October 18, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Polls, Donald Trump, and Secession

 

Friends,

Far too many pundits and commentators live and die by polls. It seems that each day some on-air talking head or online spinmeister reveals breathlessly increasingly bad results for President Trump and anyone who dares to support him or intends to vote for him.

Consider the following headlines blasted out recently by television news:

“The President has now slipped again in the polls and is behind Biden in the six battleground states.”

“Trump is behind Biden now by 12 points.”

“Georgia, a once safe GOP stronghold, is now in play, as is Texas.”

And the pattern goes on, daily and incessantly.

At the same time, Joe Biden’s essentially stay-at-home, don’t-rock-the-boat, don’t-answer-controversial-questions strategy seems to be working if you believe the pundits. Witness his “town hall” forum Thursday night, October 15, on the ABC network, where not only he faced a moderator (George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton hack) who served up careful soft-ball questions to him, but planted supporters who did likewise. Nothing really difficult, nothing that would disturb his visible senility and obvious inability to form or give a substantial answer to a mildly challenging question.

Of course, even if it is true that many Trump voters will vote for the president despite his rough exterior and bull-in-a-china-shop approach to issues, most of Biden’s supporters will pull the Democratic lever not because Biden is a fountain of intellectual brilliance and political savviness, but because of their hatred of Donald Trump…a hatred engendered by the media, the educational establishment, and the entertainment industry.

Back in 2016 actually only one polling outfit got almost everything right about the presidential election.  The Scott Rasmussen organization—Rasmussen Reports—came out ahead of nearly all eleven major polling groups: “Rasmussen Reports told you all along that it was a much closer race than most other pollsters predicted. We weren’t surprised Election Night. They were."

Once again Rasmussen is predicting a much closer election than the other polling organizations, including Fox (who were miserably wrong in 2016).

The results of the most recent Rasmussen Reports survey (Wednesday, October 14) have Biden ahead of Trump by only five percentage points, 50% to 45%, comparable to the polling results at this time in 2016.

Following the helter-skelter first presidential debate (September 29) and the initial flurry of news about the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the president apparently took a hit. Rasmussen had Trump losing to Biden by 12 points: “In mid-September, the candidates were neck and neck, but following Trump’s announcement that he was nominating federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, Biden moved from a narrow one-point lead to eight points ahead. Last week following the candidates’ first debate and Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, the Democrat jumped to a 12-point advantage.”

That survey occurred between September 30 (immediately after the first debate) and October 1 and 4-6.

But between those dates and the most recent Rasmussen Reports  (October 14) three things happened. First came the vice-presidential debate on October 7, with Vice-President Mike Pence squaring off with Senator Kamala Harris, who continually smirked condescendingly at Pence, but also at the American electorate. Pence’s performance was substantive and direct, and overall a compelling case for the current administration.

Secondly, viewers had an opportunity to watch and digest portions of the televised Senate hearings with Amy Coney Barrett. After viewing her poise and unrattled intelligence on display in the face of some very hostile questions from Democratic members of the upper legislative chamber, the latest Rasmussen survey indicates “that 51% of likely U.S. voters believe the Senate should confirm Barrett as a Supreme Court justice based on what they know at this time. That’s a 12-point increase from 39% when we first asked this question in late September just after President Trump nominated Barrett to fill the seat of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Forty percent (40%) still disagree, but that’s down from 49% in the first survey.”

And, thirdly, the president made a quick and total recovery from the COVID-19 virus, and is back on the electoral trail as the happy warrior he normally is—while Biden, forced now to get out of his basement occasionally, continues to avoid inconvenient questions, with the blatantly obvious assistance of the major media.

Significantly, in this age of virulent cancel culture and personal reputation assassination by the Progressivist thuggery online (and on the air), and the real fear that many voters have about revealing their political sentiments to pollsters—particularly true of conservatives—even the 50% to 45% results may belie something that is actually happening beyond the surveys of pollsters, just as in 2016. In fact, the Trafalgar Group chief pollster Robert Cahaly forecasts that the “silent Trump vote” will be twice as large for the president this year than in the last election and that he will win a very tight electoral victory.

