Congressman says Most of Congress is so Corrupt they should be in Prison

From: Eagle Rising

by Tim Brown - 4-27-16


Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie has long taken stands for the people. Last week, Rep. Massie called for a roll-call vote on a billion-dollar foreign aid bill. Because of his demand, the people of America are able to see how their representatives voted on the bill. Without that demand, the bill would have been passed by the voices of only about twelve representatives. How is this representative government? It isn’t and Massie said if local politicians functioned in such a manner, they would find themselves in jail.

Congressman Massie was interviewed on the morning after the vote by Brian Thomas at KRC-Radio in Cincinnati, Ohio. He told Thomas that the money contained in that bill was nothing more than “a one billion dollars slush fund for the president.” In fact, Massie pointed out that four bill passed by voice votes on the very same day, which he didn’t even have an opportunity to read!

Massie explained that these actions were unlawful. He said, “Regardless of what the rules and practices of the House are, the Constitution says the House has to have a quorum to do business — in other words to pass bills. A quorum is defined in the Constitution as a majority. There are 435 members of Congress, so a majority of 218 members must be present to do this. Yet, they commonly do it with less than a dozen members on the floor.”

While he did say that this has been going on for a long time, the majority of the time, it was used to name Post Offices or for technical corrections to a bill. However, since the camel got its nose under the tent, it has been used to pass unconstitutional spending bills to the tune of billions of dollars each. That means that only about a dozen or so representatives actually vote on this legislation.

I ask, how can the law be upheld when we are a Republic, the Constitution proclaims to ensure that we have a Republican form of government, but 12 people can make billion dollar decisions for America? That is not a Republic. It isn’t even a democracy.

Congressman Massie did say that having a couple of days’ notice did provide opportunity for him to arrange to be on the floor at the time the vote was taken. However, that doesn’t always occur.

“I will say this, we had about one or two working days’ notice that this bill was coming to the floor,” Massie told Thomas. “So I had plenty of time to get over there or plan to get over there. What’s really frustrating is when they put bills on the floor and they don’t eve give us the text to the bill, they don’t tell us in advance that it is coming to the floor. In fact, last night I was standing on the floor and they passed four bills, that were unannounced, by unanimous consent. Now, three of them were permission to use the grounds of the Capitol for some celebration or something. But, one of them was a drug bill and they passed that thing by unanimous consent as we were all filtering out of the chamber and thought the votes were over.”

Massie is not alone in his criticism of not reading bills and passing them so quickly. In 2012, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul spoke out about senators that vote without reading the bills.

Then Massie through a bombshell in the midst of the interview. He said that if the procedures that are done in the House in DC were done in his home state of Kentucky, those involved would find themselves behind bars.

“Look, if you did that in city council or in a fiscal court meeting, in Kentucky we have something called fiscal court,” he said. “It’s equivalent of city council that runs the county. You would go to jail; you would go to jail. You have to announce an ordinance like three weeks in advance. You have to do two readings. You have to vote on it twice. Those protections are put in place for the people, and they are gone here in Congress.”


God bless,
JohnnyD

The Intellectual Case For Trump II: Trump Is The Culture Warrior We Need

Donald Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse.

From: The Federalist

By Mytheos Holt - April 20, 2016

A candidate like Donald Trump should be impossible. A loud, unscripted, hard-edged reality show-style candidate with exceedingly flexible positions on many hot-button issues would be laughed out of contention for the Republican nomination in other years. A man whose serial gaffes and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the gatekeepers of good taste would be cooked before he stepped onto the debate stage. An utterly inexperienced politician, who describes our rights and privileges as particular to us as Americans rather than universal moral mandates, would be rejected by both parties at any other time in the modern era.

But in Trump’s case, these supposedly disqualifying positions and attributes have proven to be the basis for unexpected success. Why? In part, it is because he corrects massive ideological failures by the Right, which have enabled unmitigated cultural overreach by the Left, eliminating the social and cultural basis that permits a Western liberal order to exist.

For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.

The cause of this is partially a denial of how swiftly the culture has moved Left, leaving the institutional Right under the false impression it is still fighting the culture war of the 90’s and early 2000s. The Right’s obsession with 90’s-era battles over sex, drugs, and rock and roll is more than just an anachronism: it represents a self-inflicted wound that ignored how the Left used the culture to repeatedly make the case for their vision of an ideal society. We now know the Left won that war, and in this context, Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse.

