Conservatives PUSH BACK on Robert Mueller | Did The British Warn Gen. Flynn?

Another Day, Another Leftist Attempt to Censor Conservative Thought

The modern-day left’s battle against intellectual diversity on college campuses continues. Last week at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, a three-person approval committee denied use of a venue to Burton Folsom on the grounds that Folsom’s presentation was not "academic" in nature and would not attract a broad enough audience to allow him to speak in the McKay Atrium of the campus, a large centrally located venue at Davidson.

It’s important to understand just who Burton Folsom is. Folsom is a distinguished fellow and professor emeritus at Hillsdale College. He has written more than a dozen books mainly on economic history, which include the titles Entrepreneurs vs. The State, The Myth of the Robber Barons, and New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy has Damaged America. He has an M.A. from the University of Nebraska and a doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh. He has served as an associate at the Free Enterprise Institute as well as the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Very few professors at Davidson can match Folsom’s credentials or his prolific publishing success.

Even with these bona fides, the three-person panel denied the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) request to have Folsom speak at the McKay Atrium. “[The McKay Atrium] is reserved for more academic related events that are campus wide and attract a broad audience,” said an e-mail from the committee which denied the request.

YAF spokesman Spencer Brown stated, “Students, alumni, trustees and administrators should be concerned that the powers that be have decided scholarship is subject to a rigid ideological test where liberals win and conservatives are shoved to the edge of the campus."

Read the entire article

It's Time to Weed Out the Fake Patriots from Our Ranks #MAGA

Yes, Virginia (Dare) There Is A Cultural Marxism–And It’s Taking Over Conservatism Inc.

The most recent of incident of Cultural Marxist commissars refusing to admit that dissidents are to be treated as fellow citizens is the crazed female professor who accosted the NPI’s  Richard Spencer while he was exercising at a Alexandria gym. She, recognizing him from coverage of the election campaign, started haranguing him and calling him a  “Nazi.”

Instead of having her ejected for this behavior, the gym’s management terminated Spencer’s membership. [Georgetown professor confronts white nationalist Richard Spencer at the gym — which terminates his membership , By Faiz Siddiqui May 21, 2017]

Back in 2011 VDARE posted a commentary of mine on the legitimacy of the “Cultural Marxist” concept. (I reluctantly accepted the term only because I couldn’t think of a better one.)

As I pointed out, this ideology was very far from orthodox Marxism and was viewed by serious Marxists as a kind of bastard child. Yet many of those designated as “Cultural Marxists” still viewed themselves as classical Marxists and some still do.

Exponents of what the Frankfurt School called “critical theory”—like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Erich Fromm—were considered by orthodox Marxists to be fake or ersatz Marxists. But they did adopt orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory in key aspects:

Read the entire article

Pat Buchanan: How 1960s Berkeley Birthed the Right

In December 1964, a Silver Age of American liberalism, to rival the Golden Age of FDR and the New Deal, seemed to be upon us.

Barry Goldwater had been crushed in a 44-state landslide and the GOP reduced to half the size of the Democratic Party, with but 140 seats in the House and 32 in the Senate.

The Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the most liberal in history, was on a roll, and LBJ was virtually unopposed as he went about ramming his Great Society through Congress.

The left had it all. But then they blew it, beginning at Berkeley.

Protests, sit-ins, the holding of cops hostage in patrol cars—went on for weeks to force the University of California, Berkeley, to grant “free speech,” and then “filthy speech” rights everywhere on campus.

Students postured as revolutionaries at the barricades, and the Academic Senate, consisting of all tenured faculty, voted 824-115 to support all Free Speech Movement demands, while cravenly declining to vote to condemn the tactics used.

Read the entire article

TPP Is Toxic Political Poison That Politicians Should Avoid

After nearly six years of negotiations, trade ministers recently announced they had reached agreement on the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This does not mean the TPP is a done deal. The next hurdle for this rigged corporate power grab is to convince the participating governments, including Congress, to ratify it. In the United States, the trade justice movement, which has grown to be broad and diverse, can stop the TPP.

Here are two immediate actions you can take to stop the TPP: Click on the links to sign the petition telling Congress to reject the TPP and register for the mass mobilization in Washington in November.

