Category Archives: Conservatism

UPDATE II: NRO Writer’s ‘UnFollow’ Leads To Musing About The Manners-Morals Connection

Conservatism, Donald Trump, Etiquette, Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, libertarianism, Morality, Neoconservatism

National Review’s Kevin Williamson, aforementioned, once told me he was a libertarian anarchist. Although I never saw evidence for the claim, I took him at his word that he was a friend behind enemy lines. (It’s also true that I don’t study NRO’s output.) In the couple of exchanges we had, Williamson seemed far less uptight about intellectual differences than most Americans. Myself, so long as ad hominem is avoided and respect is shown—I can easily befriend ideological adversaries. And I do. One of the nicest gentlemen, for example, is Benn Steil, director of International Economics Council on Foreign Relations. I can’t imagine Dr. Steil churlishly unFollowing me. We differ. So what? I enjoyed his book, “The Battle of Bretton Woods,” immensely.

The UnFollow/UnFriend churlishness is not the province of neoconservatives and Republicans alone.

From experience, libertarians can be as uncivilized in their interactions. The column “Schooling Beck On Trump’s Nullification Promise” mentions “Ivan Eland’s learned rundown of U.S. presidents,” Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty. I contacted Eland as a courtesy. As did I ask him if he would kindly reciprocate with a Follow on Twitter. Unlike the polite Lawrence W. Reed of the Foundation for Economic Freedom, Eland has simply ignored me. Perhaps he’s on vacation.

Manners are a species of morals. Other than to hate mail or rude mail, I respond to all letters I receive—to each and every one. Many thousands since 1998, which is when I got my first newspaper column, in Canada. Due to time constraints, my replies are laconic. But if a reader has bothered to read my work and comment on what I have to say—then it’s only decent and proper to reciprocate.

I haven’t always been firm in this resolve, but I try my very best. If a colleague writes, I reply, whether I like them and their stuff or not. Ignoring a correspondent demonstrates contempt for that individual—a contempt that reflects on the rude “interlocutor.”

UPDATE (1/24): Facebook readers dispute the characterization of Williamson as remotely intellectual.

Christoph Dollis: Well, I’ve always known Kevin Williamson as a moron. Sorry that it hurts, and I get that (I’ve had similar experiences), but in my long-held opinion about Mr. Williamson, you haven’t lost much. I’m pretty sure Williamson is a staunch friend of arch cuckservative Ed Morrissey of Hot Air. ‘Nuff said.”

UPDATE II (3/5):

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UPDATED: Ranchers Hammnod And Bundy: The Best Of America

Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Government, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Private Property, Propaganda, Regulation, States' Rights

Friday, at 8:10 AM Pacific Time, I will be chatting to Bill Meyer, Program Director for News Talk FM106.7/AM-1440 KMED, in Medford, Oregon, about the WND column, “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.” An excerpt:

America, as one wag put it, is a “post-constitutional” country. Even worse, a plurality of Americans has now turned, en masse, against the First Principles of its founding. The organizing principle that currently informs American thinking is statism. It’s the state über alles: its laws, and the foot soldiers that enforce hundreds of thousands of arbitrary rules.

This sorry state-of-affairs is abundantly clear from the standoff between farmers and Fédérales, brewing in Burns, Oregon.

To look at rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son, Steven, 46, is to see the salt of the earth; the best of America. Any decent American ought to be able to see that these family ranchers, so different from politically connected agribusiness, are better and braver than all of us city slickers put together.

We slickers consume the rancher’s grass-fed, organic, “local” beef, while we cheer his oppression. Fellini, the Italian film maker who excelled at portraying corruption of the soul, as expressed in the decay of the flesh, could not have set the scene better. The idiom of Greek Tragedy works, too:

Our protagonists are the two ranchers aforementioned—sentenced to five years in jail, due to a double-jeopardy like maneuver by the federal government.

The Antagonists are the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service, The Courts, who’ve come down upon citizens with limited resources, citizens whom this Federal juggernaut is supposed to serve, not screw.

Other Antagonists in this morality play are the chorus of trash-talking radio, TV mouths and assorted bobbing heads (Republicans and Democrats), who say they care for The Folks but don’t know good folks when they see them.

Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon, has come to stand in solidarity with Dwight and Steven Hammond. The case of the Bundys of Bunkerville, Nevada, is instructive in understating the First Principles involved in the Oregon standoff.

In 2014, the BLM had come to steal Cliven Bundy’s cattle, in lieu of back taxes the BLM claims the rancher has owed it since 1993, when Bundy stopped paying grazing fees. The Bundys had homesteaded the disputed land, southwest of Mesquite, in 1877. Bundy’s forefathers had lived off the land well before the Bureau of Land Grabs came into being. The Feds subsequently passed laws usurping Bundy’s natural right to graze his cattle. The elderly rancher offered the following rejoinder: “I have raised cattle on that land, which is public land for the people of Clark County, all my life. … I can raise cattle there because I have preemptive rights,’ among them the right to forage.”

Also edifying, via The Conservative Tree House, is that “the Hammonds were forced to grant the BLM first right of refusal.” In other words, were “the Hammonds ever to sell their ranch, they would have to sell it to the BLM.” The BLM may get its way, for how are the Hammond women to pay the shakedown fines levied by the Fédérales? These amount to hundreds and thousands of dollars. How will the wives continue the Sisyphean struggle against the federal occupier, and, simultaneously, run the ranches sans the men?

