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Wednesday, July 31, 2019

How The Question “Who Benefits From This?” Can Change Your Life

(Prove all things? This is one of your tools! - CL)

Cui bono?” is a phrase you’ll often see used on conspiracy-minded Youtube videos and discussion forums. It’s Latin for “Who benefits?”, and it refers to a perspective in legal analysis that the one who stands most to gain from a crime is often the perpetrator. It’s the “motive” part of “means, motive and opportunity“.
The term comes up in conspiracy circles a lot because motive is often the biggest plot hole in the official story promoted by the authorized narrative managers of the political/media class about a given event. The alleged Douma chemical attack last year, for example, had no discernible benefit to the Assad government whatsoever, but would have benefited the cornered Al-Qaeda affiliates in the city by provoking air strikes from the west, so there remains a lot of skepticism from those who don’t automatically believe their government and the plutocratic media when they say that Damascus was responsible. Such skepticism is dismissively branded “conspiracy theory” by the establishment narrative managers, but it is fully justified.
So it’s a useful concept for analyzing world events in a way that punches through the fog of imperial propaganda. But the question “Who benefits from this?” can, and should, be taken much further.
Don’t just ask “Cui bono?” of potential false flag events. Ask it about every belief in your head. Rigorously holding that candle up to the ideas in your own mind will reveal a lot of junk floating around in there that benefit other people, both the powerful and the not-so-powerful.
To pick one of many possible examples, it’s very interesting how many of America’s ostensibly anti-establishment movements encourage their adherents to support one of America’s two mainstream establishment political parties. The so-called “Resistance” and the progressive movement both herd people who might otherwise support actual leftist movements into the oligarchic folds of the Democratic Party, as does even the lesser-evil voting promoted by those closer to the fringe like Noam Chomsky. On the right you’ve got the warmongering corporate whore party of the Republicans being enthusiastically backed by the MAGA crowd, who you’ll routinely see backing garden variety GOP agendas like the Supreme Court nomination of a longtime Bush lackey in the name of fighting the establishment. Closer to the fringe you’ve got the insufferable QAnon cult, who consistently argue that every Trump move from Assange’s arrest to bombing Syria is a brilliant 5-D chess maneuver against the Deep State.
If those in any of these various factions began sincerely asking the question “Who benefits from my believing this?” about the various reasons they hold for espousing their respective political positions, the answer would come back clear as day that of course the ones who benefit are the plutocratic class which owns both mainstream political parties and the opaque government agencies with which that class is aligned. In the flurry of reasons being proffered in favor of supporting a given faction, it’s easy to overlook the fact that some very powerful people are likely to benefit from that support.
All the information going around about what’s going on in the world is like this. News media must be consumed with an acute awareness that there are extremely powerful people who have a vested interest in manipulating the way you think and perceive. It’s just a fact, and if it isn’t at the forefront of your consciousness, your worldview will necessarily be severely malformed. Cultivating a reflexive curiosity about who benefits from a given narrative being promoted nips this in the bud.
But this isn’t just limited to news media. We get tons of stupid ideas in our heads from things like advertising, which obviously benefit no one but the advertisers and their employers. Women in particular are plagued with body image problems from being pummeled from a very early age with corporate psyops designed for precisely that purpose, and as a result we feed billions of dollars into various interests who profit from our belief that we shouldn’t have small tits or wrinkles or body fat.
Religion is another one. There are of course many immensely wealthy and powerful structures today which benefit from adherents to religion, but most of those who’ve benefited from widespread religious indoctrination aren’t even alive anymore. Governments and world religions have historically been inextricably intertwined with and supportive of each other, because religions can be used to manipulate the masses into believing that it’s virtuous to be poor, humble, meek, submissive and obedient, to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”, and to believe it would be generally sinful to use the power of their numbers to kill their rulers and seize their wealth. The answer to “Who benefits from my religious beliefs?”, if you’re Christian, is something along the lines of “All existing Christian churches, all existing political structures built around exploiting Christian beliefs for political leverage, every preacher, pope and bishop who’s ever lived, and every western ruler since Emperor Constantine.”
Many of the beliefs which have been put into our heads for someone else’s benefit don’t profit the powerful at all; many of them have been implanted by our own loved ones. It’s unfortunate, but friends and family members will often have a vested interest in putting beliefs in our heads which don’t benefit us but them. Such beliefs often revolve around keeping us from getting above our station, from feeling too good about ourselves so that we don’t go off and improve our lives instead of staying in the confining circles we were born into. Others can include believing positive things about loved ones who were actually destructive and abusive to us. Some of them are as simple as beliefs about how we are and how we should be that kept us from talking back to our parents, which if left unexamined can create submissive psychological postures in us that can stay with us to the grave. We form a lot of the beliefs we have about ourselves from the feedback we get from other people, so even something said decades ago by a schoolmate who was only interested in keeping us from rising above them in social status can continue to warp our self image.
From ground-level to the highest echelons of power, there are people who have been benefitting from the beliefs in our heads. Only by doing the necessary inner work and asking “Cui bono?” of all the ideas we believe about our world, our society, our community and ourselves can we sift apart the untrue from the true and construct a clear-eyed worldview which benefits no one but ourselves and our fellow man. Someone’s benefitting from the beliefs in our heads, and, very often, it ain’t us.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/07/30/how-the-question-who-benefits-from-this-can-change-your-life/

