UPDATE II (8/1): Ben Shapiro Uses The Left’s Logic To ‘Cancel’ John C. Calhoun

Cultural Marxism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Neoconservatism, Pseudo-history, Republicans, Secession, States' Rights, The South

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The other day on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Ben Shapiro trashed, but absolutely rubbished, John C. Calhoun, one of America’s greatest political theorists, in the estimation of historian Clyde Wilson, editor of the John C. Calhoun papers, and the foremost scholar of Calhoun in our time. From what I’ve read of Calhoun’s works, I concur.

Especially magnificent is “A Disquisition on Government,” published in 1851, wherein Calhoun developed the profound idea of ‘two different modes in which the sense of the community may be taken.’ The one ‘regards numbers only.’ The other invokes an entirely different quality or dimension, over and above the ‘numbers.’”

I was inspired to apply Calhoun’s idea in “Has Trump Awakened John C. Calhoun’s Concurrent Majority?” The column is from the book, The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016).

The more important point is logical. Ben Shapiro trashes Calhoun using the logic of the left—namely that a towering American intellectual and statesman held views considered improper to the American Idiocracy of the 21 Century.

As Professor Wilson has brilliantly written, “This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.”

Another fundamental flaw in Ben Shapiro’s decidedly Republican view of America, expressed on “Life Liberty & Levin,” is the idea that his party is the Good Party.

Libertarians (check) don’t have a bone in the bi-partisan fight, except to advocate for the truth. And the truth is that lot of pseudo-history rests on the deification of, say, the Radical Republicans.

Here is the truth with a caveat: “The Radical Republicans were far more vicious and barbaric than the Antifa. The Republicans supervised the genocide of some 60,000 Plains Indians from 1865 to 1890, led by General Sherman himself”:

MORE:  “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865,” September 6, 2017

UPDATED (7/22):

Great comment, Daffy Duck, aka Dale @dalerooster
One more thing: As someone who reads biblical Hebrew and gets it, I am Daisy Duck if Ben Shapiro knows any serious Hebrew, as boasted. Maybe Pidgin Hebrew, i.e., the Americanized crap they speak in Israel, these days.

NEW COLUMN: How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center

Conservatism, Ethics, Free Speech, Media, Republicans

NEW COLUMN IS “How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center.” It is currently on WND and The Unz Review.

Grubbing it with the SPLC and those conservatives who slip between the sheets with these scammers is ill-making. But, three years on, and my hand was forced by this fracas on Twitter. There was no option.

My thanks to WND, The Unz Review, American Greatness, Cassandra Fairbanks, Patrick Howley, and those who man-up.

Excerpt:

They’re unwilling to defend true dissidents, but Beltway lite libertarians and Con Inkers are forever genuflecting to privileged legacy journalists, who can afford to voluntarily leave their rich gigs in “protest” of cancel culture.

The Right hasn’t shut up about the New Yorker’s Andrew Sullivan, who is far less banal than the New York Times’ Bari Weiss. Both belong to the “nothing new, more of the same” neoconservative tradition. Her resignation antics are a storm in a C-cup; his “defiant” departure is the fussy equivalent (just for gay men).

For a more meaningful scandal, to the Right at least, consider the farce of a Conservative news and opinion organization (founded by a dragon slayer of a broadcaster), which has published lacerating pieces condemning America’s foremost hate group, yet has proceeded to purge writers, in compliance with the demands of said shakedown hate group.

American conservatism capitulating to America-haters? Negotiating with terrorists? Hypocrisy? Yes, yes, and yes.

Prone is the natural position of the Establishment Republican, Con Inker, neoconservative, whatever his latest opportunistic, political permutation may be.

The news site is the Daily Caller. The hate group is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The ransom demands issue from the illiterati of the SPLC, who regularly publish lists of—and hit pieces against—untouchable dissidents. They then proceed against us with all the vigor of a “a money grabbing slander machine,” to quote John Stossel, a veteran investigative journalist who has exposed this corrupt syndicate that lives off destroying people.

For his part, economist Thomas DiLorenzo has skillfully pried apart the revenue-rich, “racial racketeering” of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showing it to be nothing more than a “hate group hedge fund.”

Wrote the great leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, in the New York Press, in 2007: “I’ve long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million.”

An organization that shakes down paupers and pensioners to support its “ritualized forms of defamation.”

One would expect the Daily Caller, which has written against cancel culture and the Southern Poverty law Center, not to capitulate to such rot. But one would be wrong to expect principled positions from any Con Inc. org.

Opportunistic and prone are the only principles known to the D.C. media types. For they have no philosophy to speak of. Whatever political raiment he happens to be cloaked in—defeatism, hypocrisy and betrayal are the default positions of the D.C. “conservative” swamp dweller.

And so, July 7 saw Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor in chief, assume the supine position in a Twitter exchange, which ceded the terms of debate to the Democrats and their most diabolical proxies.

