Category Archives: BAB’s A List

With 2 Exceptions, Fox News Is A Filter For Deep-State Orthodoxy

BAB's A List, Christianity, Conservatism, Government, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

As are Modern Age and National Review, once flagship publications of classical conservatism, writes Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

As we have seen now for the last seven months something approximating a massive, multi-faceted, “soft” coup d’etat has been underway against President Donald Trump and, most especially, against his agenda. That attempt to depose, or, at the very least, “tame” or control the president is feverish, virulent and visible. Those involved in this coup effort are termed the “Deep State,” that is, those groups and their allies who have been entrenched in this country’s seats of political and economic power for decades, and who have hitherto controlled its politics, it economy, its culture, and serve as “gatekeepers” for anyone who hopes to actually “succeed” on a national level.

The late Dr. Samuel Francis identified these forces as “managerial elites,” largely unelected power brokers, financiers, life-long politicians and permanent bureaucrats ensconced in government agencies, lobbying organizations, consultants, and now, prominently, those who dominate the media, Hollywood, most of academia and the educational establishment. As he details in his posthumous magnum opus, Leviathan, we now live in a “managerial state,” where largely unseen managers and unelected elites dictate our politics, control our economy, and set the standards for our popular culture.

The Deep State is bipartisan and incorporates not just the raving mad Democrats, but also Republican leadership and many of its Congressional representatives, as well as much of the leadership of what euphemistically is labeled “the conservative movement.” The significant characteristic about the so-called establishment conservative and Republican “opposition” to the more leftist elements of the Deep State is that while these “conservatives” generally offer different approaches to national issues, which they claim are, variously, based on “free enterprise” or “individual choice,” in fact, their goals, whether in domestic policy and civil rights (e.g., acceptance of same sex marriage, gender equality, support for “moderate feminism,” etc.) or in foreign policy (e.g., imposition of American-style liberal democracy, equality, economic control, etc.), are essentially and eventually the same as those of the traditional Left.

Let me offer some examples.

Fox News enjoys a reputation as a “conservative media outlet.” Yet, increasingly, on Rupert Murdoch’s news network there are examples that a Deep State framework enjoys growing influence. The methodology and approach to issues may seem, at first, to differ from the extreme leftist nostrums; but, then, take a closer look. Turn the television remote to Fox News at certain times of the day (afternoons), and watch Shepard Smith, or, later in the day, behold the Fox All-Stars. Smith, openly gay, is an outright “Trump hater” who has on several occasions while doing the news called the president a “liar” (in his news “reports”).

Charles Krauthammer and A. B. Stoddard among the All-Stars in the early evening are notorious semi-NeverTrumpers, and even if they appear occasionally to offer faint praise and plaudits for the president in the name of “fairness,” their presence represents the Neoconservative strategy of essentially demanding the president conform to their template and, thus, to their filtering. And so, the recent announcement that the Trump administration was cutting off its training and aid to those vaunted “Syrian moderates” (who have been identified as actual terrorists), has been met with screams of horror and condemnation from several Fox “military analysts”—foaming-at-the-mouth Colonel Ralph Peters and retired general Jack Keane, both zealous advocates of sending American boys to fight to impose liberal democracy and equality in every backwater desert oasis or impenetrable jungle on the face of the globe.

Of course, Fox continues to offer more pro-Trump coverage earlier in the mornings, or on Tucker Carlson and Hannity later at night. But the trend—and the balancing act—should be a cause of concern: just how long will Rupert Murdoch permit Tucker Carlson to invite Professor Stephen Cohen onto his program to puncture holes in the “Russians Did It!” canard and advocate a more rational, positive and cooperative approach to the Kremlin? Hannity has not gone that far, and seems to partake in the dominant anti-Russian narrative (but with the Russkies aiding Hillary and not Trump), but how long will Fox permit him to criticize fellow Fox personality, Smith, as he has recently done?