Add to this the growing Hunter Biden/Joe Biden “pay-to-play” scandal (as revealed in solidly-sourced articles in the New York Post)…a situation that the establishment media and the tech giants Facebook and Twitter have done their damnedest to suppress and keep a lid on.  Thus far they have been partially successful, but the next two weeks may see additional permutations and explosive news details. Look for the tightening and frenzied grip of the Leftist tech monopoly on our public discourse, as the Deep State apparatchiks strive desperately to avoid a repeat of 2016.

The question now is just what will take place on November 3, and then, in the days that follow when hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of votes will be “found” and the specter of suddenly-appearing ballots or tossed ballots will raise its ugly head.

No presidential election since 1860 (including the disputed one in 2000) has been fraught with such momentous consequences. Indeed, mainstream writers have raised the question of possible separation or secession of some states. It would not be much of a stretch politically to see California, Oregon, and Washington State refuse to accept a Donald Trump electoral victory, especially if the popular vote goes against him. Indeed, George Mason University law professor F. H. Buckley, in his volume American Secession: The Looming Threat of A National Breakup (Encounter Books), suggests this a serious possibility. And I have done likewise in two widely diffused articles first published by The Abbeville Institute: “Is Secession the Answer?” from February 4, 2019, and “Is Political Separation in Our Future?” from August 19, 2019.

More and more it seems certain that the Southern constitutionalists in late 1860 and early 1861 were right historically, and the conclusion of the military conflict in 1865 in fact did not really settle fundamental issues. The post-war triumph of 19^th century liberalism and big financial capitalism, followed by the onrushing waves of state socialism conjoined with globalism as an almost natural result, just perhaps have run their course. We live, it seems, in a geographical entity, once a nation founded on certain principles that fully one half of the population now angrily rejects and scorns.

The next month or two will be a crucial watershed in the history of the country welded together with such great hopes in 1787. Will it continue as we have known it? Will the Progressivist totalitarians finally secure complete control? Will violence on a scale never before seen in our history erupt on our streets?

I don’t know…but since I was doxxed by Leftwing crazies over in Chapel Hill late this summer, I am sleeping with a pistol next to my bed. God help us all.

                                                            October 13, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Who Are the Real “Crazies”?

 

Friends,

A few days ago I sent out to some friends a short piece, unsigned, on “gaslighting.” If you follow media pundits and online scribblers, you’ve probably heard or seen the term used in a political or social context and wondered exactly what it meant.

Gaslighting, in that currently employed sense, can be defined as a form of psychological abuse aimed at controlling a person by altering perceived reality to the point where the person will doubt his own sanity. Essentially it involves mental manipulation  “in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and information, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s beliefs.”  

This usage apparently originates with the play, Gas Light (1938) and two succeeding classic movies from 1940 and 1944 (this latter film famously stars Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten). The main character in the play (and in the films) literally attempts to drive his wife crazy by gradually dimming the gas-powered lights in their home. As she complains that the lights seem to be getting dimmer, her husband not only denies the fact, but convinces her that it is just her imagination…to the point where she begins to question her own sanity.  

In contemporary America “gaslighting” has become a praxis, a weapon of choice of the post-Marxist Progressivist Left: That is, repeatedly projecting on to their opponents the belief and sense that somehow they (we), because of our "unenlightened views" are racist, sexist, and "against progress and 'democratic values'."  Nearly the entirety of the media, the entertainment industry, and many political leaders do this on a regular basis; it is inculcated into our children in practically all our schools.... And once we begin to believe that meme, we then retreat from real opposition, we may apologize for our perceived sins, and defensively we may compromise and give way, or just be silent.

