Conservatism Is Dangerous - Why the Non-Careerist Right Must Call Out the Big Con or Deputized Right - By Jack Kerwick

During a recent exchange with some essentially like-minded friends, someone—a Republican voter who is typically and appropriately critical of the conservative movement, or what I call the Big Con—suggested that we would spend our time more wisely if we reserved our harshest criticisms for the left.

After all, as Barack Hussein Obama, in a rare moment of candor, revealed nearly a decade ago, it is the left that aims to achieve nothing less than “the fundamental transformation” of America.

This comment of my friend’s deserves a response.  Fortunately, several are in the coming.

First, thankfully, criticism of the Big Con does not preclude criticism of the left.  We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Second, while there are admittedly some differences between the Big Con and the left, they are differences in degree, not in kind.  And herein lay the fundamental misconception in which my friend’s objection is rooted, the misconception that the resources spent on critiquing the Big Con are resources diverted from critiquing the left.

The truth of the matter is that those of us on what Paul Gottfried calls “the unauthorized,” “non-aligned,” or “independent” right—and what I prefer to call the unprofessional or non-careerist right—are  as critical as we are of the Big Con precisely because it is a species of the left.

In other words, the problem that my friend identified, the problem of critiquing either the Big Con or the left, is a false dichotomy.  Ultimately, there is but a single target here, and it is leftism, Political Correctness, “progressivism,” or whatever else we choose to call it.

Thirdly, this last point shouldn’t obscure the fact there is a difference between the Big Con and garden variety leftism.  Yet the difference is that while the Obamas, Pelosis, and CNN blabber- mouths of the world are unmistakably leftist, the Bushes, Romneys, and Fox News blabber-mouths, though left-leaning, are not unmistakably so.

And this is why it is at least as important, and arguably more so, to expose the Big Con than expend energy revisiting the same usual suspects on the hard left.

Leftists are (for the most part) recognized for who they are.  Yet as long as tens of millions of Americans continue to believe that talk radio hosts, Fox News all-stars, and National Review, Commentary, and Weekly Standard writers are “conservative” or “right-wing,” the left will continue to make the kinds of cultural and political advances that it has been making for decades.

In other words, the Big Con right is in reality the stealth left.

Consider this point in light of an analogy:

If a person wants to avoid contracting a lethal disease, or if he has already contracted it but wants to eradicate it, he will need to know all that he can know about it—its causes and symptoms, certainly, but also the treatments to which he’ll have recourse in combatting it.

Now, suppose that the “experts” in the medical and pharmaceutical industries, for whatever reasons, present as an antidote this disease a drug that, while decelerating the rate at which the disease advances, nevertheless enables it to proceed along its fatal trajectory.  Three things should be apparent:

(a)The drug would be preferable to no drug at all.  However, inasmuch as it posed no insurmountable obstacle to the disease, it would clearly be mortally dishonest for the experts to depict it as if it did, to depict it as if it was something fundamentally different than what it is in fact.

(b)Moreover, it would be the height of recklessness and injustice for those of who recognized both the terminal disease for what it is and the fake remedy not to call attention to these facts.

(c)The whole reason that we should scream from the rooftops that the public and patients are being scammed is that the authorities are abetting this terminal illness by presenting a fake as a cure.

To repeat, the choice faced by the whistleblowers is not a choice between calling attention to the terminal nature of the disease and calling attention to the pseudo-cure promoted by the experts.  In the last analysis, there is but one problem, one target, on which critics’ attention focuses: the terminal illness.  The drug is newsworthy only because it is promoted as if it poses real opposition to the disease when it does no such thing.

Similarly, it is imperative that those who want to prevent the fundamental transformation—the death—of their country to focus on the leftist illness that threatens to bring it about.  To this end, they have neither the moral nor the logical option to remain silent on the fake drug of the Big Con or the Deputized Right, a controlled opposition permitted by the left but which is promoted as an antidote to leftism by “the experts,” the agents and peddlers of the Big Con themselves.

Doubtless, there are several objections that apologists for the Big Con or the Deputized Right will raise to this thesis. The most basic of them, the one objection of which every other will prove to be a variant, is that my thesis is simply wrong.  Of course, the counter-objectors will exclaim, the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, and Laura Ingrahams of the conservative movement are not left-wing!

Undoubtedly, many (though certainly not all) Big Con celebrities genuinely think that they are the conservative enemies of leftism that they style themselves as being.  This, though, is neither here nor there, for thinking one is such-and-such isn’t the same as being such-and-such.