Monday, July 29, 2019

Is it Time for America to Break Apart? I thought you would never ask!


If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it still make a sound?

Does our awareness determine the outcome of demographic and cultural trends?

Boyd D. Cathey asks the uncomfortable question and  provides the background with 3 possible scenarios.

Vox Day provides a clarifying, but uncomfortable comment: Scenario (3) is a near-certainty simply because virtually no one who is even potentially on the side of the Christian Nationalists is currently capable of recognizing the situation, much less doing anything about it. And as Sun Tzu observes, those who know neither themselves nor their enemies almost always lose.


And what is Christian Nationalism?

Finally, the destruction of the ‘American Way’ accelerated under my watch – and yours, if you’re anywhere my age – so let’s fess up – we were part of the problem. How so?

Vox Popoli: Churchians against Christian nationalism


It's very clear what the next rhetorical battle will be:

A group formed by Christian leaders is warning against the rise of "Christian nationalism," saying the merging of Christian and American identities poses a threat to U.S. democracy and religious communities.

“As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith,” Christians Against Christian Nationalism’s statement reads.

“Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution.”

The statement is endorsed by at least 17 Christian leaders from various churches and organizations, according to the group’s website.

It won't be even remotely surprising to discover that their funding is coming from distinctly not-Christian sources, most likely the same people who fund the (((Edmund Burke Institute))) Nationalism is under attack by the globalist gatekeepers and Christian nationalism will be targeted by the Churchians.

Well and good. We have the truth, the Bible, history, science, and Jesus Christ on our side. They have lies, usury, and elite pedos on theirs. I like our odds.

Notice how they can't even bear to state the name of Jesus Christ. That's because they serve a very different god.


Sunday, July 28, 2019

American Pravda: Breaching the Media Barrier - By Ron Unz (Winning strategy and tactics!)

