—the widening separation in our society—between this newly-erected and
powerful “establishment” and those millions of citizens who had not yet been completely
infected with the Revolutionary virus has become clearly visible since the
election of outsider Donald Trump…which was not supposed to happen. The
gruesome face of eighty years of subversion, the hitherto mostly occult and
hidden “rough beast”—the Deep State—has been forced to reveal its rotten but
sharp teeth and its unflinching and unbridled hatred for those that its chosen
standard bearer, Hillary Clinton labeled the “deplorables,” those who were “irredeemable.”
In
its seemingly unstoppable effort to capture and control our institutions and
the major organs of our society, the Revolution has counted on those newly-won
institutions as vehicles for conversion of the citizenry. One, perhaps two more
presidential elections, continued appointment of a Progressivist judiciary, and
continued and intensive propagandizing in our schools and colleges and via our
entertainment—and in another ten years or so, any real opposition to this
strategy would have been neutered, rendered impotent, and made irrelevant,
swept away by the “tide of history” and the “forces of Progress.”
But
the slight window that opened in November 2016 has at the very least delayed
these plans, forcing those multifaceted forces of Revolution to reveal
themselves as never before. Donald Trump
for them has become a symbol—it is not
really just “the Donald” that they hate…and fear. Like many of us who supported
his candidacy, they also understand what he represents
and has unleashed, which is potentially far more significant than the one brash
New York billionaire coming down to the Potomac with the slogan of “making
American great again.”
They
can attempt unseat him or impeach him (as the farther Left attempts to do), or
to surround him with their advisors and consultants (as the anti-Trump Neoconservatives
do). But a breach, albeit a small one, has been opened: the Web is filled with
those who no longer accept the tutelage and correction of the Elites and
chastisement of the go-along-to-get-along “conservative movement,” which has
become more or less the feeble “right wing” of the Revolution, with shared
basic principles on issues like race, democracy and equality. The demands that
we vote Republican, no matter who the GOP candidate is, ring increasingly
hollow—that old-fashioned triangulation no longer works like it once did:
voters—“deplorables”—are demanding more than party loyalty and fealty to the
dictates of Mitch McConnell.
The
Revolution tries mightily to “put the genie back into the magic lamp.” Yes,
the Revolution has been around, in effect, since the serpent first tempted Adam
and since Satan, himself, tempted Our Lord. Its many-headed Hydra rises in each
age, and like the bloodthirsty “sans-culottes” of the French Revolution (to
quote Russell Kirk) asks: “What think ye of me?”
Tragically,
we seem to be reaching a breaking point, a point at which the citizens of what
is left of the old republic, the “bitter clingers” left in the American
heartland, witnessing the phalanxes of Evil arrayed against them, cry out in
righteous anger for relief against those who not only pervert our culture but
steal our children, and destroy our birthright and our faith…that maybe it is
time to undo the American union once so hopefully formed in Philadelphia 231
years ago? That may be our stark choice: separation, or “kill them all, and let God sort them out.”
Three
essays I append today to this column: two by Pat Buchanan and one by Jack
Kerwick. Buchanan discusses the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and its
significance, and then looks at the recent visit of French President Emmanuel
Macron to Washington and what that means in the continuing globalist efforts to
overcome any scintilla of American reluctance to support the New World Order
(Note: remember that Marc Thiessen and most of the Neocons on Fox News
supported Macron over Marine Le Pen, who was they asserted a “far right”
nationalist and populist—you could almost smell whiffs of “fascism” coming from
her!).
Lastly,
I append my friend Jack Kerwick’s essay on “America as Idea,” that is, the
zealous vision of both the farther Left and the Neoconservative Left that
America is or represents an ideology, and that ideology is, let us identify it,
just one more head of that many-headed Hydra of Revolution—universal egalitarianism
and imposed liberal democracy—that leads to the final enslavement of the human race,
barbarism, denatured and corrupted, without God and without salvation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smut Night at the
Press Dinner
By Patrick J.
Buchanan Tuesday - May 1, 2018
Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, billed
as a celebration of the First Amendment and a tribute to journalists who
"speak truth to power," has to be the worst advertisement in memory
for our national press corps.
Comedian Michelle Wolf, the guest speaker, recited one filthy joke after
another at the expense of President Trump and his people, using words that
would have gotten her kicked out of school not so long ago. Media critic Howard
Kurtz said he had "never seen a performance like that," adding that
Wolf "was not only nasty but dropping F-bombs on live television."
Some of her stuff was grungier than that.
The anti-Trump media at the black-tie dinner laughed and whooped it up, and
occasionally "oohed" as Wolf went too far even for them, lending
confirmation to Trump's depiction of who and what they are.
While the journalistic elite at the black-tie dinner was reveling in the raw
sewage served up by Wolf, Trump had just wrapped up a rally in Michigan. The
contrast between the two assemblies could not have been more stark. We are
truly two Americas now.
