Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Exorcize The Neocon Within! (You Know You Are A Neocon If…)

Feminism, Foreign Policy, Gender, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Race, Reason, Republicans

Wear your amulets to ward off the neocons; they have us surrounded. Old Right, peace-loving classical liberals—to the extent we still exist—are never safe from accusations of appeasement (not wanting to kill innocents abroad), racism (believing in the right of the individual to associate and dissociate at will—once known as the right of private property), and lack of patriotism (wishing to see Rome’s military and marching camps downsized considerably).

Jack Kerwick provides a wonderfully exhaustive list in case you are in need of exorcism. I particularly appreciate the following more subtle points:

You talk tirelessly of individual responsibility even as you affirm political determinism when it comes to black Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims. All of the ills that plague black Americans you chalk up to the poisonous policies of the Democratic Party while all of the problems of which the Muslim world is ridden you attribute to its lack of “democracy.”
Even though Hispanics voted for Barack Obama by over 70 percent in November, and blacks voted for him by over 90 percent, you insist that the only reason for this is that Republicans have failed to “reach out” to these groups. If only their members knew what the Republican Party could do for them (more political determinism), you imply, they would flock to the GOP, for blacks, and particularly Hispanics, are “natural conservatives.”
You make claims regarding the “natural conservatism” of Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants that you would never think to make about Muslims—even though, by many measures, Muslims are far more “conservative” than Hispanics and white Americans alike.

I would add that neocons, led by their fairly stupid eye candy on the idiot’s lantern—S. E. Cupp (“Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine”) and Dana Perino (“the Heidi Klum of the commentariat”) come to mind, or just mediocre minds like that of Andrea Tarantula—all argue from feminism. Their gender based commentary is that of the left, with a difference: They claim that the GOP is the natural home of women—just as it is the party of black and Hispanic homies.

Glass ceilings, 70 cents to a man’s dollar: These are the stock “arguments” made by skimpily clad (usually single and childless) Republican/neoliberal women on TV.

The Republican Party’s operatives seldom challenge the pay inequality folderol. The Daily Caller’s take on gender reflects the mindset of your typical Republican toots; it enforces the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber perspectives we’ve come to expect from the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively. The correspondent protested Nancy Pelosi’s pay equity protest, staged in Washington, D.C. the other day.
In the typical tit-for-tat, rudderless case the Republicans excel at making, this reporter condemned Pelosi—but not for her bogus theory of pay inequality, but for her hypocrisy. To wit: “…a report in the Washington Free Beacon … revealed that women working for Senate Democrats in 2011 had an average salary of $60,877, whereas male staffers made about $6,500 more. Pelosi chose not to condemn the Democratic senators,’ complained the Daily Caller’s cub (female) reporter.
Implicit in this accusation is that the wage discrepancy reported spoke to the widely accepted conspiracy to suppress women’s wages. Had this reporter been capable of argument, this is what she’d say: “We commend you, Mrs. Pelosi, for not practicing the nonsense you preach and, paying your staffers in accordance with their productivity” (a term you can’t honestly apply to the wealth-consuming government worker, but which we will, for the sake of argument). …

Yes, Republican twits and turncoats have even joined the war on older, white men.

‘Why Americans Should Know and Care About South Africa’ By Jack Kerwick

Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media, Neoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Racism, South-Africa

“Why Americans Should Know and Care About South Africa,” by Jack Kerwick, was published by FrontPage Magazine. “Decent people everywhere should be aware of the suffering and death that are part of everyday life in South Africa,” warns Jack, as he honors the memory of the “flesh and blood human beings who have been victimized by the predators who have taken over “the Rainbow Nation.” Kudos to Dr. Kerwick.

Liars in the Comments Section, however, resurrect assorted libel that was first leveled at me by the con-men at Media Matters.

1) First up is the lie that I lionized Eugene Terre’Blanche, the murdered leader of South Africa’s Afrikaner Resistance Movement. In the “War on White South Africa,” I had reported on the manner in which the controversial 69-year-old Mr. Terre’Blanche was bludgeoned to a pulp with pangas and pipes by two black farmhands. At the time of his death, the old Afrikaner had not threatened anyone. But vampiric liberals (and, evidently, neocons) bayed for the blood of men like Terre’Blanche, and celebrated his death. That we libertarians defend the life of a non-aggressor offends them. Unlike the liars above, we are civilized that way.

2) Next is the bogus accusation that “Mercer’s family escaped South Africa”: yet more lies. While I indeed left South Africa as democracy dawned (at my husband’s wise insistence; we went straight to North America: Canada first, and then the US)—my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, still resides in South Africa. Ditto most other members of my family. They have not emigrated from the democratic South Africa!

3) Finally, there is the wrongheaded claim that I am racist because I acknowledge that crime and other variables have a racial dimension, which is what a perfectly conventional multiple regression analysis would reveal too. (Perhaps liberals should ban that statistical methodology because of the statistically significant correlations it reveals.)

I do discuss demographics vis-à-vis crime in South Africa and the US quite openly, as I believe this discussion is perfectly congruent with individualism—and with the methods of the social sciences.