The Twitter entity before which Mr. Ingersoll was kneeling metaphorically in contrition was an account called “Sleeping Giants.” “They’re the worst,” attests Steve Bannon. They appear to be attached to a shakedown hub of cancel-culture activism. Illiteracy precludes any manifesto, but the constant nattering on a Twitter account has earned these cyberthugs a Wikipedia page.

To thrive, thugs need enablers. Enter Mr. Ingersoll.

First up on my Twitter feed, July 7, was a tweet from gutsy reporter Patrick Howley, founder of Big League Politics. …

…  READ ON. There’s lots of intrigue, unfortunately.

NEW COLUMN IS “How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center.” It is currently on WND and The Unz Review.

Cancel Culture Compliance Always Leads Back To A … Kneeling, Groveling Republican

Democrats, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Republicans

Twitter tiffs are hard to trace. But on matters racial and right-of-center, they invariably lead to a kneeling, prostrate Republican.

Prone is the natural position of the Establishment Republican, Con Inker, neoconservative, whatever his latest political permutation.

These days, this political chameleon (with apologies to the delightful chameleon community) has a new disguise: Con, Inc., as gladiator Michelle Malkin likes to taunt the reconstituted D.C. herd. As always, Con Inc., aims to pacify the Left and deceive the Right.

Over the authentic, Dissident Right, Con Inkers and the Left converge: We must be cancelled.

Like the Establishment Republican before him, the Con Inker expects Democrats to define the terms of debate. This means that each day ushers in a new kind of Kafka. From his prone position, the Con Inker Republican does nothing much but offer-up mea culpas to the enemy for his putative political sins as he inches closer to the Left. This enfeebled creature, formerly known as a neoconservative, keeps up the apologia even when his faction occupies the White House and controls the two congressional chambers.  

Ritual offerings accompany the bowing and scraping. Errant writers and thinkers who are not in compliance with the duopoly’s orthodoxy are denounced. Most have been purged (check).

So, if you are able to trace and make sense of the tweets below: Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief, knows me. To his credit, Mr. Ingersoll corresponded with me cordially (if utterly insincerely), before discontinuing my column at Daily Caller, pursuant to taunts by the country’s leading hate group, the Southern Poverty law Center.

And, did I mention that the Daily Caller has written ardently against the SPLC, while purging people this hate group has placed on cancel lists?

Yep.

Defeatism, hypocrisy and betrayal are generally traced back to Republicans, Con Inkers, neoconservatives.

My thanks to Patrick Howley and Cassandra Fairbanks for being standup people. Few are the people who man-up these days.

Pray For Longtime Friend And Mercer Reader James Huggins

Conservatism, COVID-19, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Intelligence, Internet, Iraq, Paleolibertarianism, War

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Please pray for my longtime reader and dear friend James Huggins. A member of my American family, really.

James was diagnosed yesterday with COVID-19, among other serious ailments that come with age.

As with so many seniors, COVID was likely contracted in a nursing facility.

I love James and I am moved to tears—humbled—that he urged his kids to contact me as soon as he was hospitalized, so as to keep me in the loop. We are usually in regular contact on Facebook, which he joined at my urging. We had messaged about a month or two ago, and I had been worrying about James since he fell silent.

Over the years, my column has proven a good litmus test for drawing quality people to me. And James was one of the first to hound me mercilessly on WND.COM, in the early 2000s, for what he believed was my misguided anti-war stance. (Archive here.)

But so bright and free a man is James (“I’m cleaning my guns on the kitchen table,” he would email), that he quickly came to the philosophy of freedom, which precluded much of the Republican Party’s politics, and certainly Bush’s war.

After we had had one of our arguments about Bush’s war, James once wrote, at WND, that he’d rather go up against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards than confront Mercer. So enamored was I of the man’s good-natured, Southern flare—idiom and humor—that I urged James to contribute to BAB.

James soon became a regular and valued contributor to my Barely A Blog. Regrettably, BAB’s thriving Comments section was closed, at the urging of one Christy Kiltz, an arrogant web-developer to avoid. (This Oregonian, and the coven of tantrum-prone witches that huddled at her office, generally got irate when their client dared to politely reject their ugly designs and rotten, shrill advice. Apparently, a client’s role is to comply with the girl gurus. (Kiltz, moreover, has the audacity to call herself a guru of coding, when she could not even convert a PHP archive to WordPress for me. A real guru did it in a matter of  days.) Sadly, however, Kiltz was successful in intimidating me into closing “Comments.” (“Spam,” you know.) At the behest of this unpleasant and errant brander and developer, I lost the readers that frequented the site daily. With my blog closed to Comments, I also lost valued, daily contact with James Huggins.

Here are some of his BAB blog posts:

“Letter of the Week: In Defense of Coulter”

“In Defense Of David Koresh.” [Well, of course.]

This bright, funny and fabulous granddad deserves—and must have—many good years ahead. Join me in praying he gets them.