"Why would I want to be stuck in a room with a bunch of fake-news liberals
who hate me?" said Trump in an email to supporters, adding that he would
much rather "spend the evening with my favorite deplorables who love our
movement and love America."
Her
objective in arranging this year's dinner, said WHCA president Margaret Talev,
was "in unifying the country," but "we may have fallen a little
bit short on that goal." The lady has a gift for understatement.
With revulsion at Wolf's performance coming in strong on Sunday, journalists
began to call for a halt to inviting comedians, with some urging an end to the
annual dinner that Trump has twice boycotted. These dinners are becoming "close
to suicidal for the press's credibility," writes Margaret Sullivan in The
Washington Post.
How did the White House Correspondents' Association descend to this depth? In 1962, along with friends at the Columbia
Graduate School of Journalism, this writer hung out outside the dinner, as we
talked to legendary Pulitzer Prize-wining investigative reporter Clark
Mollenhoff.
A memorable evening and though most of the press there had probably been JFK
voters in 1960, these journalists would never have sat still for Saturday
night's festival of contempt.
Nor has the older Gridiron dinner descended to this depth. A white-tie affair at the Statler Hilton, it
is put on by the Gridiron Club, one of whose rules is, "Women are always
present." Nothing is to be said from the podium that might affront a lady.
And the jokes from the rival party speakers are to "singe, but not
burn."
What happened to the WHCA dinner? The evening has become less a celebration of
the First Amendment than a celebration of the press themselves, how wonderful
they are and how indispensable they are to our democracy. Yet in the eyes of tens of millions of their
countrymen, they are seen not as "speaking truth to power," but as
using their immense power over American communications to punish their enemies,
advance their own agendas, and, today, bring down a president.
The press denounces Trump for calling the media "the enemy of the
people." But is there any doubt that the mainstream media are, by and
large, enemies of Trump and looking to Robert Mueller to solve their problem?
Saturday's White House Correspondents' dinner recalls to mind T.S. Eliot's
insight that, "Things reveal themselves passing away."
It was saturated with detestation of Trump, his people, and what they
represent.
How did we get here? Like our cultural elite in Hollywood and the arts, and our
academic elite in the Ivy League, our media elite is a different breed than we
knew in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Our institutions passed through the great
cultural, social and moral revolution of the late 20th century, and they have
emerged different on the other side.
Most of the Washington press corps at that dinner have next to nothing in
common with the folks who voted for Trump and cheered him in Michigan. And
Hillary Clinton surely spoke for many of the Beltway media laughing at Wolf's
jokes when she said:
"(Y)ou could put half of Trump's
supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. ... The racist, sexist,
homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic ... (Trump) tweets and retweets their
offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are
irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."
It's good to know what folks really think of you.
Perhaps, rather than seeking to create a synthetic unity, those who so deeply
and viscerally disagree — on politics, morality, culture and even good and evil
— ought peacefully to go their separate ways.
We
both live in the USA, but we inhabit different countries.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Macron: The Last
Multilateralist
By
Patrick J. Buchanan Friday - April 27, 2018
"Together," President Macron instructed President Trump, "we can
resist the rise of aggressive nationalisms that deny our history and divide the
world." Before Congress he
denounced "extreme nationalism," invoked the U.N., NATO, WTO, and
Paris climate accord, and implored Trump's America to come home to the New
World Order. "The United States is the one who invented this
multilateralism," Macron went on, "you are the one now who has to
help preserve and reinvent it."
His visit was hailed and his views cheered, but, on reflection, the ideas of
Emmanuel Macron seem to be less about tomorrow than yesterday. For the world he celebrates is receding into
history.
The America of 2018 is coming to see NATO as having evolved into an endless
U.S. commitment to go to war with Russia on behalf of a rich Europe that
resolutely refuses to provide for its own defense. Since the WTO was created in the mid-'90s,
the U.S. has run $12 trillion in trade deficits; and among the biggest
beneficiaries — the EU. Under the Paris
climate accord, environmental restrictions are put upon the United States from
which China is exempt. As for the U.N.,
is that sinkhole of anti-Americanism, the General Assembly, really worth the
scores of billions we have plunged into it?
"Aggressive nationalism" is a term that might well fit Napoleon
Bonaparte whose Arc de Triomphe sits on the Champs-Elysees. But does it really
fit the Hungarians, Poles, Brits, Scots, Catalans and other indigenous peoples
of Europe who are now using democratic methods and means to preserve a national
home for the unique peoples to whom they belong?
And the United States would seem an odd place to go about venting on
"aggressive nationalisms that deny our history."