A couple of years ago, I launched my Unz Review, providing a wide range of different alternative perspectives, the vast majority of them totally excluded from the mainstream media. I’ve also published a number of articles in my own American Pravda series, focusing on the suspicious lapses and lacunae in our media narratives.
The underlying political strategy behind these efforts may already be apparent, and I’ve sometimes suggested it here and there. But I finally decided I might as well explicitly outline the reasoning in a memo as provided below
The Mainstream Media is the Crucial Opposing Force
Groups advocating policies opposed by the American establishment should recognize that the greatest obstacle they face is usually the mainstream media.
Ordinary political and ideological opponents surely exist, but these are usually inspired, motivated, organized, and assisted by powerful media support, which also shapes the perceived framework of the conflict. In Clauswitzian terms, the media often constitutes the strategic “center of gravity” of the opposing forces.
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The Media Should Be Made a Primary Target
If the media is the crucial force empowering the opposition, then it should be regarded as a primary target of any political strategy. So long as the media remains strong, success may be difficult, but if the influence and credibility of the media were substantially degraded, then the ordinary opposing forces would lose much of their effectiveness. In many respects, the media creates reality, so perhaps the most effective route toward changing reality runs through the media.
Discrediting the Media Anywhere Weakens It Everywhere
The mainstream media exists as a seamless whole, so weakening or discrediting the media in any particular area automatically reduces its influence everywhere else as well.
The elements of the media narrative faced by a particular anti-establishment group may be too strong and well-defended to attack effectively, and any such attacks might also be discounted as ideologically motivated. Hence, the more productive strategy may sometimes be an indirect one, attacking the media narrative elsewhere, at points where it is much weaker and less well-defended. In addition, winning those easier battles may generate greater credibility and momentum, which can then be applied to later attacks on more difficult fronts.
A Broad Alliance May Support the Common Goal of Weakening the Media
Once we recognize that weakening the media is a primary strategic goal, an obvious corollary is that other anti-establishment groups facing the same challenges become natural, if perhaps temporary, allies.
Such unexpected tactical alliances may drawn from across a wide range of different political and ideological perspectives—Left, Right, or otherwise—and despite the component groups having longer-term goals that are orthogonal or even conflicting. So long as all such elements in the coalition recognize that the hostile media is their most immediate adversary, they can cooperate on their common effort, while actually gaining additional credibility and attention by the very fact that they sharply disagree on so many other matters.
The media is enormously powerful and exercises control over a vast expanse of intellectual territory. But such ubiquitous influence also ensures that its local adversaries are therefore numerous and widespread, all being bitterly opposed to the hostile media they face on their own particular issues. By analogy, a large and powerful empire is frequently brought down by a broad alliance of many disparate rebellious factions, each having unrelated goals, which together overwhelm the imperial defenses by attacking simultaneously at multiple different locations.
A crucial aspect enabling such a rebel alliance is the typically narrow focus of each particular constituent member. Most groups or individuals opposing establishment positions tend to be ideologically zealous about one particular issue or perhaps a small handful, while being much less interested in others. Given the total suppression of their views at the hands of the mainstream media, any venue in which their unorthodox perspectives are provided reasonably fair and equal treatment rather than ridiculed and denigrated tends to inspire considerable enthusiasm and loyalty on their part. So although they may have quite conventional views on most other matters, causing them to regard contrary views with the same skepticism or unease as might anyone else, they will usually be willing to suppress their criticism at such wider heterodoxy so long as other members of their alliance are willing to return that favor on their own topics of primary interest.
Assault the Media Narrative Where It is Weak Not Where It Is Strong
Applying a different metaphor, the establishment media may be regarded as a great wall that excludes alternative perspectives from the public consciousness and thereby confines opinion to within a narrow range of acceptable views.
Certain portions of that media wall may be solid and vigorously defended by powerful vested interests, rendering assaults difficult. But other portions, perhaps older and more obscure, may have grown decrepit over time, with their defenders having drifted away. Breaching the wall at these weaker locations may be much easier, and once the barrier has been broken at several points, defending it at others becomes much more difficult.
For example, consider the consequences of demonstrating that the established media narrative is completely false on some major individual event. Once this result has been widely recognized, the credibility of the media on all other matters, even totally unrelated ones, would be somewhat attenuated. Ordinary people would naturally conclude that if the media had been so wrong for so long on one important point, it might also be wrong on others as well, and the powerful suspension of disbelief that provides the media its influence would become less powerful. Even those individuals who collectively form the corpus of the media might begin to entertain serious self-doubts regarding their previous certainties.
The crucial point is that such breakthroughs may be easiest to achieve in topics that seem merely of historical significance, and are totally removed from any practical present-day consequences.
Reframe Vulnerable “Conspiracy Theories” as Effective “Media Criticism”
Over the last few decades, the political establishment and its media allies have created a powerful intellectual defense against major criticism by investing considerable resources in stigmatizing the notion of so-called “conspiracy theories.” This harsh pejorative term is applied to any important analysis of events that sharply deviates from the officially-endorsed narrative, and implicitly suggests that the proponent is a disreputable fanatic, suffering from delusions, paranoia, or other forms of mental illness. Such ideological attacks often effectively destroy his credibility, allowing his actual arguments to be ignored. A once-innocuous phrase has become politically “weaponized.”
However, an effective means of circumventing this intellectual defense mechanism may be to adopt a meta-strategy of reframing such “conspiracy theories” as “media criticism.”
Under the usual parameters of public debate, challenges to established orthodoxy are treated as “extraordinary claims” that must be justified by extraordinary evidence. This requirement may be unfair, but it constitutes the reality in many public exchanges, based upon the framework provided by the allegedly impartial media.