The Right of the ‘Young Fogies’

The culture wars permitted the Right to be taken over by what Jeffrey Hart—Richard Nixon speechwriter, sometime National Review editor, and all-around conservative giant—described as “young fogies.” Hart describes the phenomenon in an essay titled “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism,” in which he envisions as a dialogue between himself and a younger woman of the era. Here is Hart’s warning:

A lot of my students are not sold on conservatism.[…] They think conservatives are preppies who are against sex. […] In some visible cases, the main content of ‘conservatism’ seems to be a refusal of experience. We have more than our share of young fogies. I could name some names, but what the hell. In my view, young fogie American conservatives…place an altogether disproportionate emphasis on sex and sex-related moral questions. […] Some conservatives appear to confuse Victorian morality with the Western tradition, and even with Christianity.

Hart wrote those words in 1982, when candidates like Ronald Reagan were still winning young voters. But the “young fogie-ism” Hart warned against was already becoming a significant portion of the Republican brand, one that extended through the anti-video game, anti-rap, anti-sex, anti-sideboob, anti-violence handwringing that became an integral part of the Republican persona over the next two decades.

Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not. On the surface, Trump’s gold-plated lifestyle is nothing like the old Hollywood-style glamour of the Reagan White House. But for an era where most Americans have moved far beyond the culture wars of the past, where reality stars are our new tastemakers and Kim Kardashian is an icon mothers encourage their daughters to emulate, he offers an aspirational vision of wealth and accomplishment that appeals to the same combination of glitz and celebrity.

The Left Turns the Market Against the Right

Obsessing over the lost culture wars of the past is an error for the Right. But the real problem is that even if the Right hasn’t moved on from its previous losses, the Left has moved on from its previous victories. They remain focused on advancing their vision and building on their victories, to the point of eradicating any opposition from the public square. As a result, the character of the Left has fundamentally changed in a way that today’s Right seems quite incapable of grasping.

Hannah Arendt once quipped that the fiercest revolutionary becomes a devoted conservative after the revolution. This is certainly true of the Left, which has, since its culture war victories, co-opted much of the dogma of earlier conservatives and poisoned it. The old Left cast itself as transgressors against mainstream morality. This Left enforces and controls mainstream morality. The old Left championed transgressive free speech. This Left despises it.

Most importantly, the old Left cast itself as outside of capitalism. This Left is thoroughly corporatist, and only occasionally pretends otherwise. As a result, conservatives have stood by, oblivious and helpless, as the Left began to turn all our best weapons—especially the free market—against us.

This brings us to a second point: the inadequacy of the institutional Right at anticipating and explaining free markets. Conservatives and libertarians have been warning of capitalism cannibalizing itself since at least 1942, when Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter opened his book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” with disturbing news for his free market-sympathetic peers.

“I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader, considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements,” Schumpeter wrote. Much later on in the book, he observed even more cuttingly that “capitalism, inevitably and by virtue of the very logic its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”

Cultural Neutrality Is Not Possible

Schumpeter was right then, and he is distressingly right now. The cancer of leftism has spread through capitalism even further than it had in 1942. The general assumption of the American people in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the collapse and bailouts of Wall Street is that they were witnessing failures of capitalism, and the Right has done little to correct this impression.

Trump’s brazenness in admitting to past acts of cronyism is another aspect that would, for any other politician, spell his doom. Instead, it has fostered a greater degree of trust from his supporters. This is because Trump alone seems to understand that capitalism has weaknesses at all, having been a capitalist himself. The greatest of those is the fact that capitalism—and its defenders—assume it can operate from a position of cultural neutrality. It can’t.

In the latest season of “South Park,” the titular town is overrun with advertisements masquerading as human beings: soulless robots who use gentrification and political correctness (“mental gentrification,” the show wryly notes) to eliminate actual human beings from the area. This idea that a certain species of capitalism might actually drive political correctness is daring and interesting, and relatively unremarked upon by those on the Right today.

