Category Archives: Paleoconservatism

Why I Miss Lawrence Auster, RIP

Conservatism, Critique, Intellectualism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Brilliantly did the late Larry Auster dissect the demise of Russel Kirk’s conservatism at The American Conservative (TAC) magazine. Division of labor being part of a natural intellectual order that arises, Auster would have likely left it to me to point out the pimped intellectual principles this AC “writer” evinces in her meandering Mandela entry, in which “Madiba” is contrasted, in a manner, with George Washington. (Compare that AC crap with “Mandela Mum About Systematic Murder Of Whites.” You can’t!)

Auster was at his rhetorical best when deconstructing the “typically shapeless pieces”—or “weird and solipsistic” was another of his wonderful coinages—that this unthinking “conservative” crowd disgorged. About the American Conservative’s pipsqueak writers, Mr. Auster wrote with the studied contempt they deserve.

I won’t lie. Larry could be incorrigibly and unforgivingly deceptive (as detailed here). Other than to respond, when he took license with the truth (as I did in said post), I always uttered a silent “thank you” for the dirty work Larry did. (As did I donate to his account, in appreciation of the originality of a “View From The Right.” Its author was always most gracious.)

The Goldberg Variation*

Conservatism, Debt, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Republicans

This response, written by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, arrived in my email In-Box. This is the first time I’ve received a mass mailing from Mr. Goldberg. It would appear that Jonah Goldberg was somewhat exercised about the reactions to his expected flippancy about the tea party’s “quixotic debt-ceiling showdown.”

Although he harps on the responses aimed at him on Twitter, those are not worth a straw. Pat Buchanan’s veiled allusion to Mr. Goldberg’s ilk, on the other hand, is likely a different matter. In “The ‘We Can’t Win’ Wimps Caucus,” Pat writes the following:

“We told you you would lose!” wail the beltway bundlers of the Republican establishment.

“We told you you would lose!” moan neoconservative columnists from their privileged perches on the op-ed pages of the beltway press.

“Look at what Ted Cruz and these tea-party people did to us,” wails the GOP establishment. “Look what has happened to our brand.” And 2014 was looking wonderful.

What a basket of wimps.

My column, of course, mentions names:

Media conservatives and liberals were agreed. The Republican brand, as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg put it, had been damaged by the debt-ceiling standoff.

Chuckie Krauthammer, another phony conservative, concurred. After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer scolded “the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown.

Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer

Read “What If The Media Were Moral?” on Economic Policy Journal, the preeminent libertarian website.

*****

* “The Goldberg Variations”: “‘The Goldberg Variations’ is the last of a series of [sublime] keyboard music Bach published under the title of Clavierübung …”

WorldNetDaily’s 1997 Lawsuit Exposed The IRS’s Targeted Audits

Journalism, Media, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Taxation, The State

A libertarian journalist once called him “ornery.” The truth is that Joseph Farah is a fearless and visionary newsman (he has published this writer uncensored for over a decade). I was reminded of the qualities that have made WND a media powerhouse, as I listened to the Mark Levin Show in my GTI, en route to a run.

Brian Sussman was filling in for Levin. Twice did Sussman excerpt this WND news item dated April 30, 1999. Sussman went on to laud Joseph Farah’s Western Journalism Center (a parent company of WorldNetDaily) for presaging the flaccid mainstream, to proceed boldly against the Internal Revenue Service, as early as 1997.

The IRS had “infringed [the journalists’] First and Fourth Amendment rights during the 1996 audit. The journalists further alleg[ed] that the audit was politically motivated and quot[ed] the IRS agent who was directing the audit, Thomas Cederquist, who said that the audit was a ‘political case’ and that ‘the decisions were being made at the national level.’”

There is nothing new about what the BHO-directed agency of thieves is doing these days.

Posted by Sussman, the article is entitled “JOURNALISTS FIGHT IRS IN NEW FOIA SUIT: Agency failed to produce requested documents, April 30, 1999.”