Since most of these controversies involve a wide range of complex issues and ambiguous or disputed evidence, it is often extremely difficult to conclusively establish any unorthodox theory, say to a confidence level of 95% or 98%. Therefore, the media verdict is almost invariably “Case Not Proven” and the challengers are judged defeated and discredited, even if they actually appear to have the preponderance of evidence on their side. And if they vocally contest the unfairness of their situation, that exact response is then subsequently cited by the media as further proof of their fanaticism or paranoia.
However, suppose that an entirely different strategy were adopted. Instead of attempting to make a case “beyond any reasonable doubt,” proponents merely provide sufficient evidence and analysis to suggest that there is a 30% chance or a 50% chance or a 70% chance that the unorthodox theory is true. The very fact that no claim of near certainty is being advanced provides a powerful defense against any plausible accusations of fanaticism or delusional thinking. But if the issue is of enormous importance and—as is usually the case—the unorthodox theory has been almost totally ignored by the media, despite apparently having at least a reasonable chance of being true, then the media may be effectively attacked and ridiculed for its laziness and incompetence. These charges are very difficult to refute and since no claim is being made that the unorthodox theory has necessarily been proven correct, merely that it might possibly be correct, any counter-accusations of conspiratorial tendencies would fall flat.
Indeed, the only means the media might have of effectively rebutting those charges would be to explore all the complex details of the issue (thereby helping to bring various controversial facts themselves to much wider attention) and then argue that there is only a negligible chance that the theory might be correct, perhaps 10% or less. Thus, the usual presumptive burden is completely reversed. And since most members of the media are unlikely to have ever paid much serious attention to the subject, their ignorant presentation may be quite weak and vulnerable to a knowledgeable deconstruction. Indeed, the most likely scenario is that the media will just continue to totally ignore the entire dispute, thereby reinforcing those plausible accusations of laziness and incompetence.
Individuals distressed by media failings on a controversial topic often accuse the media and its individual representatives of being biased, corrupted, or quietly under the control of powerful forces allied with the establishment position. These charges may sometimes be correct and sometimes not, but they are usually quite difficult to prove, except in the minds of existing true-believers, and they do carry the taint of “paranoia.” On the other hand, claiming that media failings are due to venial sins such as laziness and incompetence are just as likely to be correct, and these charges are much less likely to risk a backlash.
Finally, once the media itself has become the primary target of the criticism, it automatically loses its status as a neutral outside arbitrator and no longer has as much credibility in proclaiming the winning side of the debate.
The Advantage of Flooding Media Defense Zones
Individuals who challenge the prevailing media narrative with unorthodox claims are often reluctant to raise too many such controversial claims simultaneously lest they be ridiculed as “crazy,” with all their views summarily dismissed.
In most cases, this may be the correct strategy to pursue, but if handled properly, an exact opposite approach might sometimes be quite effective. So long as the overall presentation is framed as media criticism and no inordinate weight is attached to the validity of any of the particular claims being presented, attacking along a very broad front, perhaps including dozens of entirely independent items, may “flood the zone” of the media, saturating and overwhelming existing defenses. Or as suggested in a quote widely misattributed to Stalin, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Consider the example of entertainer Bill Cosby. Over the years, one or two individual women had come forward claiming that he had drugged and raped them, and the charges had been largely ignored as unsubstantiated or implausible. However, over the last year or two, the dam suddenly burst and a total of nearly sixty separate women came forward, all making identical accusations, and although there seems little hard evidence in any of the particular cases, virtually every observer now concedes that the charges are likely to be true.
Suppose it is established that there is a reasonable likelihood that the media completely missed and ignored an important matter that should have been investigated and reported. The impact is not necessarily substantial, and many individuals stubbornly wedded to a belief in their establishment media narratives might even resist admitting the possibility that the media had seriously erred in that particular situation.
However, suppose instead that several dozen such separate examples could be established, each strongly suggesting a serious error or omission on the part of the media. At that point, ideological defenses would crumble and nearly everyone would quietly acknowledge that many, perhaps even most, of the accusations were probably true, producing an enormous credibility gap for the mainstream media. The credibility defenses of the media would have been saturated and overcome.
The key point is that all of the particular items should be presented as reasonable-likelihood cases, and indicative of media shortcomings rather than being proven or necessarily as important issues in and of themselves. By remaining aloof and somewhat agnostic regarding any individual item, there is little risk of being tagged as fanatic or monomaniacal for raising a multitude of them.
My American Pravda Series and Unz Review Webzine as Examples
The political/media strategy outlined above was the central motivation behind my American Pravda articles and Unz Review webzine.
For example, in the original 2013 American Pravda article I raised over half a dozen enormous media lapses, all of them now universally acknowledged: Enron’s collapse, the Iraq War WMDs, the Madoff Swindle, the Cold War spies, and various others. Having thereby set the stage by presenting this admitted pattern of major failure, demonstrating that a considerable suspension of disbelief was warranted, I then extended the discussion to three or four important additional examples, none of them yet acknowledged, but all of them perfectly plausible. Perhaps as a consequence, the article received reasonably good attention including by elements of the mainstream media itself, who are often willing to acknowledge the errors of their class so long as these are presented persuasively and in a responsible manner.
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Following that piece, I intermittently produced additional elements in the series, some more comprehensive than others, and am now embarking upon a regular series.
The McCain/POW examples in the series perfectly illustrate the strategy I have suggested above. The Vietnam War ended over forty years ago, the POWs have probably all been dead for decades, and even John McCain is in the very twilight of his career. The practical significance of raising the scandal or providing evidence establishing its likelihood is virtually nil. But if it were to become widely recognized that our entire media successfully covered up such a massive scandal for so many years, the credibility of the media would have suffered a devastating blow. Several such blows and it would be in ruins. Meanwhile, the powerful vested interests that once so vigorously maintained the official narrative in that area are long gone, and the orthodox case has few remaining defenders in the media, greatly increasing the likelihood of an eventual breakthrough and victory.