The Left Treats Race and Sex as Brands

One of the key tactics of advertisers is to make consumers feel their life is missing something without whatever product the advertiser is selling. If you look at ads that attempt to showcase the difference between, say, data packages from different cell phone carriers, you’ll often see the competition depicted as holding back their customers from the awesome data package they could have because of greed, technological incompetence, or some other abstraction that, of course, the advertised carrier doesn’t suffer from.

Once someone buys a product, you want them to feel allegiance to it, a degree of brand loyalty that can sometimes resemble political tribalism (see Apple). The aim is to make customers believe that someone who consumes that particular product belongs to a community of other buyers, who just happen to be a particularly desirable community to be a part of!

When you distill it down to its essence, the worst forms of modern leftist politics play on all of these same tactics, playing down the ramifications of policy agendas to speak to a much deeper and emotional desire to be a good person. Did you vote for Barack Obama because you wanted to feel good about yourself, but still feel life’s missing something? Vote for Bernie Sanders, and he’ll deliver on the promise to give you everything you need. Not getting the wage you could be getting? It’s the patriarchy, so switch carriers and join our feminist army for Hillary instead.

The Left treats race and sex as brands, operating with messaging and tactics that are more than just organizing techniques: they’re a brilliant technique to capture someone without the insight to see through the pitch. The Left has realized it can succeed by creating cultural turf wars among different demographics as a substitute for a policy agenda that speaks to their real needs.

The Political Equivalent of Gawker

 In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.

The point is that the post-culture war Left has not laid down their arms. Instead, they have become the political equivalent of Gawker: a divisive industry seeking cultural flashpoints to exploit and highlight, devoted to manufacturing mutual hate for their own benefit.  They thrive on the click-war hate that pits groups against each other.

It is not enough that women face challenges within a post-feminist society—they must be told that half the country is participating in a war on their priorities. In an atomized culture, breaking down people to the elements of ethnicity, sex, and gender is the Left’s go-to method of redefining society according to their priorities.

This is a key point that cannot be ignored. Because of the modern Left’s sophisticated use of advertising techniques, they have done something with their hatemongering that the Left of the past could only dream of: they have made it profitable. In so doing, they have turned a capitalist tactic on the culture that sustains it, and thus, on itself.

The Right Needs a New Cultural Vision

The Right must fight back against that. Yes, free markets remain the best economic system ever created, and a necessary precondition for a free society, but not a sufficient one. Does this mean the state has to get involved? Not necessarily. Conservatives could use another weapon to limit the spread of this kind of poison, and that’s culture.

Unfortunately, what little of a cultural vision we possess on the Right is so dated as to be largely hokey and irrelevant to the experience of Americans today. Because this new Left has become the dominant culture, the Right is obliged to form a counterculture. But countercultures are no place for young fogies. Countercultures shoot sacred cows, scandalize “respectable” norms, and generally wreak havoc for the sake of breaking down the hypocrisy and weakness of the dominant culture. By and large, it’s still the young fogies who run the show, and expecting them to create a counterculture, let alone a counterculture that produces actual art, is ludicrous.

The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness? Well, yes—but once again, Hart’s warning looms large, and fogie-ism rears its head.

An excellent example of this is an article titled “A Counterproductive Alliance,” discusing the increasing friendliness to right-wing ideas among video game fans after the #Gamergate controversy. The gist of the article can be summed up as: “How will we maintain our air of moral superiority if people show up to CPAC in costumes instead of blazers and bowties?” Never mind that #Gamergate and movements like it were the most successful backlash against political correctness: for some “conservatives,” saying yes to potential allies was too much to bear if it meant hobnobbing with the sorts of people who’ve never read a Bible or owned a varsity jacket.

Beat Dominant Culture at Its Own Game

This leaves the Right in a vulnerable and very unenviable spot: the most anachronistic elements of right-wing politics have rendered us too unimaginative to create a counterculture of our own, and too snobbish to appropriate the elements of the dominant culture that could serve as building blocks.

What’s a conservative who wants to stop culture, and thus politics, from being dragged to the far Left do? Answer: He or she has to hope that some part of mainstream culture co-opts the Right. Pray, in other words, that some Prometheus comes along who’s willing to steal fire from his fellow cultural elites to give to the Right’s forgotten constituencies, even if it annoys their more refined leaders.