This praxis has been very successful in essentially neutering many voices of the supposed opposition to the madness that is eating away at our society.  

How many elected Republicans have given way to “gaslighting” for fear of being called “racists” or “white supremacists”? But not just their apologies or silence, and their running to hide “in the tall grass”: Some have convinced themselves of the rightness of Progressivist positions, even supporting them publicly. We only need cite the literally dozens of former Bush administration officials, staffers for John McCain (his wife is voting for Biden) and Mitt Romney, and Neoconservatives like Max Boot, Bill Kristol, and others who now openly support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  

Does this not indicate something deeply disquieting about these so-called "Establishment Conservatives"? That they are easily spooked by the constant barrage of Progressivist accusations is one thing…but more profoundly, does this not indicate their own lack of deeply-held conservative convictions?  

And these were the folks we were to support as our champions in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012?  

Whatever criticisms we might level at Donald Trump, and yes, certainly there are some, he has at least done one thing of immense value: he has torn the mask partially off those "Deep State" apparatchiks, made them surface publicly, revealing them as the condescending elitists, Managerial State globalists that they are. And that, despite all the negative things, in a sense compensates in some ways for many of the Donald's peccadillos....  

It is those who righteously claim the Progressivist mantle who are the real madmen, lacking rationality, outside reality, and strangers to the inherent laws of nature and Divine Positive Laws of God. It is they who, like demons from the bowels of Hell, seek to convince us that we are "outside reality" and "unprogressive." And in this they engage in a form of transference, that is, projecting zealously onto their victims—onto the “deplorables” and those who dissent from their template—the insecurities and sense that our thinking and actions are somehow distorted, wrong, hurtful, and not normal…that we are crazy.  

In fact, it is they who are, to quote the great Christian English essayist G. K. Chesterton, the real “lunatics.” In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton discusses the concept of liberty, and in so doing defines it succinctly as “the power of a thing to be itself…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….”  Those who have rebelled against the order of Creation and nature, he adds, are “already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” It is they who have in fact rejected reality. Thus, their frenzy and anxiety not so much to convince us, as to convince themselves of their rightness….for like all Children of the Night, down deep, gnawing at them is the dark, if faint but constant sensation that this is so. 

Against their constant barrage we need to affirm our rootedness in our God-given and created nature and in two-thousand years of Western tradition and civilization...while rejecting the Progressivists as crazed fanatical rebels against that Creation and its Author.  

They must be totally repudiated...no compromises or deals with them. Things may—and probably will—get worse, and our enemies appear to gain triumph.  But in the end the Faith will conquer…if we let it.

                                                             October 8, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Academy’s War on Western Civilization

Friends,

Of all the venues where the unleashed hysteria of revolutionary Progressivism manifests itself, it is most rampant in our educational establishment, on our college campuses and in our schools. It is there in those hallowed halls and in the hothouse public school classrooms that the Progressivist infection really begins in earnest. It is there where it becomes contagious and a pathological indoctrination of our children in a rancid ideology diametrically hostile to nearly all of Western tradition and beliefs.  What occurs in those centers where our children are educated is happening in our society at large….critically dangerous, perhaps even fatal, to our culture.

Our educational system has become the seedbed—the Typhoid Mary, if you will—for the frenzied “cancel culture” we see around us and for the concerted and increasingly fanatical attempt to destroy and erase the two millennia of Western Christian civilization.

Far too many Republicans and so-called “conservatives” believe that—somehow—they can coexist or even collaborate with this lunacy. They cannot. It will devour them, just as it is devouring what remains of our heritage.

There are literally hundreds of publicized examples of this educational madness, and they are just the ones that earn particular notice. But for every one news account there are dozens, even hundreds which don’t make it into the press. For every example of progressivist “woke” lunacy there are numerous others in classrooms across the nation, or proclaimed by professorial or teachers’ organizations.