An even more indicative example comes in the recent pages of the Modern Age quarterly. I have mentioned this esteemed conservative journal previously, making comments about its apparent lurch to the cultural and political left. I began subscribing to it more than fifty years (!) ago when I was still in high school, and I have waited expectantly for each issue since then (even when overseas in university or teaching). Founded by my mentor, Dr. Russell Kirk, in the late 1950s, Modern Age was to be the intellectual journal for American conservatives. And what was refreshing about it was that it was open to the various strands of conservative thinking: you would turn its pages to see a long-running, vigorous debate between the great Southern, pro-Confederate writer Mel Bradford and Claremont professor Harry Jaffa over the anti-egalitarian nature of the Declaration of Independence and whether or not Lincoln was a true conservative (Bradford, in my view, won that debate hands down). You would read traditionalist Catholic Frederick Wilhelmsen on public orthodoxy and the inherent problems of a “secular establishment.” Whole issues were dedicated to a defense of Southern tradition and critiques of industrial capitalism (from a traditionalist viewpoint).

But, concurrent with the take-over of the older conservative movement by those unrepentant refugees from the Marxist Left, the Neoconservatives, Modern Age, too, began, it appears, its own slow turn, its “apertura a sinistra.” Writers like Bradford no longer appeared in its pages, and my friend Professor Paul Gottfried, arguably the most significant “old Right” author (with twelve books in multiple languages) in the world today, was dropped from its masthead.

The most recent issue, Summer 2017, arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It is dedicated to higher education and the assault by the Left on free inquiry at the collegiate level. There is, of course, much of value in the several articles on that topic, including a piece by Sir Roger Scruton; but there are also more of those “red flags” that I noticed in the past several issues. Leafing through, I noticed that author Thomas S. Hibbs, in his essay defending the liberal arts, praises black revolutionary and zealous abolitionist Frederick Douglass (pp. 45-48). Of course, his object is to illustrate the importance of a well-rounded education, but the use of Douglass as an example is troubling, or should be, to traditional conservatives who understand Douglass’s revolutionary activities 155 years ago. In summing up Hibbs’ essay, the now deceased editor of the quarterly Philip Augustine Lawler writes of “the wholly exemplary Frederick Douglass as evidence that skills themselves are unrealistically empty when artificially detached from questions of character.” (p. 74) This about a man who, although married, engaged in various extra-matrimonial sexual liaisons, including with extremist British suffragette Julia Griffiths and German Marxist activist, Ottilie Assing, who certainly had an influence on him.

Later in the summer issue we find a review by Eve Tushnet of a dystopian novel, Jerusalem, by author Alan Moore. But it is not so much the novel that catches my attention; it is Tushnet, who is identified (p. 92) as the author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. I have not read the book, save for a blurb describing that it attempts to chart a “third way” between total acceptance of Church doctrine and open sexual rebellion. I do not propose to offer a personal condemnation here. Rather, I simply comment that under the editorship and aegis of Russell Kirk—of the older Modern Age—this would not have occurred, that the overriding purpose of the quarterly as an outright defender of Western tradition, would have not allowed for it.

But, then, this is the age when the “conservative movement” now fully embraces same sex marriage and “conservative” Jonah Goldberg touts same sex marriage as a “conservative” institution, and Guy Benson, James Kirchik, Milo Yianopoulous, and others include it as the latest and laudatory accomplishment of “equality.”

As in the past few issues of Modern Age, the summer issue includes the perfunctory sniping at the president, as “willful” and questioning whether the established “structures” can “restrain [his] power.” (p. 86) Of course, this only mirrors the even harsher comments of David French and Kevin Williamson in the (formerly conservative!) National Review and the NeverTrumpism of Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard: “Listen, Donald, if you expect to get anywhere in DC, you had better listen to us, and mend your ways!”

The Deep State is not, thus, monolithic; it operates often with a wink and a nod, its adherents often competing among themselves, at times offering different routes and diverse solutions to problems—but, essentially, visualizing a more or less common goal. Those objectives are not those of an older generation of conservatives …. nor do they encompass the beliefs and values of millions of fly-over country Americans left behind by the “two-coast” establishment.

Last November, as if a sleeping force awakened from its deep slumber, millions of Americans—those deplorables and “bitter clingers”—arose and voted, as if their lives depended on it, for a radical course change. Intuitively, they understood that whatever real authority over their personal lives—much less over the direction of the nation—they still had, that it was slipping away ineluctably and perhaps irretrievably. They voted for a bull-in-a-china shop, someone to “drain the swamps,” someone unconventional. They understood that he was an imperfect and flawed vessel who operated outside conventions and approved Deep State norms; indeed, that was one of the major reasons they supported him. And down deep, they also comprehended that if he were elected, that the process to get his agenda and promises enacted, to even get a hearing, would be messy and extremely difficult…almost a Sisyphean task!