Did Macron not learn at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris or the Ecole Nationale
d'Administration how the Americans acquired all that land? General Washington, at whose Mount Vernon
home Macron dined, was a nationalist who fought for six years to sever
America's ties to the nation under which he was born. How does Macron think
Andrew Jackson acquired Florida from Spain, Sam Houston acquired Texas from
Mexico, and Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor acquired the Southwest? By
bartering?
Aggressive nationalism is a good synonym for the Manifest Destiny of a republic
that went about relieving Spain of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.
How does Macron think the "New World" was conquered and colonized if
not by aggressive British, French and Spanish nationalists determined to impose
their rule upon weaker indigenous tribes?
Was it not nationalism that broke up the USSR into 15 nations?
Was not the Zionist movement that resurrected Israel in 1948, and, in 1967,
captured the West Bank, and then annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights,
a manifestation of aggressive nationalism?
Macron is an echo of that George H.W. Bush who, in Kiev in 1991, warned
Ukrainians against the "suicidal nationalism" of declaring
independence from the Russian Federation.
"Aggressive nationalisms ... divide the world," warns Macron. Well, yes, they do, which is why we have now
194 members of the U.N., rather than the original 50. Is this a problem? "Together,"
said Macron, "we will build a new, strong multilateralism that defends
pluralism and democracy in the face of ill winds."
Macron belongs to a political class that sees open borders and free trade
thickening and tightening the ties of dependency, and eventually creating a One
Europe, whose destiny his crowd will forever control. But if his idea of
pluralism is multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nations, with a
multilateral EU overlord, he is describing a future that tens millions of
Europeans believe means the death of the nations that give meaning to their
lives. And they will not go gentle into
that good night.
In America, too, millions have come to recognize that there is a method to the
seeming madness of open borders. Name of the game: dispossessing the
deplorables of the country they love.
With open borders and mass migration of over a million people a year into the
USA, almost all of them peoples of color from Third World countries who vote
70-90 percent Democratic, the left is foreclosing the future. The left is
converting the greatest country of the West into what Teddy Roosevelt called a
"polyglot boarding house for the world." And in that boarding house
the left will have a lock on the presidency.
With the collaboration of co-conspirators in the media, progressives throw a
cloak of altruism over the cynical seizure of permanent power. For, as the millions of immigrants, here
legally and illegally, register, and the vote is extended to prison inmates,
ex-cons and 16-year-olds, the political complexion of America will come to
resemble San Francisco.
End goal: Ensure that what happened in 2016, when the nation rose up and threw
out a despised establishment, never happens again.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
America-as-Idea:
A Fiction With Many Uses
Your average American generally and your average
flag-waving, parade-attending American specifically, is likely to be unaware of
two facts.
First, when Republicans and Democrats, “liberals” and
“conservatives,” in government and Big Media reference America, they have
something very different in mind than that entertained by everyday Americans
when the latter refer to their country.
Secondly, Republicans and Democrats, “liberals” and
“conservatives,” in government and Big Media, despite the appearance of
consistent disagreement, actually endorse one and the same conception of
America. It is the conception of America that, for reasons that will
later be disclosed, is championed by the Mono-Party, the Regime,
or, as I call it, the Big GAME (Government-Academic-Media-Entertainment
complex).
From this stance, America is an Idea.
America is depicted as the first and only nation in all of
human history to have been “founded” upon a “principle” or “proposition.”
Thus, like any other idea, like any other mental phenomenon,
it is fundamentally immaterial. What
this in turn means is that while America is typically identified with certain
particulars like a landmass, a government, a legal order, etc., ultimately it
is a trans-historical, trans-cultural Idea that just happens to
be instantiated—imperfectly instantiated—in such contingent, material forms.
In the last analysis, then, America is an Idea that, as
such, is borderless.
As to the exact character of this Idea, proponents differ
amongst themselves. Usually, however, America is conceived as a creed affirming
“human rights,” “Democracy,” ideals of Freedom and Equality, or something along
the lines of these abstractions. But however its proponents decide to
construe the Idea, they agree that America’s identity is
anchored in this timeless, immutable Essence.
This Idea or Essence is also normative. It is ethical:
The Idea is something to which all human beings the planet over should aspire.
In this vision of America-as-Idea, we see ontology and
ethics converge seamlessly: America, ultimately, is a moral reality.
America-as-Idea also implicates its own peculiar epistemology.
Because the Idea purports to be a timeless object of discovery, it is said, as
Jefferson says of our “unalienable rights,” that it is “self-evident.”
That is, the epistemology is unmistakably and
inevitably rationalist. Knowledge of
the Idea is a priori, independent of
experience. Hence, in theory, it is accessible to all rational creatures in all
places and at all times.
This conception of America is the official, contemporary
understanding promoted by The Big GAME, the Regime. It
is the vision of leftist ideologues and the Deputized Right, of “progressivism”
and Big Conservatism (the Big Con) alike.