Furthermore, the “conservatism” of the Big Cons is in effect a ramshackle construction, a kaleidoscopic ala’ carte of views on topical issues that, if distinguishable at all from those of their leftist counterparts, is distinguished on account of its differing in details from those positions taken by leftists at the moment.  Examples of this abound.

Not all that long ago, it was the “conservative” position to favor same-sex “unions,” but oppose same-sex “marriage.” Now, as to how this was uniquely or even distinctively conservative is anyone’s guess, for it was also the Democratic left’s position as recently as seven years ago.  But once the Supreme Court discovered a Constitutional right to homosexual marriage, the “conservative” position changed.  Today, it is considered “conservative” to either explicitly affirm same-sex “marriage” or implicitly affirm it by way of such smokescreens as “States’ Rights” or deference to “the rule of law.”

In the case of abortion, most Big Cons maintain that they’re pro-life. Yet they’re willing to allow for the killing of the unborn if the child was conceived in rape or through incest, hence militating decisively against the very ground—the innocence of the prenatal human being—on which they profess their opposition to abortion.  Or Big Cons claim that less money than that which leftists want to give it should be given to Planned Parenthood.

When it comes to immigration, the “conservative” position has been that while illegal immigration is bad, potentially limitless immigration—from anywhere in the world—is good.  In a good number of instances, the “conservative” position has been amnesty—though always packaged under a different label designed to conceal the fact that it’s amnesty that “conservatives” advocate.

We could go on.

Nor should it be any surprise that Big Cons abet the left in the latter’s long march through the institutions when it is considered that both trade in the same sorts of abstractions within which they couch their positions on contemporary issues.

The Deputized Right and the social Democratic left regularly espouse the rhetoric of “human rights.”

They both speak as if America is ahistorical, the first and only country in all of history to have been founded on some universal abstraction.  The Big Con/Deputized Right calls this the doctrine of “American Exceptionalism.”

Both the Big Con and the left endorse the Ellis Island/Melting Pot myth, the fiction that America had no founding stock and that, from its inception, it has been and was always meant to be a rest area for the planet.

And the Big Con specifically insists upon America’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage.  Yet this is a term that appeared nowhere in our political-cultural lexicon until quite recently, as far as the life of America is measured.

In short, the Big Con and their leftist sparring partners have labored tirelessly engaging in unabashed historical revisionism and amateur philosophy regarding the origins and character of America.

I have no doubts that at least some of the Big Cons are unaware of the consequences of their actions.  Nevertheless, there can be no denying that the Big Con, the Deputized Right, functions as an accomplice to the left.  The Big Con is as much, and possibly even more, responsible for the leftward drift of America than is the recognized left, and it most definitely is exponentially more responsible than is the militant left that would have otherwise remained a joke, a freak show, or a danger to be dealt with had it not been for the Big Con’s capitulation to the left’s machinations.

So, to my friend who questioned the utility of criticizing the Big Con, I underscore the importance—the duty—of those of us on the unprofessional right to expose the fake antidote of the Big Con for what it is.  Only in doing so can we hope to mount the resistance to the left that it warrants.

The Best of Jack Kerwick

Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.

Previous article by Jack Kerwick: Academia: Reason and Rigor

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/03/jack-kerwick/why-the-non-careerist-right-must-call-out-the-big-con-or-deputized-right/

The Conservative Movement Is a Big Con - By Jack Kerwick

Time constraints preclude the thorough analysis of “The Big Con,” the so-called “conservative movement,” that this subject deserves.  For now, however, suffice it to say that the conservative movement is largely a fiction constructed by the merchants of Big Conservative media—to whom, from this point onward, I refer simply as Big Cons.

As long as those of the Big Cons remain the faces of the official right, the left will continue to do what it has been doing for the last so many decades: It will continue cleaning house in the “cultural wars.”

Of course, the Big Cons could never so much as remotely concede this as a possibility, much less an actuality.  Such an admission would, after all, be bad for business.  Yet it is true all the same.

Simply put, Big Cons have neither the will nor even the imagination necessary to fight the left on the terms that the left has established.

To put it even more bluntly, Big Cons fear the left.

In fact, even this manner of speaking understates the case: Big Cons are terrified of the left.

So as to avoid misunderstanding, the referent here isn’t limited to the fear of professional ruination and/or the loss of social status, i.e. all of those invitations to Manhattan and D.C. cocktail parties that so many Big Cons crave. The fear to which I refer is more primal than this:

Big Cons fear for their physical safety lest they get on the bad side of the left’s more rabid faction.