The results after six months are, admittedly, mixed. Some of the former NeverTrumpers have cloyingly clawed their way into various perches within the administration, intent on shaping its focus and outreach. Others of their ilk remain “chirping sectaries” on Fox and in the DC-New York punditry. And over on the Left wing of the Deep State establishment, the raving Democrats and the Mainstream Media carry on daily assaults, carefully massaging and then leaking via their embedded agents every bit of evidence, manufactured or otherwise, they can amass, in their unsavory effort to undo last November 8, with now the powerful weapon of a Special Counsel to insure that the attacks—even without any real evidentiary support—go on until, they hope, either Trump leaves office on his own accord, or is removed.

This, then, is the United States in 2017, the result of a century and more of acceptance of the Idea of Progress and of an historical and social progressivist narrative which shapes our outlook and dominates our politics, our schools, our entertainment, our religion, and admits no dissent. The open disaccord manifested last November cannot be allowed to interrupt its unstoppable advance. This is the notice we have received: “Accept our rule and our power, or be destroyed.” And it is up to us to say with the great St. Pius X:

“…that the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a One-World Power which shall have neither dogmas, nor hierarchy, neither discipline for the mind, nor curb for the passions, and which, under the pretext of freedom and human dignity, would bring back to the world the reign of legalized cunning and force, and the oppression of the weak, and of all those who toil and suffer. […] Indeed, the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators: they are traditionalists.”

And we must answer, as did St. Pius’s predecessor, Leo XIII: “Christians are born for combat, whereof the greater the vehemence, the more assured, God willing, the triumph: ‘Have confidence; I have overcome the world’.”

*****

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

Southern Baptists At The Crossroads: Will They Resist Cultural Marxism?

BAB's A List, Christianity, Communism, Pop-Culture, Religion

By Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

“At the base of all political issues, there is a religious question.” There have been numerous writers credited with first writing or using those words. While studying in Spain, my dissertation director asserted that the great Spanish thinker, Juan Donoso Cortes, had said them in the 1840s; other sources indicate that Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote them at about the same time. And there are other accounts and other authors who apparently said more or less the same thing.

In the end, it really makes little difference who said or wrote that phrase: its truth and profound reality percolate throughout the history of Western Christianity, whether written down or not. And the observation is ever more significant in our turbulent contemporary times.

The history of Christianity over the past 150 years, if not longer, clearly illustrates the existence of an immense ongoing battle—a war—between those who defend the traditions and orthodoxy of their faith and those who believe that that faith must be continuously updated and open to the intellectual currents of the times. Witness the great struggles in the 19th century between theological “liberalism” and “higher criticism,” opposed to “traditionalism” and Biblical inerrancy. And in the 20th century this combat continued as “Modernism” threatened the very nature of the Catholic Church and social gospelism and assaults on Biblical fundamentals gnawed away at the various Protestant communions.

Early on traditionalists seemed to maintain their own in these debates. Whether by the conservatism of the Prussian Lutheran establishment in Germany, or with the staunch response by the Catholic Church under pontiffs like the Gregory XVI, Bl. Pius IX, Leo XIII, and St. Pius X, liberalism, socialism, and other challenges to orthodoxy were mostly held at bay. It was St. Pius X who definitively condemned theological Modernism in his powerful encyclical Pascendi gregis Dominandi in 1907.

In the United States, the theological debate perhaps reached its zenith with the great Calvinist Presbyterian theologian, Graham Machen, who had been a professor of theology at Princeton University, but finally left that school because of its embrace of theological liberalism. He then founded the Westminster Seminary in 1929, based on more orthodox and fundamental beliefs. Machen’s very public combat, in many ways, signaled a revival of fundamental orthodoxy within various Protestant denominations.

Yet, like a virulent infection—a cancer—that refuses chemotherapy, the attacks on Christian orthodoxy did not disappear or go away. Throughout the 1930s into our own times the conflicts continued, if sometimes just below the surface. Indeed, by the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican/Episcopal Church began to give way to more “modern” views on such issues as sexual morality. Methodists, divided one hundred years earlier between Methodist Episcopal Churches, North and South, re-united in 1938, in a union through which liberalism soon gained the upper hand. Northern and Southern Presbyterians formally re-united in 1983, once again submerging a more conservative (Southern) confession within a dominant, more liberal (northern) one.

