Friday, March 18, 2016

The Official Republican Establishment's Last Betrayal!

The Republican Establishment at Work!
NOTE: This article was first published back in 2013 under the title "Who Killed the Republican Party" after an earlier series of betrayals of the American people. Then as now the betrayers were neoconservative jackals. They have been working stealthily for more than 30 years to subvert the conservative movement and hijack the Republican Party. Now this gang of collectivist thugs is trying to destroy Donald Trump in their desperate effort to hang on to power. These people are not now nor have they ever been "conservatives" in the sense most Americans use the term. For that matter, most Americans are not "conservatives" either. Conservatives, by definition, want to keep things as they are. Most Americans, as Trump's huge following proves, are not at all interested in keeping the status quo. They are small government traditionalists who believe in God, truth, and individual liberty and who want to preserve the future for their children and grandchildren. Far from wanting to "conserve" the current order, Americans want to bring it down and restore peace, prosperity, tradition, individual responsibility and freedom. For their part, the neoconservatives are the collectivist enemies of everything Trump supporters want to achieve. They believe in big government, moral relativism, and perpetual war as a way to secure power. They pose an existential threat to peace and to what little remains of American liberty. They are absolutely evil and their treachery cannot be allowed to prevail. This article is being republished now in the hope it will help the people understand the nature of the internal enemy we are facing. Given the rise of Donald Trump and the violence threatened by his enemies, it is as timely now as it was in 2013.

The GOP's "conservative base" is frustrated, angry and confused. It appears to many that almost overnight the Republican Party somehow morphed into a "socialist light" version of the Democrat Party. They watch in baffled disbelief as the GOP's national leadership systematically betrays cherished principles and abandons the pursuit of pro-life, pro-Constitution, and limited government policies. Even as Obama launches a full scale frontal attack on the Second Amendment, the leadership of the GOP, including prominent Republican Senators and Members of Congress stand silent and unengaged. How did this happen?

Shocked and dispirited Republican true believers are painfully experiencing the truth of Mark Twain's observation, "It ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you. It's what you know for sure that ain't so!" Despite what passionate partisans desperately want to believe, the Republican Party is not a stalwart defender of Constitutional principals and free market economics. The GOP and the Democrat Party have operated as wings of a single political party, the Washington Party, for many decades. Neither wing has the slightest interest in the Constitution which today is trotted out only when necessary to mollify flyover country rubes. Neither has the slightest interest in controlling spending. Both are fully-invested in the Welfare/Warfare State.

Most Americans, busy raising families and earning livings, are only marginally interested in the daily behind-the-scenes machinations that define Washington's political landscape. Because it received almost no coverage in the popular press or television news outlets, only a few know of the decades-long war waged beneath the surface for the Republican Party's soul, a war ultimately lost by traditional conservatives. Fewer still understand the motives of the combatants or appreciate the impact of that struggle's outcome on today's political scene.

In the 1950s a small group of Trotskyite intellectuals became disenchanted with aspects of Marxism and began a philosophic migration away from communism. The new movement paused briefly at the "Scoop" Jackson/Hubert Humphrey faction of the Democratic Party before selecting the Republican Party as its final host. The migration was led by Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss, the intellectual fathers of neoconservatism.

Kristol, father of The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, was Managing Editor of Commentary Magazine from 1947 to 1952 and Professor of Social Thought at the New York University Graduate School of Business from 1969 to 1988. Since 1988 he has been ensconced as a Distinguished Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Strauss, who died in 1973, was a Political Science Professor at the University of Chicago for most of his career. Unfortunately for those who value Constitutional government, Kristol, Strauss, and their acolytes brought a lot of socialist baggage with them when they "came over" to conservatism.

To provide some context, it is important to understand that the Reagan Coalition was not a movement so much as it was an expedient alliance of people united by a shared opposition to Communism and the Welfare State. That alliance included traditionalists, constitutionalists, libertarians, social conservatives, and militant nationalists. When the Soviet Union imploded, so did most of the Reagan Coalition's cohesion. Today the tattered remnant is barely held together through an uneasy collaboration of fiscal conservatives, Eastern establishment liberals and, of course, the neoconservatives.

