As you might have noticed, things have been pretty quiet here on the blog and podcast. Where I once released one podcast a week, it has now been months since my last post.

I am still here; I have not gone anywhere. My day job still keeps me busy, and I have also increased my involvement in local politics. I am a precinct committeeman, the secretary for my district’s Republican committee, and this month I will start a term on the Library Board of Trustees. I volunteer for the Republican Party in my state, attempting to build bridges that will bear good fruit in the future.

Most of my writing attention has been given to Substack, where I focus on local issues, while still occasionally indulging my passion for history. I have also been published at the Idaho Freedom Foundation as well as Action Idaho. I was especially honored to have had an opportunity to write for the July edition of the UK Mallard magazine which was guest edited by Raheem Kassam.

I do not expect to publish anything further at Decline & Fall. Obviously the premise reminds sound – nothing in the past six months has done anything to change my mind that our country is due for a major upheaval. However, I have come to recognize that the name drives people away. People are looking for hope, and do not want to hear about the decline and fall of our great nation.

I believe I have written some valuable work here – among my favorites are my essay on why conservatism has failed, the comparison of Donald Trump with Richard Nixon, my look at how it was Barack Obama, not Donald Trump, that broke American politics, the analysis of the ongoing dispossession of our country, and my podcast from this year looking at the historic American nation through the lens of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

I would like to preserve this work, and to reintroduce it to my new audience. To that end I am planning a video series called American Turning that will look at the historical context of our present situation and examine various ideas of where our society might be going. Same idea as Decline & Fall, but with a more positive and uplifting title. I will repurpose much of what I have already created for this endeavor, and I hope to begin work on that later this year.

For now, I invite you to continue following me at Substack. I make every post and video available to free subscribers, though if you wish to support me financially that is most welcome. (Just a few hundred more and I can quit my day job!) You can also follow me on Twitter, Telegram, Gab, or any of the other big social media sites.

I started Decline & Fall in late 2018 because I wanted to add some historical context to the ongoing conversation about the state of our nation. No matter how big or small my audience, I did it because I enjoyed the process. Some people make art, some design buildings, I craft essays and podcasts. I feel the same satisfaction, knowing I have brought into being something that did not exist before. I will continue to do that in other areas. I hope you will join me on our shared journey into the future.

This weekend, Raheem Kassam of the National Pulse released a new podcast discussing former Vice President Mike Pence’s statements to the Federalist Society where he cast aspersions on former President Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election:

There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress that I possessed unilateral authority to reject Electoral College votes. And I heard this week that former President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election’. President Trump is wrong.

Mike Pence, Remarks to the Federalist Society, 2/4/22

Raheem is entirely correct that Pence is being disingenuous and calculating, attempting to cast any follower of Donald Trump who questions anything about the 2020 election as being “un-American,” perhaps hoping to improve his own (nonexistent) chances in the next election. However, I must humbly disagree on one point. Early in the podcast, Raheem suggested that the role of the Vice President in counting the electoral votes before the Joint Session of Congress gave him the ability to send those electors back to the states in the event of disputes or controversies:

The point of a presiding officer in an election is to factor in all of those things. [Referring to laws changed unilaterally, illegal drop boxes, privatization of elections, sketchy voting machines, etc.] If not, why have a presiding officer at all? …If you think your job, Mr. Pence, is to just to grab an envelope from whomever gives it to you, open it up and say ‘…and the winner is!’ then f___ off and host the Oscars.

Raheem Kassam, The National Pulse Podcast, 2/5/22

Raheem is echoing what many on the right have said since the debacle of January 6^th, and several very intelligent constitutional lawyers have made the same argument. I recognize that I might well be wrong in my analysis, or at the very least it is ambiguous enough to allow for disagreement. However, I read the Constitution as saying that the role of the Vice President in counting the votes of the Electoral College is 100% a ceremonial thing, akin to being a presenter at the Oscars.

Article II, Section I, Paragraph 3 lays out the rules for electing the president. This section is repeated nearly word for word in the 12th Amendment, which clarified the way presidents and vice presidents were elected:

The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President… they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, …and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, …which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;–The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;–the person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President…”

US Constitution, Amendment XII

Nothing in there gives the vice president any leeway; he is instructed to simply open the certificates and allow the votes to be counted. I believe that what the founders intended is that any discrepancy or dispute about the electoral votes should be settled at the state level before they arrived at the Joint Session. They clearly did not envision states being complicit in rigging the presidential election. The role of the vice president really is to open the envelope and say “…and the winner is!”

During the podcast, Raheem mentioned the disputed election of 1876, where three states sent dual slates of electors to Congress. At the time, the Republicans maintained that the wording of the Constitution meant that the President of the Senate, Thomas Ferry, had discretion about which certificates to count. Democrats countered that Ferry was merely an Oscar host, and that the Join Session had final say on which votes were counted. Both positions were entirely self-serving.

Unfortunately for us, the way the issue was resolved did not set a clear precedent for the future. Congress instead passed a law creating a special commission to figure out what to do, and the commission eventually settled on a compromise wherein Congress accepted the Republican slates of electors and new President Rutherford Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. While a commission like this was possible in 2021, Vice President Pence could not have called for it on his own. It would have required a majority in the House and the Senate, and there were not enough Republicans with the courage to do so.

Others have pointed to the-Vice President Richard Nixon’s role in certifying the 1960 election, in which he lost a close and contested race to Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts. The state of Hawaii was called for Nixon by just over a hundred votes on Election Day but was immediately challenged by the Democrats, who called for a recount. As the recount progressed, it began to look like Kennedy might win. Both Republican and Democrat electors for Hawaii signed their certificates by the deadline and sent them to Washington DC for the Joint Session of Congress. A recount later confirmed that Kennedy had indeed won the state, so new certificates were signed by the Democrat electors. However, mail being slow back then, especially from Hawaii, both sets of electoral votes were present when Vice President Nixon presided over the Joint Session.

With both the state legislature and the high courts of Hawaii having declared that Kennedy was the winner, Nixon called for unanimous consent of the Congress to accept the Democrat electors. This was a very different situation from January 6^th, 2021. While Republican electors in some of the contested states did sign their certificates, just in case there was a valid dispute, the legislatures and courts of those states all stood behind the Democrats. Had Vice President Pence made a motion for unanimous consent to accept the Republican electors in these states, it would have been soundly defeated.

Further, there is nothing in the Constitution that grants the vice president the authority to send the electoral votes back to the state legislatures, as President Trump and many conservative activists were demanding. By the time the Joint Session convened on January 6^th, the die was cast. Ultimately, the problem lay with the state legislators who rubber-stamped the electoral votes of their states after ignoring the problems of mail-in ballots and privatized election systems.

Any further objections needed to be made by the congressmen and senators in the Joint Session, not the vice president. Several Republicans had planned to object, just as Democrats did during the vote counts in 2000, 2004, and 2016, but the portrayal of the protest at the Capitol that day as an “insurrection” took the wind out of their sails. I predicted in November 2020 that the media would do their best to portray the election as a fait accompli, and that any disagreement would be seen as interfering in the will of the American people. Unfortunately, too many cowardly Republicans bowed to this media pressure, and so investigation of the myriad problems in the election of 2020 were relegated to the fringe.

We can grumble at Pence for not doing more, but we cannot deny that he was sticking to the beaten path of American political precedent. Trump was asking him to do something that had never been done before, which raises the real question of all of this. Is it time for us to start pushing the limits of our laws and our Constitution? The left clearly has no respect for them, and because of that they’re running roughshod over our society and our political system. Is it time to fight back? To cross our own Rubicons?

Abraham Lincoln is respected today as one of our greatest presidents, but he tore the Constitution to pieces to save the Union. He illegally raised federal troops, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and he engaged in a war that killed 600,000 Americans, all to save the country he served.

Are we at that situation again? Are we angry with Mike Pence because he failed to see the gravity of the situation, and failed to follow in Lincoln’s footsteps to take unprecedented (and probably unconstitutional) steps to save the country? If so, then let us clarify that perspective and decide how we can move forward in this post-constitutional age.

One thing I wholeheartedly agree with Raheem Kassam about is that Mr. Pence, like many other Republican leaders, is very much a creature of the establishment swamp. He would like nothing more than to go back to pretending that the American government still works for the people. Listen to the whole podcast. Raheem and co-host Natalie Winters discuss in detail how Big Tech and other oligarchic enterprises are buying our democracy bit by bit. Once-venerable institutions like the Federalist Society are now wholly owned by the technocracy.

Who can we turn to? America will not be made great again by people like Mike Pence, no matter how much they claim to revere our Constitution. The old guard of the GOP establishment acts like the Roman Senate in the imperial era: going through the motions and pretending they still matter. No, if we are to have a fighting chance to save our republic it will be rabble-rousers like Donald Trump who upend the comfortable establishment. A new generation of Republicans is rising, with leaders such as Matt Gaetz and Anthony Sabatini of Florida, Joe Kent of Washington, and Blake Masters of Arizona. These men understand the gravity of the situation, that we will not be saved by the same appeals to the Constitution and to decency that have been issued by Republicans for three generations now. Saving America means becoming radical in the defense of our liberties, our values, and our traditions. Mike Pence is not the man for this time.

Today marks the observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day across America. Social media accounts of politicians from both sides of the spectrum are competing today to see who can honor Dr. King the most. Republican leaders and pundits are perhaps even more enthusiastic than the left in the way they revere Dr. King and his fight for civil rights. The same conservatives who denounce the George Floyd riots, Critical Race Theory being taught in schools, and affirmative action in universities will fall over themselves to put Dr. King on a pedestal.

In the entire history of our republic, only two men have been honored with national holidays: George Washington, the father of this nation, the greatest American in history, who remains first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

It makes sense: Dr. King is, in a way, the father of modern America. The social revolutions of the 1960s created an entirely new country, even if many people still do not realize it. Despite speaking about his desire for the United States to “live out the true meaning of its creed,” King’s actions permanently altered the nature of our society.

Author Christopher Caldwell wrote a fantastic book last year called Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, in which he looked at the massive upheavals our society has experienced since that decade. In that book he examined how the actions of men such as Dr. King, President Lyndon Johnson, and even President Ronald Reagan all affirmed this revolution, this transformation into a completely new country, despite their allegedly good intentions.

The political divides of the past fifty years are really about the New America trying to displace the Old.

The Old America is mostly made up of conservative Republicans. We believe that the founding of this country was in 1776, that the true meaning of America is found in freedom and liberty, that our founding documents are the Declaration of Independence, and that our biggest hero is George Washington.

The New America is mostly made up of progressive Democrats. They believe that our country was founded in the 1960s, that our values are inclusivity and equity, our founding documents are the “I Have a Dream” speech and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and that the true heroes of this country are civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr.

Acolytes of New America have been working hard to erase any trace of Old America from both our discourse and our very geography. What sort of message does it send for Republican leaders to genuflect before the very architects of this destruction?

Referring to this bifurcation of America in Age of Entitlement, Caldwell says:

American politics had re-sorted itself around that question—which came down to the question of whether one had benefited from or lost by the transfers of rights, goods, and privileges carried out under the new constitutional dispensation that began in 1964. The Democrats were the party of those who benefited: not just racial minorities but sexual minorities, immigrants, women, government employees, lawyers—and all people sophisticated enough to be in a position to design, run, or analyze new systems. This collection of minorities could, with discipline, be bundled into an electoral majority, but that was not, strictly speaking, necessary. The hierarchies of government, the judiciary, and the corporate world were Democratic in their orientations. Sympathetic regulators, judges, and attorneys took up the task of transferring as many prerogatives as possible from the majority to various minorities. Republicans were the party, as we have noted, of yesteryear’s entire political spectrum, of New Deal supporters and New Deal foes, of the people who would have voted for Richard Nixon in 1960 and the people who would have voted for John F. Kennedy. The lost world of that period seemed an idyll to many Americans. The parties represented two different constitutions, two different eras of history, even two different technological platforms. And increasingly, two different racial groups.

Republican leaders go out of their way to honor Dr. King for two reasons, I think: First, they want to demonstrate their anti-racist bona fides, trying to head off the usual name-calling and accusations that are deployed against any conservative who does not toe the progressive line, and second, they want to draw a distinction between the ideals that Dr. King supposedly stood for and the modern edifice of social justice and identity politics. Yet as Caldwell explains, that edifice was built on Dr. King’s work!

Republicans and others who may have been uneasy that the constitutional baby had been thrown out with the segregationist bathwater consoled themselves with a myth: The “good” civil rights movement that the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., had pursued in the 1960s had, they said, been “hijacked” in the 1970s by a “radical” one of affirmative action, with its quotas and diktats. Once the country came to its senses and rejected this optional, radical regime, it could have the good civil rights regime back. None of that was true. Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. They were what civil rights was. They were not temporary.

Despite appealing to Americans’ belief in the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Dr. King’s actions helped bring forth a new society based on an unwritten constitution of forced equity and government interference. It was King’s luck, so to speak, to be gunned down before anyone could witness the inevitable fruit of this poison tree. He died a hero before he could become a villain. His martyrdom has allowed people from all sides to claim his mantle, from race-baiters like Al Sharpton, Marxists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even the pro-life movement appeals to King’s ideals. Every year, Christian conservatives march Dr. King’s niece, Alveda King, out to explain that his true legacy is conservative, despite every other member of his family marching in lockstep with the progressive left.

Millions of conservative Republicans have grown up in post-1960s America, and thus have no frame of reference to compare our new society. MLK Jr. Day was enshrined as a federal holiday in the 1980s, and for many of us it has always been a part of our culture. Writing in Chronicles Magazine nearly forty years ago, arch-conservative Sam Francis warned that the deification of Dr. King would inevitably lead to the destruction of pre-1960s American icons:

It is merely a matter of time before the Confederate flag is surrendered, along with local statues of Confederate veterans and heroes, “Dixie,” and most other memorials of antebellum civilization. Their passing may not be a cause of mourning among many outside the South (or many within the South, for that matter), but the same logic that compels their abandonment reaches further. The three most prominent monuments in Washington, DC, are those dedicated to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Is there a schoolchild in the United States today who does not know that the first two were slaveowners? Is there any literate person in America who does not know that none of the three was a racial egalitarian, that every one of them uttered statements that make Jimmy the Greek sound like an ACLU lawyer? The same argument that drives Mr. Snyder from his low but honest trade and pulls down a banner commemorating the last stand of a desperate people will demolish the obelisk and temples that memorialize the major statesmen of the American nation.

Francis was a prophet. The last decade has seen the elimination, not just of the Battle Flag and Confederate statues, but of memorials to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Abraham Lincoln. These men represent an America that is, in the eyes of many in power today, dead and gone. The New America founded by Dr. King cannot tolerate symbols of the Old America to remain.

Why should I bring this up on MLK Jr. Day? Why rain on the parade of Republicans who want to honor a civil rights leader? Why not just let sleeping dogs lie? Can we not just honor Dr. King together and remember his words of freedom and equality?

Because truth matters. Dr. King may have had some lofty ideals, and he certainly gave a good speech, but not only were the consequences of his actions bad for our country, he himself was not the saint we think he was.

Digging into Dr. King’s life brings up all sorts of issues that should trouble us, issues that should not be swept under the rug in the name of hagiography:

• Dr. King was apparently a serial philanderer.
• Dr. King allegedly plagiarized his doctoral thesis.
• Dr. King’s theology was far from what we would consider to be orthodox Christianity.
• Dr. King was, if not an outright Communist, sympathetic to socialist philosophies and kept company with card-carrying Communists.

If you read Dr. King’s interview with Playboy Magazine in 1965, you might notice that his words bear a striking resemblance to the Marxist race-baiters of today. He calls for more government spending on black communities, he makes excuses for race riots, and he calls Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater a “racist” and Alabama Governor George Wallace “Hitler”. It is all too familiar, no?

Conservatives might not like to admit it, but the road to George Floyd started with Martin Luther King Jr. Replacing Independence Day with Juneteenth started by replacing George Washington with Dr. King as the most important man in American history.

By all means, let us proclaim the words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” By all means, let us reinforce some of the good things that Dr. King spoke of in his speeches. But we should not rewrite history. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. planted the tree that is now bearing such poisoned fruit in our society. To place him equal to George Washington in the American pantheon is to endorse that fruit, and diminish the heroes that truly built this country.

French journalist and commentator Eric Zemmour announced his candidacy for President of the Republic today, with a speech that should be required reading for patriots not only in America but throughout Christendom. I would like to read for you the speech translated into English. May it inspire you as much as it has me.

Here is the original speech, in French: https://youtu.be/k8IGBDK1BH8

Twitter thread by user pegobry: https://twitter.com/pegobry/status/1465641008260132871?s=20

Full translation by user malmesburyman: https://twitter.com/malmesburyman/status/1465785819969429505

(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban took control of Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, nearly twenty years after American and coalition forces ousted them in our post-9/11 invasion.

Our two-decade occupation of that country, intended to transform a land of disunited barbarian tribes into a modern liberal democracy, failed in spectacular fashion, faster than anyone had thought possible, with the whole affair broadcast live on social media. The chaotic scenes in Kabul throughout the month of August reminded many of the evacuation of Saigon in 1975 after the fall of South Vietnam. Worse, in fact: during the writing of this essay, suicide bombs exploded in the Kabul airport, killing dozens of people, including American servicemen.

The fall of Afghanistan and the failure of our long mission there raises several hard questions that all Americans must consider.

Why have we thrown away so many lives in the cause of nation-building abroad?

Why are our leaders so invested in foreign wars, even in the face of mass public opposition?

Why did the United States – the greatest country in the history of the world – fail to accomplish its missions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or the many other places to which our troops have been deployed?

The United States of America was born in the fires of revolution and built on the foundation of liberty. Yet our founders did not believe it was our job to foment revolution or export liberty to the rest of the world. In 1797, President George Washington famously warned against entangling ourselves in European alliances. In 1821, future President John Quincy Adams echoed Washington’s warning, saying that while America would support in spirit the cause of freedom throughout the world, we should not spend our own blood and treasure on behalf of others. “She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” he said.