Perhaps, say, some titanic elite figure who knows leftist pop culture’s weaknesses from the inside, and is willing to lose his cozy insider status to go at it like a wrecking ball? You know, the sort of person with enough cultural cachet to turn an episode of “Saturday Night Life” into an hour-long infomercial for his political vision, rather than a source of endless sneering gags about Republicans? The kind of person who can get away with barking orders at MSNBC hosts? That kind of person?

Oh look, it’s Donald Trump. Trump, alone among the 2016 Republican candidates, has been willing to seize the banner of the Right in the current culture war, and plant it straight in the backs of his fallen leftist antagonists. Trump did this the way countercultural warriors are supposed to win fights: he beat the dominant culture at its own game by rejecting their assumptions about what was allowed.

Hoisted on Their Own Petards

Compared to Trump at his most mocking and satirical, Gawker is tame. Compared to Trump at his most daring and impetuous, even the most ruthless of Hollywood’s antiheroes look peevish. Compared to Trump’s seemingly oblivious moments of benevolence, Upworthy looks mawkish and saccharine. Trump has made destroying the young fogies on the Right and Left the greatest thing on TV.

If the leaders of the Right are scared of Trump because he will say anything; the Left is scared of Trump precisely because he will say anything. He does not play by the rules, and that makes him less predictable and more dangerous. What Ronald Reagan and Trump have in common is obvious: an incredible capacity to use the media to captivate the American people. One learned this in Hollywood, the other in reality TV, but both deployed this skill to great effect.

There is, of course, a big difference, as well: everyone knows Reagan cast himself as a sunny, heroic figure. Trump, on the other hand, is taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality, i.e., a comically larger-than-life villain. But there’s a neat thing about villains, or at least well-done ones: they get to show where people’s ideas of good and evil fall flat. Trump does this brilliantly to the Left. He has taken the humiliating mockery that the media has trained so effectively on “hicks,” Christians, and Republicans, and turned it round to expose the smug, mostly leftist Babbits and young fogies of the Acela Corridor as no less ridiculous.

That’s a good start for someone who wants to make America great again, rather than letting America succumb to its eventual, leftist-driven death by a thousand clicks.


God bless,
JohnnyD

The Intellectual Case For Trump I: Why The White Nationalist Support?

The cowardice of the Republican Party and its allies has embittered people who love America’s heritage and see it as necessary for preserving free government. They see Trump as a champion. 

From: The Federalist

By Mytheos Holt - March 30, 2016

Donald Trump deserves to be president. More than any of the current candidates—although not to their exclusion—he is the best choice to lead this nation.

This is not an easy position to hold in DC. Having already lost friends of multiple years and having been subjected to practically every hysterical insult you expect people to stop using at the age of 15, I think it’s safe to say that the social pressure so many #NeverTrump people want to bring to bear on Trump supporters has materialized.

Speaking for those same Trump supporters, I also would say that it only hardens our opinions. I have never been so certain of anything as I am now that Trump is the one man who could deliver on a promise to make not just America, but the Republican Party, great again.

However, I owe those railing against me an answer to this question: “Why?”

It’s a valid question, even if those asking it often do so because of bigoted and incorrect assumptions about Trump supporters. Some of our detractors think we’re all old, stupid, kneejerk reactionaries with poor bank accounts and even poorer educations, not to mention total bankruptcy in the realm of conservative principle, if we even knew conservative principles existed. Others think we’re simply unaccomplished, cynical opportunists trying to introduce toxic white identity politics (or worse, white nationalism) into the GOP to feather our own nests while destroying the party.

I’m Not the Trump Caricature You Think I Am

For me, nothing could be further from the truth. I am young, financially secure, and graduated from one of America’s elite liberal arts colleges with strong academic distinctions thanks to a senior thesis attempting to reconstruct Frank Meyer’s fusionism post-George W. Bush. I once vocally supported the Gang of Eight immigration bill, and my employers since leaving college have included National Review, the Senate GOP leadership, the Washington Times, Glenn Beck, and former Republican Party Web Director and anti-Trump gadfly Liz Mair, none of whom could be accused of being either fringe or unprincipled.

My resume needs no help, and without going into detail, it would probably be far better for me from a career standpoint if I had backed Ted Cruz this entire time. However, deciding who to support for president isn’t about me. It’s about what’s best for the country and for the Republican Party. Trump is both.