I have selected a representative sampling of these as examples, and I will list them below—they are just the tip of the iceberg, just an impressionistic view of what is occurring in our academic system today. But they offer a very definite idea of the perilous and utterly disastrous state of our education system. Either we—our leaders—take strong and radical action, and initiate comprehensive reform, or there is no future for this nation…or for Western civilization.

First, there are courses on “how to make a revolution and overthrow the government”:

Washington and Lee University Offers Course on ‘How to Overthrow the State’

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/09/03/washington-and-lee-university-offers-course-on-how-to-overthrow-the-state/

 

ALANA MASTRANGELO     3 Sep 2020

“Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, is offering a course entitled ‘How to Overthrow the State,’ which includes encouraging students to engage in ‘producing a Manifesto, and ‘writing a persuasive essay on rewriting history and confronting memory’….”

-------------------------

And what about the University of Rhode Island? You see, “woke” students (and the university administrators) there just don’t feel comfortable or safe around monuments and murals honoring soldiers who fought in World War II—they were “too white”:

University to remove World War II murals because they show too many white people

https://www.thecollegefix.com/university-to-remove-world-war-ii-murals-because-they-show-too-many-white-people/

MATT LAMB - ASSISTANT EDITOR •SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

“Students didn’t ‘feel comfortable’ sitting near the murals, administrators said….

“The University of Rhode Island recently announced plans to remove two murals depicting World War II veterans because it lacks ‘diversity and a sensitivity to today’s complex and painful problems,’ according to the university. Kathy Collins, vice president of student affairs, told CBS 12 she received complaints because the two folk-art murals portraying life in the GI Bill era of the 1950s ‘portray a very homogeneous population’ and that most of the people depicted in the murals are ‘predominantly white’.”

---------------------------

Or then there is this representative nugget, gaining quite a bit of currency and support among academics:

Brooklyn College Education Prof. Claims Math Is ‘White Supremacist Patriarchy’

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/08/09/brooklyn-college-education-prof-claims-math-is-white-supremacist-patriarchy/

 

TOM CICCOTTA   9 Aug 2020

“Brooklyn College Professor of Math Education Laurie Rubel argued this week on Twitter that the mathematical equation 2+2=4 ‘reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.’ Rubel’s tweet was retweeted and promoted by several academics at universities and colleges around the nation.

“According to a report by Campus Reform, Brooklyn College Professor Laurie Rubel, who teaches math education, tried to make the case this week that basic math is ‘white supremacist.’ The tweets are part of a larger trend in recent scholarship by American academics, many of which have argued that ‘objective truth’ is a social construct.

‘The idea that math (or data) is culturally neutral or in any way objective is a MYTH. I’m ready to move on with that understanding. Who’s coming with me?’ Rubel wrote in a tweet.”

I have to admit that math was never a subject where I shined—but a construct of “white supremacist patriarchy”? Hmm. If I had known this back in the eleventh grade, I might have used that excuse in defense of my abject disaster in calculus! Of course, I’m kidding, besides, I’m white. But apparently, a growing number of university professors now follow along with Rubel’s insanity.

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This line of thinking spills over in the classroom and, very obviously, in what students are learning in the ivy-lined-halls of academe. They don’t think up or adopt these ideas out of thin air, like the Greek goddess Athena, who was born out of Zeus’s head, fully grown and developed. Such ideas are inculcated and taught “out of professors’ heads,” and like an infectious virus they take root. What Professor Rubel suggests, he teaches, and the results in far too many cases are this:

Students Claim Objective ‘Truth’ Is a ‘White Supremacist’ Myth

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/04/17/students-claim-objective-truth-is-a-white-supremacist-myth/

 

TOM CICCOTTA   17 Apr 2017

“Students at the Claremont McKenna Colleges argued that objective truth is a social construct devised by ‘white supremacists’ to ‘attempt to silence oppressed peoples’ in a letter to the Pomona College president.