At some point along the way our country’s mission was changed. In 1898, we defeated the remnants of the Spanish Empire and took over their colonies, from Cuba to Guam to the Philippines. In 1917, we entered the Great War, sending millions of soldiers to Europe to, as President Woodrow Wilson put it, “make the world safe for democracy.” In the late 1930s and early 1940s, we lent money and equipment to Britain, France, and later the USSR to help them in their fight against Nazi Germany, joining the war ourselves after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. For really the first time in our history the eyes of America were turned outward toward the world. Our young men saw action in North Africa, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and dozens of small islands in the South Pacific. It was also during World War II that the United States first became interested in the Middle East. Those backward Arabic kingdoms, until recently under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire, were sitting on trillions of dollars’ worth of oil – oil that would be necessary to power the massive American war machine in the future.

The aftermath of World War II saw American troops remain abroad to enforce the new world order as well as protect our exhausted allies from the new threat of Russian communism. Rather than sending them out on a mission with measurable aims, our troops were now expected to permanently garrison far-flung outposts of our empire. President Harry Truman made this explicit when he declared that the policy of the United States would be to contain Communist expansion throughout the world. The Truman Doctrine was a major shift from our previous policy of noninterference and would involve our country in many conflicts over the next forty-five years. The “domino theory” postulated that if we let one nation fall to communism, then it would start a chain reaction that would lead to the entire world being overcome by the hammer and sickle, and we would then face invasion of our own shores. “We have to fight them over there, so we don’t fight them here,” we were told. Does that sound familiar?

When North Korea invaded their southern neighbors, intending to impose communism on the whole peninsula, the United States led a coalition of United Nations forces to defend democracy once more. We fought to a stalemate in Korea, and tens of thousands of US troops remain there protecting a tenuous peace to this day.

With Korea still fresh in our memories, we allowed ourselves to be pulled into the quagmire that was Vietnam, losing fifty thousand brave young men in a futile attempt to prop up a corrupt government against the fanatical devotion of Ho Chi Minh and his own Russian-backed communists. Despite having won a massive landslide in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson was so unpopular in 1968 that he did not even bother running in his own primary. Former Vice President Richard Nixon won the election that year on a platform of peace with honor. To that end, he authorized an increase in strategic bombing, not only of North Vietnam but of neighboring Cambodia as well, slowly withdrawing American ground troops at the same time. After winning a 49-state landslide in 1972, Nixon announced the Paris Peace Accords. The US would withdraw completely from Indochina, while North Vietnam would return prisoners of war and respect the autonomy of the south.

By this time, the United States was tired of war. Congress was fed up with how Presidents Johnson and Nixon had prosecuted the war with little oversight, and so they passed the War Powers Resolution over Nixon’s veto in 1973. The law now required the president to seek congressional approval before deploying troops for an extended mission. Consequently, Nixon’s successor President Gerald Ford could only watch helplessly as the North Vietnamese Army overran Saigon in 1975. The images of our staff and Vietnamese refugees escaping from the roof of a CIA safe house are seared into our national memory.

America’s military reputation had been seriously damaged in Vietnam. The Cold War continued through the 1970s, but without the sense of imminent destruction that had accompanied it during events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. The American military was only used for small actions against weak countries such as Grenada and Panama. while the Soviet Union became bogged down in their own Vietnam when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Their invasion, and our support of the Mujahideen rebels, once again threatened to inflame tensions between the two superpowers that had cooled in the years after Vietnam.

Also in 1979, the US-backed Shah of Iran was deposed by a group of hardcore followers of Shiite Islam, taking hostages that were not freed until President Ronald Reagan came into office in January of 1981.

The concept of terrorism began to seep its way into public consciousness during this time. In 1983, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah bombed the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, in response to our intervention in their bloody civil war. Seventeen Americans were killed. Five years later, more than two hundred and fifty people were killed when terrorists working for Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi blew up a Boeing 747 flying over Scotland. Before 9/11, Islamic terrorism was a nuisance, but it never loomed very large in the public consciousness. As late as 1993, James Cameron’s film True Lies featured Islamic terrorists as comedic villains.

The Cold War still dominated American attention during the 1980s. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was heralded as the beginning of the end of communist domination of Europe, and the USSR itself collapsed two years later. It was the fabled “end of history”. With nuclear war suddenly no longer seemingly imminent, the United States felt freer to engage in military action. As the Soviet Union was falling into the dustbin of history, America decided to involve herself in a territorial dispute on the other side of the world. Iraq, whom we had supported in their war against the hardcore Shiites of Iran, had invaded their tiny neighbor of Kuwait intending to annex them and claim their vast oil reserves. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, once an ally of the United States, mistakenly believed that one – we had tacitly approved his invasion, and two – that we had become a paper tiger, easily dealt with if we tried to intervene. Saddam had assembled the fourth largest army on earth and promised the “mother of all battles” to anyone who stood in his way.

President George H. W. Bush assembled a coalition of nations and issued an ultimatum to Saddam: leave Kuwait or be removed. Some political leaders in the United States urged caution, worried that Iraq would turn into another Vietnam. When the invasion, Operation Desert Storm, finally, came, it was a resounding success that silenced naysayers for a decade. In a magnificent hundred-days campaign, the US-led Coalition completely defeated Saddam’s army, driving them out of Kuwait with the US suffering fewer than 150 killed in action. President Bush’s approval rating skyrocketed as most Americans celebrated the victory. Support for the troops was at an all time high, and Lee Greenwood’s patriotic ballad God Bless the USA played constantly on FM radio.

America was back! With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world had a single superpower for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. Our overwhelming victory in the Persian Gulf signaled to the rest of the world that we could take on that mantle. Rather than returning to a pre-World War II “America First” attitude, we doubled down on globalism, pledging our blood and treasure to maintain what President Bush called the new world order. Rather than waging wars of conquest, we would now be using our military for humanitarian reasons, to ensure that all people had food, water, medicine, and freedom.

Despite our agreement with Saudi Arabia to maintain troops in their country only for the duration of the Gulf War, we found reasons to keep them there far longer. After Saddam Hussein brutally put down a rebellion by the ethnic Kurds in the north of Iraq, the United Nations imposed a “no-fly zone” over the area, and the US Air Force enforced this mandate from the skies. Our leaders gave us good reasons for our remaining in the Middle East, and the idea that our presence might cause resentment among people there was casually dismissed. We are the USA, the world’s only superpower, and there is nothing we cannot do.

Little did we know that we had already reached the peak of American military and cultural superiority.

The first cracks in the image of our invincible military power appeared soon. Just two years after the Gulf War, the United States intervened in a civil war in Somalia that was causing famine and starvation. The United Nations was supplying food and medicine to the Somali people, but a brutal warlord named Mohamed Farrah Aidid began attacking the aid convoys and confiscating the goods. To stop these attacks, President Bill Clinton authorized an incursion by American special forces to capture the warlord and his top lieutenants.

The mission quickly went awry, and two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by Somali militias. American troops mounted a heroic rescue mission, but several soldiers were killed. Video of Somalis dragging the bodies of American troops through the streets of Mogadishu was like a knife in the heart of the American psyche. Our invincible military, which had so recently won a nearly flawless victory, was now being humiliated in Africa.

Though the overall mission in Mogadishu was a success, the experience left the American public less willing to risk our troops on humanitarian causes. President Clinton withdrew our forces from Somalia entirely, a move decried by his Republican opponents as showing weakness. Was pulling out of Somalia the right choice? Unfortunately, we might have been in a no-win scenario already. Antiwar activist Scott Horton wrote a book in 2017 titled Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, in which he explains the history of our involvement in the Middle East and the many mistakes we have made along the way.  In the book he claims that Osama Bin Laden, who at the time was a veteran of the Afghan Mujahideen, was disappointed that President Clinton withdrew our forces from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident.

“Though Bin Laden later cited this withdrawal as proof America was ultimately a weak adversary, at the time, just two years after the first Iraq war, the Al Qaeda leader claimed he sought to bog down the US in a ‘war of attrition’ there.”

Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand

President Clinton remained hesitant to use ground forced for the duration of his time in office. He refused to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, and our involvement in the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo was restricted to the relative safety of airstrikes. When Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group Al Qaeda attacked an American barracks in Saudi Arabia and two of our embassies in Africa, Clinton again limited our response to air strikes.

Ever since the invention of the airplane, strategic bombing has been the holy grail for political leaders. It is a way to cause damage to the enemy without much risk, especially since post-World War II we have seldom been challenged for air superiority. Yet air strikes are often more bark than bite, more flash than substance. Factories can be rebuilt, and military equipment can be repaired. On the other hand, local populations subject to our bombs only hate us more for causing such death and destruction and become more loyal to their leaders who are fighting against us.

Despite the relative ineffectiveness of strategic bombing, it remains a favorite tool for American leaders. They can come to their citizens and say they are accomplishing something, punishing those who have harmed us, while avoiding putting troops in harm’s way. No American president wants to be responsible for the deaths of American soldiers, nor for the pictures of flag-draped coffins that inevitably follow.

September 11^th, 2001 changed everything. Four airplanes were hijacked. Three buildings were destroyed. Three thousand Americans were killed. Our sense of security in our nation and in our airports forever shattered. The American people demanded revenge, and airstrikes would not be enough this time. In a meeting with lawmakers, new President George W. Bush said:

“When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.”

President George W. Bush, September 13, 2001

Conservative country singer Toby Keith echoed President Bush’s rhetoric when he promised to “…put a boot up your ass; it’s the American way.”

The American people were united in their desire for resolute action. Intelligence reports suggested that 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan, which was under the control of the Islamic extremist government the Taliban. The United States demanded that the Taliban turn over Bin Laden and senior Al Qaeda leadership, and when they refused, we launched an invasion intending to topple the government and capture or kill the terrorists.

Afghanistan occupies a unique place in the world, both geographically and historically. The region lies between China to the east and the Persian and Arab world to the west, with Russia to the north and India to the south. It is crisscrossed by mountains such as the Hindu Kush and the edge of the Himalayas, with sheltered valleys in between. This unforgiving land has been home to many different tribes, cultures, and religions. Today, the Pashtun people are the most numerous, but there are significant communities of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Turkmens, Balochs, and more.

When Alexander the Great conquered his way from Greece to India, he apparently found Afghanistan difficult and inhospitable. Years later, the Silk Road made its way through the Khyber Pass on its way from China to Persia, leading to many different people setting foot in this land. The region was often a flashpoint between great powers and experienced a blending of very different cultures and beliefs. At various points throughout history, Afghanistan was ruled by the Greeks, the Persians, the Hindus, and even the Mongols. Islam eventually became the predominant force in the land, and by the mid-1800s a Muslim king sat on the Afghan throne.

Because of its strategic location, many great powers have involved themselves in Afghan affairs. In the 1800s, Britain and Russia played the “Great Game,” a series of geopolitical maneuvers to use Afghanistan as a buffer between the Russian Empire and British India. To that end, Britain invaded Afghanistan three times over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in a humiliating defeat for the British Empire, the Second led to British control over Afghanistan and the Third, while a British tactical victory, saw the United Kingdom permanently withdraw from the region. This withdrawal presaged the collapse of the British Empire just three decades later.

The Afghan monarchy survived for several more decades before falling to a coup in 1973. The ensuing military dictatorship was itself overthrown by the Communists in 1978. The new government’s hold on power was very shaky, so their Soviet backers decided to intervene in their favor. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 outraged the western world. President Jimmy Carter responded with what historians call the Carter Doctrine in early 1980, warning that the United States would consider any act of aggression in the Persian Gulf region an attack on our interests. We began building military bases throughout the Middle East to counter the Soviet threat as well as to project our power more forcefully in the area. President Carter ordered a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, and Presidents Carter and Reagan both authorized secret deals to send weapons to the Mujahideen, the alliance of Afghan tribes fighting against the Communists.

In the 1988 film Rambo III, Sylvester Stallone’s action hero travels to Afghanistan to aid the Mujahideen, bringing the conflict to American cinemas. During the film, one of the American soldiers mocks his KGB captor, saying:

“Every day, your war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed, poorly equipped freedom fighters. The fact is that you underestimated your competition. If you’d studied your history, you’d know that these people have never given up to anyone. They’d rather die than be slaves to an invading army. You can’t defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam! Now you’re gonna have yours.”

Would that our own leaders had remembered that thirteen years later.

The Soviets withdrew in 1989, and their puppet government fell just a few years later. However, the USSR itself did not even last that long, collapsing in 1991. People were beginning to believe that Afghanistan was truly the “graveyard of empires”.

After the fall of the Soviet-backed government, the Mujahideen alliance crumbled, and the tribes resumed fighting their vicious civil war. Into the fray stepped a group of Pashtun Islamic scholars from Kandahar called the Taliban. Having once supported the Mujahideen, the Taliban promised to end both the fighting as well as what they considered the pernicious influence of western culture in their country. The message of the Taliban gained them a large following, and soon they were able to defeat the other tribes and take control of the country. After conquering Kabul, they declared themselves the leaders of the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and imposed strict Sharia law on their people. Women were made to wear full burqas and were often not allowed to leave their homes without a male escort. Western culture was entirely forbidden, movie theaters were closed, and western music and literature were banned. The Buddhas of Bamiyan, enormous ancient statues carved fifteen hundred years ago into the mountains of the Hindu Kush, were destroyed on the orders of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. When Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorists were expelled from Saudi Arabia, the Taliban offered them shelter in Afghanistan.

So it was that the United States and our coalition partners invaded Afghanistan in October of 2001. President Bush promised that this would not be another Vietnam. At first it seemed that he would emulate his father’s quick and decisive victory in Desert Storm ten years prior. American Special Forces dropped into Afghanistan and connected with the Northern Alliance, a confederation of tribes and former Mujahideen that had been fighting the Taliban for five years. This coalition quickly ousted the Taliban from Kabul, Kandahar, and the rest of Afghanistan’s major cities. The US State Department worked with the leaders of the Northern Alliance to form a new representative government for Afghanistan.

Had we ended our mission there, it might have gone down in history as another American military triumph. Unfortunately, most of the Taliban leadership, as well as Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, had escaped from their mountain hideout of Tora Bora into Pakistan. Many accounts lay the blame for Bin Laden’s escape on US General Tommy Franks, who inexplicably refused to call for reinforcements to take Tora Bora before the senior Al Qaeda leadership could run for the border. The question of how and why Bin Laden escaped has plagued our country for nearly twenty years. Was it sheer luck, incompetence, or worse? Some antiwar activists have long suggested that American leadership let Bin Laden go, needing a scapegoat for future military actions.

Rebuffed by the US-backed provisional government, Taliban leader Mullah Omar launched an insurgency in 2002, and the United States and our allies settled in for the long and difficult task of securing a free and democratic nation in this war-torn region.

On the eve of the 2001 invasion, Steve Sailer looked at the prospects of a military adventure in Afghanistan through the lens of Rudyard Kipling’s short story The Man Who Would Be King and its 1975 adaption directed by John Huston. In the story, the characters Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine in the movie) decide to hike into the remote valley of Kafiristan, in northeast Afghanistan, and set themselves up as kings. Their plan seems to work at first, as they use their experience in the British Army and their superior weaponry to turn uncivilized tribes into an elite force. However, their adventure ends in tragedy when they fail to appreciate local customs.

Sailer predicted that our invasion would likely turn out the same way – initial success, followed by a long-drawn-out tragedy should we choose to remain and try to build a nation in the wilderness. He wrote:

“Those who advocate that we stay in Afghanistan long after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are dealt with should ponder Kipling and Huston’s parable.”

Steve Sailer, September 26, 2001

As usual, Steve Sailer was absolutely right. Before Bin Laden and his lieutenants had even escaped from Tora Bora, our leadership was already moving on to their next target.

Rather than concentrate on pacifying Afghanistan, the Bush Administration decided instead to expand the Global War on Terror. In 2003, the United States government charged Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with breaking post-Gulf War UN resolutions aimed at preventing him from committing genocide against the Kurds and for developing weapons of mass destruction. President Bush proclaimed the Bush Doctrine, which held that the United States had the right to preemptively attack foreign nations and terror organizations that threatened our safety and security. What a far cry this was from the doctrines of non-interference laid out by George Washington and John Quincy Adams. Nevertheless, at the time the American people were scared that 9/11 was only the beginning of a deadly campaign of terror.

After 9/11, President Bush had gone to Congress seeking approval to use military force to hunt down the terrorists who had committed the attack. Rather than granting this request with a very limited scope, as then-Congressman Ron Paul had wanted, Congress instead passed an open-ended bill that gave Bush and future presidents nearly carte blanche to fight a war on terror throughout the world, including Iraq. Rather than declaring war on Al Qaeda, or even on the Taliban regime that sheltered them, the Bush Administration instead launched a War on Terrorism, as if something so abstract could ever be defeated by military action.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has since been used as a perpetual blank check by the Bush, Obama, and even Trump administrations to deploy troops anywhere in the world. Despite only a few dozen elected leaders remaining in Congress since the 2001 vote, the AUMF continues to be used to justify intervention in foreign nations to this day.

To listen to our political leadership and news media at the time, we had to invade Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, which were committed by extremists who hated us because of our freedoms. Yet how many Americans at the time knew that we had maintained a military presence in the Middle East for more than twenty years? The Carter Doctrine had turned the Persian Gulf into an extension of the American empire. After the Gulf War, rather than leaving, we maintained bases throughout the Arab world. It was precisely this extended presence that animated Osama Bin Laden in the first place: he was offended that “infidels” – American troops – were stationed in the holy land of Mecca and Medina. This is not to say that Bin Laden was justified in his campaign of terror, but the simplistic rationale given to us by our leaders and journalists did not tell the whole story.

In hindsight, the threat of Afghanistan and Iraq to the citizens of the United States appears to have been overstated. It raises the question: did the government use 9/11 and the Bush Doctrine as an excuse to launch a series of endless wars across the globe? Had Iraq not turned into a quagmire so quickly, would we have continued invading other nations throughout the world?