Both chambers of Congress must ratify the TPP by a majority vote using a process called “fast track.” The trade justice movement fought a multi-year campaign to prevent Congress from giving the president fast-track trade authority. We delayed it for much longer than the corporate traders wanted, forcing the TPP into the election year. Since the TPP is “Toxic Political Poison,” an election year is not when they wanted to consider it. The corporate traders were required to compromise to pass fast track. One key compromise was making the text of the agreement public for 60 days before Congress considers it. This is a tremendous opportunity to educate and mobilize people.

Just after the TPP negotiators reached an agreement, we asked Ralph Nader if the TPP could be stopped. He said, “It will be stopped on its demerits.” He further noted its wide impact, saying, “Its scope is everything,” and described it as a “global corporate coup … the most brazen corporate power grab in American history.” The TPP, he said, is “a major peril to our national authority” that is “ceding our sovereignty, ceding our self-reliance, ceding everything we can do within the boundaries of the United States.”

Read the entire article

Deconstructing Western Civilization

Damon Linker has a characteristically sharp piece about New York magazine’s 6000+ interview with an anonymous zoophile — in this case, a man whose fetish involves sex with a horse. Linker connects to my initial blog post about this thing, and shares my revulsion at what the magazine has done, and what it means:

[T]his is a very big deal, in cultural and moral terms. No, not the fact of bestiality, which (like incest) has always been with us, but the fact of an acclaimed, mainstream publication treating it as a matter of complete moral indifference.

As I said in my post, it’s not that this interview is going to make people heretofore disinclined to copulate with animals change their minds. It’s that a piece like this is a canary-in-the-coalmine cultural moment. Linker:

Why, then, is the New York interview a big deal? Because it’s perhaps the most vivid sign yet that, in effect, the United States (and indeed the entire Western world) is running an experiment — one with very few, if any, antecedents in human history. The experiment will test what happens when a culture systematically purges all publicly affirmed notions of human flourishing, virtue and vice, elevation and degradation.

But Linker says there are two problems with my analysis (and with the trad reaction in general). First, he says that we trads are wrong to blame relativism for this, saying that it’s more accurate to put the fault down to “an absolute ethic of niceness,” by which he means an increasing refusal to condemn, because that would be mean. I see what he’s saying here: it’s not that people affirm bestiality, but that they refuse to condemn it because hey, if that’s someone’s choice, who am I to judge?

(Of course we know from extensive sociological research that the Millennial generation, at least, can be quite judgmental on a number of topics. But the ones they suspend judgment on are matters of religion, and matters of sexuality. In those cases, niceness reigns.)

Read the entire article

Why Conservatives Say No

A day after the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, the Senate advanced the Gang of Eight’s “comprehensive immigration reform” bill. The work of the Court’s narrow majority looks more likely to endure than the Senate’s lopsided one, but momentum is cutting against conservatives in both cases.

These two seemingly unrelated issues remind us that the most difficult word in politics is “no.” When a large group of Americans wants something, even views the attainment of that thing as important to their identity, they will get it eventually. Their political opponents will come to find denying them exhausting.

This is not always a bad thing. Justice has often been done only after victimized groups have worked long and hard to pursue it. Neither the demolition of Jim Crow nor women’s suffrage would have come about absent such efforts. “We shall overcome.”

Nevertheless, this tendency does become problematic when it makes it difficult to defend the interests of society as a whole against the interests of particular individuals or groups, evoking James Madison’s concerns about factions. Just as for neoconservatives every tin pot dictator is always Hitler in 1938, for liberals every social issue is always Selma.

If you oppose whatever war the neoconservatives wish to fight, you are enabling a new Hitler. If you disagree with whatever social cause the liberal champions, you are the new Hitler, or at least the new Bull Connor.

Read the entire article

What Do “Conservatives” Want to Conserve?

During the past weeks, Republican candidates have been bitterly attacking each other, mostly telling the people that the other candidates are not conservative enough.

As a rule of thumb, I think that most of what they say about the other candidates is true, while everything they say about themselves is a lie.