“Generalizations, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample.”

To repeat the complete Cannibal quote, I state the following, on page 41 of “Into the cannibal’s Pot”:

“In all, no color should be given to the claim that race is not a factor in the
incidence of crime in the US and in South Africa. The vulgar individualist will
contend that such broad statements about aggregate group characteristics are
collectivist, ergo false. He would be wrong. Generalizations, provided they are
substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies
on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a
representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based
on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular
crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all
individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination
has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and
precious resources—one’s life and property—are best invested.”

In all, “I cop to Western man’s individualist disdain—could it be his weakness?—for race as an organizing principle. For me, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state so that individuals regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.”

CPAC Sheds A Heavy Weight; Gains Light-Weights Galore

Bush, Conservatism, IMMIGRATION, Intellectualism, John McCain, Neoconservatism

As was mentioned a few posts back, Chris Christie will be conspicuous by his absence from this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which will commence on March 14.

New Jersey’s popular Republican governor is getting his comeuppance. He campaigned for the Democrat Barack Obama throughout October of 2012. Now the governor has not been invited to partake at CPAC. “He’s not … conservative,” offered Al Cardenas, who is chairman of the American Conservative Union that sponsors CPAC.

CPAC has hosted countless unconservative members of the establishment, one of them was the Republican’s presidential nominee for 2008, John McCain.

As part of the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity, McCain worked to legalize 20 million illegal immigrants. He blessed George W. Bush’s deficit spending and obscene stimulus package. By National Review’s count, McCain voted for higher taxes 50 time. And like any good liberal, he disparaged Mitt Romney for making it in the private sector.

The Conservative Political Action Conference would be acting less incongruously were they to blackball dough ball Christie for being the consummate backstabbing, slimy, opportunistic politician. Republicans who are not conservative are the norm.

For example, Jeb Bush. This year brother Bush will be a featured speaker at CPAC. Bush junior is hardly much of a conservative. Jeb Bush’s new book, “Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution,” advocates further liberalization of US immigration policy. However, so liberal has the GOP become on immigration, since November 2012, that Bush’s book is being rejected as too hawkish.

Fear not. Substituting, at CPAC, for the absence of one heavy weight governor—and the reference is not to Christie’s intellect—are plenty lightweights. See for yourself.

Desmond Tutu NOT An Example Of Black Privilege

Affirmative Action, Israel, Neoconservatism, Race, Racism, South-Africa

I am not sure why the authors of Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream, reviewed by philosopher-pundit Jack Kerwick on FrontPage Magazine, picked on Desmond Tutu as an example of black privilege in South Africa.

It must be an authorial tic peculiar to neoconservatives, and applied to anyone with an anti-Israel position, for which Archbishop Tutu is famous. It is also typical of the neoconservative’s reflexive ahistoric approach, where a proposition or an idea (black privilege) is applied without nuance, to any and all annoying blacks (Tutu is that alright).

Horowitz and Perazzo even show that black skin privilege transcends continents. Alluding to South Africa’s Bishop Demond Tutu, they write: “What white spiritual leader could support the torture-murders of South African blacks, compare Israel to Nazi Germany, and still be regarded as a moral icon? A black cleric like Bishop Desmond Tutu can.” (Indeed, as occasional Front Page Magazine contributor and former South African resident Ilana Mercer amply demonstrates in her, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, the new South Africa is black skin privilege on steroids.)

(From “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream” by Jack Kerwick.)

I don’t think Desmond Tutu is an example of black privilege. He supports it, but doesn’t exemplify it.

If anything, the elderly Archbishop, whose inauguration I attended and with whom my father and I took afternoon tea many decades back, embodies the old-style, old school African man. Tutu grew up in wretched poverty, received—and gladly accepted—a decent education courtesy of the Church, and worked his ministry so hard as to reap the rewards. (In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” I discuss the wonders the white-run churches had done in South Africa, as do I mention what was for me a memorable meeting with the Archbishop. From that occasion I took away that he was fond of my father and respectful of dad’s Jewish faith and scholarship. How good an equalizer were some schools in the old South Africa? You be the judge. Tutu and I, and tens of thousands of other Africans, belong to the same alma mater: UNISA.)

Sure, Tutu is a left-liberal. But to me, as I said in “King Tut(u) Not So Terrific,” his impiety stems from never having piped up about the ethnic cleansing of rural whites, Afrikaners mostly, from the land in ways that beggar belief. Saint Mandela has also remained mum about these Shaka-Zulu worthy murders.

And so have our neoconservatives!

Witness the authors of Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream, who, it would appear, protest Tutu’s alleged support for the “torture-murders of South African blacks” (by which I am told they meant white South Africans), but say nothing, seemingly (just like Tutu), about the targeted slaughter of whites in South Africa, and then only when it’s politically safe to do so. (Watch Barely a Blog for commentary about Oscar Pistorius.)

Jack Kerwick, of course, is correct (and most kind) to subtly remind neoconservatives that it is “the new South Africa [that] is black skin privilege on steroids” (and that a rightist has already plumbed the depths of this topic).