In Fool’s Errand, Scott Horton tells of retired General Wesley Clark seeing a memo in the Pentagon explaining which countries were in our cross-hairs. Horton writes:

“The memo included a list of seven countries to be the subject of US regime-change policies in the new War on Terrorism: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. None of the governments of these countries supported Al Qaeda or threatened the United States.”

Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand

The existence and veracity of this memo seems likely, considering that we have used our military to attempt regime change in most of the nations on that list.

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003, with the aim of regime change. Overthrowing the leadership of Syria has been US policy for the better part of the last decade as well. US Special Forces are known to be active in Sudan and Somalia, though this garners little attention. And, of course, the United States famously intervene in Libya during the Obama Administration. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bragged about helping to overthrow Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, an action that destabilized the entire region and led directly to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012. Images of the body of Ambassador Chris Stevens being dragged through the streets recalled the horror of Mogadishu nearly twenty years previously. Clinton, of course, famously dismissed the entire Benghazi tragedy in congressional testimony:

“What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, January 23, 2013

The last country on the list, Iran, has long been the target of neoconservative warmongers in and out of the government. Recall that the United States supported Saddam Hussein of Iraq in the 1980s as he fought against his neighbor to the east. To this day there are think tanks and news websites dedicated to whipping the American people to support an invasion of Iran. Older generations remember the coup that overthrew the Shah in 1979 and the captivity of our embassy staff. We are told that the Iranian ayatollahs are hell-bent on apocalyptic war, and that if they manage to develop nuclear weapons, then they will undoubtedly destroy Israel and the United States. One might suspect that the purpose of our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s was to put our troops in a position to encircle Iran, which lies between the two nations. Thus far, no president has taken the bait to attack Iran, and hopefully none ever will.

The reality of Middle Eastern politics is much more complex than what we hear on the nightly news. The Iranian Shiites are working with their Syrian and Qatari allies, as well as militias in Iraq and Yemen, to try and gain hegemony over the region. In response, Saudi Arabia has been attempting to build a coalition of Sunni Arab states, as well as the Jewish state of Israel, to oppose Iran. While this is all very fascinating, none of it requires American military involvement.

Unfortunately, by the early 2000s the conservative movement and the Republican Party had become almost entirely identified with military adventurism. In a previous essay, I traced this phenomenon back to the era of the Vietnam War. Despite the war being started by Democratic Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, by 1969 the war had become identified with the Republican President Richard Nixon. The antiwar movement that had risen under President Johnson became allied with all sorts of left-wing causes, which compelled the right-wing to come out in favor of the war. While many musicians made antiwar ballads, for example, conservative country stars like Merle Haggard sang in support of the war and of our troops.

When Vietnam veterans returned home and faced mockery and ostracism from antiwar protestors, conservatives responded with unconditional support for the military. This reached a fever pitch during the Gulf War and continued into the Global War on Terror. In the days after 9/11, the entire country was united in their desire for retribution. However, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began to drag on without end, a new antiwar movement developed, coming mainly from the left. Conservatives still believed that it was important to support the troops, and that supporting the troops necessarily meant supporting the wars.

Mainstream media latched on to the antiwar movement in the mid-2000s because they were reflexively anti-Bush. Except for Fox News, which remained pro-war from the start, news outlets began condemning the wars and highlighting American losses, as well as showcasing atrocities such as the torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. Free-speech advocate Julian Assange and his Wikileaks platform, which exposed the killing of civilians by US forces, were lauded by the left-wing media. Mainstream media focused their attention on our failures every day; Cindy Sheehan, a mother of a soldier killed in action in Iraq, was highlighted for months on end.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts challenged President Bush in 2004 and attempted to appeal to both sides. He presented himself as having faithfully served his country in the US Navy during Vietnam, but he also highlighted his opposition to that war. CBS News’ 60 Minutes program tried to drive a wedge between President Bush and his military-supporting voters by presenting forged documents that claimed Bush had gone AWOL during his tenure in the Texas Air National Guard.

President Bush won reelection by a narrow margin and continued our adventures in the Middle East. As in Afghanistan, the initial invasion of Iraq had been a success. The US military succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who was later found hiding in a hole in the ground. He was tried, convicted, and executed by the new democratic government we had quickly assembled. As with Afghanistan, however, an insurgency against our occupation soon developed, and by 2006 Iraq was in the throes of a deadly and chaotic civil war. The deterioration of our military strategy, highlighted by the left-wing media, helped the Democrats take over Congress in the 2006 midterm elections.

Both Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Clinton of New York campaigned for the Democratic presidential primary in 2008 on an antiwar platform. Obama was able to trump Clinton’s antiwar record by virtue of not having been in the Senate for the 2001 and 2003 votes to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. Clinton, on the other hand, had initially voted for both before turning against them. Yet something strange happened when Obama was elected president that year. The antiwar movement that had so consumed the left wing basically evaporated, almost overnight. Cindy Sheehan no longer received invitations for interviews on cable news. The daily litany of combat deaths and American atrocities ceased. Outside a principled group of antiwar activists who opposed the wars on moral grounds, most of the attention disappeared now that a Democrat was in the White House. Legitimate antiwar activists who had pinned their hopes on Obama to end the wars were soon left bitterly disappointed. Even after Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden himself at his safe-house in Pakistan, the wars continued.

President Obama did not follow through on his promises to end the wars nor did he close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. On the contrary, Obama expanded the wars, deploying additional troops to Afghanistan and even diverting troops from Iraq into neighboring Syria. He even began large-scale drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, and several other countries, often with extensive collateral damage – military jargon for civilian casualties. A loose association of the remnants of Al Qaeda and other Sunni Muslim militias had coalesced into a would-be caliphate: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIS quickly took control of a large geographical area in the Middle East, and videos of western soldiers and journalists brutally beheaded by ISIS fighters dominated the news.

The geopolitical situation in the Middle East was never black and white, but it became extremely confusing in the 2010s. The Obama Administration decided to prioritize regime change in Syria, claiming that President Bashar Al-Assad was a dictator who was killing his own people. The American government sent money, material, and troops to aid the rebels who had been fighting Assad in a civil war, even though many of these rebels were themselves aligned with Al Qaeda and ISIS. American news media attempted to distill the various conflicts into a simple good guy / bad guy paradigm, but few people knew what was really going on. The conservatives who had once strongly supported intervention began to tire of the constant war, and this new right-wing antiwar movement found its voice in Donald Trump.

Trump was never shy about sharing whatever thoughts came into his head. He destroyed sacred cows on both the left and the right during his 2016 presidential campaign. He called Senator John McCain of Arizona – the GOP presidential nominee from 2008 and a POW during Vietnam – a loser, and he said that President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was a huge mistake. Trump promised to do what Obama did not – destroy ISIS and then bring the troops home. Rather than rejecting this heretical speech, Republican voters embraced it, sending Trump to the White House in one of the biggest political upsets in American history.

With a Republican president in office who wanted to stop the endless conflicts, mainstream media completed the transformation that had begun in 2008 and now fully embraced forever war. In early 2017, President Assad of Syria allegedly used chemical weapons against rebel forces, so President Trump responded with a targeted airstrike against a Syrian chemical plant. This was perhaps the only time in his entire term that left-wing news media praised Trump, calling him “presidential” because he fired some missiles. The military brass, all of whom had risen through the ranks during the Global War on Terror, and who had survived President Obama’s ideological purges of the Pentagon, were entirely in favor of maintaining our military presence in the Middle East until the end of time. Many of these generals obfuscated, lied, and outright disobeyed President Trump’s orders to bring the troops home. Far from being the heroes that conservatives had long believed them to be, military leadership was exposed an arm of the deep state bureaucracy that hindered and fought our elected president for more than four years.

General James Mattis, supposedly the “mad dog” of the Marine Corps who had fought in the initial Afghanistan invasion, resigned as Trump’s Secretary of Defense rather than obeying the president’s order to withdraw the two thousand troops that Obama had left in Syria. In the leadup to the 2020 presidential election, several active military brass and intelligence officers publicly denounced President Trump and called on Americans to throw him out of office. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley allegedly refused to follow Trump’s orders to use military force on the deadly rioters in the summer of 2020. The military leadership, most of whom were wholly committed to the cause of endless war, had no use for a president who was trying to put a stop to their schemes.

Why is the deep state, media, and the military leadership so invested in endless war? Why is it that no matter who we vote for, the troops remain deployed at the fringes of the American empire?

In 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of what he called a growing military / industrial complex. In the 1940s, the United States had pushed our factories into overdrive to create the military equipment necessary to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. After the war, these companies continued to innovate and produce material to keep up with the Soviet Union in an arms race that could decide the fate of the world. Yet once a system like this is created, it does not simply go away once the crisis has abated. By 1991, when the Cold War ended, there was too much money and capital at stake to simply dismantle the massive array of defense contractors and lobbyists that were designed to produce weaponry to fight the Soviets. Like all government programs, their priority shifted to justifying their own existence. They needed a new enemy to fight.

There are many jokes about how temporary government programs never go away, even if the crisis for which they were created is long gone. Our massive standing army was needed to save the world from the communists starting in the late 1940s, and now it is needed to save America from the terrorists. It always works the same way. Remember being told more than a year ago that we were only locking down for two weeks – “fifteen days to slow the spread,” they told us? Now we are looking at never-ending lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine passports.

The same deep state bureaucracy that has been running our government from the shadows for the past six decades has a vested interest in keeping us deployed abroad, whether in Afghanistan or in any of the other dozens of nations we are currently engaged in. In Fool’s Errand, Scott Horton says that the military / industrial complex and the deep state bureaucracy are really the same thing:

“Their priorities now vastly outweigh those of the civilian population, just as Eisenhower had cautioned. The necessity of emergency has been their mandate to maintain power, and it appears that they will never let it go. None of these things really have anything to do with helping the people of Afghanistan or even securing true American national defense interests there. Instead, the economics of politics create a conspiracy of a thousand separate interests and motives, none of them significant enough to justify the policy on their own, yet they somehow add up to a bureaucratic inertia that has thus far proven impossible to restrain.”

Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand

As I alluded to in my essay on the failures of the conservative movement, a cadre of socially liberally yet fiscally conservative activists migrated to the right in the second half of the 20^th century. These neoconservatives were extremely anti-Communist, but not for the same reasons most right-wing Americans were. Many of the original neoconservatives were Trotskyites, who believed that Joseph Stalin had betrayed the purity of the original socialist revolution. They fled their homes in Russia and eastern Europe and allied themselves with American social conservatives to defeat the Soviet Union. In reality, the neocons had little in common with American social conservatives outside of their shared hatred of the USSR, but they successfully merged the concepts of conservatism with unchecked militarism. With the Cold War ending, these neoconservatives needed a new conflict to keep this alliance alive. 9/11 provided the perfect justification. Who could possible object to invading the country that harbored the people who killed three thousand Americans? The nation’s feelings were summed up by country star Toby Keith:

“Now this nation that I love has fallen under attack, a mighty sucker punch came flyin’ in from somewhere in the back. Soon as we could see it clearly through our big black eye, man, we lit up your world like the fourth of July.”

Nineteen terrorists had committed the atrocity of 9/11, and they were backed by a few hundred others. Yet our elected leaders and neoconservative thinkers did an incredible job of using our desire for vengeance against those that harmed us to justify endless intervention, invasion, and occupation for the next twenty years. If the neoconservatives and deep state warmongers learned one thing from Vietnam, it was that high casualties are the one thing the American people will not tolerate. More than fifty thousand Americans never came home from the jungles of Indochina, which combined with the compulsory draft fed the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 70s. The Global War on Terror, on the other hand, has neither the high casualties of Vietnam nor a draft. This has allowed the bureaucrats to conduct their military adventures long after most Americans have forgotten about the whole thing.

The American people have notoriously short attention spans and quickly acclimate to the new status quo. Now that we have been involved in the Middle East for decades, it can seem controversial to suggest changing that situation. Recall the Republican-led Congress pushing a bill that would have prevented President Trump from withdrawing our troops from Syria, just a few years after the same Congress had opposed President Obama’s initial deployment. There is also an element of binary thinking involved. Americans who grew up during the Cold War grew accustomed to a world that was split between good and evil. The Russians were the bad guys, and we were the good guys. When Russia invaded Afghanistan, they were the bad guys, so we had to help the good guys. President Bush elucidated this view when he divided the world into two groups in a speech shortly after 9/11:

“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

President George W. Bush, speech to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.

Today, that binary view is even more embedded in the American psyche. College campuses and even grade schools now teach from an intersectional perspective, looking at culture through a Marxist lens that divides everyone into two groups – the oppressed and the oppressors. The media/academia complex is therefore able to appeal to both sides’ binary thinking – the right feels a duty to intervene in nations such as Afghanistan because we must stop the evil terrorists, while the left feels a duty to stay there to ensure that oppressed minorities such as women and gays are protected from the evil oppressors in the Taliban.

We can see both sides at work as globalist leaders attempt to justify our endless wars.

In 2018, General H.R. McMaster, who was formerly a commander of US troops in Afghanistan as well as President Trump’s National Security Advisor, went on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge show to explain why we must remain in Afghanistan forever:

“It’s not a bad investment. It is a good idea. Think of it as insurance, insurance against a return of these murderous groups that want to kill our children. It’s a myth that despite this vast investment of blood and treasure that nothing has been gained in Afghanistan.”

H.R. McMaster, Uncommon Knowledge October 23, 2018

When President Trump signed a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in early 2020, his former National Security Advisor John Bolton argued that we had a moral imperative to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely. After the agreement was announced, Bolton tweeted his disapproval:

Even former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who campaigned for the 2004 Democratic presidential primary on a platform of withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, complained when President Trump began withdrawing troops from the Middle East. Replying to a tweet by former Obama staffer Ro Khanna, Dean wrote hysterically:

This is what we call “mission creep”. We went to Afghanistan in 2001 ostensibly to destroy Al Qaeda and topple the Taliban, but now our supposed national security experts say we must stay there indefinitely, not only to prevent all future terrorism, but also to ensure that children can go to school and women enjoy equal civil rights. If this is a justification for indefinite occupation, then why not invade every other country that does not share our values? Saudi Arabia still adheres to a strict interpretation of Islamic law, should we invade and occupy Riyadh and force them to ban the burqa? Singapore imposes harsher punishments on petty criminals than we are accustomed to here, should we invade their little island and force them to adopt American jurisprudence? Should we invade Mexico and Central America to put a stop to drug crime?

Even if we accept the premise that we have a right to invade and occupy foreign nations to force them to adopt American values, this only raises the question of what exactly are American values? If you are of an older generation of conservative, you believe that American values are freedom, liberty, a good work ethic, a belief in the Christian God, fairness, true justice, and the right to pursue happiness without government interference. However, look at the American values being spread across the world by our government and NGOs today – extreme feminism, homosexual propaganda, transgender dogma, and agnosticism, if not outright atheism. Do you feel comfortable supporting this kind of worldwide evangelism? We rightly condemned the way the USSR exported atheistic communism during the Cold War, but 21^st century Americanism might well be worse.

During the month of June – the so-called “Pride Month” celebrated by every American politician and corporation – the US embassy in Kabul tweeted a picture of a rainbow flag. The fact that this might offend the Muslims in Afghanistan that we are trying to convert to Americanism did not bother the embassy staff; I suspect they took a perverse joy in pushing something so controversial onto their hosts.

Several thinkers on the right have been using the phrase “globohomo” to describe this new American secular religion. The “globo” refers to globalism, the idea that national borders are outdated and that we are all citizens of the world, with no distinct culture worth protecting. The “homo” can refer either to homosexuality, their preferred vector for attacking the family, which is the foundation of all society, or homogeneity, the idea that we must all be made to think and believe the same. Globohomo activists spread their religion with more passion than the most zealous 19^th century Christian missionaries. Recall that Congress overrode President Trump’s veto of a spending bill last December that included all sorts of insane budget items, including ten million dollars for “gender programs” in Pakistan. Republican leaders balk at spending money on American citizens, claiming it is creeping socialism and too expensive, but there is no foreign aid too big for our government to cheerfully fund. Our occupying armies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the world are just agents to assist in exporting globohomo propaganda to every corner of the planet.

Last March, when it still seemed like our occupation of Afghanistan might go on forever, foreign policy pundit Richard Hanania posted a long Twitter thread about a US government report on gender equality in Afghanistan. He first notes that there are no native Afghan words for “gender,” and facetiously remarks that, “the US will need to help change the language, maybe introduce new pronouns to accomplish its mission.” Reading through the document, Hanania reports incredulously that the US created gender quotas for the Afghan parliament, which predictably led to sexual harassment of female representatives. The report also says that many of these female representatives had never visited the places they were supposed to represent. The same issues came when the US tried to impose gender quotas on the Afghan National Army as well. Hanania concludes his thread by referring to the Afghanistan Papers expose, which quotes a USAID worker complaining that gender equality was often the central goal of every single project in the country and noted that it caused resentment and revolt among the Afghans.

Remember the Afghanistan Papers? They were a collection of damning exposes of our occupation that were compiled and published in late 2019. These papers revealed that much of what was reported to the American people were outright lies, and that our mission there was an abject failure. We were spending literally trillions of dollars, that rather than being used to create a modern democratic country and ensure safety and stability for the Afghan people, were instead being diverted to NGOs and warlords alike. Rather than instigate a thorough review and reconsideration of our policy there, they were quickly forgotten.

Perhaps we could have rebuilt some semblance of civilization in Afghanistan had we adapted to the local culture rather than attempting to force 21^st century Americanism on the population. In a piece this week for the British news magazine The Critic, Gawain Towler remembers meeting the last king of Afghanistan Mohammed Zahir Shah around the same time that US forces were beginning their mission to topple the Taliban. Towler wonders if, rather than trying to create a democracy in Afghanistan, the US and coalition allies should instead have restored the king to his throne. Sure, Americans have an innate disgust for the whole concept of monarchy, considering how our country began, but Zahir Shah had some advantages that our puppets Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani did not. For one thing, he already had legitimacy, as he and his family had ruled over Afghanistan during its golden age between the Third Anglo-Afghan War and the coups of the 1970s. Second, monarchy has some advantages over democracy when attempting to rule a land of distinct tribes such as Afghanistan. However, the US government never seriously considered the option. Towler says:

“The US, though it was aware of the possibilities of an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem, and a solution that could have utilised the residual loyalty of the Afghan peoples, decided against. The rest is dour, bloody history.”