Leftists make noise, issue uncompromising demands, organize in massive numbers, clog streets, and use abrasive, even outrageous, language—tactics designed to intimidate others.  Yet leftists do more than just intimidate.  They attempt to slander and ruin reputations and livelihoods. They are also known for destroying property and engaging in acts of violence, even murderous violence, in some instances, against those who they regard as their enemies.

All of the while, the “respectable” voices of the left in government, academia, Hollywood, and the media either ignore the thug antics of their street soldiers or try to rationalize them away.  Neither course of action is particularly difficult, for Big Cons are all too eager to allow the Democratic left to distance itself from the barbarism of its base.

Big Cons can be counted upon to do one or more of three things, and they tend to engage in these moves in tandem.

First, they react to the left’s more obvious excesses by calling attention to them.

Then, they go on the defensive, bending over backwards to assure the world that just because they are critical of the left for this or that position doesn’t mean that they aren’t “sensitive” to the subjects at hand.  In other words, Big Cons spare no occasion to advertise to the world their abhorrence of just those moral transgressions of which the left accuses them—“racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “xenophobia,” “fascism,” and so forth.

Finally, toward this last end, Big Cons launch an offensive—only it’s an offensive against those on their own side, or to their right.

This three-fold prong is the standing operating procedure of Big Cons.

The cooked Confederate monument controversy is a textbook illustration of this Big Con pattern.

(1)Big Con commentators focused their audiences’ attention on, say, the scene of a mob of zealot leftists trying to tear down a statue of a Confederate hero—a scene that any American with a scintilla of sanity and civility will have no problems recognizing for the ugliness that it is.

(2)Then they condemned the hysteria, irrationality, and destructiveness of the “protesters” (yes, Big Cons never fail to accept whatever terms the left selects for its positions and activities).

(3)However, Big Cons were quick to qualify their condemnatory remarks with assurances that they understood and empathized with those people, particularly black people, who purported to be traumatized by the sight of statues of long-dead Southerners.  In doing so, they distanced themselves from Southerners (and others) who defended the monuments, and in many instances, Big Cons joined the call for the removal of the monuments and even went so far as to accuse some monument supporters of being “racist.”

Big Cons are partisans, for sure.  They are partisans of appeasement, appeasement of the left.

This three-point strategy of Big Cons is, unequivocally, a losing strategy against an enemy as aggressive and resolute as the left.

While talking and writing are important, for sure, Big Cons never do more than this.  For instance, they never use any of their vast resources to call for boycotts of leftist enterprises. Big Cons could quite easily organize demonstrations rivaling, and possibly exceeding, in size those that George Soros and other leftist millionaires and billionaires fund.

Big Cons have refused to form marches on Washington D.C. and, for that matter, around the country, pro-Second Amendment marches, say, or One Million Deplorables rallies intended to register the disgust of millions of Americans with the Russian-Collusion/Trump witch hunt.

If only they had the will to do so, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and the lot of the Big Cons, given their combined fortunes and influence, could have effortlessly arranged for several of these immense demonstrations of loud, militant, and enraged Americans.

But they do not have the will.

Perhaps those Big Cons with television programs could reserve a daily segment on self-defense training for Americans who want to avoid being pummeled by leftist vermin simply for wearing a MAGA hat or an American flag decal.  These segments could include tips on how to physically fight offensively, or maybe even showcase an gun expert who could familiarize viewers with different sorts of weapons.

The point is this: Short of secession (which, ideally, is the most morally proper option), there can’t be any peaceful co-existence between those who want to win by whichever means necessary and those who live in fear of offending the sensibilities of those who want to win by whichever means necessary.

There can be no peaceful co-existence between people as long as one of these two groups lives in fear of the other.

If a tentative peace can be had, it can be had only when both groups have fear.

This, though, is the problem.  The left, for all of its hysteria, doesn’t genuinely fear their enemies. That is, they don’t have that raw fear of being physically harmed.  While violence is something to be avoided and used only as a final resort, violent leftist bullies and terrorists must know that if they proceed to lay a finger on the hair of the head of anyone who they would demonize as a “racist” or “fascist,” it could mean their very lives.

This is a message at which Big Cons will never so much as hint, lest they be accused of advocating violence.

Interestingly, Big Cons never tire of rejecting pacifism and appeasement as responses to Islamic terror, and they are the first to lambast the “feminization” of boys and men.  Yet in the face of the ongoing violence to which non-leftist Americans are being subjected right here at home by leftist thugs, the Big Cons won’t dare suggest that perhaps those on their side of the political divide prepare to physically fight in defense of themselves and other innocents.