I purposely keep Ron Paul out of this dogfight. The reason is because, as the last tactic against the only candidate who consistently, by words and deeds, has done what he swore to do, defend and protect the Constitution, Ron Paul is not a conservative.

Self-entitled conservative Republicans apparently believe that they have a monopoly on the Constitution. Now, given the fact that they still love “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush, still the main destroyer of the Constitution in recent times — though Obama is trying harder to beat his record — I wonder, what do conservatives want to conserve?

Do they want to continue reducing the freedom of the American people by both Republicans (Patriot Act) and Democrats (National Defense Authorization Act)?

Do they want to conserve the breakdown of the rule of law by the very ones who are supposed to preserve it?

If that is what so-called “conservatives” want to conserve, preserve, protect, save, safeguard, keep, sustain, maintain, prolong and perpetuate, please count me out!

Jeffersonian Exceptionalism

The American exceptionalism that has become an unchallengeable part of political discourse in the United States has taken on substantive trappings that are not at all intrinsic to the concept that America is indeed an exceptional place. Those trappings include a sense that some principles and rules of international relations somehow do not apply to the United States. They often include an attitude that the United States can do right but no wrong. There is often a disdain for any need to understand, much less to accommodate, the interests, perceptions, and feelings of non-Americans. There is a tendency to see the United States as an indispensable player in sundry matters around the globe. And there usually is the belief that because American values and institutions are superior to anyone else's, they are readily applicable to non-Americans, who will readily accept and understand them.

The politically unchallengeable aspect of exceptionalism makes it a tool to use (more often by the Right than by the Left) against anyone arguing for careful foreign policies that pay due regard to conflicting interests and to limitations that apply even to the United States. Use of the tool puts the opponent on the defensive. It would be political poison to be suspected of not believing fully that the United States is exceptional.

The trappings ought to be stripped away from the core concept of America indeed being a special place. Robert Merry has discussed the importance of distinguishing exceptionalism from the idea that American values are univerally applicable. I have described how some of the attitudes and beliefs that accompany the version of exceptionalism commonly expressed today have underlain trouble that the United States has gotten itself into overseas.

Fortunately there is a version of exceptionalism that has long standing in American political thought, that views American values and institutions as just as special as anyone else views them, and is not burdened with the unhelpful latter-day trappings. This version is at the center of the American political tradition that Walter Russell Mead, in his splendid book Special Providence, labels as Jeffersonian. Jeffersonians, writes Mead, “believe that the specific cultural, social, and political heritage of the United States is a special treasure to be conserved, defended, and passed on to future generations.” Foreign policy has much to do with that conservation and defense: “To capitalize on that rare and precious opportunity to build a free country was the highest aim of Jeffersonian domestic policy; to preserve that sanctuary and that revolution has been and remains the highest aim of Jeffersonian statecraft in international relations.” As for universality, Jeffersonians believe that the United States could better serve the cause of democracy beyond its borders “by setting an example rather than imposing a model.”

Is “Conservatism” Enough? Russell Pearce’s Defeat And The Future Of “The Movement”

Conservatives, both Establishment and grassroots, lose because they don’t want to win.

Modern American Conservatism is unique among political movements in that it flinches from actively seeking victory. Partially this is because of the philosophical underpinnings of Movement conservatism—one is hard pressed to visualize an effective mass movement growing out of a battle cry of “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton.” But more than that, there is a deeper problem: American conservatism systematically undercuts its most stalwart champions, even as it follows hesitantly in their wake.

The most obvious example: Pat Buchanan, conservatism’s great Lost Leader, who was systematically ostracized from the movement he helped to build. Rather than continuing (and completing) the Reagan Revolution in 1992 and 1996, Establishment conservatives actively chose respectable defeat over Politically Incorrect victory—and so today find themselves in a political climate where it is increasingly difficult for Republicans to even compete.

Now we see Russell Pearce, president of the Arizona State Senate and champion of SB 1070, suffering a crushing defeat in Tuesday’s recall election—even as his efforts have launched a nationwide movement, inspiring similar laws in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, just for starters.

Americans needs to become more cynical about the people who claim to represent them. Patriotic immigration reform has to be as non-negotiable as lower taxes and gun rights.