“The letter came in response to Pomona College President David Oxtoby’s affirmation of commitment to free speech and intellectual diversity following the chaos that ensued during a lecture featuring Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Student protesters derailed her lecture on the rise of anti-police attitudes by banging on windows and shouting, ‘F*ck the police,’ and ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Campus security ultimately forced MacDonald to livestream her lecture from a near-empty room across campus.”

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And then there is the rash—the epidemic?—of “woke” white women college professors who have pretended to be black, but now have come forward to “confess” their grievous “sins” and lived lies. (Maybe we should revisit the 19^th Amendment?) Obviously, being black is the color and race of Predestination and the Elect in the new totalitarian religion of post-Marxist Progressivism. It’s like gaining instant and desired sainthood and celebrity, even if it must be faked.

Be it the notorious Rachel Dolezal (remember her assumed identity: Nkechi Amare Diallo?) or a Jessica Krug (“I am a culture leech!”), one really has to wonder about these female academic impostors. This is where a college education at Harvard and at many other universities, and the indoctrination of “woke” professors, leads: demented fanatical Harpies.

Here’s another example, and notice that the individual involved does not identify as either male or female, but “non-binary,” and goes by the pronoun “they” or “them”—a “third sex”(!).

Got that? The news item comes from Left-leaning AOL:

UW-Madison teaching assistant resigns after admitting to lying about being Black

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/09/18/uw-madison-resigns-after-admitting-lying-being-black/24624135/  Sep 18th 2020 4:55PM

“UW-Madison teaching assistant CV Vitolo Haddad is really Italian.  On the heels of the Jessica Krug controversy, yet another white academic has come clean about pretending to be a person of color. According to reports, CV Vitolo-Haddad – a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student/TA who identifies as non-binary and goes by ‘they’ or ‘them’ pronouns – has come clean about pretending to be Black and/or Latinx when in reality ‘they’ is Italian. In a Medium blog post, Vitolo-Haddad confessed to ‘their duplicity, apologizing for ‘every ounce of heartbreak and betrayal’ ‘they caused by co-opting the Black experience in order to gain access to ‘Black organizing spaces’.”

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Lastly, the AP Stylebook is used among journalists, but also on campuses as a guide to writing. Here’s their latest admonition to writers:

New AP Stylebook guidance recommends using ‘unrest’ instead of ‘riot’ to avoid stigmatizing protesters

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

https://www.theblaze.com/news/ap-stylebook-rioting-unrest-looting

 CARLOS GARCIA

“The Associated Press Stylebook tweeted an admonishment to stop using the word "riot" to describe political protests and instead use the milder "unrest" to avoid stigmatizing protesters.”

Everything must be done and done forcefully—no opposition tolerated—to protect the “space” of supposed minorities and to destroy “systemic [white] racism.” Anything in the way, anything that the zealots hear and see that somehow can be construed to offend them simply must be purged, must go. And, of course, that includes anything associated with Western civilization, culture, and history.

In a word, this is truly demonic—these are demiurges from the very depths of Hell.

Each of these examples, each of these cases, could be multiplied and added to; they are emblematic of what is going on at UNC and UVa, not just at Yale or Swarthmore. And until genuine reformers—radical reformers who are not afraid of the resulting barrage of severe criticism from the Left and the Educational Establishment—get involved and take dramatic action, the process and the irresistible decline of our civilization will continue.

                                                             October 4, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Philosophy of Progress is Killing Us

 

Friends,

Over the past few years I have written about what I term a “triumph of lunacy” in our society—most significantly on our college campuses and in our schools, in our entertainment, in the media, but also in our culture generally. The post-Marxist progressivist Left, after the apparent political set-back of the 2016 elections, has redoubled its efforts with a frenzied fanaticism unknown in our history, at least since a few years before the War Between the States.