As long as the Big Cons remain in charge of the official right, the left will continue to advance, for the left has no reason to fear the Big Con.

The Best of Jack Kerwick

Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.

Previous article by Jack Kerwick: Nikolas Cruz and ‘Mental Health’

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/02/jack-kerwick/the-big-con-and-why-the-left-will-continue-to-win/

Big Conservatism (The Big Con) and the Fundamental Transformation of America - By Jack Kerwick

Ever since Barack Obama infamously announced his intention to “fundamentally transform” America, the merchants of Big Conservative media, i.e. The Big Con, have seized upon this as proof of Obama’s disdain for America as it has traditionally conceived itself.

It’s true, of course, that this assessment of the 44^th POTUS couldn’t be more correct: It is inconceivable that, being a proponent of Blackism and socialism, Obama could find anything worth conserving, much less loving, in the predominantly white, Christian, Constitutional Republic that America was originally meant to be and that it actually succeeded in becoming for much of its history.

Yet, while it will doubtless come as a shock to many to hear this, the fact of the matter is that the cogs in the wheel of Big Con are no less guilty than Obama of striving to fundamentally transform their country.

Before proceeding further, however, there are a few points that must be made.

First, whether it is a person, an object, or a whole society, the “fundamental transformation” of a thing is a change in that thing.

Second, the fundamental transformation of an entity is a change of a specific sort, a dramatic change.  Whatever it is that undergoes a fundamental transformation changes, well, fundamentally, in the most basic, rudimentary of respects. When, for instance, a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, or an acorn changes into an oak tree, both undergo a fundamental transformation.

Third, as these last two examples illustrate, while fundamental transformation is a kind of birth, it also marks a sort of death. The 20^th century philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote that change, any change, is “an emblem of extinction.”  Change, in other words, is a threat to identity.  Thus, according to Oakeshott, virtually everyone, knowing that change is inescapable, has a “disposition,” a conservative disposition, to abate its flow.

Fundamental transformation, being of an abrupt, radical nature, is that much more frightening than those changes that occur gradually. The fundamental transformation of an acorn into an oak tree requires the dissolution, the extinction, of the acorn, just as the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly requires the death of the former.

So, when Obama expressed his and his supporters’ desire to fundamentally transform the United States of America, he put all Americans on notice that the left desires to, in effect, extinguish the only America that had ever existed.  Obama’s “America” (if we could still even call it by this name, a name ascribed to the New World by European explorers and settlers in honor of one of their own, another dead, old white guy), the product of the feverish swamps of the leftist imagination, promises to be as fundamentally different from historical America as the oak tree is fundamentally different from the acorn.

As any student of revolutionary movements knows all too well, the project of fundamentally transforming a society requires the radical revising of its past.  To put it another way, the ideologue determined to fundamentally transform a society can’t possibly be interested in the past for the past’s sake.  Quite the contrary, even “the past” is of value to him only insofar as it can be enlisted in the service of his mission to inaugurate the Eschaton, the future state of affairs for which he aches.  But this in turn means that the ideologue has no alternative but to bend, and even break, the past so as to fit it into his Master Plan of Fundamental Transformation.

In short, the transformer must lie about the past in order to actualize the future of his imaginings.

As should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to events for any length of time, the official political right has been no less guilty than the official left on this score.

Both Democratic “progressives” in the political and media classes as well as their Republican “conservative” counterparts not only incessantly lie about America’s past; they promote one and the same Big Lie.

The Big Lie is comprised of two components, both of which are equally, thoroughly, deceptive.  The first is that America was “founded” upon an Idea or Proposition, the Idea, say, of Equality, of equal Natural or Human Rights.  Let’s call this the Propositional America Thesis (PAT).

The other is that America is “a nation of immigrants.”  This is the Immigrant America Thesis (IAT).

As we’ll see, though each is logically independent of the other, PAT lends support to IAT: According to PAT, America is actually the first ahistorical or suprahistorical nation, for the abstraction upon which America is “founded,” or the concept that is America, being both timeless and universal, transcends history.  In doing so, it transcends race, religion, ethnicity, culture, and even language.  Yet this in turn means that anyone, irrespectively of their origins, can become an American—as long as they are willing to embrace the principles upon which the nation is “founded.”

And this, according to the peddlers of the Big Lie, is exactly what has happened from America’s inception until the present.  No people can claim America as uniquely their own, for the Idea that is America, being an Idea, is without a history and without borders.

Hence, anyone from anywhere in the world who affirms the proposition or propositions that are said to constitute America can become an American.

