Category Archives: Old Right

How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism

Bush, Democracy, Donald Trump, Intelligence, Iran, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Terrorism

THE NEW COLUMN, “How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” is now on WND.com. An excerpt:

It’s fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump’s foreign policy.

A couple of months back, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative nirvana:

“… for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. ‘The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,’ Trump said. ‘We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'”

“For a moment,” swooned Lake, “I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.”

Onward to Venezuela!

Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an expansionist foreign policy with “American exceptionalism.”

It’s not.

As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country’s founding. They’re more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State.

That’s just the way things are.

So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in “a proxy Sunni-Shia religious war,” Riyadh’s ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake.

After a campaign of “America First,” the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975-2015; Saudi Arabians murdered 2369!

Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate sheiks?

Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected. Curiously, they’re currently rioting.

If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency—its spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump’s original “America First” plank—is to “undermine American democracy.”

Besides, “good” Americans know that only the Russians “meddle.” …

… READ THE REST.  “How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism” is now on WND.com.

AND REMEMBER: John Quincy Adams (July 4, 1821) counseled detachment in foreign policy. America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. … She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

UPDATE (1/5/018):

Let Iranians figure out their own destiny. Wild guess: They want TRADE, not sanctions.

1: How Do You Know You’re A Neocon? Hint: It Has To Do With How You See US History

Cultural Marxism, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Political Philosophy, States' Rights, The State, War

A neoconservative will have hastened to condemn a wise and magnanimous man, John F. Kelly, for seeing redeeming qualities in Robert E. Lee.

Robert E. Lee. was an honorable man,” said White House Chief of Staff Mr. Kelly. How dare he! And how right he was. Lee was a great American.

When Lee resigned his commission as the colonel of the 1st U.S. Cavalry in April 1861 and subsequently took command of the state forces of Virginia, and eventually of the armies of the Southern Confederacy, he was only acting to “fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country.”

John F. Kelly is an honorable and wise American.

Allen C. Guelzo, the author of the piece condemning Kelly, writes in the neoconservative, Cultural Marxist tradition, whereby history is painted over with a cheap patina of current political dogma, to conceal traditional, republican virtues of yesteryear.

Pat Buchanan on The Great Man.

UPDATED (1/5/018): Real Rightists Have Never Taken The Libertarian Party Seriously

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Logic, Old Right

Arguing against the Libertarian Party today, as some libertarians do ponderously, is making a Straw Man Argument, meant to make the arguer seem daring intellectually.

I took a swipe at the Libertarian Party’s two goofballs, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, for their statism in “Someone Should Tell Bill Kristol Dwarf Tossing Is Cruel.”

Before that, in 2013, some clown reared his head to run for office, so I wrote, “Beware Of Liberals In Libertarian Drag,” to expose how like the Left these lite libertarians were, especially in agitating over identity politics.

Otherwise, move on, nothing here to see. Real Rightists have never taken the Libertarian Party seriously. (As have we never veered from the immigration restrictionist position, despite damnation from a lot of libertarians.)

UPDATE (9/10): It should be obvious:

The Party is a joke. But libertarianism, the paleo kind, is never a joke.

UPDATE (1/5/018): Jess Sessions should cease and desist from his drug war, or be made to.

UPDATE IV (10/23): Bannon: ‘The Trump Presidency That We Fought For, and Won, Is Over’

Donald Trump, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Political Philosophy

“’The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,’ Bannon said Friday, shortly after confirming his departure. ‘We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.’”

… Bannon may have resigned, but it was clear from the time that Kelly became chief of staff that Bannon’s remaining time in the West Wing was going to be short. Kelly undertook a study of the West Wing’s operating system, and let it be known that he kept hearing about Bannon as a disruptive force and a source of leaks aimed at undermining his rivals. One of those, with whom Kelly is deeply in sympathy, is National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who clashed forcefully with Bannon over such policies as strategy for the war in Afghanistan.

It is plainly Bannon’s view that his departure is not a defeat for him personally, but for the ideology he’d urged upon the president, as reflected in Trump’s provocative inaugural address—in which he spoke of self-dealing Washington politicians, and their policies that led to the shuttered factories and broken lives of what he called “American carnage.” Bannon co-authored that speech (and privately complained that it had been toned down by West Wing moderates like Ivanka and Jared)…

The writing’s on the wall, Deplorables. As Steve Bannon goes, so goes the promise of America First.

Bannon says that he once confidently believed in the prospect of success for that version of the Trump presidency he now says is over. Asked what the turning point was, he says, “It’s the Republican establishment. The Republican establishment has no interest in Trump’s success on this. They’re not populists, they’re not nationalists, they had no interest in his program. Zero. It was a half-hearted attempt at Obamacare reform, it was no interest really on the infrastructure, they’ll do a very standard Republican version of taxes.

“What Trump ran on—border wall, where is the funding for the border wall, one of his central tenets, where have they been? Have they rallied around the Perdue-Cotton immigration bill? On what element of Trump’s program, besides tax cuts—which is going to be the standard marginal tax cut—where have they rallied to Trump’s cause? They haven’t.”

Bannon believes that those who will now try to influence Trump will hope to turn him in a sharply different direction.

“I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” he says. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling, I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency—and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville—his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”

MORE: “Bannon: ‘The Trump Presidency That We Fought For, and Won, Is Over.‘”

UPDATE I (8/19):

UPDATE II (8/21):

Always Ivanka.


And Jared.

UPDATE III (8/22): Rationalization is a defense mechanism, in this case against disappointment. Steve Bannon said the presidency was over. Believe him.

“Trump has systematically elevated outsiders in his operation while alienating or firing allies like Bannon and Priebus.”


More ridiculousness from The Donald:

UPDATE (10/23): Stephen Miller Still Standing:

Comments Off on UPDATE IV (10/23): Bannon: ‘The Trump Presidency That We Fought For, and Won, Is Over’

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