What distinguishes our revolutionary period from previous upheavals is that today’s revolutionaries have, in effect, created a “counter-reality” in which they base their thought and actions. That reality they have manufactured out of a critical misapprehension of the nature of creation and the nature of mankind. That counter-reality is totally subjective, anchored in fractured internal thinking processes which have been infected and warped from their inception. That counter-reality is the inverse of the two-millennia of Western civilization; it possesses its own language, its own precepts, its own rules of conduct, its own goals and objectives, undeterred by the inexorable laws of nature or the historic teachings of the Christian faith. Indeed, it is the contrary of historic Christianity.

In a very substantial sense the raging post-Marxist Left and its nostrums are grounded in the “idea of progress,” a broad conceptual movement in history that dates back several centuries, at least to the Enlightenment of the 18^th century, but which achieved a large degree of intellectual triumph in society in the 19^th, most especially with the social theories of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and others. The late conservative philosopher, Robert Nisbet, wrote comprehensively about it in his volume, The History of the Idea of Progress. It posits that history is a process materially leading to the improvement and refinement of our technological and scientific environment, and, philosophically, leading to more “individual freedom” and the abolition of what are considered hindrances to that expanding freedom and what are perceived to be any obstacles to the irreversible expansion of “rights” and “equality”—which become over time almost inexhaustible and unlimited. Nothing can stand against the ideas that proponents of progress propound. If you do, you are a hopeless reactionary, a bigot, old-fashioned, and probably a racist and a misogynist.

Of course, material progress is observable, constant, and measurable, and is to be welcomed generally. Going from oil lamps to electric lights, or from horse-and-buggies to automobiles is seen positively by most everyone. There are, certainly, a few negatives in such progress (e.g., damage to the environment, altered living patterns, etc.), but most of those negatives are outweighed by the positives and the material enhancement of civilization.

The real problem comes when the “idea of progress” is made the benchmark for intellectual thought and how political and social goals are presented and achieved under its banner. For it then becomes, depending on how it is defined, the vehicle for ideologies that use it to shape and push their agendas—whether the liberals of the 19^th century, or the Marxists and Communists of the 20^th. To be “on the side of progress,” to be part of the irresistible “forces of history,” is to grant to one’s beliefs a kind of inescapable inevitability: you can’t oppose what I am saying and doing, because it’s simply going to happen, and you can’t stop it!

In our society, and in Western society generally, the inevitability and positive nature of intellectual progress is more or less taken for granted. Most conservatives, including those opposed supposedly to the current revolution on our campuses and in our streets, accept it as a given. They may demur and disagree about what the goals should or ought to be, but the essential premise, the template idea, remains fixed and unassailable.

Thus, on Fox News most pundits applaud greater “rights” for minorities, both racial and sexual. They just don’t agree with some of the more vigorous applications coming from the Left. For “establishment conservatives” increasingly same sex marriage must be a full constitutional right—full transgender normalization and acceptance in society is desirable—women must have equal access to every position or role that men have (e.g., no more male-only academies, no more “Boy” Scouts, etc.)—absolute racial equity, even if that means special advantages, must be pursued—and “American democratic values” are in all parts of the globe demanded (even at the point of an M-16 rifle).

The progressivist Left goes much further. Indeed, the same demands for equality, and expanded and newly-discovered “rights,” in the slogans and proposals of Leftists often become props in an overpowering effort, not as much for desired “social justice,” but more for the acquisition of power: a means to an end, the control of society and its structures.

Right after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the first violent riots here in North Carolina, a couple of black college students videotaped a group of exclusively-white “millennials” demonstrating in a frenzy in Raleigh, North Carolina. The black videotapers noticed and commented that all the demonstrators were white, probably the sons and daughters of wealthy white (liberal) parents, and graduates of prestigious universities like Duke or UNC. The irony wasn’t lost on the two blacks, who wondered: “What do those privileged whites know about black issues?” Indeed, what they know is undergirded by and laden with the intellectual progressivism and post-Marxist ideology they’ve learned in classrooms at those very same prestigious universities.