The most significant, unrelenting, and universal opponent to theological liberalism and modernism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries had been the Catholic Church. Yet, it too, despite formal condemnations by St. Pius X and the continual opposition to various theological errors, witnessed internal subversion and, at the Second Vatican Council (1963-1965), the validation of what can be termed a kind of “pastoralism,” that is, the application in the apostolate, if not in official doctrine, of a practical liberalism. The case of the Catholic Church is unique in that its historic and doctrinal anathematization of liberalism, modernism, Biblical “higher criticism,” as well as its condemnations of socialism and communism, are irreformable. Thus, the attempts to subvert its mission and teaching involved a pro forma, perfunctory acknowledgment of settled doctrines, while at the same time implementing a practical “pastoralism” that in effect rejected those doctrines: ecclesiastical schizophrenia writ large.

At its origins, Marxism found itself in abrasive opposition to traditional Christianity. It was only in the early 20th century that Marxists developed a concerted approach—a philosophy—of forming cooperative “united fronts” with more liberal Christians on issues where they believed “collaboration” possible. But just what kind of “collaboration” was envisaged? Early on, Marxists understood that their political triumph would not be complete unless the traditional opposition of the Christian church was neutralized and Christian culture, itself, conquered. For international Communism that meant that cooperation and the “united front” efforts would be a means of weakening and eventually subverting not just theological orthodoxy, but also significantly politicizing the culture and its traditional basis in Christianity, pushing it to the political and cultural Left. In that way, formal Christianity, once the most steadfast opponent of Marxist ideology, would be neutralized and, in many cases, become its most notable collaborator.

In a very real sense, the subversion and fall of establishment Christianity was the last major conquest of a continuing anti-Western Marxism, even after of its collapse in Russia. Indeed, as Paul Gottfried has carefully explained in his fascinating volume, The Strange Death of Marxism, while the older, more establishment Soviet Communism disappeared in the late 1980s, a more virulent strain of Marxist belief—Cultural Marxism—continued even more aggressively and successfully in Western Europe and in the United States.

Among major Protestant denominations, the Southern Baptists have been, arguably, the most resistant to the leftward drift and theological deterioration that have characterized so many other communions. Yet, in more recent years, they, too, have been subject to assault, and most specifically on social and political questions. Indeed, increasingly the contagion of cultural Marxism, disguised generally as a renewed “concern” for “social justice,” has gained a foothold in the SBC.

The essential problem is that many otherwise orthodox Evangelicals are also subject to the Progressivist appeal and narrative on social issues and the dominant linguistic template that imposes a mode of communication and resulting pastoral action that carries with it an eventual decay in traditional theology as well.

Recently, the Southern Baptist Convention has adopted resolutions condemning: “racism,” the so-called “Alt-Right,” and, finally, the “Confederate flag.” Although Southern Baptist congregations enjoy a great deal of autonomy, such declarations indicate something deeper and more profound that is occurring within the denomination, and it should raise serious red flags among Baptist conservatives.

The success of cultural Marxism in “turning” much of Christianity, infiltrating its institutions of learning and its seminaries, altering its pastoral messaging, and weakening its theological resolve, confirms the aphorism of the historic “united front” approach: “pas d’ennemis a gauche” (first said by French socialist Rene Renoult in 1919)—“no enemies on the Left.” This ongoing process reflects the success of cultural Marxism in creating a template, an inexorably progressivist view of history, a standard where intellectual thought and language have been dogmatized, and even those who supposedly oppose its announced aims and objectives are forced into accepting its ideological parameters and grounds of debate. And in doing so, they fatally limit the effectiveness of their response, and insure the continued advance of the Revolution.

There is, however, hope for counter-revolution. And it is seen in the increasing—and untainted by the politically correct culturally Marxist straight jacket—reaction on the part of such organizations as the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X in the Catholic Church, the various continuing Anglican confessions that reject the heretical inanity so rampant in that denomination, the proliferation and incredible growth of conservative Presbyterian churches, and the refusal of millions of Baptists to accept the political dictates of the SBC. And, more fascinatingly, by the tremendous revival of traditional Orthodoxy in Russia and Slavic countries.