A similar strategy in broader form is applied by my Unz Review alternative media webzine, which hosts numerous different writers, columnists, and bloggers, all tending to sharply challenge the establishment media narrative along a wide variety of different axes and issues, some of them conflicting. By raising serious doubts about the omissions and errors of our mainstream media in so many different areas, the goal is to weaken the perceived credibility of the media, leading readers to consider the possibility that large elements of the conventional narrative may be entirely incorrect.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.
Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is also the founder of RonUnz.org
Copyright © 2019 The Unz Review

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/ron-unz/american-pravda-breaching-the-media-barrier/

Saturday, July 27, 2019

Vox Popoli: The clash of the two "Americas"


America can't be broken apart, but the USA can be, and will be.

The question comes down to this: Is the fragile American experiment in republicanism begun in Philadelphia in 1787, which required a commonly-shared understanding of basic principles, now over, or at the very least is it entering its agonizing death throes?

One can certainly trace a progressively destructive trajectory in American history since the overthrow of the American constitutional system in 1865. And the results of that history are now reaching almost an unimaginable breaking point.

Increasingly, we live in a country that has become de facto little more than a mere geographical entity. True, it is still formally a nation, but a nation where there are in fact at least two very distinct Americas, with radically differing visions of what is real and what is not real, radically differing conceptions of what is moral and what is not, radically differing views about truth and error, and radically differing ideas about using whatever means are available to reach a desired and posited end. For all the talk of equality and racism, the revolutionary side in actuality seeks to replace one oligarchy—which it calls “white supremacist”—with another oligarchy of its own making, in fact, a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia’’ that would make Joseph Stalin’s Communist state seem like a Sandals Retreat in the Bahamas.

At the base of this revolutionary movement is the critical use of language. Ideologically-tinged words—“devil terms”—now occur with amazing regularity and frequency: racism, white privilege, sexism, toxic masculinity, equality, democracy, and so on. These terms have been weaponized and are now employed by those on the Left—but also adopted by many elitist movement conservatives (“conservatism inc.”)—to disauthorize, condemn, and damn anyone who would offer effective opposition to the rapid Leftward perversion of what remains of this nation.