Gawain Towler, August 17, 2021

In its arrogance, the US decided to impose not only democracy but our twisted 21^st century values on the Afghan people. It was never going to work, not in twenty years, not in two hundred, but our military and political leaders continually demanded that we remain there forever. Even today, as the last Americans are being evacuated from Kabul and the Taliban is firmly in control of the country for the first time in nearly twenty years, some neoconservative pundits are demanding we go back into the fray. Mainstream news media is lambasting Joe Biden over the catastrophe in Kabul, claiming that his decision to follow through with President Trump’s withdrawal was a mistake. While some conservatives are happy to see the legacy media finally find fault with Biden, we should not be too quick to celebrate. The only reason they attack him now is to try and return us to the paradigm of endless war that our globalist deep state wants to continue.

Some of their rationales have become farcical. Numerous articles have been published in the past two weeks lamenting the billions of dollars’ worth of rare earth minerals known to be in Afghanistan and complaining that our withdrawal means that China will soon be making deals with the Taliban to extract them. This is yet more mission creep, more excuses for us to never leave. In Fool’s Errand, Scott Horton addressed the mineral issue, had been brought up by US commanders such as General David Petraeus. He writes:

“Did the generals really think the American public would be impressed by such arguments? That the US Army should militarily occupy a country in the heart of Eurasia indefinitely because a few American companies might be able to make some money mining lithium there someday? Apparently.”

Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand

Why did the same country that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in less than four years fail to defeat the Taliban and establish a modern Westphalian nation-state in Afghanistan in twenty?

Perhaps we were never meant to win at all. In a 2011 interview, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange explained his theory of why we continue to occupy foreign nations:

“Because the goal is not to completely subjugate Afghanistan. The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States, out of the tax bases of European countries through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. That is the goal, i.e., the goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war.”

Julian Assange, 2011

Remember that Assange was beloved in the 2000s when he embarrassed the Bush Administration but became globalist enemy number one when he likewise embarrassed Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. Today he sits in a prison cell at the behest of the American deep state.

Even if we really were trying to win, Afghanistan is a difficult place to fully conquer. Whereas Japan surrendered in 1945 when faced with doomsday weapons that could annihilate entire cities, Afghan rebels shrugged off the loss of their cities and faded into the mountains. All they had to do was wait us out. As the saying goes, we have the watches, but they have the time. The Taliban learned the same lessons from history as the North Vietnamese. More than two thousand years ago, the Roman general Fabius Maximus faced a similar situation. The Carthaginian warlord Hannibal Barca had invaded Italy and annihilated every Roman army that stood in his way. Fabius realized that he could not defeat Hannibal in open battle, so he instead spent years harassing the Carthaginians, keeping his army alive and intact until the Romans could send an invasion force under Scipio Africanus to threaten Carthage itself.

The Fabian Strategy has proven to be the best way for an inferior force to defeat a more powerful aggressor. George Washington utilized this strategy in the American Revolution, only giving battle to the British when he had the advantage and keeping his army alive and intact the rest of the time. While Washington won several important victories against the British, such as at Boston and Trenton, perhaps his greatest feat was withdrawing from Long Island after a defeat. So long as Washington and his army survived, the British could never declare victory. Washington knew that time was on his side. If he could keep his army intact in the face of trained redcoats, disease, and the inevitable loss of morale, then eventually the British Parliament would be unwilling to continue spending the money and lives it would take to defeat him.

Our political and military leaders have forgotten this important lesson ever since the United States became a world power. Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists used this strategy against us, as did the Taliban rebels in Afghanistan and the insurgency in Iraq. In 2007, President Bush appointed General David Petraeus to implement a new counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq, but this failed as well. There was nothing we could do in the Middle East to shake the correct perception that we were an occupying army imposing a foreign culture on a proud people.

The people of Afghanistan have always been a loose confederation of tribes who would rather not have to work together with each other. Our attempt to impose democratic rule in this environment was doomed to failure, especially since our idea of democracy involved propping up globalist bureaucrats and corrupt warlords. The first president of our puppet government was Hamid Karzai, a warlord who was educated in India and had raised funds for the Mujahideen in Pakistan. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, was a globalist bureaucrat that had lectured in American universities before returning to Afghanistan to take up the mantle of leadership. The Roman Empire used to take the sons of conquered barbarian chieftains and raise them in Rome, immersing them in Roman culture, then returning them home to serve as puppet leaders. The American globalist empire does the same thing. While men like Karzai and Ghani looked good on paper to the American bureaucrats running the show, they never achieved much popular support in their own countries.

The various warlords we propped up in an effort to achieve democratic legitimacy were even worse. Many were corrupt, skimming millions of dollars intended to aid the Afghan people and build infrastructure. Many pundits have suggested that the supposed “three hundred thousand” troops in the Afghan National Army that Joe Biden bragged about earlier this summer never really existed anywhere but on paper, just cover for millions of dollars laundered through the Afghan government.

Pederasty was widespread, and the American government covered up the systematic rape of boys by Afghan army officers and police chiefs for fear that the truth would erode trust in the puppet government. If you were a regular Afghan citizen, how would the American occupation look to you if you knew the truth about the corruption and mass rape that was going on with our tacit approval? What would you do if the Taliban came in and promised to put an end to such things and expel the foreign occupiers? Is it any wonder that many cities and army units simply surrendered to the Taliban during their August offensive rather than fight to protect an illegitimate and degenerate regime?

One of the issues with the way we went about our occupation was that we lacked objective knowledge about the local political situation. Once tribal warlords learned that we were tracking down members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, it became a game of settling old scores. Without knowing any better, American forces likely ended up arresting or killing people who had nothing to do with terrorism. The people who rose highest in our puppet government were the warlords who knew best how to manipulate their American allies.

In Fool’s Errand, Scott Horton says:

“The US has intervened all over, picking winners and losers based on bad or scarce information, making political compromises with terrible criminals, and sowing the seeds of future distortions of power.”

Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand

Later in the book, Horton explains how locals would manipulate our troops by accusing their enemies of being Taliban. He says

“By always choosing to see each conflict as a fight between good guys and bad guys, the US creates self-defeating policies and makes new enemies they have to deal with later.”

Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand

The Taliban has learned their own lessons from the past. Military strategist and author William S. Lind describes a concept called Fourth Generation Warfare, which moves beyond the old idea of armies facing each other in the field. The Fabian Strategy can be seen as a form of Fourth Generation War, especially when it is a non-uniformed irregular force that can blend in with civilians when not fighting the superior army. This is exactly what the Viet Cong did in the 1960s, and what the Taliban insurgency has done for the past twenty years. Another component of Fourth Generation War is the moral high ground. In 2001, the United States easily held the moral position, as we were seeking justice for the horrific atrocity of 9/11. The longer we stayed, however, the more we lost that high ground. Today we are seen as an occupying force, allowing and even abetting corruption and perversity among our allies. The Taliban, on the other hand, has been able to claim the moral high ground, at least in their own country, by promising to oust the occupiers, get revenge on corrupt collaborators, and restore order and security to a war-torn nation. It is interesting to watch these past few weeks as the Taliban has stopped short of the mass bloodshed that western journalists have predicted. It is as if the Taliban has realized the moral factor of Fourth Generation Warfare and are, at least publicly, at least for now, attempting to hold that position.

A final reason that the Taliban was able to defeat us in Afghanistan is a problem that affects every area of American life today. Globalists believe that the values they espouse are universal, common to all mankind, rather than restricted to any specific culture or people. In his 2004 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush said:

“We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again.”

President George W. Bush, January 20, 2004

But what if our definition of freedom is not what other cultures prefer? We envision freedom as growing up without government oppression, of having an opportunity to work for a living, support a family, and own a nice house with a white picket fence. We believe that freedom means we can choose how we worship, or if we believe at all. We believe a proper society is one based on democracy, and the idea of one man / one vote. Is that what Afghans want? Is that what Iraqis want? Is that what Somalis, Vietnamese, and Russians desire? The purpose of nations and borders is to allow people groups to create governments and societies that fit their needs. This is the essence of nationalism, and the basis for the Westphalian system. The values of Western European Christians were so successful at creating the most prosperous society in history that we forgot where these values came from and assumed that they were simply common to mankind. Why would an Afghan not want the same white picket fence that symbolized the American dream? Besides, abstract ideas such as democracy and liberty are meaningless without concrete things such as security, food, and medicine. In our zeal to export democracy to Afghanistan, we allowed corrupt warlords to interfere with those concrete needs.

The Taliban won because they believed in something, while we have become so tolerant, so inclusive that we no longer believe in anything at all. In an article for Tablet Magazine, Lee Smith wrote last week about a concept drawn from the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun called assabiya, or group solidarity. Smith writes:

“Its awareness of itself as a coherent people with a drive for primacy is frequently augmented by religious ideology. The stronger the tribe’s assabiya, the stronger the group.”

Lee Smith, August 18, 2021

Smith explains how assabiya is often stronger in more primitive peoples, but as civilizations develop, they lose that social cohesion. An advanced civilization like the United States has less internal loyalty than a primitive tribe like the Taliban. We have superior military technology, but they have something we lack: a reason to fight.

People fighting for a cause will often defeat mercenaries who are only fighting for a paycheck.

My friend Dan McKnight is a Marine Corps veteran and the founder of the antiwar group BringOurTroopsHome.US. As the Taliban advanced on Kabul, McKnight lamented the waste of blood and treasure in the Afghan quagmire:

“Eighty-nine billion [dollars] in equipment and training for the Afghan military was paid by you and me. 20 years and nearly 4000 lives. For what? For the Afghan civil war to continue… a war they’ve been fighting for 40+ years. They simply pushed the pause button on their civil war for 20 years while we occupied their country under an unconstitutional Authorization Of Use Of Military Force.”

Dan McKnight, August 13, 2021

What hubris we had! Everyone from President Bush to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol thought they could accomplish what the Soviet Union and the British Empire could not. They all thought that the lessons of history did not apply to the invincible United States of America. A common refrain back then was that the response to 9/11 must be overwhelming, lest the world think that the United States was weak, and take advantage of that weakness to erode our supremacy. Ironically, our failure to pacify Afghanistan over the course of twenty years has left us weaker than ever.

In the 2010 film Iron Man II, the villain played by Mickey Rourke says to Robert Downey Jr.’s title character:

“If you could make God bleed, then people will cease to believe in Him. And there will be blood in the water, and the sharks will come.”

The sharks are beginning to circle. Just hours after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Chinese state media published an article warning that the US will not be able to protect Taiwan when (not if) the CCP decides to fully annex the island:

“Once a cross-Straits war breaks out while the mainland seizes the island with forces, the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere.”

Global Times, August 16, 2021

The United States has tacitly guaranteed the safety of Taiwan, the last remnants of the old Republic of China, in case of invasion by the Communists. But if I were Taiwan right now, I would not count on American support.

Consider that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union for global supremacy lasted forty-five years. The era of the US being the sole superpower has been ongoing for thirty years now, and twenty of those thirty years have been spent in Afghanistan. What a waste of an opportunity that few nations in history have been fated to receive!

With the humiliation of the US military, intelligence agencies, and diplomatic corps in Afghanistan this year, look for them to take out their frustration on us. The massive national security apparatus put in place after 9/11 that was used to hunt down Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups is coming home. Over the last few years, the deep state bureaucracy has been working to portray conservatives as the new threat. Military and intelligence leadership have been claiming that supposed “white supremacists” are the greatest threat to peace and safety in America, and after the January 6^th protests at the Capitol, anyone who voted for President Trump is seen as a potential insurrectionist. Resistance to mask and vaccine mandates is also being portrayed as domestic terrorism. The few outspoken activists who criticized the creation of this national security apparatus in the early 2000s have been proven correct. The deep state military / industrial complex must keep churning, and it does not care if its targets are Afghans, Iraqis, or American conservatives.

To resist the tyranny that we all know is coming requires a change in perspective.

First, conservatives must let go of the reflexive and unconditional support that we have always given the military. Today’s armed forces are not the red-blooded American men charging into battle to defend our freedoms that they once were. Rather, today’s military embodies the worst aspects of woke ideology – the anti-white racism of Marxist Critical Race Theory, full acceptance of homosexual and transgender propaganda, and a firm belief that the purpose of the armed forces is to bring about social change rather than win wars. The armed forces of the United States are today more likely to be used against us than to defend our freedoms.

Our military leadership is full of over-decorated men and women who have not achieved valor in the field but instead have risen through woke schools and think tanks, and who mouth the correct platitudes. A meme went around social media last week showing Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II and later President of the United States, compared with Mark Milley, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The overweight Milley has more medals on his chest than Ike, despite never having won a war, or conquered anything larger than a buffet table. Milley demonstrated why he has risen to his current post earlier this year when he testified to Congress that his priority was understanding the so-called “white rage” that drives conservative Americans and Trump supporters.

Our military no longer deserves the unreserved devotion of the American people. Patriotic Americans should stop looking to the military as a viable choice for a career or training. Stop sending your sons (and your daughters) to this arm of the deep state. I would like to see conservative veterans forming unofficial militias throughout the land, giving young men the benefit of training that will serve them well in the future without woke indoctrination and the risk of being deployed to maintain the globalist American empire.

Second, we should take a lesson from the Taliban. Obviously, those men hold values and beliefs that are antithetical to our American Christian heritage, but their tactics deserve serious consideration. In 2002, the Taliban had been annihilated, and its few remaining leaders were hiding in caves or in exile abroad. By 2021, they had taken over every major city in Afghanistan. Rather than pretending they were “winning” all along, or trying to vote in a rigged system, the Taliban adopted the mindset of dissidents and insurgents in their own country. They did not grab their guns and assault Kabul on day one, but instead spent time, energy, and money building organizations and relationships throughout the country. They demonstrated to citizens and tribesmen that they would do a better job of ensuring their safety and security than the American-backed government. When the time came for their final offensive, most of the groundwork had already been laid: many cities and armies simply surrendered, and some even joined the Taliban on their march to the capital.

What does that mean for an American resistance against Marxist tyranny? It means we cannot assume that once a civil war begins that we will automatically win. It means we must build our own dissident organizations and start forming alliances of red communities and states. It means we, our families, and our friends must become antifragile, because the heavy hand of the federal government is coming for us. We must do the hard boring work of building a shadow society that will be ready to run a new nation someday, rather than waiting for a Caesar to call us to battle in the streets.

Third, we must understand who our tribe is. Recall Ibn Khaldun’s concept of assabiya, or group solidarity. In places like Afghanistan, a person’s first loyalty is to his family and then his tribe, not to such an abstract concept as a country. For many years, the United States was a triumph over tribalism, as immigrants from England, Scotland, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Italy left their tribal loyalties behind and gave their allegiance to the nation that was America. We thought we could impose the same civic nationalism on a nation like Afghanistan, which has proud tribes with cultural memory going back thousands of years.

For many years, conservatives have repeated the slogan “my country, right or wrong.” We must think smaller. Tribalism is returning to the world. The demographics of our country are rapidly shifting from being dominated by the descendants of European Christians, to a mélange of tribes and nations from across the globe. Ironically, the importation of refugees from the many countries we have intervened in over the past twenty years since 9/11 has helped accelerate the demographic decline of our own nation. The shared culture, heritage, beliefs, and values that once united us are now sources of division, strife, and even hatred. The coalition of angry tribes that forms today’s Democratic Party wants to keep us divided so that we will not pose a threat to their rule. They want to keep us focused on abstractions like the flag, a sports team, or party labels. They know that if the historic American nation were to unite as one, nothing could stop us. The Taliban, for all their obvious faults, believed in themselves. We must do the same. No more apologizing for our ancestors or proclaiming ourselves above petty partisanship. We must rediscover the same nationalist zeal, the same reason for being that our founding fathers were so confident in.

Finally, we must look forward, not backward. America as we know it is done. There is no returning to the 1990s, the 1950s, or any other time when things were better than they are now. While we can look to the past for inspiration in building our future, we must remain focused on what is to come. We cannot undo the results of the 2020 election, and even if we could, not even Donald Trump was able to stem the tide of degeneracy that is washing over our nation, nor the creeping totalitarianism being pushed by the deep state bureaucracy. Reclaiming the culture is a tough road; why not build our own culture outside the rotting corpse of americana? Reforming the public school system is nigh impossible; better to build a new system based on homeschooling, private schooling, and online learning, with an emphasis on tradition, the classics, and the Great Books. The same goes for churches, corporations, and our very government. Did the Taliban attempt to reform the corrupt Karzai and Ghani government? No, they created a more attractive alternative.

The same Toby Keith who sang such a defiant ballad calling for revenge on America’s enemies in 2001 sings a different tune now. This summer, he released song for Independence Day that includes the line:

“Seems like everybody’s pissin’ on the red, white and blue; Happy birthday America, whatever’s left of you.”

The United States as we know it does not have much left in the tank. Our own domestic enemies are attempting to use this time of decline to establish a tyrannical state that would be the envy of totalitarian dictators throughout history. We must seize the opportunity to build a new nation once again dedicated to freedom and liberty.

In his piece for Tablet Magazine, Lee Smith writes:

“It’s frightening to see American leadership pulling America apart at the seams. And it’s shocking to see our constitutional order ripped to shreds as the establishment undercuts property rights, imposes capricious public health regulations, mandates experimental medical treatments, and holds political prisoners. But the lesson of Ibn Khaldun is that these destructive policies are simply indications that a cycle that has been repeated through the ages is once again in motion. To watch history erupt in our own timeline is indeed terrifying, but it is part of the natural order of human societies.”

Lee Smith, August 18, 2021

Empires rise, and empires fall. That is the great lesson of history. No nation is exempt from these ironclad laws. Is it just coincidence that several great empires spent their final years in the mountains of the Hindu Kush? The British Empire dissolved thirty years after their withdrawal following the Third Anglo-Afghan War. The Soviet Union collapsed a mere two years after they withdrew from Afghanistan. How long does America have before we face the same fate?