The battle—the War for Belief and for our civilization—continues. The tide of advancing Progressivism continues to wreak its havoc and destruction across the entire West. Yet, the assurance of traditional believing Christians is certain: even in the depths of the most unprecedented darkest times, the light of Faith will conquer. The Blessed Marco d’Aviano entreated the small Christian garrison at the siege of Vienna in 1683, facing, as they were, 300,000 fanatical Muslims: “If you believe, you will be victorious.”

And thus it was on September 11, 1683; and it can be so again.

*****

~ Dr. Boyd D. Cathey is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. In addition to writing for The Unz Review, Cathey writes for The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

Republicans Let The Left Get Away With Incitement To Murder

BAB's A List, Democrats, Donald Trump, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Republicans, Russia

By Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

Yesterday’s attempted mass murder of a dozen Republican congressmen practicing for the annual congressional charity baseball game continues to hold the headlines … yet, on the Mainstream Media [MSM] the narrative continues to be that the deceased assassin, James Hodgkinson, was just an “loner,” a “sick” individual, unrepresentative of “mainstream” Democratic views. No, we are told, he was isolated, acting by himself, he had “snapped.” And from both Democrat and Republican leaders we then are counseled to “come together” and “reject hate,” and “lower the volume.”

Some pundits of the MSM go further, and actually blame what happened on Donald Trump—you see, it was he who initially unleashed this “climate of hate” by his “racism,” his “sexism and homophobia,” and his “anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

Got that?

Thus, the pundits in the media and the Democrat leaders (and far too many Republicans) attempt to erect an equivalency between the “hateful” statements of the president, on the one hand, and what they term as the “irrational but understandable reaction” by a scandalized and isolated individual, on the other.
This narrative is the very definition of standing truth on its head, of calling what is white, black; and what is black, white. Or, to use a more historical descriptor, it is an example of “the Big Lie.”

Three days before the assassination attempt in Alexandria, a columnist for The Huffington Post, Jason Fuller, published an essay at that venue. Now, The HuffPost is what we would call “mainstream Left.” It conveys views that are quite common among leading Democratic politicians; its writers have appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and at other sites. In other words, in our current politics, it passes for establishment, on the Left.

I actually receive its emailings most every day. But I had not read Fuller’s piece, published June 11, until a friend and former associate (who holds a doctorate and is a fine writer) sent it to me yesterday. Actually, after the attempted assassination, the essay was taken down by The HuffPost … and, after you read it (below), I think you will understand why.

Jason Fuller is representative of thousands, perhaps millions, of anti-Trump “resistance” people. That is why what he wrote on June 11 is so extremely threatening … and disgusting. He—and Hodgkinson—are not isolated, they are, as I have written, identical in their thinking, tips of an iceberg cultivated and encouraged and abetted by those same political leaders and that same media which shed tears—momentarily—yesterday for the attempt to murder congressional Republicans, but who, when it comes down to it, don’t retract or apologize for ANYTHING they have said, don’t halt any of the vicious and virulent venom they have unleashed, don’t retract any of the totally “fake news” they have spread about like horse manure, don’t apologize for any of the lies and deceptions that they have engaged in.

Fuller spins a web of charges against not just President Trump, but everyone in his administration, and also various members of Congress. They have, according to his febrile and utterly corrupted brain, all committed “treason,” and thus they must be tried, convicted, and executed. For Fuller there is no doubt about the “Russian collusion” narrative, no matter what James Comey admitted or what all the other Intel chiefs have testified to. It’s a fact because he wants it to be a fact, and because for the past seven months the MSM and leading Democrats have opened a Pandora’s Box of reckless insinuations and violent attacks, and created an immense mythic, politically poisonous narrative.

And notice, although he talks about a “trial,” it is only a “show trial,” because Fuller, like millions of other brainwashed Americans, has already convicted Trump, Pence, Bannon, Priebus, Speaker Ryan, Senator McConnell, and any other public figure who in any way supports the president, of treason. They all must be killed … that is, after a perfunctory “show trial.” Shades of the old Soviet days and their “show trials.”