In effect, these protesters demonstrate against “white supremacy” and “institutional racism” in a not-so-hidden effort to expiate their own sin of “whiteness,” inculcated into them by “woke” professors and an ideologized educational system.

But they are also out in the streets attempting to create a “new world order” in which the real objective is power, and that power recurs to global elites. “Systemic racism” may be a target but actually and more significantly, opposition to it is a means of advancing the overall goal of completely restructuring and recasting society—and the destruction of two millennia of civilization and its culture, annealed by the Christian faith—on behalf of those elites.

Until conservatives understand the fundamental dangers in embracing the “idea of progress” philosophically and in praxis—until they learn that beginning with the same premises on “equality” and “rights” as their purported opponents will inevitably conduct them to giving way to those opponents…and to denying implicitly, if not finally explicitly God-given creation and its natural and Divine Positive Laws--until they recognize this, they will remain prisoners of a dialectic that leads them always to eventual surrender to the Left.

The post-War Between the States Southern divine and essayist Robert Lewis Dabney summed up this type of conservatism succinctly and presciently 150 years ago. That quotation is apt and applies to far too many members of today’s “conservative loyal opposition”:

“This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

“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. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. 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. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance.

“The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women's suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position."  [From “Womens’ Rights Women,” Discussions, vol. IV, Secular Discussions.]

Will they learn before it is too late? Or will they—far more likely—give way like previous temporizers in the face of the lunacy? 

                                                         September 29, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Sampson County and the Defense of Western Civilization

 

Friends,

The absolute lunacy—the madness—now regnant on our college campuses and in college classrooms (and also in our public schools) should be obvious for all to see. But only in recent years have many “conservatives” really begun to examine the pitiful state of higher education in actual detail. Yes, there have been acute critics and excellent studies, detailing serious problems on campuses across the nation. Notable authors have documented the virtual take-over of academia by the frenzied leftist progressivists, and the practical result that true open inquiry and genuine debate have given way to a “single party” ideological authoritarian control worse than anything ever imagined in the old Soviet Union.

This is something we should have taken far more seriously fifty years ago. For now the “woke” descendants of the Vietnam-era radicals and the student graduates of the upheavals of 1968 have asserted near full control over our educational system.

Back in 1970-1971 I was in grad school at the University of Virginia, finishing an MA in history, and I knew and befriended some future PhDs whose own students would populate the faculties of some America’s most prestigious universities today. Their radicalism back then was strangely mild, even quaint, compared with the virus which has seemingly swept through academia in 2020. I had one friend, like me getting a Masters degree in history, who was passionately in favor of the Viet Cong, quoted Che Guevara, and actually gave me a copy of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonialist The Wretched of the Earth—useful, as I had a seminar with a Leftist professor who prescribed it in his “social history” class, and I didn’t have to purchase it!  I don’t know what happened to my friend, except I heard he did earn a doctorate and then went on to teach impressionable minds at a major university. I think that became a pattern.

Later, doing my PhD in Spain, the student radicalism had not yet reached that country—in the early 1970s General Franco continued, if tenuously, to keep a lid on such things. Additionally, my university, the University of Navarra (one of two private universities in Spain at the time), was a very conservative Catholic institution, run by the Opus Dei order and heavily endowed. Even so, among some of my fellow students I detected how foreign publications and samizdat broadsides were certainly beginning to affect their thinking, and after Franco’s death that lid literally blew off. Still, for me the ability to discuss ideas and to have a superb (and very traditional) dissertation director were a special grace…I wonder how many grad students have that opportunity in Spain in 2020, or here in the United States?

For fifty years, then, the virus that began in earnest back in the early 1960s has basically been allowed to grow and metamorphosize. It is no longer just an advocacy of “third world liberation” or support for Communist and Marxist revolution; it is no longer just a rebellion against parts of the West’s moral code—on gender and marriage, especially; it is no longer resembles the older “civil rights” movement of the 1960s. It has gone far beyond those goal posts and far beyond what my Leftist classmate at Virginia espoused forty-nine years ago. It is, as my friend Dr. Paul Gottfried has called it, a “post-Marxism” which incorporates and owes much to a Marxist template, but incorporates far more into its, at times, amorphous ideology.