That both the left and Big Con subscribe to this lie can be gotten readily enough by the fact that their agents only ever express concern over illegal immigration—the implication being that as long as immigrants to America arrive legally, their origins are inconsequential.

America is Nation of Immigrants.  We hear this from Fox News, National Review, and talk radio as much as we hear it from NBC, Slate, and Salon.

Now, while Republican politicians and their apologists among the scribblers and talkers in Big Conservative media don’t tell the exact same version of the Big Lie as that told by their leftist counterparts, they do indeed endorse the same Big Lie:

Both leftists and “conservatives,” for example, erase from history the Christianity of America’s founding stock.  While leftists would have us think that America’s Founders were deists and atheists who sought to emancipate America from centuries of Christian superstition by enshrining within their Constitution a clause prohibiting any and all public expressions of (Christian) religiosity, the official right in Big Conservatism characterizes America’s roots as “Judeo-Christian.”  This latter move has the same effect as the leftist’s version of the Big Lie by obscuring the religious-specific character of the men and women that settled and pioneered—that founded—America.

Both the left and the Big Con affirm that American is but an Idea.  The only difference is the manner by which each goes about doing so. For instance, it is obvious that the left is affirming PAT whenever leftists refer to illegal migrants as the “undocumented.”  Sometimes leftists will go so far as to refer to illegals as “undocumented Americans!”  The implication is that the only thing separating illegals in America from American citizens is a matter of some paperwork, some boxes to check off and lines on which to leave signatures.  Illegals, that is, are Americans inasmuch as they affirm American “values.”

Big Conservatives, on the other hand, betray their commitment to PAT whenever they identify the doctrine of “American Exceptionalism” (AE) with America and the espousal of AE with patriotism.  AE is the creed that America is exceptional economically, militarily, politically, and so forth, it’s true. Yet it’s true only so far as it goes, for AE’s champions insist that America is exceptional in these respects precisely because it is exceptional in being the only country ever to have been “founded” upon an Idea or Proposition.

And here we have come full circle.

Neither the left nor Big Con is willing to acknowledge that the Declaration of Independence was a declaration on the part of English colonists of their independence from the Mother country of England. It was a declaration of secession. The rights to which Jefferson referred he and his compatriots knew full well belonged to a historically, culturally, and ethnically-specific constellation of chartered prerogatives and duties extending back centuries, the legacy of an English tradition.  The rights that they valued and which they felt the government of England had violated were not “the Rights of Man.”  They were the rights of Englishmen.

America’s founders never intended to produce a so-called “melting pot” of races, religions, and ethnicities from around the planet.  It’s correct that many of them were willing to accept some immigration for the purpose of building their young country, the founders were well aware of the potential dangers that immigration posed, with several of them—Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson, to name but a few—expressing concerns regarding immigration that couldn’t be more Politically Incorrect by today’s standards.

Importantly, as early as 1790, not long at all after the Constitution was ratified, the founders limited citizenship to white men, “free” white men who had been in America for two years.

Obviously, none of this is meant to imply that America must remain as the founders (and many subsequent generations of Americans) had envisioned it.  The point, rather, is that both “progressive” leftists and the merchants of the Big Con behave dishonestly in having us think that their views of America are those to which the founders subscribed.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is still another point at which I’ve been at pains to argue:

The agents of Big Conservatism are just as responsible as are their leftist counterparts of seeking to fundamentally transform America by radically rewriting its history.

The Best of Jack Kerwick

Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.

Previous article by Jack Kerwick: Big Conservative Media?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/12/jack-kerwick/big-conservatism-the-big-con-and-the-fundamental-transformation-of-america/

Alt-Left Celebrity Extraordinaire - By Jack Kerwick

What is commonly referred to as “the conservative movement”—an alliance between Republican politicians and media polemicists—is what I call Big Conservatism, or the Big Con.

The movers and shakers of the Big Con, though styling themselves as an alternative to the left are, in actuality, an alternative-left, the alt-left.

That Big Conservatism is an alternative-left is gotten readily enough by their respective stances on a range of issues.

Ben Shapiro, widely hailed as a rock star of the Big Con, is a classic case in point.

Shapiro is talented. There can be no question about this. After all, it’s quite the feat for one so young to have mastered the talent that many in the Big Con have labored decades to nail down: Shapiro, despite the fact that he is a left-leaning neoconservative, has convinced legions of Americans, particularly younger, college-aged Americans, that he is not only a conservative, a man of the right, but a cutting-edge, risqué conservative.

Inasmuch as the men and women of the Big Con are distinguished on account of their ability to excite their base—voters, readers, listeners, and viewers—while simultaneously currying favor with the official left, Shapiro is its posterchild.