 How can I say that? I could make the standard boilerplate argument about qualifications for the job. After all, Trump is probably the most accomplished man in recent history to make a run at the presidency. He has built an international business empire that is instantly identifiable. Furthermore, unlike Mitt Romney, whose business experience was arguably difficult to transfer into the realm of politics, the specific type of business Trump does has required him to work with everyone from local politicians to foreign heads of state in order to succeed. The man knows his way around finessing politicians probably as much as some diplomats do, and, given the president’s responsibility to represent America to the world, this experience is invaluable.

 Furthermore, Trump’s capacity to adopt the posture of a strongman is an asset in dealing with illiberal foreign regimes, which generally view the heads of Western liberal democracies as easy dupes and empty suits. Trump’s presentational style is a type of politician they recognize, and I daresay one they will respect more easily.

Or, I could talk about Trump’s great personal virtues. Yes, I said personal virtues. For while it has become de rigeur among conservatives to sneer at Trump as a man who personifies the opposite of family values, I submit that the evidence of Trump’s character as a family man and father is not only irrefutable: it literally stands beside him every time he wins a primary. I’m talking, of course, about Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. Any parent who had raised even one child to turn out as well as any of those three adults would have cause to beam with pride. To have raised all three is simply mind-boggling.

Whatever Trump’s flaws as a spouse—and to be sure, they exist—we should all be so lucky as to have a father like him. In fact, one of the filthiest and most transparently dishonest memes to have emerged from this election is the image of Trump as a leering incestuous molester because of some (admittedly cringe-worthy) comments he made about Ivanka. However, if Trump was crawling into his daughter’s bed to molest her, let’s just say Ivanka doesn’t seem to have noticed and leave this disgusting smear in the trash where it belongs.

The First Part of the Intellectual Case for Donald Trump

However, convincing as I do think these arguments are, there is a conspicuous absence of a third case, which one usually sees being made for presumptive GOP nominees (and whatever the denialists say, yes, Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee now) at this point in their run—i.e., to my knowledge, no one has yet made an intellectual case for Trump.

No one has marshaled philosophical, practical, and principled arguments in defense of the idea that thinking people who care about such things should, without any compromise of their own critical faculties, decide that Trump is the man to lead America.

Make no mistake, it is not an easy case to make, not because there are no arguments for it, but because you can’t meaningfully separate Trump from the numerous other cultural and historical phenomena that gave rise to his candidacy, many of which are far from obvious without being exposited. However, at its most basic, that case will advance three arguments:

1. That Trump, alone among the candidates, is forcing conservatives to defend the people left behind by liberalism, however unfashionable they may be, and however culturally alien they may have once been to our movement.
2. That Trump’s candidacy is about more than one man becoming president: it is symbolic of a national cultural Zeitgeist, and speaks to the modern political moment, in ways that no other candidate has been willing or able to do.
3. That Trump’s candidacy is the only tonic that can cure the conservative movement of its many ills, by forcing it to reckon both with the many ways in which the country has left it behind, and with the damning ways in which it has betrayed itself: in short, that Trump is chemotherapy for the soul of the Right.

Now, the reader can probably tell that this isn’t so much a hard case to make as a big one. When it comes to the first prong, I speak not merely from dusty Ivory Tower pontification, but from actual real-world experience with my subject matter. When I say “the people left behind by liberalism,” I’m not speaking of some abstract demographic category. I’m speaking of actual people whom I really knew, including some of the very people whose attraction to Trump most frightens his critics.

For this reason, and also because (being a Trump supporter) I’m not exactly above a little sensationalism, I’m going to start this piece by answering a very uncomfortable question: Why do white nationalists support Trump, if he isn’t one himself?

I’m no white nationalist (in fact, being Jewish, I’m pretty sure I’m disqualified), and I regard the ideology with just as much disgust as I do every other form of radical identity politics. That being said, I do have a fairly unique ability to answer this question, and with apologies to Lloyd Bentsen, it can be summed up this way: I know white nationalism. A white nationalist was a friend of mine. Trump is no white nationalist.

If he’s president, there might well be fewer of them. Why? Well, if you’ll indulge me in just a little more autobiographical navel-gazing, you’ll find out.