Whether it be the goons of Antifa or the rioters with Black Lives Matter and a host of other revolutionary groups, there is one principal tenet that more or less defines them. In slogan form it is: “Western Civ has got to go!”  Our inherited Western—and Christian—civilization of the past two millennia is defined, whether explicitly or not, as evil, the work and creation of “white oppressors” and “white supremacy,” and “gender discrimination.” “Historic systemic racism”: voila’ the problem! And since our culture and civilization owe their overall existence principally to Europe (and mostly white Europeans) and to the historic Christian faith, they must be destroyed or perverted beyond recognition.

It’s that simple…but it remains unrecognized by far too many of the supposed defenders of our culture.

Thus, not just Confederate symbols, but symbols, monuments, literature, music, art, language, everything that in any way smacks of the hated Western tradition must be uprooted and cast on the trash heap, even violently. And our supposed defenders? Those so-called “conservatives” and Republicans who have promised to defend our heritage and traditions? Many of them desert the battlefield ignominiously at the first sound of grape shot.

Take just one local case that exemplifies what is occurring all over the South and the nation: a few miles down the road from me in mostly rural North Carolina is Sampson County. Recently, the Sampson County Board of County Commissioners voted to relocate their Confederate monument which has stood in the county seat, Clinton, since 1916. Commissioner Jerol Kivett, one of three Republicans on the board had sworn up-one-side-and-down-the-other to acquaintances of mine, that he would never countenance such a move. But when the push to relocate the monument came, Kivett, going back openly on his promise, led the retreat, that is, like so many other Republicans he fled to the tall grass.

Not only that, but Kivett and the other board members flagrantly violated North Carolina’s Heritage Protection Act [HPA], the Monuments Law of 2015, which clearly states that only the North Carolina Historical Commission can approve relocation of historic monuments from State or “public property.” [N.C.G.S.100.2-1(b) and (b) (1)] And that under no circumstances can a relocated monument be placed in a museum. Yet, Kivett flagrantly proposed:

“I move that the statue previously located on top of the Confederate soldier monument … be relocated to the Sampson County History Museum; and that its accompanying base…be placed in storage with the contents of time capsule that may be located in the base, being relocated to the Sampson County History Museum.”

The vote was 5 to 0 to relocate.

Maybe Kivett (and his cohorts) believe that his cowardly actions will save him from being called a “racist” or “white supremacist,” or maybe he has pecuniary interests which he felt might be damaged by defending Sampson County’s veterans from 1861-1865. Or maybe his cowardice was really occasioned by the fact that all along he never was what he professed to be or to defend.

How many more Jerol Kivetts exist across not just the Southland, but across the face of the United States? Their number is legion, and their lack of courage and treason against our heritage and inheritance is reprehensible.

They do not seem to realize the age—the times—in which we live. They do not realize that taking down Confederate monuments is just the first step in an ever-widening campaign to denude our society, to cleanse it of anything which connects us to our past and the rich inheritance we have received as a trust. In effect, perhaps unwittingly, they participate in the destruction of two millennia that has given us life and sustained and enriched us, and they enable that inheritance to be replaced by the law of the jungle and sheer totalitarian barbarism.

They do not seem to understand that their temporizing now before the fanatical revolutionaries, their surrender to the mob and to mob opinion, will eventually catch up with them and will also effect the world they leave to their children and grandchildren. They have convinced themselves of their own sincerity and that they’re doing the right thing.

They may not understand yet, they may somehow justify what they do and have done. But they will stand severely accursed and accused by future generations of assisting, of being complicit, in the destruction of our civilization.

How then will you answer, Jerol Kivett?