It is not only the frenzied talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, but such “respectable” conservative voices as Bill Kristol, Hew Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Ben Shapiro, the National Review crowd and various Republican types , who have joined in to legitimize each new progressivist conquest (e.g., same sex marriage) and attack any real opposition to the Leftist “long march” through our institutions. Like the hard Left, the establishment conservatives betray a hardly-concealed contempt for Middle America, for those hard-working, gun-owning, church-going, underpaid folks who still try to raise a family morally on a shrinking salary. They see the rest of us as mere rubes, a servile class who are not supposed to have a voice—this, you see, is now “American democracy.”

The "two Americas" to which the author refers are not, in fact, two Americas. There is a white Christian America and there is a not-white not-Christian not-America which are now locked into an existential struggle. The USA is now divided into a New World remnant of Christendom and the stronghold of Satandom. The latter wishes to conquer and destroy the former because it is a separate nation that worships the god of this world rather than God the Father of Jesus Christ.

Belloc was not entirely correct. It isn't just the national element that matters, as both the national and the religious elements are significant with regards to how the end of the USA will play out.

A conceptual model is only as good as its predictive utility. And, as you will note, there is very little predictive value in the liberal-conservative divide, the black-white racial divide, or the Democrat-Republican divide. But the Christian Nationalist vs Judeo-Christian Globalist model is almost perfectly predictive, not only of future events, but even individual behaviors, everywhere across the West.

The USA is presently facing its own October Revolution right now, one that has been decades in the making. And many of those seeking to complete the destruction of Christian America and rule over a USSA are the literal descendants, intellectually, ideologically, and genetically, of the very Bolsheviks who subjected Christian Russia and Christian Ukraine to 70 years of persecution and suffering.

The author sees three possibilities:

(1) Either there must be some large mass conversion of one side or the other (a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion?), probably occasioned by some immense and earth-shaking event, war, depression, disaster; or (2) there must be a separation into independent jurisdictions of large portions of what is presently geographically the United States, including possible massive population exchanges—this separation/secession could be peaceable, although increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst, (3) the devolution of this country would continue into open and vicious civil and guerrilla war, followed by a harsh dictatorship. 

Scenario (3) is a near-certainty simply because virtually no one who is even potentially on the side of the Christian Nationalists is currently capable of recognizing the situation, much less doing anything about it. And as Sun Tzu observes, those who know neither themselves nor their enemies almost always lose.