Now, I would bet you that dormant oil well in my back yard that if you asked Jason Fuller his opinion, generally, of the death penalty, like almost all leftists, he would stoutly oppose it and react with horror and call it “inhuman” and “abusive of human rights.” But in this case, in the case of Trump and the entire leadership of the GOP, well, he would make a bloodthirsty exception; and from the tenor of his column it is very evident that he would love to be there when such executions occur and probably like to throw the switch himself. In fact, it is apparent that he eagerly lusts after the blood of those figures whom he firmly believes have threatened the future of the planet by challenging climate change and have, according to the Leftist narrative, stolen the 2016 election, aided and abetted by that evil genius Vladimir Putin (who obviously crept into thousands of polling places and miraculously changed vote totals, all with Donald Trump’s connivance!).

What is both utterly scandalous and extremely disturbing about this published piece on a national “mainstream” leftist webzine is that it is NOT unique; if you read far enough and scratch below the surface, it is fairly common to find similar items and commentary. And it is those same rabid epigones of the Deep State—the MSM (CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.), the Democrats (like Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, etc.), Hollywood, academia—who have unleashed this venom and hatred. It is they who have let out the genie of vitriolic language and unhinged hatred, of massive acts of “resistance,” of violence on campuses and in the street. They are the ones who have been screaming blood-curdling screams and imprecations and threats … and, as was to be expected, their millions of followers, cocooned in that parallel universe constructed on myth, lies, and deception, have begun to act upon the premises handed out to them by that leadership.

So, those brief tears and that wailing by Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders don’t cut it. The attempt of the MSM urging “that we all come together,” or to blame President Trump and talk radio, are ludicrous, an attempt to divert attention from their own direct responsibility and guilt. Yes, it was James Hodgkinson’s gun that was pointed at those Republicans, but it was, in fact, a gun created and filled with ammunition provided by a Rachel Maddow and a Chris Matthews on MSNBC, any of the pundits at CNN and the MSM, and of Waters, Pelosi and others, so self-righteously ensconced in Congress. It is they who must bear ultimate responsibility, and, if not so judged here and now, must face the eternal judgment of history and of God.

What we are witnessing is just one emanation of the multifaceted response of the Deep State and its warped minions to what happened last November. I have said before, and I repeat it again, those forces will use any tactic, employ any strategy, and do anything to recover what they lost and to maintain their Progressivist trajectory. What James Hodgkinson attempted and Jason Fuller gruesomely envisioned are but the natural results of the age old black-hearted Deep State revolution which luxuriates in evil and rebellion against both God and nature. It must be opposed.

*****

Deep State Establishment Vs. The Aristocratic Republic The Founders Bequeathed

America, BAB's A List, Communism, Constitution, Democracy, Donald Trump, Federalism, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, Government, History, Intelligence, The State

By Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

Who is former CIA director William Brennan? Here is what the Wikipedia says of him: In 1976, he voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall in the presidential election; he later said that he viewed it as a way “of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.” Despite that and despite what such actions denote, he has been involved in the most sensitive of US intelligence work and in the CIA for twenty-five years, serving directly as a personal intelligence advisor in the administration of Bill Clinton, and, as a staunch Obama supporter, appointed to head the CIA in 2013.

This fact puts into context an element of the present multifaceted assault on the Trump presidency, and, indeed, of a highly-politicized intelligence community, infiltrated over decades by cadres of Deep State operatives and sleeper agents, whose goal is to bring down that presidency.

The Deep State establishment wants us to do our thing—pay bills, pay taxes, take the children to school, watch ESPN, mow the grass, maybe go to church, but mainly stay away from getting involved in the “big issues” of really deciding how this country is run. That is their thing: making executive decisions at the top of the food chain, running this nation, conducting its foreign affairs, enacting its domestic policy, lining their pockets, and passing legislation that most of us never hear about until it hits us in the face—or in the pocket book. It’s not exactly an old fashioned dictatorship, but neither is it the republic that our ancestors or the Founders of this nation envisaged, either.

Certainly, those men who assembled to draft our Constitution some 230 years ago did not believe in a “peoples’ democracy.” For them, the republic they gave us did have tiers and gradations, such that those with the most involvement and interest in the new nation would also have the most direct influence. Thus each of the thirteen states had a plethora of property requirements and age requirements, as well as religious tests: all these came together to insure a high level of participation from those who had those interests.