I recently wrote about Christopher Caldwell’s thesis that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 introduced a parallel and superior unwritten constitution that has been used to erode the rights of white Americans in the name of enforcing equity of outcome between racial groups. As Caldwell says, it was not designed to disenfranchise white men per se, merely that it added extra rights to everyone else, which has the same effect.

Steve Sailer wondered about that, and so he asked Google if whites have civil rights. The search engine indicated that this was a novel question that nobody had ever asked before. Just like the word “diversity,” the phrase “civil rights” is merely a euphemism to indicate special rights for minorities, so the idea of whites having civil rights is essentially a contradiction in terms.

Sailer has some suggestions for how to remedy this problem, assuming that our judges and Supreme Court still recognize our original Constitution. He is perhaps more optimistic than I am, but the essay is worth reading in full. The greatness of our Constitution is in its protections for individual liberties, but the fatal flaw is that few in our government care anymore.

Just a few days after the 2020 presidential election, when it had become obvious that the fix was in, a fringe website called State of the Nation published a post claiming that a 19th century Supreme Court decision means that Donald Trump actually won the election. In Let’s be very clear about the 2020 election outcome: “FRAUD VITIATES EVERYTHING” the site authors reference the 1878 Supreme Court decision United States v. Throckmorton, which was about a land deed that was later found to be fraudulently obtained.

Coming from a website with headlines such as Was Kobe Bryant assassinated? and CORONAVIRUS HOAX: Fake Virus Pandemic Fabricated to Cover-Up Global Outbreak of 5G Syndrome, one might be tempted to ignore it and move on. However, shortly after the post was published, a screenshot was posted on 4chan, and has been making the rounds in conservative social media ever since.

Many conservatives who believe that the 2020 election will be inevitably overturned and Trump returned to office explicitly or implicitly refer to this post. You might hear them saying “fraud vitiates everything” as if it were a magical incantation. I was curious about the foundation of this argument, so I examined the case in question.

In 1878, Justice Samuel Miller wrote the majority opinion in the case of United States v. Throckmorton. Apparently a certain man, W. A. Richardson, had petitioned for a land deed in California, and in doing so had presented documentation from a Mexican bureaucrat who had administered California prior to the Mexican-American War. It was later discovered that these documents were not authentic, rather they had been created after Mr. Richardson had applied for the US title.

In his opinion, Justice Miller refers to several other cases where fraud was alleged after a judgment. He is very careful to not overstep the doctrine of rex adjudicata which says that a judgment once made should not be re-litigated. This is the civil version of the double jeopardy rule in criminal cases – once a defendant is exonerated, the government cannot charge him again for the same crime. The purpose of rex adjudicata is to prevent people from wasting the court’s time by suing and counter-suing the same issue over and over again.

Justice Miller cites a “Mr. Wells” who wrote on the subject of rex adjudicata. In the citation he quotes this Mr. Wells writing:

“Fraud vitiates every thing, and a judgment equally with a contract; that is, a judgment obtained directly by fraud, and not merely a judgment founded on a fraudulent instrument; for, in general, the court will not go again into the merits of an action for the purpose of detecting and annulling the fraud.’ . . . ‘Likewise, there are few exceptions to the rule that equity will not go behind the judgment to interpose in the cause itself, but only when there was some hindrance besides the negligence of the defendant, in presenting the defence in the legal action. There is an old case in South Carolina to the effect that fraud in obtaining a bill of sale would justify equitable interference as to the judgment obtained thereon. But I judge it stands almost or quite alone, and has no weight as a precedent.”

United States v. Throckmorton, Paragraph 16

Let us take a moment to define our terms. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “vitiate” means to make faulty or defective, to debase in a moral or aesthetic sense, or to make ineffective. The legal usage of the words seems to be the third definition, to make ineffective. Therefore according to Wells, fraud (once proven, of course) in a contract or a judgment renders the whole thing moot. However, in that same citation, Wells says that only a specific kind of fraud will invalidate a contract or judgment – if the judgment was simply “founded on a fraudulent instrument” then the courts would not reopen the case.

Later in his judgment, Justice Miller refers to a Massachusetts court decision regarding a divorce case that involved fraudulent testimony. He quotes Massachusetts Chief Justice Shaw who wrote:

The maxim that fraud vitiates every proceeding must be taken, like other general maxims, to apply to cases where proof of fraud is admissible. But where the same matter has been actually tried, or so in issue that it might have been tried, it is not again admissible; the party is estopped to set up such fraud, because the judgment is the highest evidence, and cannot be contradicted.”

United States v. Throckmorton, Paragraph 22

Do you see yet what is going on here? The blogger at State of the Nation quoted Throckmorton and claimed that the SCOTUS “categorically” asserted that “fraud vitiates every thing.” However, the case itself shows these words to be quotations by Justice Miller of previous cases whose outcomes were contrary to what the State of the Nation author is suggesting. Both the Wells and Shaw citations are essentially saying “fraud vitiates everything, but…”

Indeed, the Shaw citation works against the claim that United States v. Throckmorton means that Trump will be reinstated. In that case, Chief Justice Shaw specifically wrote that the fraud in question was not admissible because the decision had already been made. He did not allow the divorce case to be re-litigated. Throckmorton itself was dismissed by Justice Miller for lack of jurisdiction. What does that mean for Donald Trump in 2020?

First, in Throckmorton Justice Miller is only dealing with contracts and judgments. The case had zero to do with elections. This is a basic category error made by the bloggers at State of the Nation, and perpetuated by people sharing the screenshot or repeating the phrase. (I suspect that most people do not bother going back to the source.) The blogger at State of the Nation attempts to fit a square peg into a round hole:

“The same U.S. Supreme Court ruling also determined that fraud vitiates contracts.  An election is essentially a binding contract between the electorate and the elected.  This indispensable social contract is irreparably broken through voter fraud and election cyber-crimes as the public trust is profoundly violated.”

http://stateofthenation.co/?p=35491

Ironically, just two years prior to Throckmorton there was an actual disputed presidential election. Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York apparently defeated Republican Rutherford Hayes of Ohio, but three southern states remained up in the air months after the election. Allegations of fraud were made on both sides. In the end, a congressional committee came to a compromise wherein Hayes would receive the disputed electoral votes, but he would then as president withdraw federal troops from the South and end the era of Reconstruction. This election provided the template for a suggested commission that might have been created had the 2020 election not been so successfully stolen.

While not going as far as these conservative activists want, Throckmorton seems to allow for re-litigation in some cases, while not setting any hard precedents. However, electoral law is its own beast. The office of President of the United States is established in Article II of the US Constitution, and the method for electing the president is laid out in Section 1:

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.”

US Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 2

Election Day is also established by the Constitution:

“The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”

US Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 4

This is one place where the unilateral changes made to election law by governors and state bureaucrats should be reasonably challenged. The Constitution says that the Electors shall be chosen on “a day” not “multiple days”. Early voting is clearly unconstitutional.

The method for electing the president is that each state chooses Electors, who then convene in December to cast their votes. Those votes are counted and certified by a Joint Session of the new Congress the following January. The winning candidate is then sworn in on January 20th. There is nothing in the US Constitution that compels states to choose their Electors in any specific fashion. In the early days of the Republic, state legislatures simply selected Electors. Today, all fifty states and the District of Columbia choose their electors with popular elections. (Remember, when you vote for president, you are not really voting for the president directly, but for the Electors who will cast their votes on your behalf.) Two states – Maine and Nebraska – split their electors somewhat proportionally, while the others are winner-take-all.

Unfortunately for those who are hanging on to hope of Donald Trump being reinstated after audits prove electoral fraud, there is no constitutional mechanism for this. No matter what fraud or illegal activities took place in the lead-up to the 2020 election, constitutional mandates were followed. Every state certified their own presidential elections, and the Joint Session certified the Electoral College votes. I am not aware of a time when Electors have been “recalled” after the fact. Even if a state such as Arizona voted to recall their Electors, I do not believe it would have any practical effect.

The time for investigating and dealing with the fraud was in November and December of 2020, before certification took place in the state legislatures and the Joint Session of Congress. Yes, those legislators, congressmen, and senators who certified those votes knowing that fraud had taken place were spineless. The January 6th protest was used as an excuse to ignore the fraud entirely. The Republican Party should have fought harder, but they rubber stamped this thing because they were afraid of what would happen if they took a controversial stand.

As for the audits themselves, even the “general doctrine” that “fraud vitiates everything” requires proof of that fraud. I am afraid that we will never get the proof we want. Too much time has passed, and the ballots and voting machines have been touched by too many hands. As they say on TV, the crime scene has been hopelessly contaminated. We will likely see a lot of evidence of fraud, but outright proof? I doubt it. Besides, there is nothing will convince CNN and the left that this was anything less than the most secure election in history. We are beyond the point where truth and facts matter.

President Trump will not be reinstated next month, or at any other time before Inauguration Day 2025. Anyone saying so is either misinformed or selling hopium to desperate conservatives. We should definitely push for more secure elections, but I believe the most positive outcome of the audits is to convince rank-and-file conservatives how broken the system really is. Our elections have been fraudulent for many years, as both sides utilize underhanded tricks to get their guy across the finish line. Recall that the 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon was decided by a few probably-fraudulent votes in a handful of corrupt counties in Texas and Illinois. The votes we cast have little relation to the numbers that appear on the screen at the end of the day, and these audits are only going to confirm that sad fact.

America will not be saved by putting Donald Trump back into office. Magic words and incantations do not change the fact that we are living in an occupied country. We must fearlessly face the truth at all times. The way forward is to build local communities of like-minded people who will weather the storm to come. Whether it is totalitarianism, secession, or civil war, having a tribe of men at your back is the only way to preserve and defend the remnants of Western Civilization.

(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)

The Constitution of the United States was truly a revolutionary document.

Our founding fathers recognized their moment in history. After nearly two centuries of growth and development as English colonies, the settlers of the New World had developed into their own unique nations. After throwing off their allegiance to the British crown, they had a unique opportunity to create a new government from scratch. These men – John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and more – understood the gravity of the choices they would make. They carefully crafted a constitution that balanced the necessity of a strong central government with the desires of the states for sovereignty. The Bill of Rights codified protections against many of the infringements and injuries that governments had engaged in for all of human history.

For more than two centuries the Constitution has been the supreme law of this land, and it remains a source of pride for patriotic Americans. It was fit, as John Adams said, for the “moral and religious people” that our ancestors were.

The purpose of this Constitution, beyond simply the creation of a government, was to ensure that the liberties our Founding Fathers had fought and died for would endure. The Preamble to the Constitution explains it clearly:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The Constitution of the United States of America

Has the Constitution held up as a guarantor of our freedoms? Has it protected the liberties of the posterity of our Founding Fathers?  Governments, courts, and even private companies have been slowly chipping away at the freedoms we once took for granted. America today is a multi-ethnic empire, home to many different groups of people, many of whom have no loyalty to our founders or their ideals.

Despite our Constitution, despite our laws, the historic American nation is losing its country.

The decline of the United States of America has been a slow process. At times it is so gradual that we do not realize it is happening at all. We become comfortable with the status quo, and we only notice the most recent outrage. Most Americans still believe in the Constitution. Conservatives trust it to protect us from the worst progressive indulgences. Even Marxist progressives pay lip service to the Constitution despite seeking to undermine it in service of their evil vision. However, I do not believe that the Constitution is the true supreme law of the land.

Author and journalist Christopher Caldwell argues persuasively in his book Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties that the civil cights acts of the 1960s inadvertently created a new constitution that is at odds with, and even supersedes our original Constitution. These laws gave the government a mandate to fix inequities in society, even if at the cost of our constitutional rights. Caldwell writes:

“The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible—and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

The reason that Caldwell calls civil rights a “rival constitution” is because any time there is a conflict between our constitutional rights and racial equity, courts rule in favor of equity. Whereas equality means that all people are treated the same before the law, equity means that all people must achieve the same outcome. This is, of course, nonsense. While we are indeed all equal before God and the laws of men, we are not equal in all ways. There are physical, mental, and emotional differences between all people. Furthermore, racial groups – being extended families writ large, as Steve Sailer puts it – have certain characteristic strengths and weaknesses as well. Yet the dogma of equity assumes that any difference of outcome between the races is prima facie evidence of racism and discrimination.

The word “racism” once meant prejudice against individuals based upon their ethnic background or skin color. It meant using the force of law to discriminate based on race. Today that definition has been expanded to mean any disparity between racial groups, or even so-called “microaggressions”. The charge of “racism” today does not even require ill intent. Critical Race Theory teaches that racism is systemic; that is, it is integrated into the very structure of Western Civilization and is all around us like water is to fish. There is no rational defense against this charge of racism, so there is no point in trying to argue.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 set in motion a chain of events that dramatically altered our country. Whereas the New Deal established that the government had a duty to take care of its citizens’ basic needs, Civil Rights gave the government a mandate to create equity between racial groups by any means necessary.

Conservative parents are making headway this year in the fight against the Marxist ideology of Critical Race Theory in public schools. Christopher Rufo has done great work exposing how schools and teachers’ unions are using this evil, racist, anti-white, anti-American ideology to indoctrinate millions of students. A common refrain from conservative activists is that CRT betrays the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. and the original Civil Rights Act. Caldwell argues, however, that CRT is merely the logical result of Civil Rights, and that the well was poisoned from the start.

I understand that for many conservatives, especially those who were around in the 1960s, criticizing civil rights is like criticizing America – it is beyond the pale. Only racists would have a problem with civil rights, no? Yet look at what civil rights have wrought – anger, strife, and more racial division than ever before. Polls consistently show that black Americans are more pessimistic about civil rights today than they were fifty years ago. Conservatives will try to square this circle by portraying affirmative action, CRT, and the so-called “racial awakening” of recent years as a betrayal of civil rights, but I believe this is just avoiding an unpleasant truth.

The iconoclast webcomic Stonetoss recently published a picture of a workman diligently breaking a small edifice labeled Critical Race Theory while ignoring the giant structure behind him labeled affirmative action. The implication is spot on, but the artist could have gone even further, showing a massive city-sized monument labeled civil rights.

“Republicans and others who may have been uneasy that the constitutional baby had been thrown out with the segregationist bathwater consoled themselves with a myth: The “good” civil rights movement that the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., had pursued in the 1960s had, they said, been “hijacked” in the 1970s by a “radical” one of affirmative action, with its quotas and diktats. Once the country came to its senses and rejected this optional, radical regime, it could have the good civil rights regime back. None of that was true. Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. They were what civil rights was. They were not temporary.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

Mr. Caldwell’s book is worth reading in its entirety, but I will summarize some of his arguments here. Before I read the book myself, I had not considered the way in which civil rights superseded our Constitution. It was an epiphany that explains so much of what is going on in our country.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. This decision overrode a previous Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896, in which the Court had ruled that segregation was not necessarily a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment so long as facilities were generally the same.

While we can generously assume that the Supreme Court had good intentions with Brown – segregated facilities for black students were often subpar – they opened a can of worms that is still vexing us today. The Court’s decision did not contain any suggestion as to how to rectify segregation, only that it must be fixed. Once the order for desegregation was applied to private facilities as well as public, there would be no limits on the power of government to fix any inequity, no matter how small. Caldwell writes:

“But in constitutional terms, the decision was arbitrary and open-ended. Brown granted the government the authority to put certain public bodies under surveillance for racism. Since the damage it aimed to mend consisted of “intangible considerations,” there was no obvious limit to this surveillance. And once the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality, desegregation implied a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

As Caldwell explains it, the Civil Rights Act was designed to rectify certain injustices in a specific part of the country, but it instead opened the floodgates to various interest groups and communities who saw a way to bypass the Constitution. At first it was all about achieving racial equity between blacks and whites, then feminist groups began using the same process, then homosexuals, and now every group except white males has found in the language of civil rights a requirement for government action. The result is that the entire mechanism of government has been turned against white men, the very descendants of the people who created this country in the first place.

There are many who claim that it is racist to say that white men built America. After all, we are a “nation of immigrants,” right? I maintain that it is not racist to honor one’s own heritage. Nobody should be ashamed of their people, whether they are descended from Europeans, Africans, Asians, or Native Americans. Everyone should be proud of who they are. The people who are derided today as “white” are descended from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Russia, Poland, Norway, Bohemia, and a hundred more places. The people who founded the United States of America were of mostly English descent, who happen to have light-colored skin. While that is controversial today, it remains the truth.

Recall that even before the American War for Independence, the North and South developed very differently. The nascent Industrial Revolution took hold in the diverse North, while the South quickly grew prosperous due to a handful of cash crops, especially cotton. Spanish colonists in the 16^th century had intended to use Native American Indians as forced labor, but humanitarian efforts by priests such as Bartholomew de las Casas convinced them to spare the natives this indignity. Unfortunately, plantation owners, still in need of labor, turned east, to Africa.

Slavery has been a part of the human condition since the dawn of time. When Roman legions conquered barbarian tribes, those they did not slaughter were brought back to Rome and sold in massive slave markets. African tribes would enslave their neighbors, and the Islamic empires of northern Africa enslaved native Africans. Slave traders looking to supply the New World with forced labor did not go to Africa because they hated dark-skinned people, rather it was because that was where slaves were for sale. The sadistic white slave hunters of Alex Haley’s Roots, who captured entire tribes of black men and boys, surely existed, but usually traders simply bought slaves at the existing markets.

Slave labor has always been a short-term solution to a long-term problem. While it certainly makes rich plantation owners richer, since they have no need to pay competitive wages, it depresses the prospects for poor whites in the same area. The antebellum south had no middle class to speak of. This is the same problem that broke the economy of the Roman Empire, and it is the same problem we see today as corporations prefer to import a servant class of migrant workers from south of the border rather than pay competitive wages to Americans.

With slavery becoming the backbone of the southern economy, but never taking hold in the industrial north, battle lines were naturally drawn according to geography. The Mason-Dixon Line became a metaphor for the social and political division between the North and the South. The American Revolution was an alliance between the industrial, Puritan, abolitionist north and the agrarian, rural, slave-owning south. The division between these peoples had existed prior to the migration to the New World. The ancestors of the northern Puritans had been on one side of the English Civil War in the mid-17^th century, while the ancestors of the southern Anglicans had been on the other.