Is it Time for America to Break Apart?, by Boyd D. Cathey - The Unz Review


There is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the background like an unchained wild beast:
What has happened—what is happening—to the geographical entity we call the United States, to its people, to its culture? Does it not seem like the country is coming apart at the seams, in just about everything, from its once-established moral base in a more or less historic Christian framework to its very vision of reality, of what is real and what is not?
Millions of “woke” social justice progressives now control the Democratic Party and most of our media; they dominate our entertainment and sports industries; they push for open borders and what amounts to “population replacement” of natives by illegal aliens; and they have a stranglehold on the near entirety of our educational system, from the primary grades to our colleges.
Each year those institutions turn out millions of freshly-minted automatons—intellectual zombies—who think like their unhinged teachers and professors have trained them, and who then take up responsible positions in our society and increasingly support and vote for a type of veritable madness which, like an unstoppable centrifugal force, is tearing this country apart, creating unbridgeable divisions that no amount of misdirected pleading or faux-compromise can repair.
The progressives loudly tout their support for “equality” and what they term “liberation from arbitrary restraints.” They tell us that they are working against historic “racism and sexism.” But, in actuality, their program turns real liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in unrequited passions and desires, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of actual lunacy.
In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?’’ He responds, in part:
“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…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…. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much… But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [bolding added]
The social justice fanatics who demonstrate in the streets, who appear nightly on our news channels broadcasting the ideological virus they call news, who parade before a House or Senate committee (or serve on that committee!), and who indoctrinate gullible and intellectually-abused students in supposed centers of higher education, are, to use Chesterton’s parable, lunatics. They are “already outside the world of reason,” and their unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.
They partake of a virulent cultural post-Marxism that, despite slogans of “defeating racism, sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy,’’ and establishing equality, is ultimately unachievable. Its advocates are, measured by the historical reality of two millennia of Christian civilization and by the laws of nature, insane.
They sloganize about “the fruits of democracy” and “equal rights,” where in some future utopia “racism” and “sexism’’ will finally be banished….but where, in fact, the very contrary will exist, where democracy will have become a totalitarian dystopia a thousand times worse and more oppressive than anything George Orwell envisioned in his phantasmagoric novel Nineteen Eighty Four.
This element, this force in our country, which now numbers many millions of votaries, works feverishly and tirelessly to achieve its objectives. And, as we have seen, especially since the presidential election of 2016, it will do anything, use any tactic, including defamation, lawsuits, censorship, even violence to achieve its ends, to turn back what it perceives even in the slightest to be “counter-revolutionary.”
The question comes down to this: Is the fragile American experiment in republicanism begun in Philadelphia in 1787, which required a commonly-shared understanding of basic principles, now over, or at the very least is it entering its agonizing death throes?
One can certainly trace a progressively destructive trajectory in American history since the overthrow of the American constitutional system in 1865. And the results of that history are now reaching almost an unimaginable breaking point.
Increasingly, we live in a country that has become de facto little more than a mere geographical entity. True, it is still formally a nation, but a nation where there are in fact at least two very distinct Americas, with radically differing visions of what is real and what is not real, radically differing conceptions of what is moral and what is not, radically differing views about truth and error, and radically differing ideas about using whatever means are available to reach a desired and posited end. For all the talk of equality and racism, the revolutionary side in actuality seeks to replace one oligarchy—which it calls “white supremacist”—with another oligarchy of its own making, in fact, a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia’’ that would make Joseph Stalin’s Communist state seem like a Sandals Retreat in the Bahamas.
At the base of this revolutionary movement is the critical use of language. Ideologically-tinged words—“devil terms”—now occur with amazing regularity and frequency: racism, white privilege, sexism, toxic masculinity, equality, democracy, and so on. These terms have been weaponized and are now employed by those on the Left—but also adopted by many elitist movement conservatives (“conservatism inc.”)—to disauthorize, condemn, and damn anyone who would offer effective opposition to the rapid Leftward perversion of what remains of this nation.
It is not only the frenzied talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, but such “respectable” conservative voices as Bill Kristol, Hew Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Ben Shapiro, the National Review crowd and various Republican types , who have joined in to legitimize each new progressivist conquest (e.g., same sex marriage) and attack any real opposition to the Leftist “long march” through our institutions. Like the hard Left, the establishment conservatives betray a hardly-concealed contempt for Middle America, for those hard-working, gun-owning, church-going, underpaid folks who still try to raise a family morally on a shrinking salary. They see the rest of us as mere rubes, a servile class who are not supposed to have a voice—this, you see, is now “American democracy.”
We are not supposed to question this arrangement; we are not supposed to get off the “reservation” assigned to us. That, you see, was the way the “new oligarchy” would work. But in 2016, in exasperation, we did question it, and we did so because instinctively we knew that the unelected managerial class—a cosmopolitan and globalist elite—was far more loyal to its own class and more concerned about conserving its power and authority. It did not give a damn about us, despite the endless stream of campaign promises we hear every election season.
