April 28, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Nancy Pelosi, the Subversion of Conservatism, and Our Hope

Friends,

Attached to this short installment of MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey is a brief video excerpt of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a training exercise intended for Democratic operatives (taken off of C-SPAN, 2017). It outlines succinctly how to develop and disseminate falsehoods and "fake" news, using a cooperative and receptive news media, and then, using that same media, confirm in the public's mind those same asserted falsehoods thus furthering the progressivist agenda, while discrediting any legitimate opposition. 

This has been the tried and true praxis of the progressivist Left, most intensively since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But it goes farther back, for this tactic predates the Trump presidency. It is indeed a consistent approach to perceived enemies, to disqualify and deauthorize them.

We see this tactic employed prominently in the widespread use of charges of "racism" and "white supremacy," or in claims of historic "male oppression" of women. It has been very successful in stanching those voices that might object or raise uncomfortable questions or objections.

And what has been critical to the success of this practice is that far too many so-called conservatives have bought into this template. 

The older conservative movement, beginning in the 1950s with the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, the earlier years of William F. Buckley's National Review, and figures like the late Senator Barry Goldwater, were not afraid to stand up and boldly and rationally challenge the Leftists of that time. Those early conservatives with intelligence and passion critiqued the budding mania for a never-ending "civil rights" movement (which now has been extended to include and encompass everything from making race the unique and sole criteria for judgment in America to same sex marriage and normalization of transgenderism, with assuredly more to come). 

But with the pilgrimage of the ex-Leftist "Neoconservatives" into the "Conservative Movement" during the 1970s and 1980s, and with their control of most its journals, foundations, and think tanks, the "Old Right," those who continued to uphold older traditional ideas, were basically exiled. And the same tactics used by the progressivist Left now were used by the Neocon-dominated "Conservative Movement, Inc"' to silence traditional conservatives, to inhibit them from broad public view and thus combating the new narrative. 

For the Neocon conservatives basically accepted the template of what I call "the farther Left" on everything from the expansion of "civil rights," to continued government intervention into our personal lives, to the deterioration and destruction of our tradition of Christian morality, and to a zealous belief in "globalism" and the quest to go round the world and forcibly impose what is euphemistically called "democracy" on cultures which in many cases have no experience with that defecated form of governance and which certainly don't desire us meddling in their internal affairs.

Speaker Pelosi, certainly, is addressing Democratic operatives, she is instructing them essentially in how to discredit their opponents, to virtually silence them. But her words could be applied equally to the conservative/Republican elites who supposedly represent the opposition to the madness which seeks to engulf and overwhelm us who have basically succumbed and surrendered in the face of that tactic.

Let me offer an example or two.

On May 8, 2012 the citizens of North Carolina voted overwhelmingly, 61% to 39% to approve an amendment to the North Carolina constitution declaring that marriage is between one man and one woman. Yet after the US Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) decision overturning all such legislation, what was the reaction of establishment conservatives and the GOP? 

The silence was deafening, just as it had been with the earlier decisions on organized prayers in schools, and even with abortion. For even with the Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and, true, the consistent reaction against it (led by mostly Evangelical and Catholic Christians), the organized opposition never received the kind of strong national political support from Republicans when in power. Such was considered too diversionary and apt to weaken Republican support among suburban women: in other words, politically inexpedient. Thus, action was better left to individuals in the states.

The fear by establishment conservatives and Republicans of transgressing the steadily advancing template of the farther Left and the praxis advocated by Pelosi and her friends in the media—of being savaged by CNN or The Washington Post—plus the social and moral liberalism of most Neocons (many of whom, for example, now eagerly accept same sex marriage and transgenderism), have essentially denatured and neutered what now goes under the name of conservatism in America.

Pelosi’s words, thus, apply broadly to an America which bears little resemblance to the old republic established by the Framers in 1787. Our society chugs along fitfully, living precariously on myths, worshipping totems, and mouthing slogans and words which no longer have much meaning in reality.

Truth dies in the darkness, and it has been the common objective of the farther Left and the elites who have controlled the conservative movement and the Republican Party to keep it that way.

Yet small voices “shout from the rooftops”—journalists like Pat Buchanan and Ilana Mercer, journals like Chronicles magazine, Web sites like Reckonin.com and The Abbeville Institute and The Intellectual Takeout.

We are told that we fight forlornly, for a lost cause. Yet when I hear this I am put in mind of what T. S. Eliot wrote:

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

We fight, then, to keep Hope alive, and in the expectation that Victory finally will be God’s.

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I hope you can open the short video clip, attached.

"Pelosi and the Wrap-Up Smear"