A Slate cover story from earlier this year is revealing.  Slate, mind you, is a well-known left-wing publication. Yet the “progressives” who run it see in Ben Shapiro a potential ally in their “resistance” to Donald Trump and his army of Deplorables.

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Seth Stevenson, the author of “The Many Faces of Ben Shapiro” (anything but an inapt description of the piece’s namesake), interprets his subject through what he himself characterizes as a “psychoanalytic narrative.”  Shapiro, Stevenson explains, was bullied terribly as a child.  This experience, he suggests, could account for why Shapiro despises Trump.  “In my opinion,” Shapiro remarks, Steve Bannon, the former editor of Breitbart, for which Shapiro once wrote, “is a bully” who “sold out” the “mission” of the outlet’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, “in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.”

Breitbart, Shapiro continues, was transformed into “Trump’s personal Pravda.”

Stevenson writes that because Shapiro defended Kim Fields, a reporter who claims to have been assaulted by a member of Trump’s entourage during the campaign—a claim for which Florida prosecutors concluded they had no grounds for prosecution—he was then besieged with “anti-Semitic” tweets by “alt-right bullies” who, according to the Anti-Defamation League, made him the most attacked “journalist” that year.

Because Shapiro is “among a dwindling cadre of Trump-averse conservatives at a time when the mainstream GOP and its media apparatus are following (and sometimes leading) our cretinous president straight into the muck,” Shapiro, Stephenson writes, is among those “influential right-wing figures” upon whom he can see himself “relying” to help the country “hold the line” should Trump choose to “roll his tanks (metaphorical or otherwise) over the ramparts of American democracy [.]”

Shapiro was all too happy to grant Slate the opportunity to use him so as to contrast his reasonable, principled conservatism with the vulgar, unprincipled, “racist” and unthinking pseudo-conservatism shared by Trump, many of Shapiro’s media colleagues who support President Trump, and, of course, the tens of millions of Americans, mostly traditional Republican voters, who constitute Shapiro’s audience and who came out in droves to vote for the President.

Shapiro was all too happy, in fact, to highlight the chasm separating the two.

Ben Shapiro is among those “conservatives” who has earned the approval of the left.  He is part of the controlled-opposition, a “rightist” who has been deputized by the left.

Let’s review some of Shapiro’s record:

For starters, let’s recall that for all of his caterwauling over Trump’s “bullying” tactics, Shapiro has always been a loyal Republican whose support for George W. Bush was particularly adamant.  This is revealing, for Bush, along with Congressional Republicans and Democrats, used false pretenses to embark the United States upon a path to war that continues to the present day.

Shapiro, along with his colleagues in the Big Con, vigorously argued on behalf of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Collectively, these invasions have come at the cost of trillions of dollars, the loss of over one millions lives, hundreds of thousands of orphaned children, and hundreds of thousands of human beings who have been permanently maimed and traumatized.  Far from ushering in a new Democratic Age throughout the Middle East, the Big Con’s wars radically destabilized the latter, unleashing fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organizations like ISIS while decimating ancient Christian communities and the communities of other religious minorities that received some measure of protection from the secular rule of men like Saddam Hussein.

The Big Con generally and Shapiro’s voice in particular were instrumental in making these wars happen.

And yet Trump, to hear NeverTrumpers like Shapiro tell it, is supposed to be the bully.

Shapiro and his ilk wax indignant over what they regard as Trump’s crass tweets and oral remarks—even though they used their resources to support politicians who wielded their power in ways that have caused incalculable bloodshed, pain, treasure, and death for legions of human beings.

The Iraq War is today recognized as arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster in our country’s history.  The Afghan war, of which few people any longer even speak, is our country’s longest-running war. Neither an end, nor victory, is in sight.

Shapiro has never apologized for his role in advancing these disasters.

To his credit, though, and unlike some of his fellow travelers, Shapiro at least did admit at the time that the wars to export Democracy to the Middle East were necessary features of a larger scheme for American empire—something in which he believes.

In 2005, Shapiro wrote an article in which he castigated “impatient isolationists,” i.e. the majority of Americans who had already, by this juncture, turned against the war in Iraq.  Since, following the fall of the old Soviet Union, America is the world’s only remaining superpower, the only remaining “empire,” it has a “duty” to preserve itself as an empire.

This, in turn, means that America has a duty to engage in pre-emptive wars, for pre-emption “is the chief weapon of a global empire.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.  It doesn’t matter that Iraq posed no direct or imminent threat to the United States. In “toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq,” America “prevent[ed]” Hussein’s “future ascendance and end[ed] his material support for future threats globally.”