This alliance between North and South created a unique American nation, separate from the mother country of Great Britain, and the breakdown of that alliance resulted in the Civil War. The core of America, what we call the historic American nation, is descended from one side or the other, or both. My own ancestry is from both – I have ancestors on one side who fought to preserve the Union, ancestors on the other who fought for Southern independence, and many on both sides fought for America in 1776.

The issue of slavery was always contentious. Despite what children are being taught in public schools today, even southern slaveowners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were troubled by the institution. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson writes:

“…in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

Modern historians and students have struggled to make sense of the inherent contradiction of a slaveowner declaring that slavery was evil. Most just wave it away by saying that Jefferson was a hypocrite, and that he should be unequivocally condemned in hindsight. But let us look at it rationally: Slavery existed, and one man was never going to end it singlehandedly. Thomas Jefferson owned a plantation, a plantation that needed labor to survive. Should he have freed all his slaves and hired workmen to replace them? Slavery was so embedded in southern culture that few white men would have been willing to do “Negro work”, and the costs would have put the plantation at a significant disadvantage. The same would have been the case if he had paid his slaves a living wage. In this situation, is not the most humanitarian course to treat your own slaves as well as possible, while laying the foundation for future abolition?

In any case, Jefferson so hated the institution of slavery that his original draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed King George III for its import into America. It was removed before the final version, so as not to antagonize the southern colonies. Yet the specter of slavery haunted the new nation. The slave trade itself was abolished in 1807, by which time about four million Africans were laboring in the American south. The question of what to do with this situation was one of the primary concerns of politicians and statesmen in the first half of the 19^th century. Should slavery remain legal? Should new territories and states in the west be allowed to have slaves? What about slaves who escaped into the abolitionist North?

Finding compromises between the North and South was the chief aim of the early statesmen of the Republic. Men such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Stephen Douglas made their names in the debates over slavery. Despite numerous political compromises over the expansion of slavery into the territories and the status of fugitive slaves, the two sides only grew more polarized. Abolitionists, convinced of their own moral superiority, refused any compromise over what they considered a black and white issue, while the hardcore southern fire eaters drew a staunch line regarding their “peculiar institution” and refused to budge as well.

Great Britain had also abolished the slave trade in 1807 and had even tasked the Royal Navy with patrolling the west African coast to enforce that ban. In 1833 they abolished slavery entirely, mostly due to the efforts of Englishmen such as John Newton and William Wilberforce. There are several reasons why abolition was simpler in Britain than in the United States. For one, the British economy was not as dependent upon slave labor as the American South. Also, Britain paid slaveowners for their confiscated property. Whether slaves should be morally considered “property” is beside the point – for them it was a capital investment that was wiped out with the stroke of a pen. American abolitionists refused to countenance such a compromise, however, since they considered slavery a moral question, not an economic one. The fact that abolition would surely financially ruin the South was of no concern to the northern abolitionists.

It is ironic, considering how obsessed with race we are today, that American discourse in the first half of the 19^th century was obsessed with the question of slavery. It was race that made American slavery so pernicious. As I have said, slavery has been a part of the human condition forever, but in America we associated forced labor with a certain race of people. The debate in America was not simply about the morality of slavery itself, but the standing of the African people. Were they human beings, entitled to the same rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution to white people? The peculiar institution of slavery brought an entire population to our shores, creating a permanent underclass in American society – of course there was going to be conflict. To a certain degree, I do not take issue with the idea of black solidarity today. I believe that the descendants of slaves here in America have a stake in this country. As Malcolm X said, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.” The question is, can we have unity today? Is it possible for the descendants of slaves to share this nation with the descendants of the Founding Fathers?

Tribalism is the history of the world. Human beings have always felt a closer bond with kin than with strangers, and so we naturally form families, clans, tribes, and nations. The word “nation” comes from the Latin word natio which means “birth”. At its most basic level, a nation is really an extended family of people who are bound together by blood, by shared history, by shared beliefs, and by similar desires about how to organize society. This world is full of nations, and each one is unique, which is why it makes sense for each nation to have its own state. We call the belief that each nation should be allowed to rule itself “nationalism”.

The original form of nationalism from the 19^th century was a belief that people of the same ethnicity, culture, and language should unite to rule themselves. In those days, Germans, French, and Italians were spread throughout various kingdoms and empires, but the nationalist movements of the mid-1800s inspired them to form nation-states, throwing off kings and emperors in a wave of revolution. Today, nationalism is about not wanting to be part of a multi-ethnic empire like the United States.

It is a conceit of both left and right that America is different from other nation-states in that it was based upon an idea, rather than a specific people group. Under this formulation, an immigrant who becomes a naturalized citizen is just as American as a descendant of 17^th century pioneers, and it is racist to say otherwise.

We assumed that, in the inexorably march of history, tribalism had been replaced by universalism. The values that developed in Western Civilization had become so successful that we forget how unique they really were. We assumed that every culture, ever nation, every tribe desired the same sorts of lives that we had come to cherish. Yet one only must read the news to see how that is not the case.

Many of the values we consider to be universal are being derided by the woke Marxist left. The Museum of African American History and Culture, a division of the Smithsonian Institution, recently published an infographic describing the supposed ideas and habits that make up so-called “whiteness”. Among these pernicious things are rugged individualism, the nuclear family, an interest in history, a belief in hard work, a commitment to being on time, an appreciation for beauty, and a sense of justice. We make a grave mistake when we believe that our values are shared by every nation and people group on earth.

Practically speaking, it is obvious that America is home to many different nations today. Olympic finalist Gwen Berry made headlines last month when she pouted like a child on the podium while the national anthem was playing. She complained that she felt slighted, because our national anthem was racist toward “her people”. When an activist like Berry speaks of “her people,” she does not mean all American citizens, rather, she means black Americans. To the ears of white conservatives, with their universalist viewpoint, this sounds strange, even offensive. The modern media establishment encourages ethnic pride in every modern group, except for one. The historic American nation is not allowed to take any pride in our heritage lest we be slandered as white supremacists. Even though we are all labeled as “white,” we are supposed to keep pretending in universalism even as every tribe and nation around us are not ashamed to work for their own interests.

White America and black America are parallel nations within the same state. No matter how much we flagellate ourselves for the sins of slavery and racism, no matter how much we preach universal values, it does not change the facts. We are different peoples, with different beliefs, different cultures, and different ways of running a society.

Our forefathers did not see a future where black and white America lived together in harmony. In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

Thomas Jefferson, The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

Well, you might say, that sort of thinking is old-fashioned. We are more enlightened now. After all, many conservatives will say, America is unlike any other country on earth because it was founded upon an idea, not upon any particular race or culture. As long as you believe in the words of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, then you are just as American as anyone. Even if that were true, it requires that we all buy in to those words. What happens if that changes? What is America without the Constitution?

Christopher Caldwell tackles that very question in Age of Entitlement:

“Where a shared heritage is absent or unrecognized, as it is in the contemporary United States, all the eggs of national cohesion are placed in the basket of the constitution. Hence a paradox: With the dawn of the civil rights era, the U.S. Constitution—the very thing that made it possible for an ethnically varied nation to live together—came under stress.”

Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement

Civil rights were designed to heal the divide in our country and allow men and women of all races to achieve the American dream, but they deepened our divisions instead.

The Civil War brought an end to slavery, and threatened the unique culture of the American South. Radical Republicans such as Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania wanted to crush the defeated Confederacy, remaking it into a multiracial state. President Abraham Lincoln disagreed, wanting rather to bring the rebellious states back into the union as quickly and peacefully as possible. After Lincoln’s assassination, the Radical Republicans tried to bend President Andrew Johnson to their will, even impeaching him, but they were unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was a time of great change in Dixie. The South had been destroyed by four years of war, and northern carpetbaggers were coming in to buy up land at bargain prices. The 13^th Amendment abolished slavery, which was good, but those four million ex-slaves now needed to find work and places to live. General William T. Sherman had famously promised former slaves “forty acres and a mule” to call their own, but this promise was disregarded by the federal government.

The 14^th and 15^th Amendments gave citizenship and the vote to freed slaves, and President Ulysses Grant used the power of government to enforce these new rights. Many areas in the South elected Republican for the first time ever as grateful African Americans cast votes for their benefactors. The former leaders of the Confederacy chafed under this new arrangement and conspired to regain power. The original Ku Klux Klan was formed at this time and fought both the freedmen and northern carpetbaggers. Many former Confederate soldiers continued fighting a guerrilla war against the north – Jesse James’ outlaw gang was one famous case.

The disputed election of 1876 ended in a compromise wherein Republican candidate Rutherford Hayes carried the South in exchange for ending Reconstruction and withdrawing federal troops. Once done, the new South quickly returned to the status quo. Former Confederate officials regained political office, and they set about crafting laws to maintain their own power. Freed black slaves had been guaranteed citizenship and the right to vote, so the southern leaders came up with workarounds such as the grandfather clause and poll taxes to prevent them from exercising those rights. Segregation was enforced by government fiat, from hotels and restaurants to schools and even train cars. These laws were collectively known as “Jim Crow”.

It was this two-tiered society that Civil Rights was supposed to repair. The rest of America looked at the apartheid system in the South and said it had to go. Southerners resisted – Governor George Wallace of Alabama proclaimed, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” – but the ball was rolling. Brown v. Board of Education ordered the desegregation of public schools, but enforcing that decision was another matter. In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas ordered his National Guard to block admittance of black students at Central High School in Little Rock, but President Dwight Eisenhower responded by federalizing the Guard and allowing the students to enter the school.

According to Christopher Caldwell, there were two perspectives on the fight for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. These perspectives were classified by sociologist Alan David Freeman as those of outsiders and insiders, or perpetrators and victims. To the white majority – the perpetrators – civil rights meant removing barriers to success for blacks and other minorities. To the black minority – the victims – the promise of civil rights was not equality under the law but equity – they wanted the government to use the full force of its power to make them as rich, prosperous, powerful, and satisfied as everyone else. If the former perspective was correct, then it was done, accomplished with the stroke of a pen. The latter, however, required ever-increasing government involvement in our daily lives, and the abrogation of many of our constitutional rights. Caldwell writes:

“The legislation of the mid-1960s made legal equality a fact of American life. To the surprise of much of the country, though, legal equality was now deemed insufficient by both civil rights leaders and the government. Once its ostensible demands had been met, the civil rights movement did not disband. It grew. It turned into a lobby or political bloc seeking to remedy the problem according to what Freeman would call the victims’ view: “lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing.” The federal government made it a central part of its mission to procure those things for blacks. The results were disappointing on almost every front—naturally, since the country had never signed up for such a wide-ranging project.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

Natural rights such as the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, property rights, and freedom of association have long been recognized by liberal statesmen as inalienable, protected – implicitly and explicitly – by the Bill of Rights. In our new society, however, the desire for racial equity trumps any of these rights. We can speak freely, so long as it is not so-called “hate speech”. We have the right to our own property, but we cannot deny services based upon race or other protected characteristics. We have the right to associate with whomever we choose, so long as there is no appearance of racial disparity. Do you see how this works? As Christopher Caldwell said, “The problem is that rights cannot simply be “added” to a social contract without changing it. To establish new liberties is to extinguish others.”

The problem with the Civil Rights Act and subsequent laws was that they were incredibly open-ended and vague. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Company that private businesses were prohibited from using aptitude tests on potential employees because they resulted in disparate outcomes between whites and blacks. Even though the Civil Rights Act itself had specifically allowed for aptitude tests, Chief Justice Warren Burger ruled that any disparity of outcome meant that they ran afoul of the government’s new mandate to enforce racial equity. Caldwell writes:

“Government could now disrupt and steer interactions that had been considered the private affairs of private citizens—their roles as businessmen or landlords or members of college admissions boards. It could interfere in matters of personal discretion. Yes, this was for a special purpose—to fight racism—but the Griggs decision made clear that the government was now authorized to act against racism even if there was no evidence of any racist intent. This was an opening to arbitrary power. And once arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

Civil rights opened the door to all sorts of rent-seeking by various interest groups. The fact that civil rights came about at the very time that our government opened our borders to the world with the 1965 Immigration Act led to many unforeseen consequences. Laws designed to rectify past wrongs were seized upon by people who had no connection to slavery or Jim Crow. Caldwell says, “Reforms conceived for a country that was provincial, dutiful, and 4 percent immigrant are not necessarily well suited to a country that is cosmopolitan, hedonistic, and 15 percent immigrant.”

Today, every possible intersectional group uses that door to extract resources from the American government, at the expense of the historic American nation. Yet it is still in the area of race relations that we see the greatest changes occurring in our society. Everything is viewed through an intersectional lens. If Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep in 1921 and awoken today, a quick glance at news headlines would have him wondering why 21^st century America is so obsessed with race in general, and the black race in particular.

It is true: Events and ideas are all viewed through a racial lens. Last summer, Time Magazine published their infamous cover story on the Great Reset, as several writers laid out their vision for a post-covid world. Several of the essays were about how the new world would better serve the interests of “diversity” and “people of color”. Even coverage of the covid pandemic itself has a racial component – every time I open YouTube, I am prompted to watch a video about how covid has affected so-called “communities of color”. The Democratic Party recently introduced a bill to enforce health equity, claiming that systemic racism has left minorities in a more vulnerable position regarding their health than white citizens. The text of that bill, House Resolution 666, is straight out of Critical Race Theory handbooks. Its introduction refers to the Museum of African American History’s description of so-called structural racism. You will recall that this museum’s publications said that everything we take for granted in a civilized society, such as a good work ethic and the nuclear family, are representative of “whiteness” and therefore racist.

A few years ago, conservative media had fun with a story that asked if peanut butter and jam sandwiches were racist. Today that kind of thinking is normal in media. Nothing is allowed to exist without questioning its relationship with racism and the black community, even outside the borders of the United States. These attacks on the historic American nation are just a part of a worldwide assault on Western Civilization itself. In Britain, the BBC recently tweeted, “Rural racism in Dorset: Why is our countryside 98% white?” to which Steve Sailer innocently replied, “Because whites are indigenous to rural Dorsetshire and nonwhites are not?” The article attached to the BBC’s tweet quotes several minority residents in Dorset who complain about “subtle racism” such as people looking at them while they are out and about. Sailer continues, “The project of the 21st Century is to dispossess whites of the very nice countries they have built, so the fact that whites are indigenous to rural England seems like a racist conspiracy to the dispossessors. The slightest resistance, such as staring, must be crushed.” This “dispossessionist mindset”, as Sailer calls it, is the reason why the historic American nation is being driven out of the country our fathers created. Marxists view society as a zero-sum game – for black Americans to succeed, white Americans must be forcibly diminished.

This obsession with race has created a class of black journalists and activists who believe the world revolves around them. Gwen Berry’s over the top tantrum upon hearing The Star-Spangled Banner on an Olympic podium, as if she had just been told that the ice cream machine at McDonalds was broken, is just the beginning.  The New York Times editorial staff is filled with black female writers who complain in the paper of record that someone asked to touch their hair twenty years ago. Not to be outdone, Asian writers complain about being stereotyped in elementary school. The fact that Asians actually have higher average wealth and income than white people makes their chase for victim clout all the more pathetic.

One would be forgiven for believing that the demographics of America were similar to South Africa, where black Africans are a large majority. The constant focus by media on black issues has certainly skewed our perspectives – recent polls show that the average American believes that our country is 33% black, while a sixth of Americans believe that blacks are an outright majority. The truth is that only 12-13% of Americans are black.

Nevertheless, nothing is safe from the demands by black activists to make it all about them. Even though the NFL is 70% black, activists complain that there are not enough black coaches. The NFL has long had something called the “Rooney Rule” that says that teams are required to interview a black coach for any available vacancy. For a while in the late 90s and early 2000s, Minnesota Vikings assistant coach Leslie Frazier was the token minority interview.

Movies, music, and even advertising are overwhelmingly focused on African Americans. If you can stand to watch commercials, try to count the number of white men – there are not many. Couples are often mixed-race, if not entirely black. Any time a black actor is snubbed for an Oscar nomination, activists complain on social media, accusing the Academy of being racist. This year, everyone expected the late Chadwick Boseman to win Best Actor, so much so that the Academy rearranged the schedule of events to put that category last, so they could end the program on a tribute to the Black Panther actor. Journalists were shocked and surprised when Anthony Hopkins won the award instead, and the program ended awkwardly.

Perhaps the biggest area of black egocentrism is the insertion of Africans into every area of history and culture. On the fringes of the internet, you will find websites claiming that Cleopatra was black, or that Beethoven was actually black. In more respected publications you will hear that America was entirely built by African slaves. Besides being patently false, this claim erases the work of millions of American pioneers. Sure, slavery was the foundation of the southern economy, but what of northern industrialism? What of the railroads, roads, and bridges that crisscrossed the continent? What of the brave families who packed everything they owned into a Conestoga wagon and crossed the wide prairies for Oregon and California? What of the men who fought and died in the War of Independence, and every American conflict since then? What of the more than six hundred thousand men – mostly white – who died to free black Americans from slavery itself? This libel is a deliberate erasure of the historic American nation, more dispossession in the name of racial equity.

The recent establishment of Juneteenth as a federal holiday is another nail in the coffin of white America. While its proponents claim that it is a “long overdue” recognition of the abolition of slavery, and that it will not detract from other American holidays, both premises are false. The purpose of elevating Juneteenth – an obscure holiday celebrated in a small region of Texas – is to keep the idea of slavery and racism at the fore of public consciousness. It is yet another reminder to white Americans that we are irredeemably racist, and that we must sacrifice our property, our money, and our heritage as penance. Both Scott Greer and Tim Pool, from two different perspectives, have argued that the rise of Juneteenth will necessarily diminish July 4^th, our true Independence Day. If a municipality has scarce resources, for example, will they put them toward a citywide celebration of Independence Day, thus incurring the wrath of woke activists, or will they give the squeaky wheel grease by celebrating Juneteenth instead? This is not just academic – the city of Evanston, Illinois recently canceled their 4^th of July parade (citing covid) but sponsored a pride parade and a Juneteenth parade last month.