Traditional conservatives never really understood the power of propaganda, naively believing that facts and logic would carry the day. They even allowed neoconservatives to define the terms under which the battle for control of the GOP would be waged. The very labels that the neoconservatives assigned to the combatants (neoconservative and paleoconservative) served the neoconservative purpose. Those labels conferred an undeserved legitimacy on neoconservatism, creating the illusion that a symmetrical division existed within the body of conservatism when, in fact, that which calls itself neoconservativism is not conservative at all.

The first overt volley fired on behalf of the neoconservatives in the War for the GOP's soul was an article appearing in National Review on March 16, 1992, entitled "In Pursuit of Anti-Semitism Chapter II." The article was a long, rambling, and utterly dishonest attack on the editorial positions of Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan occasioned by their reasoned disagreement with American policy toward Israel. Sobran and Buchanan were accused of anti-Semitism, a canard reminiscent of Jesse Jackson's frequent allegations of racism against those who opposed Welfare State social policies. At the time I could not understand the motive for this completely unwarranted hit piece. The article's blatant falseness and unfairness so infuriated me that I cancelled my subscription, one that had been in effect since undergraduate school.

In hindsight, the motive has become obvious. The smear campaign against Sobran and Buchanan was the opening gambit in the process of "redefining" conservatism. By discrediting the most prominent and effective spokesmen for traditional conservatism, potential impediments to that redefinition would be neutralized. By the way, that many neoconservatives are Jews is true but irrelevant. The neocons use this demographic fact to vaccinate themselves against opposition by playing the "anti-Semitic" card whenever their policy preferences are challenged. The tactic is intellectually dishonest and illogical but it has certainly been effective.

For those who wonder how in the name of God's Green Earth "conservatism" ever came to mean support for an explosive increase in domestic federal spending, the expansion of welfare state programs, federalization of local and state issues, warrantless surveillance, executive branch dominance, Wilsonian global intervention, and endless war, it is only necessary to understand the blatant and unblinking arrogance that is among neoconservatism's defining hallmarks. As none other than Irving Kristol wrote unabashedly in The Neoconservative Persuasion, "...one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills[emphasis added], into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."

That quote should send chills down the spine of every American who reads it. In a single sentence one of neoconservatism's founding fathers arrogantly admits his intention to "redefine" the politics of GOP and conservatism itself (whether Republicans and conservatives like it or not) and demonstrates his eagerness to consign the American constitution to history's ash heap in favor of "modern democracy."

Kristol, Strauss, and their disciples are moral relativists who share a disregard for truth that is nearly as great as their disdain for the essential American idea of individual liberty. Kristol wrote, "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

On the role of the State, Kristol is quite open. He wrote, "Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his "The Man Versus the State," was a historical eccentricity."

For his part, Strauss wrote an entire book ("Natural Right and History") praising what he called the political realism of the ancients who denied that there was any natural human right to liberty or truth. He was especially taken with Plato's discourses on "noble Lies." Strauss implicitly believed, as did Plato, that "noble Lies" were essential to stable government because they gave the people meaning and purpose. Strauss also believed that secrecy is necessary tool for ruling elites. In "Persecution and the Art of Writing", he explained that "the wise" must conceal their motives and actions in order to protect themselves from uprisings and reprisals.

If you wonder what has happened to the Republican Party and to conservatism, understand that neoconservatives remain ascendant within and close to the power structure of the GOP. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, former Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey are numbered among them. Neoconservatives also control much of what passes for the conservative media including The Fox News Channel, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, National Review, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and most of putatively conservative Talk Radio.