An excerpt:

On the heels of their civil lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, journalists for the Western Journalism Center, parent company of WorldNetDaily, filed another lawsuit against the agency after the agency refused to disclose all the documents requested by the journalists in their Freedom of Information
Act request.The journalists initially filed their FOIA request on July 18, 1997,
in an effort to obtain IRS documents concerning the audit of the Western
Journalism Center in 1996. On October 20, 1997, the IRS responded to the journalists’ request, but they failed to turn over all the documents
that were requested. The attorney for the journalists is Judicial Watch Chairman Larry Klayman. Klayman’s Judicial Watch is a legal watchdog that currently has five lawsuits against the White House for such affairs as Chinagate and Filegate. Klayman said that it is his intention to ask the Court to order the IRS to conduct an immediate turnover of the Center’s entire file to the journalists. He commented that the IRS has no legal authority to detain any of the Center’s files and believes that the journalists will get the files
that were requested. In a related lawsuit against the IRS, Landmark Legal Foundation and its president, Mark Levin, filed a FOIA suit against the IRS in their investigation of politically-motivated audits such as the audit of the Western Journalism Center. A survey done by the Western Journalism Center revealed that at least 20 non-profit organizations “unfriendly” to the Clinton administration had faced IRS audits since 1993. Although Landmark has been stonewalled in their efforts to obtain IRS files leading to the names of those individuals responsible for the political audits, Klayman said the Western Journalism Center case should go forward because the journalists are asking for information on behalf of themselves. They aren’t asking for third party information, as is the case in the Landmark suit. Once the journalists have possession of their files, Klayman said that he will be able to show that the audit the journalists endured is the worst-case scenario of all the people and entities that were audited for political reasons. Speaking about the new suit against the IRS, Klayman said, “This case goes hand-in-hand with the other case that the Western Journalism Center filed against the IRS for civil rights violations.” The “other case” that Klayman is referring to is the civil case filed against the IRS during May of last year in which the journalists allege
that the IRS infringed on their First and Fourth rights during the 1996 audit. The journalists further allege that the audit was politically motivated and quote the IRS agent who was directing the audit, Thomas Cederquist, who said that the audit was a “political case” and that “the decisions were being made at the national level.” The journalist’s civil case is currently in the process of appeals. Although the IRS has tried to conjure up various legal reasons as to why they can’t hand over all of the documents that the journalists are requesting in the FOIA suit, Klayman said that, in reality, they’re trying to cover something up.

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‘Slavery Is The Price I Paid For Civilization’

Intellectualism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

The words in this post’s title were spoken by “famed black writer” Zora Neale Hurston. She was “what today we are inclined to call a ‘paleoconservative’ or ‘paleolibertarian,’” who was “born in the early 1890s in the lower South.”

Thanks to Jack Kerwick’s profile of Zora Neale Hurston, timed for Black History Month, we know something about this brilliant (black) member of the Old Right.

Hurston resented the efforts made by black and white intellectual alike to make of black Americans a new proletariat, a victim class perpetually in need of an all-encompassing national government to ease the “lowdown dirty deal” that “nature has somehow given them.” Hurston was adamant that she was “not tragically colored.” She insisted that “no great sorrow” lies “damned up in my soul, lurking behind my eyes,” and she placed a world of distance between herself and “the sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it.”
For what contemporary black commentator Larry Elder refers to as the “victicrats” among us, Hurston had zero use. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she remarked. Much to their chagrin, though, “it fails to register depression with me.” Furthermore, she stated bluntly that “slavery is the price I paid for civilization.”
Our increasingly joyless generation is oblivious to another of Hurston’s insights: A sense of humor can bear most, if not all, painful things. Regarding racial discrimination, she noted that while she “sometimes” feels “discriminated against,” she does not get “angry” about it. Rather, the experience “merely astonishes me,” for how, Hurston asks, “can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

… Pearls before swine.

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