Here we arrive at the “Catastrophe,” also an element in Greek tragedy. …

… Tune into to patriot Bill Meyer’s show. And, of course, read the rest on WND. The complete column is “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.”

UPDATE: “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best Of America” was discussed on The Bill Meyer Show, January 8, 2016 (LISTEN).

On Black Crime, Obama’s ‘Blackism’ & Burke’s Allergy To Neocons

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Crime, Critique, Paleoconservatism, Race, Racism, Republicans

The following is Part II in a conversation with Jack Kerwick, author of “The American Offensive: Dispatches From The Front.” Read Part I, “Black Muslims & the Racial-Industrial Complex.” Visit Jack’s Beliefnet blog—”At the Intersection of Faith & Culture”—friend him on Facebook, and email him at: jackk610@verizon.net.

ILANA MERCER: Barack Obama as a devotee of “Blackism.” Explain. Why do you think this president is incapable of empathizing with the untold number of white Americans dead by blacks and Muslims?

JACK KERWICK: What I call “Blackism” is an ideology, a recipe for achieving racial “authenticity.” Like any ideology, it is the distillation, the cliff note, of a cultural tradition, the tradition of black Americans. Biological blackness is necessary for authentic “blackness.” It is not, though, sufficient. Blackism is designed for the Barack Obamas of the world, those who are at least partially black biologically but for whom black culture is a foreign language. The ideology is a simple method that, being a method, is comprised of a few principles that need only be affirmed in order to achieve “racial authenticity.” One of these principles is that ultimate reality is comprised of collectivities, primarily racial collectivities. Another principle is that non-whites are perpetually oppressed by whites. It isn’t that Obama or any other Blackist would think to deny that whites (and others) can and have been harmed and killed by blacks and Muslims. It’s only that they must see such violence as stemming from “root causes”—“racism,” a “legacy of slavery and Jim Crow,” “the Crusades,” “imperialism,” “poverty,” etc.—that, ultimately, whites should have rectified.

MERCER: Like me, you are still haunted by the “Knoxville Horror”? Why?

KERWICK: This real life story is the stuff of nightmares. In 2007, in Tennessee, a young white couple in their early 20s, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, were carjacked, abducted, raped, tortured, and finally murdered by four black men and a black woman. Newsom was blindfolded, sodomized with an instrument, and shot execution-style. His body was then set on fire.

According to The Knoxville News Sentinel, “Christian suffered horrific injuries to her vagina, anus, and mouth. She was not only raped, but savaged with ‘an object’…She was beaten in the head. Some type of chemical was poured down her throat, and her body, including her bleeding and battered genital area, likely scrubbed by the same solution [.]” “She was then ‘hog-tied,’ with curtains and strips of bedding, her face covered tightly with a small white trash bag and her body stashed inside five large trash bags before being placed inside a large trash can and covered with sheets.” The medical examiner concluded that “Christian died slowly, suffocating [.]” Far from being the chronic victims of interracial crime, as the Racism-Industrial-Complex would have us think, blacks are much more likely to be the victimizers: In roughly 90 percent of all attacks involving blacks and whites, the former are the perpetrators. Thankfully, your average black-on-white attack doesn’t involve the savagery of the “Knoxville Horror.” Yet the latter is the textbook illustration of the reality of black-on-white racial violence, as well as the randomness and mercilessness that far too many such attacks do involve. Beyond this, the “Knoxville Horror” is the textbook case of the media’s complicity in the evil of black-on-white violence, for just as it routinely refuses to cover the latter, so the national media refused to cover the ghoulishness in Knoxville …

The complete interview is “Obama’s ‘Blackism’ & Burke’s allergy to neocons,” at WND.

Decentralizing and Deregulating Republican Politics

Conservatism, Elections, Media, Politics, Regulation, Republicans

Even a hint of the dreaded GOP establishment creeping back into their midst has some in the Republican campaigns screaming for an exorcist.

Via Breitbart:

Several 2016 GOP presidential campaigns are now revolting, not just against the Republican National Committee (RNC) controlling the debate process, but against controversial GOP establishment lawyer Ben Ginsberg’s efforts to insert himself into the process.
Aides to four top campaigns—those of billionaire Donald Trump, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich—have all confirmed they will not sign onto a letter organized by Ginsberg after the GOP presidential campaigns all broke from the RNC on Sunday night.

For some candidates it’s all for show: Kasich is establishment. Ditto Christie. Others are for real. But it’s all good. Any challenge to the existing political order is good. The Republican campaigns have begun divesting the Republican National Committee (RNC) of its overweening powers. Why should a central command apparatus control the political process? When it comes to libertarian candidates, we know how the RNC has behaved. The campaigns are also firing a media organ that, together with party apparatchiks, has generally been a bad-faith broker between the public, on the one hand, and any Republican, libertarian or constitutionally minded political candidate.

At this point, in this magnificent upheaval in American party politics, Fox News fans should take a moment to consider why it is that most of the network’s anchors were almost as livid as the liberal media over the ongoing revolt among the ranks of the candidates. The reason is that Fox News is mainstream media. Fox even set the tone of the debates, with a performance almost as odious as that of CNBC. Come to think of it, only little Andy Cooper of CNN did his journalistic due diligence as debate moderator, this year.