Remember that modern discourse sees everything through the lens of race. What is Independence Day but a celebration of hypocritical white slaveowners? Indeed, just last week the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets spent the holiday weekend trashing the idea of Independence Day, specifically the American flag itself, claiming that it represented whiteness and conservatism rather than America as a whole. I would not be surprised to see serious calls from influential people in the next few years to do away with both the flag and the 4^th of July altogether.

In fact, we are already seeing the first signs of this disavowal of old-fashioned patriotism. Mara Gay, a black woman who writes for the New York Times, spoke about how “uncomfortable” she felt seeing trucks flying the American flag. The New York Times itself followed up those statements with a long article about how the flag is becoming identified with white people, and that patriotism makes minorities (aka the New York Times editorial staff) feel unwelcome. The American people have loved their country for centuries, but now that pride is demonized by ivory tower journalists because it hurts the feelings of a few nonwhite people. The Marxist left is much more comfortable with the various rainbow flags of homosexuality and transgenderism, or of the “Black Lives Matter” flag. The woke commissars who run our State Department even sent out a memo recently allowing embassies to fly the BLM flag. Is that not a fitting display of the conquest of this country and the dispossession of the historic American nation?

An obsession with race, and with African Americans specifically, is also evident in news coverage. Not only does every story have a racial component, but all of the major news outlets decided last year to start capitalizing “black”. They claim this is because “black” refers to a specific culture, a specific group of people. Obviously, they are not capitalizing “white” as that would be racist. There is a song going around that is being called the “black national anthem,” and it has even been played at NFL games in tandem with The Star-Spangled Banner. Would it be fair to call the latter the “white” national anthem? Of course not, that too would be racist. You see, however, how the black community is recognized as its own nation within the borders of the United States of America. This is encouraged by our elites, while any unity of white Americans is discouraged, or even criminalized. In our Orwellian times, black nationalism is good but white nationalism is bad. As I said, I have no problem with black nationalism – more power to them – I simply believe that all ethnic groups, including white people, should have the same right of association.

Education is another area that has been completely taken over by black egoism. In the 1960s, violent black supremacists occupied college offices and demanded more money for black student unions and for black studies curricula. Today, public schools, colleges, and universities have entire departments dedicated to so-called “diversity” and spend millions of dollars on diversity endeavors. Ethnic studies, as well as feminist studies, queer studies, and other classes devoted to intersectional interest groups, are more common than STEM. James Lindsay recently acquired a complete list of books used in the social studies program at Albuquerque Public Schools, and every single title is about race or other intersectional identities. I am heartened that the public is waking up to the pervasive spread of Critical Race Theory in public schools, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Christopher Caldwell points out that this has been the case for a long time. He writes:

“It was fair to say that ethnic studies had taken over not just college curricula but even primary and secondary school history teaching. In 2008, education professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland asked 2,000 eleventh and twelfth graders to name the ten most significant Americans who had never been president. Three standbys of Black History Month—Martin Luther King, the anti-segregationist protester Rosa Parks, and the escaped slave Harriet Tubman—ranked 1, 2, and 3.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

Consider that – public school students were taught that the most important people in American history (not counting presidents) were Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman. What of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton? What of John Marshall, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay? What of non-political figures such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford? What of Babe Ruth? Scott Greer often reminds us that conservatives have accepted the premise that Martin Luther King was just as important, or perhaps even more important than our own founding fathers. Even before the 1619 Project, we had already rewritten history to make civil rights the central focus of all American history. The 1776 Commission, President Trump’s answer to the 1619 Project, was full of the same cringy paeans to diversity and civil rights that the left was pushing just thirty years ago.

“Diversity” has become the code word for black representation – I recall news media claiming that the nearly all black cast of Marvel’s Black Panther was “diverse”. Every institution in America is required to bend the knee to this new god. Caldwell writes:

“’Chief diversity officers’ and ‘diversity compliance officers,’ working inside companies, carried out functions that resembled those of twentieth-century commissars. They would be consulted about whether a board meeting or a company picnic was sufficiently diverse.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

Once you see how race-obsessed our modern discourse has become it is impossible to un-see. Diversity has indeed become a new god in American secular religion. Caldwell again writes:

“After the Army medic and self-taught Muslim fanatic Nidal Hasan killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Obama’s first year in office, Army chief of staff Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., said, ‘Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.’ For Casey, to be accused of racism was literally a fate worse than death.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

The status of our national capital is an ongoing and controversial issue, and of course race plays a part. According to the Constitution, an area was to be set aside, distinct from any particular state, as the site for the capital. The New Deal and World War II massively expanded the federal bureaucracy, and those bureaucrats had to live somewhere. Many moved in to the swampy land of the District of Columbia, and soon those people clamored for the same voting rights as state residents. Congress and the states passed the 23^rd Amendment in 1961 which gave residents of DC the right to vote in presidential elections. Congress also devolved their own constitutional authority over the District to an elected mayor.

Right now, the Democratic Party is demanding statehood for DC, which would reallocate at least three representatives and add two more senators to our Congress. The District, home to nearly a million people, is approximately 48% black and 45% white, and has voted overwhelmingly Democrat in every presidential election since the passage of the 23^rd Amendment. We all know which party stands to gain from DC statehood. Yet the Constitution stands in the way of simply declaring it so by an act of Congress… or does it? I would not be surprised to see an activist judge, ruling according to our new constitution of civil rights, declare that DC must be granted statehood because to withhold it would be racist to a place with large black population.

Sometimes courts still forget that our Constitution has been superseded by civil rights. The New York Times recently complained that the Constitution stands in the way of the Biden regime’s plan to award covid relief money exclusively to people of color. The article quotes Syovata Edari, who owns a chocolate shop in Wisconsin, complaining that she did not get the $50,000 from the government that she expected. She said, “It doesn’t surprise me that once again these laws that we fought and died for, that were intended to benefit us — to even the playing field a bit more — are being used against us.” Steve Sailer facetiously replied, “I mean, sure, the 14th Amendment sounds like the part about “the equal protection of the laws” applies to everybody, but we all know that it’s good for the government to discriminate against whites.”

Where to begin? Ms. Edari claims that “her people” fought and died for rights that were intended to benefit them. Who died to free the slaves? The historic American nation made a massive sacrifice of its own blood to free Ms. Edari’s people from servitude, but there is no gratitude for that today. While she made sure to mention that the 14^th amendment was meant to “level the playing field,” the rest of her quote shows that she thinks the purpose of the amendment was really to give special privileges to blacks.

The fact that some judges are following the “old” Constitution by writing injunctions against the regime’s plan to increase “equity” by showering money on minorities is considered a problem by our elite media. What does this portend for the most coveted racial prize of them all: reparations?

Black activists have been increasing their demands for reparations for slavery, even as the actual time of slavery recedes further and further into the past. Black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates famously called for reparations several years ago, and many leftists have jumped on the train behind him. The website Vice published an article a few weeks ago with the headline “America’s First Black Billionaire Wants His Reparations Check, Now.” Yet if you ask any of these people how much they are owed, how much to consider the supposed debt paid, you will not get an answer. They will always demand “more”. It will never end. In their eyes, the blood of six hundred thousand American soldiers was not enough to pay this debt. More than fifty years of welfare and affirmative action was not enough either. Not even the higher standard of living for the descendants of American slaves compared to their free cousins in Africa is considered a worthwhile recompense. No amount of money will stop the demands for more, more, more.

The Vice article claims that $14 trillion would be enough to “close the black / white wealth gap,” but this is short sighted. Despite what Marxists believe, wealth is not distributed from the top down, but created from the bottom up. The millionaire next door has wealth because he worked for it, making sacrifices and wise investments for many years, not because he was given a check from the American taxpayer. You could shower $14 trillion on black America and in ten years most of that money would be gone, and then what? We would hear yet more demands for reparations and affirmative action.

In the name of racial equity, we have essentially repealed our Constitution, spent trillions upon trillions of dollars, and now we are in the process of erasing our very history because it offends the sensibilities of black Americans. One of the unspoken conditions of reconciliation after the Civil War was that the South could honor their heroes. Charles Francis Adams Jr., scion of the great Adams family of American mythos, wrote after the war that, “…The essential and distinctive feature of the American Civil War, as contrasted with all previous struggles of a similar character, was the acceptance of results by the defeated party at its close.” The South, for the most part, gave up their dreams of independence, and in exchange, the North allowed the South to retain their heroes and unique culture.

The Battle Flag was incorporated into the designs of many southern state flags. Statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and many other Confederate leaders were erected throughout the South. Southern writers wrote glowingly of the so-called “lost cause” and romanticized antebellum Dixie. For one hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, this was accepted as a reasonable expression of southern pride.

But this pride cannot continue to exist in a world where everything revolves around black sensibilities. Rather than being a symbol of rebellion and southern pride, the Battle Flag has been recast as a deliberate racist insult toward black Americans. Reframing it in this way caused many Republicans to feel like they had to join in calls for its removal. Nikki Haley, then Governor of South Carolina, ordered it taken down from the State House in Columbia. The fact that Haley, a second-generation immigrant who had no stake in the heritage of the state she led, was the one to remove the flag was especially galling to many proud southerners. A fear of taking a controversial stand was another rotten fruit of civil rights. Christopher Caldwell said:

“Plainly the civil rights acts had wrought a change in the country’s constitutional culture. The innovations of the 1960s had given progressives control over the most important levers of government, control that would endure for as long as the public was afraid of being called racist.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

All the media and political establishment must do to get Republicans to obey is to threaten to call them racist. The GOP gave in on the Battle Flag because they were afraid of the association it now had with racism, slavery, and Jim Crow. Save for a few brave people on the fringes, most of us are still afraid of being called racist. Those on the fringes who are not afraid are tarred as white supremacist by both the left and the right, are banned from social media, fired from their jobs, and essentially exiled from polite society. The rest of us go along with absurdities, lies, and the erasure of our heritage in exchange for being allowed to make a living and support our families.

Few Republicans were willing to defend either the Battle Flag or Confederate statues. At the time of this writing, the House of Representatives has just passed a bill that would remove not only Confederate statues from federal offices in Washington, DC, but also those of antebellum leaders such as Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who supported slavery and secession. Military bases which carry the names of Confederate generals are in the process of being renamed, as the GOP joined Democrats to override President Trump’s lame duck veto late last year.

Throughout the country, memorials to Confederate heroes are being torn down, often with municipal support. The cities that raised these monuments in the first place have come under the control of Marxist whites as well as radical black activists. In Memphis last month, the body of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was literally dug out of the ground to be moved to an obscure museum hundreds of miles away. One might have thought that digging up the bones of your enemies was something that went out of style hundreds of years ago. Apparently not.

The case of Robert E. Lee is emblematic of this destruction of the past. Once considered the epitome of the southern gentlemen by South and North alike, Lee has now become the symbol of evil white men. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower considered Lee to be one of the greatest Americans in history, but that is not enough for the woke iconoclasts. Hundreds of schools, roads, and parks have been renamed in the past few years in the quest to erase the name of Lee from history. Christopher Caldwell recently wrote an essay for the Claremont Review of Books on the ongoing reevaluation of Robert E. Lee, which you can read here. In that essay he writes:

“…as the present generation has radicalized around race ideologies, opinion on Lee has become more frenzied and passionate than it has been since the height of the Civil War. He has suddenly become an object of hatred. The reputation for decency and honor that has clung to Lee since his death, even among the historians most critical toward the Confederacy, has not softened this new hatred but stoked it—as if the reputation itself were an insult launched across the centuries.”

Christopher Caldwell, “There Goes Robert E. Lee”

Robert Edward Lee was the quintessential southern gentleman. Far from being antithetical to the American spirit, he was in the very heart of it. His home in Arlington, Virginia overlooked the Potomac River, about thirty miles upstream from George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation. The two families were linked in several ways, actually. Lee’s father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, was a Revolutionary War hero, and had been the man who famously eulogized Washington as “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Robert E. Lee himself married Mary Custis, the granddaughter of George Washington’s stepson. When Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, he carried George Washington’s sword at his side. After the war, Lee served as president of Washington University in Lexington, Virginia, which was renamed Washington and Lee University after his death.

Modern historiography of the Civil War paints the Confederates as rebels, of course, but we must remember that they saw themselves as the true successors to the Revolution and the Spirit of 1776. Four of the first six presidents were Virginians, and men such as Robert E. Lee saw themselves as the successors to those great heroes. Had the Confederacy won independence, it would have looked to the same Declaration of Independence as its own heritage.

Even as late as the 1970s, already in the age of civil rights, Robert E. Lee remained a figure of reverence in American discourse. In 1975, Congress voted to posthumously restore Lee’s citizenship; only ten representatives voted against the measure. It was really in the last ten years, during the so-called “racial reckoning,” that Lee has been cast as evil. Because race is now the primary concern for media figures and historians alike, the very fact that Lee owned slaves has become the only thing worth knowing about the man. The details about Lee’s life and his relationship with the institution of slavery are not important to modern eyes. Yet like Thomas Jefferson, Lee had a complex relationship with the peculiar institution. There are stories about how he taught his slaves to read and write, and about how he took the Eucharist side by side with a black man. Like Jefferson, Lee seemed to find slavery itself distasteful, and treated his own slaves as well as he could. He fought for the Confederacy not because he supported slavery, or even secession, but because he believed it was his duty as a Virginian.

Christopher Caldwell points out in his essay that the museum at Appomattox Courthouse downplays Lee and Grant in favor of a narrative that is once again all about race. “Appomattox is about Grant and Lee,” he writes. “Lee cannot be offered a different role in the story of the Civil War without altering the meaning of what Grant did, what Appomattox meant, what the Civil War settled, and what the United States stands for. If Lee is a racist scoundrel, then Grant is either a gullible man or an accomplice.” Yet this is exactly what the woke mobs believe. They have declared that we must not only erase Lee, Jackson, Davis, and Forrest, but also Grant, Lincoln, and even Theodore Roosevelt. I do not doubt that we will soon see serious calls to blast away the faces of our American heroes on Mt. Rushmore.

Contrary to what people such as the 1619 Project’s Nicole Hannah-Jones believes, there has never been a time in American history when slavery was not controversial. It has been an institution that Americans have struggled with since the very first African slaves stepped foot in the New World. Yet as Christopher Caldwell notes, whereas our fathers struggled with slavery as a matter of liberty, today we only look at it through the lens of race. The abolition of slavery was once considered the moral imperative for the historic American nation who had founded their country in the name of freedom and equality before God, but today it is considered the achievement of black Americans despite the obstacles of white supremacy and racism. The role of white Christians in abolishing slavery has been erased, because it is inconvenient to a narrative that says whites are irredeemably evil.

A few months ago, Haitian documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck published a four-hour miniseries on HBO called Exterminate All the Brutes with the premise that white Europeans are uniquely responsible for the very concept of genocide. Amidst overly dramatic reenactments of evil white men torturing poor blacks and American Indians, Peck weaves a story of brutal men who conquered the world, exterminating darker-skinned peoples wherever they were found. Not mentioned once in the documentary were the names Lincoln, Wilberforce, or Ulysses Grant. It is one thing to discuss a peoples’ sins, but it is quite another to do so while ignoring their virtues.

The reason why race has been injected into American discourse in this manner is nothing less than to erase the historic American nation. Our fathers built the greatest country in the history of the world – the shining city on a hill – and the fact that we, their posterity, are still here is unacceptable to the dozens of other ethnic and interest groups who want a piece of the pie. Civil rights remade our Constitution, reorienting our government away from protecting our natural rights and toward rectifying every possible complaint by ethnic minorities. The Democratic Party has become a coalition of all these groups, each of whom seeks to lay claim to the United States of America, and each one united in their hated of white people. While the Republican Party is resisting the pull to become explicitly identified with white Americans, that is their inevitable destiny. Christopher Caldwell writes:

“American politics had re-sorted itself around that question—which came down to the question of whether one had benefited from or lost by the transfers of rights, goods, and privileges carried out under the new constitutional dispensation that began in 1964. The Democrats were the party of those who benefited: not just racial minorities but sexual minorities, immigrants, women, government employees, lawyers—and all people sophisticated enough to be in a position to design, run, or analyze new systems. This collection of minorities could, with discipline, be bundled into an electoral majority, but that was not, strictly speaking, necessary. The hierarchies of government, the judiciary, and the corporate world were Democratic in their orientations. Sympathetic regulators, judges, and attorneys took up the task of transferring as many prerogatives as possible from the majority to various minorities. Republicans were the party, as we have noted, of yesteryear’s entire political spectrum, of New Deal supporters and New Deal foes, of the people who would have voted for Richard Nixon in 1960 and the people who would have voted for John F. Kennedy. The lost world of that period seemed an idyll to many Americans. The parties represented two different constitutions, two different eras of history, even two different technological platforms. And increasingly, two different racial groups.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

The divide between Democrats and Republicans has been growing starker every year. Today, the gulf between the two parties is greater than at any time since the secession winter of 1860. While there have always been disagreements between the parties, until recently one could admit that both sides believed in America. Today, the Democratic Party is a coalition of nations who are united in their desire to tear down the United States as well as Western Civilization as a whole. The Republicans, for all their spinelessness, for all their fecklessness, are the only major party standing up for the historic American nation. Again, Caldwell writes:

“Those who lost most from the new rights-based politics were white men. The laws of the 1960s may not have been designed explicitly to harm them, but they were gradually altered to help everyone but them, which is the same thing. Whites suffered because they occupied this uniquely disadvantaged status under the civil rights laws, because their strongest asset in the constitutional system—their overwhelming preponderance in the electorate—was slowly shrinking, because their electoral victories could be overruled in courtrooms and by regulatory boards where necessary, and because the moral narrative of civil rights required that they be cast as the villains of their country’s history. They fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

Caldwell goes on to say that by recasting America as an idea, rather than the inheritance of its founders, we dispossess ourselves. The right believes that the “idea” of America consists of liberty and equality, but the left has redefined those terms to mean welfare and equity, at the expense of America’s white majority.