The Girl in the Brown Skirt

“Oh God! To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.” —“A Christmas Carol,” Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits

I once met a young woman whom I will call Sylvia, after her favorite poet, Sylvia Plath. At the time, Sylvia had been raised as a member of an infamous white nationalist organization. And I do mean “infamous.” These weren’t the comparatively well-mannered sorts that attend conferences led by Richard Spencer. These were the sorts of people who probably get raided by the FBI.
 
Where I met her was probably the last place you might expect to find white nationalists, closeted or otherwise. Now since I am, as already established, Jewish, this obviously made me initially regard the girl with something less than charity. I was almost afraid to speak to her.

That is, until I actually did speak to her, in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help, mostly out of morbid intellectual curiosity. When we first spoke to her, Sylvia was fairly careful with her words, and obviously seemed to realize she wasn’t among company who’d take kindly to open admiration of Adolf Hitler. She was, however, more than happy to enthuse about Pat Buchanan, VDare, and restricting immigration.

Now, at the time, I was fresh off having argued for the Gang of Eight bill until I was proverbially blue in the face, so when Sylvia started talking about immigration, I obviously pounced on this as a first opportunity to break down her worldview. I’m fairly certain that all I managed to do was scare her, though she did actually put up a far better fight than any white nationalist has a right to, probably because, despite her sheltered upbringing, she was off-the-charts brilliant. This instantly registered with me, and was later confirmed when she later revealed she’d learned a new language in only two weeks.

Over the coming weeks, I continued to send out feelers and message and speak with her online, keeping my ethnic heritage a secret at first so I could probe her ideology without sending up alarm bells. After a while, she got used to me, and we bonded over our mutual love of H.P. Lovecraft and dark internet humor. As a result, she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Of course, at some point I had to reveal that I am a Jew. Needless to say, this shocked her, not least of all because apparently her people train their children to recognize Jewish heritage in someone’s features, yet I had registered as pure Aryan. The realization that “they can look like us,” to use her words, set off something of a minor existential crisis for her, but I’m pleased to report that she got over it, and that my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less.

When Two Worlds Collide

That’s because what shocked her even more than my Jewishness was that I’d known she was a white nationalist and still willingly engaged with her like a human being and an equal. From someone who belonged to a group that she’d assumed held nothing but contempt and malice for people like her, this was the last thing she expected. The feeling was mutual on my end.

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation. What happened instead was that, with the scales lifted from both our eyes about the other’s decency and humanity, we started dissecting the other’s culture as it actually existed rather than how we’d been taught to believe it did. To make a very long story short, she came away understanding that my people weren’t intentionally hurting her people, and I came away with an appreciation for how much, and how unfairly, her people really were hurting.

I say “unfairly” for multiple reasons: firstly, because people as brilliant as Sylvia is do not deserve to be written off as incurable white trash. Giving everybody the opportunity to succeed means everybody, even people who were raised in ways we find troubling. One doesn’t have to be willing to offer blanket pardons to the Aryan Brotherhood to see that someone who was merely raised with bad ideas is not necessarily a lost cause, no matter how repellent those ideas are. In fact, lifting people like Sylvia out of circumstances where they think white nationalism is the only solution seems like Americanism at its finest, not a betrayal of the idea.

The other reason I say the pain experienced by Sylvia’s community is unfair is because when you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss uniforms, and Klan hoods, there are things that even rabid, clannish white nationalist society does better than our own. Ironically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.

One of the odder things I learned was that Sylvia and every other child in her community had to learn to speak German and English, and achieved total fluency in both by their teens. I’m from California, and our own education system wishes it were that good. We don’t have to excuse, or even tolerate, the massive amounts of bad behavior such people engage in to learn from the few decent things they do. After all, just because Mussolini made the trains run on time doesn’t mean punctuality in public transit is itself bad, no matter how hard the DC Metro system pretends.

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

Nationalism Is Backlash to Hatred of Western Culture

This brings me to the first and, arguably, the most important lesson that Sylvia taught me about what drives people into the arms of white nationalism: that urge comes not from economic dispossession, nor spiritual dispossession, but cultural dispossession

No, I don’t mean the sort of “where has my country gone” ignorance that I and my fellow coastal cosmopolitans like to mock over cocktails. I mean the sorts of people who are attracted to white nationalism are people whose own communities have been hollowed out by economic and cultural forces beyond their control, and who are now adrift in a society they perceive to be universally hostile to their heritage for no good reason.