By this same principle, the principle that pre-emption is indispensable to advancing America’s “global empire,” America should be considering invasions of “Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and others.”

This Big Con celebrity argues that while advancing empire promises to secure America’s “future security,” it is also a worthy end inasmuch as it consists in “forwarding freedom” throughout the world.

In another place, Shapiro asserts that “America must be defended and her liberties spread abroad when possible.” The only alternative is what Shapiro calls “kowtowing” to “international multiculturalism”—which he equates with “a relativistic sea.” This last alternative is no alternative, for “international multiculturalism” leads inescapably to “tyranny.”

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In 2003, Shapiro called for the removal of the five million Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from “Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper.” “It’s an ugly solution,” Shapiro wrote, “but it is the only solution.”

In response to the charge that such a policy is Nazi-esque, Shapiro has a response ready at hand: “There are no gas chambers here. It’s not genocide; it’s transfer. It’s not Hitler; it’s Churchill.”

Because Winston Churchill approved of the forcible removal of upward of nine million Germans from the Polish territory that the Allies created by slicing off a portion of Germany, there is nothing objectionable about the Israelis forcing millions of Palestinians from the only homes that they’ve ever known.

Churchill, Shapiro notes, shared his own view that when “two populations are constantly enmeshed in conflict, it is insane to suggest that somehow deep-seated ideological change will miraculously occur, allowing the two sides to live together.”

As for those who are reluctant to accept his proposal, Shapiro cuts to the quick: “It’s time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn’t a solution.”

In March of 2016, Shapiro wrote: “I will never vote for Donald Trump.  Ever.”

He proudly declared: “I stand with #NeverTrump.”

To hear Shapiro tell it, Trump is the anti-Shapiro: “I will never vote for Donald Trump because I stand with certain principles,” such as “small government and free markets and religious freedom and personal responsibility.  Donald Trump stands against all of these things.”

Shapiro stands with “the Constitution of the United States,” the Constitution’s “embedded protection of my God-given rights through governmental checks and balances,” and “conservatism.”

Trump stands against such things.

Trump, rather, stands for, among other odious things, the “targeting of political enemies,” “an anti-morality foreign policy,” “government domination of religion,” “nastiness toward women,” “tacit appeals to racism,” and “unbounded personal power.”

The patent silliness and hysteria of Shapiro’s remarks should now leave even the most casual of observers incredulous.  He also forecasted that “Trump will get blown out in a general election.”

And in the event that this prediction materialized, it is not NeverTrumpers like himself who would have deserved the blame but the Deplorables, those who secured for Trump his party’s presidential nomination. It is not on “our consciences,” the consciences of NeverTrumpers, that the guilt of a Clinton victory would deserve to fall.  “It’s on the consciences of the people who went along with this nomination.”

Today, nearly two years after Trump defied, and as he continues to defy, the Never Trumpers—the alt-leftists and the official left—Shapiro no longer self-regards as Never Trump.  Now he calls himself a “Sometime Trumper.”

Perhaps it is precisely because this is such a meaningless moniker that it is perfectly suited to cover the bases of one who has been as spectacularly wrong as Shapiro has been throughout his career and extending into the era of Donald Trump.  No one, including those who have supported his candidacy from the beginning, backs Trump in all instances, just as few people unequivocally support anyone.  “Sometimes Trump” is meant to simultaneously fulfill two purposes:  (1) conceal Shapiro’s belated recognition that he had been just as wildly irrational and melodramatic over the prospects of a Trump presidency as his fellow NeverTrumpers and those on the official left continue to be; and (2) prevent Shapiro from having to confess that he had been wildly irrational and melodramatic.

To see that “Sometime Trumper” is as rhetorically deceptive as it is logically and substantively useless, consider it in light of an analogy.  Imagine a man who spends his time issuing one unequivocal condemnation after the other of capital punishment, i.e. a man as zealously anti-capital punishment as Shapiro was anti-Donald Trump. This same man, though, over time and upon the development of events, begins to soften his original stance.  He now realizes that perhaps there are indeed some classes of criminal offenders that are deserving of the death penalty.

Yet rather than simply admit that he is now a proponent of capital punishment, he says instead that his position has not changed substantially, that the only difference between where he stands now and where he stood in the past is that he now supports the death penalty only in some instances.  In most cases, the man continues, he still opposes it.