So there you have it. According to the prolific written admissions of the movement's founders, neoconservatives are purposeful liars and incipient totalitarians who hold the American people and their traditions in absolute contempt. Today they control much of the national GOP's internal workings. How much do you appreciate where the neocons have taken "the Republican party, and American conservatism...against their respective wills?"

FJB


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Friday, March 4, 2016

TRUMPED!

This is not an election. It is a revolution!

Donald Trump has become the focal point of the 2016 primary election campaign. Trump and the nonstop establishment attacks against him dominate the news cycle. However, the real story is that millions of self-identified Republicans have rejected establishment candidates to vote for Trump. Even more remarkable is the fact, virtually unreported by the Mainstream Press, that millions of blue collar voters who previously voted as Democrats or Independents have crossed party lines to do the same thing.

The numbers don't lie. In the first four contests of the 2016 election seasons (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada), Republican participation grew by more than 28% while Democrat participation dropped by 20%. People who chose to vote Republican in those contests outnumbered those who chose to vote Democrat by 415,767. This has never happened before and portends a political earthquake of transforming proportions. To put it in perspective, Obama won the 2008 presidential election with a popular vote total of 69,498,516. Assume for a moment that Hillary Clinton becomes the Democrat candidate and somehow manages to match Obama's 2008 vote total (she won't). If the current trajectory continues Donald Trump's national popular vote total will crush her by more than 7,100,000 votes!

The GOP establishment persists in its doomed efforts to maintain its grip on power. "Donald Trump is not a conservative" the GOP establishment chants. Marco Rubio says so. Lindsay Graham says so. John McCain says so. Mitt Romney says so. So did Jeb Bush and his brother, George W. They are correct. Donald J. Trump is not a conservative...but neither are they

Real conservatives would have used the House of Representatives' power of the purse to stop Obamacare cold along with illegal immigration and every other unconstitutional scheme put forward by Obama during the years that the GOP has controlled the House. Congressional GOP leaders failed to do so because they wanted to keep the promises made to big insurance companies and large employers regarding profit protection and cheap labor (crony capitalism at work). Instead, believing the America people were too stupid to see what they were doing, they used "omnibus spending bills" to avoid "shutting down the government", a transparently obvious device that allowed them to escape the consequences of their actions.

Pat Buchanan may well be the last national politician standing who could honestly claim the conservative label. Real conservatives believe in traditional morality (including the sanctity of marriage), the constitution, the free market, the Bill of Rights, the right to life, genuine capitalism, national sovereignty (with America First) and a strong national defense. 

In contrast, the clique of so-called "neo-conservatives" who hijacked the conservative "brand" back in the Middle 1980s (and the Republican Party in the 30 years that followed) believe in international empire building, moral relativism, open borders (amnesty with "a path toward citizenship"), crony capitalism, big government involvement in everything from "health care" to education and "Israel First". I have no problem with Israel's need to defend herself but, when Marco Rubio trumpets his fealty to Israel, he sounds as though he is running for President of the Knesset, not President of the United States. 

So Donald J. Trump is not a "conservative" but he is an honest, business-savvy American Nationalist with traditionalist leanings who understands the need to preserve American culture and our civil institutions. Trump isn't perfect and can certainly be crude. However, he doesn't pretend to "know everything", and isn't afraid to admit it when he makes a mistake. As an executive, he is accustomed to surrounding himself with the right people when specialized knowledge is required.

The American people are sick of Washington's lies. They know that they've been conned. They have finally awakened to the realization that the bi-partisan Welfare/Warfare State is a criminal enterprise that has been robbing them blind and lying to them. It is time to clean out the barn.

FJB

This site is not affiliated with any political party. Its goals are to advocate for individual liberty, traditional morality, and domestic peace and to resist all forms of tyranny and statism. It reflects the point of view of a life-long constitutionalist and recovering Republican. If you are among the millions trying to understand what has happened to the GOP, please visit "Who Killed the Republican Party?" If you agree with the content of this post, please feel free to print and distribute it or forward the link to your political representatives at the state and federal level Thank you for your interest.