That heritage, as white nationalists in America see it, is the heritage of Western civilization. If you wonder what that means (which is reasonable), let me spell it out: It means historically Western European cultural norms. Specifically, norms like respect for agents of the law, aspirational pride in work, willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions, disdain for laziness and welfarism, and reproductive responsibility (i.e., not having children you can’t afford to keep).

They respect these norms not merely because these are what their own communities follow, but also because they think these norms make constitutional government, liberty, and classical republicanism possible. If you have to pick between the two, defend the norms every day, since temporary cessations of liberty will naturally recover if they’re still in place, whereas the institutions without the norms will become meaningless: the Constitution will become a pointless scrap of paper to which people pay only lip service, and constitutional government will become bureaucracy hiding behind the fig leaf of a separation of powers.

Where this otherwise perfectly respectable, conservative pride in Western culture atrophies into white nationalism when the person holding it comes to believe that respect for liberal Western civilization is inextricably tied to one’s race. One particularly irreverent white nationalist YouTube songster sums this attitude up in a video mocking libertarians: “It’s not that freedom is bad/But only whites think it’s rad.”

Moreover, and this cannot be stated enough: these people genuinely believe that to be proud of the history of Western European accomplishment, and one’s own descent from the people responsible, is taboo in modern America. If you look at what cultural studies departments, much of modern media, left-wing college students, and the crazy wing of the Democratic Party says, this is probably at least partially accurate. Unfortunately, however, it’s not just leftists who are responsible for the rise of white nationalism in communities like Sylvia’s. We conservatives bear some blame too, though in this case, largely because of misunderstandings of how our own behavior is perceived.

The Right Has Also Failed

The biggest problem we have is that many conservatives are, understandably, reluctant to engage with the sort of leftist, victim-culture-spouting loons who regard Western civilization as unrepentantly evil. This is not because we have no good arguments against them; we do. But to argue with them, we think, makes them look more serious and relevant than they are. If you live in the rarefied world of Washington policy debates, this approach probably makes sense and even seems obvious.

But if you’re a blue-collar worker in Appalachia being screamed at by leftist protesters that you have “white privilege” and all you hear from the official Right is stony silence, you come to a wildly different conclusion: you assume conservatives are either ashamed to express our disagreement, or don’t disagree.

Add to this the fact that so much of the official Right’s response to left-wing attacks about diversity involves not denying their premise, but instead pointing to how many token members of each ethnic group are Republicans, or the fact that we’ll throw accusations like “racist” around over issues like immigration, and it gets harder and harder for otherwise conservative people to deny the idea that “conservatism” doesn’t want to conserve them, or the Western values and norms that made conservatism and constitutionalism possible, at all. The only people who do seem to want to man those barricades, from their perspective, are white nationalists.

This is not ground we should be ceding to extremists. Yet, so far, only one candidate has refused to do such a thing: Donald Trump.

Trump, whatever else he might be, is unabashedly pro-Western. What’s more, he understands the essentially cultural and even spiritual nature of the vacuum white nationalism fills. Unlike so many so-called “reformocons,” who wax poetic about the need to empathize with blue-collar workers’ economic concerns, yet are only willing to throw “family-friendly” tax credits at them like table scraps to starving dogs, Trump understands that however besieged people like Sylvia feel by economic woes, they feel even more besieged by attacks on their pride and dignity.

Unlike the white nationalists, Trump has defended that pride and dignity without once mentioning race, but instead with reference to the historical reality and promise of uniquely American greatness. His pitch is nationalist, yes, but it is not racist, and so immediately understandable that you can even put it on a baseball cap.

In fact, Trump, and Trump alone, has been willing to say what should have been obvious from the start: that the universalism and Whig historical pretensions of Kemp-and-W-style “bleeding heart conservatism” are dangerous distractions if they leave the American people as wounded prey for anti-American, extremist bottom feeders.

His image of a man fighting for America and its allies, and only them is a long-overdue return to form for a GOP long since captured by delusions of immanentizing the eschaton at the point of a gun. Those delusions have to stop, and Trump has to be allowed to punch through them.

Otherwise, the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as proverbial “cuckservatives” forever mentally masturbating with our own empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.


God bless,
JohnnyD