The question as to why or how it is that partisans of seemingly different
stripes have managed to coalesce around the same conception of America can be
answered easily enough even on the dubious assumption that such
partisans really are of different stripes:
From the vantage of America-as-Idea, America is an ideological or creedal nation.
In other words, America so conceived is an ideology.
Admittedly, America-as-Idea—an idea that is racially,
culturally, ethnically, and theologically-neutral—is a potentially (but
by no means necessarily) conciliatory device in the increasingly multi-racial,
multi-ethnic, and multi-religious America of 2018. Nevertheless, it isn’t
likely for the sake of reconciling rival racial and other interests that the
movers and shakers of the GAME labor tirelessly to depict America as an
ideological nation.
America-as-Idea serves purposes that are at once political
and economic.
America-as-Idea, given its character as an ideology, can be
concisely reduced to a small handful of propositions that, with minimal effort,
virtually any person can learn by rote. Given that it consists of abstractions,
and abstractions, by their nature, are general and vague, America-as-Idea
readily lends itself to conscription in the service of virtually any agenda
that its proponents seek to advance.
By annexing to itself the Nation of Immigrants myth,
America-as-Idea not only permits endless immigration from everywhere on the
planet; it positively encourages it. While it’s true that relatively few
of its proponents explicitly advocate on behalf of a literally borderless
America, and while it’s undoubtedly true that most proponents of this vision of
America recognize the undesirability, or at least the impracticality, of
welcoming the world’s population into their country, it’s no less true that any
restrictions they seek to impose on immigration can’t but appear as arbitrary and,
therefore, unfair:
If America is an Idea that, like every other mental entity,
is literally borderless, comprised as it is of a principle or small set of
principles that can effortlessly be confined to memory and affirmed by anyone
with the inclination to do so, then any person in any location of the world in
effect becomes an American the moment he or she pledges allegiance to these
principles. Immigration law designed to impose caps and quotas, to say
nothing of bans on immigrants from certain countries, can only appear as, at
best, a practical and temporary expedient. Or maybe it will strike
observers as a necessary evil.
At worst, restrictions on immigration will be viewed as
unjustified, the expression of “discrimination,” “racism,” “xenophobia,” and so
forth.
Even legislation regarding the steps for citizenship must
appear morally suspect from the perspective of the champions of
America-as-Idea, for, to reiterate, a person becomes an American the moment
that he or she embraces the Principle that is America. The bipartisan chorus
regarding the “brokenness” of America’s immigration system, I submit, reflects
this belief. After all, it is virtually always and only those who want more immigration
and amnesty (by some euphemistic name or other) who most loudly bemoan our
“broken” system.
So, America-as-Idea, vis-à-vis endless, Third World
immigration, serves the economic interests of Big Business and the Chamber of
Commerce by way of supplying cheap labor, and it serves the political interests
of Democrats and leftists by supplying votes.
Yet there is also an ideological interest advanced on this
front: The “Anti-Racism/Diversity” offensive of the GAME requires
America-as-Idea.
Since America is an Idea, it no more belongs to a person or
exclusive set of people than do Plato’s Forms, Augustine’s Divine Ideas, or any
other ontological or moral propositions purporting to be timeless, universal,
and objective.
America-as-Idea, that is, is not a creation; it’s
an object of discovery.
America-as-Idea, by way of the massive planetary immigration
that it encourages, serves the ideological end of combatting “White Privilege”
and “institutional racism” and promoting Diversity, Tolerance, and
Inclusion. It as well facilitates “free trade” and “capitalism.”
On the foreign policy front, America-as-Idea provides the
ideological underpinning for limitless military interventionism. If proponents
deem that governments have insufficiently affirmed the Idea that is America—the
ideal of Democracy, say, or Human Rights—then “regime change” is a moral
necessity and the regime’s subjects ripe for “liberation.”
The policy of interventionism, like immigration, speaks to
the ideological, economic, and political ambitions of the agents of the GAME.
Ideologically, the ideals of Freedom, Equality, human
rights, and Democracy get an assist from the enterprise of going to war in
their name.
Economically speaking, the Military-Industrial-Complex
against which President Eisenhower long ago warned his fellow Americans is
enriched. Not only do military contractors profit enormously, but so too
do those in the media profit via ratings and circulation.
Politically, those in government can use the occasion of war
to drum up fear and impress upon their constituents a sense of national
“crisis,” which is a Godsend for politicians in that a crisis is always
pregnant with possibilities for the consolidation of power, further
centralization of government authority, and, of course, reelection.
And there is no crisis like that of war, the
penultimate call for the mobilization and collectivization of human resources.
So, your garden-variety, patriotic American will do himself
a good turn to bear in mind the many uses and interests that this ahistorical
fiction of America serves the next time he hears a politician or pundit refer
to America as an Idea.
==============================================================================