We understood that the chances of success were minimal, and even if we were successful—electorally highly unlikely—the establishment and Inside-the-Beltway elites would ground to dust or coopt any opposition, including even Donald Trump.
But the unlikely did occur, and the elites—the media, the entertainment industry, almost the entirety of academia, the progressivist Democrat Left, and also those supposed defenders of our interests, “conservatism inc.”—responded with unleashed and unrestrained anger, contempt and condescension. Those elites feel threatened by the “natives’’—threatened by those of us on the giant fly-over plantation between the million dollar mansions surrounded by walls in Silicon Valley and the paneled million dollar board rooms on Wall Street where the international globalists gather to plot the future of the world.
No matter that Donald Trump filled much of his administration with establishment figures and GOP standbys (especially in foreign policy). The fact of his election had signaled that the mask of the administrative state, its very authority had been seriously challenged. And what followed was what can only be described as a torrent of lies, fabrications, assaults on our character, attempts to suppress our guaranteed rights of speech and expression, shaming us, and efforts to destroy our livelihoods or get us fired from our jobs or dismissed from our schools.
And, of course, there was the Russia Hoax, involving the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, the Mueller Commission, a compliant media, and the FBI and other intelligence services, and totally false claims that somehow the Russians “had interfered” in our elections. In fact, the “Russia Hoax” was completely political; the Russians were not involved, save for a few double-agents who were actually working for American/FBI interests. It was a massive, unparalleled effort not just to bring down the president, but more significantly, to discredit any opposition to the Deep State establishment’s control.
There are then, palpably, two Americas. They still use the same language, but they are increasingly incapable of communicating with each other. Almost weekly words and terms are redefined beyond comprehension, and those “devil terms” have become the modern equivalents of linguistic hydrogen bombs deployed by the progressivists. They illustrate what political theorist Paul Gottfried has called a “post-Marxist” praxis that has actually moved beyond the assaults of cultural Marxism towards a new and imposed template.
No dissent from this template is permitted in our society. If it demands you call black, white; then you must comply, or suffer the consequences. If your eyes tell you one thing, but the collective media and elites tell you something else, “who you gonna believe, them or your lying eyes”?
For “conservatism inc.” this state of affairs poses critical problems: the “movement” is more or less moribund, like a Persian eunuch at court, of little danger to the harem and of doubtful usefulness otherwise. Its stale ideas are not attractive to Millennials and offer no practical solutions to the challenges at hand. Indeed, in too many cases “establishment conservatives” and their Republican cohorts in Congress only serve to normalize each progressivist victory. Creative ideas from the Right only come nowadays from what is termed “the disauthorized Right,” from the nationalist Right (especially in Europe), and the populist and Old Right (here in the United States).
Some “movement conservatives” have recognized this. And there has been recent talk about the “conservative movement” somehow harnessing the newly unleashed nationalism and populism—witness the recent efforts of Zionist scholar Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism, 2018) to incorporate these tendencies into the conservative mainstream. A national conference on “nationalist conservatism” was held in Washington on July 14-16. But such attempts are essentially efforts by a “phony right” (as Paul Gottfried terms it) to once again derail real opposition to the Progressivist project and maintain control over disparate elements (and also deflect criticism of Israel, always a bugaboo for the Neoconservatives).
Such efforts will ultimately fail, just as the creation of a new American nationalism will flounder, as well. Unlike most European nations which possess an organic history and common heritage, the United States has traveled too far down the road of unbridgeable division for a rooted nationalism to be successful. The disparities and extreme differences are far too great.
It is time to look elsewhere for solutions.
America in 2019 faces three possibilities for its future:
(1) Either there must be some large mass conversion of one side or the other (a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion?), probably occasioned by some immense and earth-shaking event, war, depression, disaster; or (2) there must be a separation into independent jurisdictions of large portions of what is presently geographically the United States, including possible massive population exchanges—this separation/secession could be peaceable, although increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst, (3) the devolution of this country would continue into open and vicious civil and guerrilla war, followed by a harsh dictatorship. Disorder always abhors a vacuum, and that vacuum will be filled one way or another.
Given the present state of this nation, are there any other realistic possibilities? After all, despite the pious pining of the Neoconservative publicists that America is the world’s “exceptional” nation, the new Utopia, God did not grant us national eternity, did not guarantee our future. And our leaders and many of our citizens have done their damnedest to undo and undermine all those original hopes and promises.
The modern American madness, the lunacy—and that is certainly what it is—increases exponentially, it seems, on a daily basis. There are so many examples of it, it is so rampant in our society, that our surprise and outrage have become inured: imagine something incredibly and impossibly awful and crazy…and, lo, it actually will happen in our insane society.
There are only a very few things, a few statements by Abraham Lincoln that I can agree with. One of them is this (1858): “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The time has come; the moment has arrived for us to discuss not only what is wrong with the country, but how we actually might resolve the issues that confront us. And just perhaps the answer is not a new and necessarily-controlled or imposed faux-nationalism, but some sort of national separation, hopefully peaceful, that might be the least disagreeable course. The other options, all of them, bring violence, civil war, and probably dictatorship. And that is something we must hope to avoid.