So, what then is the difference between then and now? Do we not still have an aristocracy that, in effect, runs the country?

The issue here is rather the nature of government and how it is construed and operated. Our Founders considered the aristocratic republic they established to be a natural development, based firmly in the deepest traditions and inherited beliefs of the citizens of the new nation. The new constitution would represent an organic “moment” in which the new United States would crystallize its history, reaffirm its British heritage of law and justice. It was, then, not a revolutionary moment, but one cementing a link and connection to the past, to rights that went back to Magna Carta, to Rome, Athens, and, yes, Jerusalem.

It was also intended to be transparent, in that this constitutional arrangement, with its mix of the traditions of aristocracy and limited democratic participation, was not hidden from view. Nor was it intended to be. Americans knew what they were getting. Of course, there were debates over aspects of the founding, and there were disputes, seen most particularly in the several state conventions in the 1820s and 1830s, about whether we wanted to move further in the direction of “democracy” or not.

A major concern of the Founders was the effect wealth might have in influencing elections. They wanted to avoid impropriety as much as possible, to make such concerns as public as they were able. While they foresaw that men of great affluence might gain advantage, imposing set property conditions and the accumulated weight of traditions, custom, and a sense of deference they believed, could offset such dangers. And, very importantly, they wished that local and states’ rights act as a major counter-balance to eventual encroachments attempted by the Federal government. In other words, they posited what Catholic theorists term “subsidiarity,” that is, what can be done on a lower level of governance, ought to be done on that level and not on a higher level. A whole series of layers of intermediate organisms, families, communities, states, would insulate citizens from overweening powers emanating from Washington.

But, as was stated more than once, the republican “experiment” depended largely on the virtue of its citizenry.

Contrast this now with what acute observers like James Burnham (e.g., The Managerial Revolution) and Samuel Francis (e.g., Leviathan) have starkly noted about the modern United States, about how unelected and largely unseen “managers,” technocrats, and political operatives have in a real sense taken over both the electoral process as well as the running of government, forming a new, “hidden” kleptocracy, of those who answer to no one, and whose tenure is unlimited. It is, thus, an ugly and grasping inverted mirror of the model the Founders envisaged.

And since 1865 those protective, intermediate layers—states’ rights, local controls, our liberties—have succumbed, one by one, to the power of the Federal state which seems to increasingly suck the lifeblood out of society. We now are face-to-face, far too often, with the full power and threats of a Federal bureaucracy which seems to know no limits. Those unseen managers, the Deep State establishment, will brook no real opposition. If it should appear, it is either tamed and bought off, or squelched.

Enter Donald J. Trump and an agenda that promised to “drain the swamps,” and a very rude awakening in last November’s election. For the Deep State establishment it could not—must not—be permitted to stand. And thus we come to today, all the chimerical controversy about how the “Russians did it,” and how that uncouth ruffian in the White House needs to be taken down a peg or two, surrounded by “experienced advisors,” or perhaps removed from office, toute suite!

This process has in effect torn the lying mask off the face of the Deep State, and most particularly, its advance panzer units, the Mainstream Media. A recent study completed by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy [May 18] has analyzed media coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days in office. Here is what was found:

CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post…. All six portrayed Trump’s first 100 days in highly unfavorable terms. CNN and NBC’s coverage was the most unrelenting—negative stories about Trump outpaced positive ones by 13-to-1 on the two networks. Trump’s coverage on CBS also exceeded the 90 percent mark. Trump’s coverage exceeded the 80 percent level in The New York Times (87 percent negative) and The Washington Post (83 percent negative). The Wall Street Journal came in below that level (70 percent negative), a difference largely attributable to the Journal’s more frequent and more favorable economic coverage.

Even Fox scarcely gave the president more than 50% favorable coverage.

Add to this the unrelenting assaults by Democrats, academia, Hollywood, and various skittish Republicans and NeverTrump Neoconservatives, and we can see the massive offensive against not just President Trump, but even more, against the “drain the swamps” agenda that brought him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the first place.

More than once I have called for a massive response to this massive offensive. I have stated that while winning this past November 8 was a mini-miracle, extremely difficult to achieve, “winning the victory” would be even harder. And, certainly, it is proving to be so.

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