It should be painfully obvious to all with eyes to see that this thinking is painfully confused: Not even the most adamant proponent of the death penalty supports it in all cases (whatever this is even supposed to mean).  Anyone who supports the death penalty for any crime is a supporter of the death penalty.

Shapiro’s stance on Trump is no different.

But we shouldn’t expect for this Big Con/alt-left celebrity to ever acknowledge this.

The Best of Jack Kerwick

Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/07/jack-kerwick/ben-shapiro-alt-left-celebrity-extraordinaire/

The Big COVID Con Exposed - By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

 

One of the great grifter movies, aside from the Clinton and Obama presidencies, is The Sting. Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford} team up, “to pull off a complicated scheme known simple as the Big Con,” a racket to crush Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) and his empire.

We have had several iterations of the Big Con over the past four years, with Gondorff and Hooker played by a rotating cast including James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. All schemed and conspired to destroy Donald Trump and his family and presidency.

The latest sequel features Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx as the grifters and swindlers, using the Chinese coronavirus as the Big Con to keep President Trump from winning a second term in the White House. In the movie, the con succeeded but in Washington D.C., the con-verse is happening, with the schemes blowing up in the faces of the deep state grifters.

In the past week, two pillars of the COVID Con collapsed: deaths and positive tests. Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

The first crack in the pillar occurred in early May when task force member Dr. Birx claimed, “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.” She believed the CDC was inflating Wuhan flu mortality by as much as 25 percent.

The pillar of COVID deaths crumbled just days ago when the CDC updated their mortality numbers to reflect deaths “from COVID” versus deaths “with COVID.”

Death with COVID means that George Floyd is counted a COVID death because he tested positive at autopsy. This is similar to the case of a Colorado man dying of alcohol poisoning but the death was later blamed on COVID. Washington public officials counted gunshot fatalities as COVID deaths.

The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths allegedly associated with COVID. In other words, only 4 percent of media sensationalized deaths were due solely to COVID and not other underlying medical conditions.

Could COVID have been a contributory factor? Sure, but what about the underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, even terminal cancer, all of which significantly increased the risk of death from COVID or even the seasonal flu. The CDC summarized it succinctly, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.”

What this means is that those at lower risk, younger and healthier, are extremely unlikely to die from the Chinese flu, and shutting down the economy to protect the healthy makes little sense, unless economic destruction is the ultimate goal.

Not surprisingly, this revision received little attention in the DNC media, covered only by conservative news sites like Gateway Pundit. Not only ignored, but the truth was suppressed with Twitter blaming the updated CDC numbers on QAnon and removing tweets discussing the new data.

It seems the left wants QAnon to be the new “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton once blamed for reports that her husband was having sex with a young White House intern. Yet the CDC numbers are on their website and the blue dress spoke for itself.

As death counts became suspect and testing ramped up, the media did a smooth sashay to case counts, or positive tests. Death counts and hospitalizations were flat, suggesting herd immunity was present in many parts of the country. To justify keeping businesses, churches, and schools closed, the DNC media now focused on positive tests.

A positive test means simply that there are viral particles in a person’s respiratory tract. They have been infected months ago and the sensitive PCR test detected dead viral fragments. A positive test does not mean a person is sick or contagious. And more testing means more positive cases, leading to so-called “surges” that were anything but.

Days ago, in of all places, the New York Times, the second pillar of the COVID Con crumbled, as they reported,

The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.

Sensitivity of the PCR tests has to do with amplification of genetic material from the virus. The fewer cycles required, the higher the viral load and greater likelihood of being contagious. By setting the threshold of amplification cycles too high, the test is overly sensitive.

Imagine a home security alarm so sensitive that it is triggered by a wind gust or leaf hitting a window. The homeowner will certainly be alerted if an intruder is attempting to break in, but the alarm will be going off constantly with false, or in the case of the virus, non-clinically significant positives. Or as the NY Times put it,

Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.

33 amplification cycles may be the upper limit for detecting live virus, according to the CDC, but many commercial labs are using 40 cycles as a positive test, in essence sounding the burglar alarm when a bird lands on the back deck.

The NY Times found, “Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers.

Is this purposeful or incompetent? I suggest the former. President Trump downplayed testing in favor of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine. The Democrat-media establishment immediately pushed for more testing and told everyone that hydroxy was as deadly as cyanide.

Fox News crank Neil Cavuto said of hydroxy, “It will kill you.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming an “evidence-based” approach to combating the Chinese flu, pushed for “testing, testing, testing.” Yet both of those admonitions were fear-based, not evidence-based.

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

 

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn, Twitter, Parler, and QuodVerum.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_big_covid_con_exposed.html