I am afraid that civil rights were a mistake. Perhaps it was necessary at the time to find some way of rectifying the racial issues in the Jim Crow South, but the Civil Rights Act opened Pandora’s Box, leading to many of the issues that plague this country today. Until we on the right admit this, we will never fix the problem. Unfortunately, it is difficult to speak any form of truth these days. At the end of his book, Caldwell correctly notes that the establishment of civil rights as a superior constitution necessitates extreme censorship. If we were allowed to openly speak the truth about what has been going on for the past fifty years, then we might have a chance of undoing it. Our ruling regime cannot take that chance. The Bill of Rights says we have freedom of speech, but that freedom does not extend to criticizing the new constitution built upon civil rights, nor the interest groups that benefit from it. Everything from anti-black racial slurs to factual FBI crime statistics are entirely verboten under our woke censors. We mock the Chinese government for cracking down on people who make fun of Premier Xi Jinping but try making fun of George Floyd over here in the land of the free. Caldwell writes, finally:

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, as we have noted, a legislative repeal of the First Amendment’s implied right to freedom of association. Over decades it polarized the political parties and turned them into something like secret societies, each of them loyal to a different constitutional understanding. Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws. The combination was a terrible one—rising tensions along with a society-wide inability to talk or think straight about anything.”

Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement

It is not racist to desire a homeland for your people. Our ancestors fled Europe for many reasons – religious liberty, escape from the constraints of a strict class structure, a chance to become wealthy, or even just a desire for adventure in the New World. We should not be ashamed of our forefathers, but celebrate them, warts and all. We are their heritage; we are the posterity for whom they wrote the Constitution in the first place.

The dispossession of America began with the best of intentions in the 1960s. The fruits of civil rights are not only the loss of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, but also the extreme censorship necessary to maintain that dispossession. Everything I have written in this essay is enough to make me persona non grata in polite society. I am already banned from Twitter, and I cannot be fired from my job, but there are millions of Americans who are not in such a fortunate position. They are forced to keep their mouths shut, to silently acquiesce to the loss of their own country. This is a tragedy.

The nation is not the state; the nation is the people. It is time for our people to take back our country. Stop apologizing for historical wrongs. Stop compromising on things like Juneteenth, hoping that it will buy you some good will. Stop hoping for an easy return to the America you once knew. We have an opportunity to build a new homeland out of the ashes of the old, to fulfill our Founding Fathers’ promise to protect the blessings of liberty for their posterity.

The only way through this time of crisis is forward. The historic American nation – the last and greatest outpost of Western Civilization – must survive. As long as you and I are still here, raising families, teaching our children our history, our stories, and our faith, then, by the grace of God, it will.

Last week, former Trump security advisor Michael Anton, who published the hugely influential essay The Flight 93 Election under a pseudonym in 2016, spoke with programmer and political philosopher Curtis Yarvin, who under his own pseudonym Mencius Moldbug wrote some of the most influential works of the early 21st century.

I was interested to hear Yarvin echoing some of my own thoughts on the inevitable rise of an American Caesar, but he went even further by suggesting that President Franklin Roosevelt was a Caesar, as were Lincoln and Washington before them. He defines a “Caesar” as a leader who uses the existing political framework to inaugurate a new type of government, consolidating power in just a single man. Unlike the original Caesar, who bequeathed that power to his successors, Roosevelt instead bequeathed it to a permanent bureaucracy within the Executive Branch of government, what was now call the Deep State.

In any case, Yarvin suggests that this Caesarian revolution occurs about every 75 years, so we are due for another. Like me, he believes that our Caesar is a teenager right now, and he predicts that this future monarch will gain power by promising to transcend and end the red/blue divide in America, just as Caesar transcended the class divide in Rome.

I recommend you listen to the whole thing. Two hours will go by quickly as these two brilliant men ruminate on the fate of our own Republic.

Imagine for a moment that you are watching the news, or reading a history textbook, and you learn about a particular nation at a particular point in time.

This nation has become increasingly controlled by powerful oligarchs who, rather than being loyal to their homeland, continuously sell it out in exchange for power and profit.

The oligarchs of this nation use the justice system to engage in personal vendettas against political opponents. Conversely, family and friends of the regime get away with nearly anything – including murder.

Journalists and activists who expose embarrassing secrets about the regime are either arrested and held without bail or forced into exile.

State media makes up the most absurd lies about the previous leader, while engaging in obvious propaganda in favor of the current regime, whom they favor.

The most recent election for leader of this regime was riddled with problems. Various localities, under the leadership of the victorious party, altered voting rules on the fly, without legislative oversight. However, state media denounced all accusations of fraud, and social media censored anyone who tried to bring attention to these irregularities.

Millions of people who supported the incumbent leader came out to protest in provincial capitals, finally culminating in a large demonstration at the national capitol building. State media claimed that this was an “insurrection”.

State media promoted false narratives of this “insurrection,” claiming that violent protestors assaulted and murdered police officers. Independent investigations found these claims to be false, but the incoming regime maintained their narrative.

The regime used the so-called “insurrection” as cover for arresting many dissidents, holding them without bail in solitary confinement. Those who were not arrested found themselves blacklisted from social media. The ousted president was also banned from social media at the behest of the ruling party.

Ask yourself what you would think about such a country if it turned out to be Russia, or China, or a third-world banana republic. Then ask yourself what it means that this is America in 2021. The United States of America censors journalists, rigs elections, and imprisons dissidents. We have become the very sort of authoritarian regime that we have spent the last 75 years mocking and denouncing. Can it happen here? It already did.

How then shall we live?

(I posted this on Locals the day of the verdict. Reposting here for posterity.)

Quick thoughts on the Chauvin verdict:

The rule of law in America is dead. Let the rule of the mob begin. Street thugs threatened violence, a sitting Congresswoman threatened violence, and the supposed President of the United States implicitly urged the jury to make the “correct” choice.

Patriotic Americans are learning that they cannot count on the police, the law, or the justice system to protect them and their natural rights. It is time to leave the cities, stock up on guns and ammo, and prepare to do what is necessary to ensure the safety of your families.

Move to red states, and to rural areas, but do not let down your guard. Leftists spend every waking moment plotting to turn cities like Bozeman, St. Louis, Tulsa, and Boise into Minneapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Portland. It is not enough to simply ask that we be left alone. We have to fight to maintain what we have, and begin to take back lost ground.

We say “the mob influenced the jury to vote the way they did” and mean that this was a travesty of justice. The leftists say the same thing, but with pride – communists have always used mob violence to achieve their political aims. Their aim right now is the complete destruction of Western Civilization.

Concepts such as the trial by jury, the common law, and the presumption of innocence are part of America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. The woke mob says that is “racist” and “white supremacist” and must be abolished. They would replace it with a legal system based on skin color and other intersectional values.

Weak men like Greg Gutfield celebrated the verdict because they think they can sacrifice Derek Chauvin to the woke mob in exchange for a return to normalcy. They misread the situation. There is no going back. This verdict will only encourage the woke mob to get more violent, and to try and take more ground. They are already saying tonight that this verdict is not enough. The Cultural Marxists will not rest until every acre of this country either bends the knee or is burned to the ground.

As for the police, this verdict shows that big city politicians do not have your backs. You can do everything you were trained to do and still be hung out to dry as a sacrifice to the woke mob. Every police officer in America should resign tonight. Leave the cities and move to red communities that appreciate and support patriotic law enforcement personnel.

Hopefully today’s events convince more normal conservatives that they cannot simply shut these things out and return to their football games and barbecue grills. The future of our nation, our people, rests in our hands, and we are running out of time to save it.

(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)

Allow me to tell you the story of a man who became President of the United States. This man was considered by many to be a political outsider, and he ran on a platform of ending foreign wars and reigning in an out-of-control federal bureaucracy. This President had a very contentious relationship with the media – in fact, they despised him, and used any excuse to attack him. The deep state bureaucracy fought him, the media slandered him, and the Democratic Party sought his impeachment. Leftist demonstrators rioted at the very mention of his name. In the end, they destroyed him, and his plans to drain the swamp were left unfinished.

The man of whom I am speaking is Richard Milhouse Nixon.

For most Americans of this generation, knowledge of President Richard Nixon begins and ends with Watergate. Most people know that he resigned in disgrace and assume that he must have been an especially bad man, and bad president, in order to do so. Yet a look at the presidency of Richard Nixon shows a series of remarkable victories and achievements in the face of some of the harshest opposition in American history. As I studied the man and his life, I began to wonder how history will treat another DC establishment iconoclast, President Donald Trump. As he left the White House for the last time as President, Nixon’s closest friend and confidant Henry Kissinger remarked that history would judge Nixon as one of the great Presidents, despite the scandal. Nixon replied, “That depends, Henry, on who writes the history.” Today I would like to write some history of a man who served as President, who fought the good fight against the Deep State, and who should remain an inspiration to patriotic Americans for ages to come, no matter what slant our history books put on him. Pay close attention and hear how the Nixon Administration compares with the now-completed Trump Administration. Pay attention to the tactics the Deep State used to destroy the former, and how they used the same tactics against the latter as well.

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this essay are from President Nixon’s memoirs.

Richard Nixon was not born into a rich and powerful family like his erstwhile friend and rival John F. Kennedy. The Nixons were a relatively poor Quaker family in California, before that state was known for wealth and glamor. Nixon’s father worked many jobs, including lemon farmer, rancher, and grocer. What savings the family had was depleted as two of Nixon’s brothers fought long and losing battles against tuberculosis. After high school, Nixon turned down a scholarship to Harvard and enrolled instead at nearby Whittier College so he could still help the family. After graduating at the top of his class with a degree in history, Nixon went to the East Coast to study law at Duke University. He worked his way through school, sharing a cramped dorm cabin that lacked running water.

Nixon returned home to practice law in California and married Thelma Ryan, who went by Pat, in 1940. The following year the couple went to Washington DC where Richard worked in the Office of Price Administration. Both his government service and Quaker background ensured that he need not worry about being drafted into the military after Pearl Harbor, nevertheless Nixon sought and received a naval commission and was eventually assigned to sea duty in the Pacific.

Richard Nixon served honorably for several years, working mostly in logistics. After his retirement from the Naval Reserve in 1946 he once more returned home to California, this time to begin his political career. The ambitious young man was a skilled debater and campaigner. He defeated the Democratic incumbent in California’s 12^th congressional district and returned to Washington in 1947 as a freshman Congressman. Fittingly, another World War II naval veteran joining the House of Representatives that year was none other than John Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Nixon quickly gained influence in the political world. He was the youngest member of the Herter Committee, which traveled to Europe in 1947 and recommended that President Truman implement the Marshall Plan to save Europe from both starvation and Communism. Nixon also distinguished himself on the House Un-American Activities Committee with his dogged investigation of Alger Hiss, a university professor who lied about his past associations with Communist groups in America. In just two terms in Congress, Nixon had gained enough renown to not only win a Senate seat in 1950, but also to be placed on the Republican presidential ticket in 1952 as General Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate.

Nixon faced the greatest test of his young career late in the 1952 campaign. After winning his Senate race, Nixon faced the challenge of paying for his constant travel and communication with supporters. Rather than try to pay for it from public funds, Nixon put together a committee to manage a donor fund, taking care not to allow any appearance of quid pro quo. However, the media, already irritated with Nixon for his strong anti-communist views, used it as a vehicle to attack him, demanding that Eisenhower boot him from the ticket. Ike’s advisors would have preferred that Nixon quietly withdraw, but he instead went on live television – still a very new medium – and gave a detailed account of his finances, successfully defending himself against accusations of quid pro quo or a personal slush fund. Nixon explained that the only personal gift he had received from his supporters was a dog named Checkers, already beloved by his two daughters. Public reaction to the “Checkers speech” was overwhelmingly positive. Eisenhower kept Nixon on the ticket, and they won a resounding victory in November.

At just forty years of age, Richard Nixon was one of the youngest Vice Presidents in American history. President Eisenhower utilized Nixon much more than previous administrations, sending him around the world on diplomatic missions. When Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, Nixon informally took on the duties of President. The 25^th Amendment had not yet been passed, so there was no clear direction as to how much a Vice President should take over when a President became incapacitated. Richard Nixon walked a fine line between doing what was necessary to ensure the smooth operation of the executive branch of the government while not appearing to be overly ambitious as Eisenhower recovered. The two men drafted a memorandum defining his role, which later served as the basis for the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution.

In 1958, Richard and Pat Nixon visited South America, where their motorcade was attacked by violent mobs in Peru and in Venezuela. Nixon was convinced that the mob violence was engineered by radical Communists. He later said, “The only way to deal with Communists is to stand up to them. Otherwise, they will exploit your politeness as weakness. They will try to make you afraid and then take advantage of your fears. Fear is the primary weapon of Communists.” Later, recalling the violent riots in South America, he said that “…the greatest danger a non-Communist nation faced was from a handful of activists and infiltrators who could impose their will on the whole society.” Anyone who paid attention to the summer of hate in 2020 will recognize that left-wing tactics have not changed.

Richard Nixon minced no words when talking about the threat of international Communism. Today, that threat has cloaked itself under different names such as antifa, Black Lives Matter, racial solidarity, environmentalism, feminism, and more. Yet their purpose remains the same: to dismantle Western Civilization in favor of their Marxist-Leninist utopia. In his memoirs, Nixon quotes John Foster Dulles, who served as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, saying, “Communism is stubborn for the wrong; let us be steadfast for the right. A capacity to change is indispensable. Equally indispensable is the capacity to hold fast to that which is good.” No matter what names they call themselves, the forces that seek to destroy our civilization must be opposed. We cannot give an inch to those who want to erase our history and steal our posterity.

In 1959, Vice President Nixon traveled to Moscow on a goodwill visit. Premier Nikita Khrushchev took Nixon on a tour of an exhibition showing the Russian people what life was like in America. By the time they arrived at the model kitchen, their friendly discussion had turned into a somewhat heated debate about the merits of capitalist free markets versus Communist central planning. At one point, Khrushchev predicted that Nixon’s children would someday live under Communism, to which Nixon retorted that Khrushchev’s grandchildren would live in freedom. In hindsight, perhaps both men were correct. Russia threw off Marxism-Leninism in 1991, and, though still autocratic, now have much more freedom than they did sixty years ago. America, on the other hand, is quickly embracing the same failed socialist philosophies that the people of Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela once came to here to flee.

Richard Nixon’s extensive foreign policy experience made him the natural choice to succeed President Eisenhower in 1960. He had the support of a united Republican Party, while the Democrats soon coalesced around Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. There were many similarities between the two men: both had come to Congress in 1947, both served in the Navy in World War II, and both represented the torch being passed to a new generation. However, the media clearly had a favorite dog in this fight. In his memoirs, Nixon describes “…the way so many reporters in 1960 became caught up in the excitement of Kennedy’s campaign and infected with his personal sense of mission.” This sounds familiar to anyone who has watched the way the press has covered Democratic politicians in the last half century. Remember Chris Matthews of MSNBC exclaiming that Barack Obama’s speech sent a “thrill” up his leg?

We like to think that our press reports the news objectively and allows the American people to decide how to interpret it, but that is obviously not the case. It is not true now, and it was not true in 1960 either. While journalists ask their favored politicians such as Obama the sorts of questions that teenage fangirls ask their boy band crushes, they treat Republicans with disdain. No matter how many times Donald Trump repudiated so-called white nationalists, white supremacists, or the KKK, journalists demanded he do it again. If he did not respond on cue, they published hysterical headlines about how he had yet again refused to disavow racism and hate. This tactic is not new. Richard Nixon received the same treatment, remarking once that “Reporters never tired of asking if I had repudiated the John Birch Society.”

With Joe Biden now in the White House, our supposedly objective press has gone into overdrive in their hagiography of the new administration. Slavish devotion on the part of our media was bad enough during the Obama years, but they now go out of their way to be as positive toward Biden as they were negative toward Trump. Journalists tend to see themselves as partners with Democratic politicians in their aim of changing the world, while Republican politicians are their enemies. At least today we have alternative channels of information, although they are quickly being censored by Big Tech. In 1960, there were no alternative channels – the big three TV networks told you the news the way it was. The media presented JFK as the golden boy, while Nixon, despite being of similar age and with more executive experience, was portrayed as stodgy and old-fashioned.

The famous TV debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy perfectly illustrates this point. According to some historians, radio listeners believed that Nixon had easily won the debate, while television viewers, who saw the photogenic Kennedy matched up against the recently ill Nixon, thought that JFK had won. The advent of television was the beginning of the end for well-spoken statesmen who were masters of rhetoric. Their kind would soon be eclipsed by good looking men skilled in the art of pithy one-liners and viral slogans. Image is everything now. It is no surprise that America has not elected a bald president since Dwight Eisenhower. The media anointed John Kennedy as the torchbearer of the new generation, and they have continued writing the history ever since. Nixon himself did not believe that televised debates were good for the political process. He wrote, “I doubt that they can ever serve a responsible role in defining the issues of a presidential campaign. Because of the nature of the medium, there will inevitably be a greater premium on showmanship than on statesmanship.” In the 1968 campaign, Nixon pointedly refused to debate his opponent on TV.

In any case, the election of 1960 was incredibly close. Kennedy won by razor-thin margins in both Texas and Illinois, and many at the time believed that there were shenanigans afoot in both states. Richard Nixon declined to challenge the results, believing that he could better serve his country by gracefully conceding than by engaging in a long challenge. We will probably never know the real truth of the election. Nixon’s concession did nothing to improve his image with the media, however. They still hated him, and when he ran for governor of California, they continued to attack him mercilessly.

Many on the left and right suggested that President Trump should have gracefully conceded in 2020, despite the obvious evidence of fraud and other election malfeasance. However, the example of Richard Nixon shows that he would have been damned if he did, and damned if he did not. Nixon chose to concede, while Trump chose to fight, yet both were savagely attacked by our media. If anything, Trump learned the lesson of 1960 that he might as well fight since they would destroy his reputation either way.

After losing the California governor’s race in 1962, Nixon told the press they would not have him to kick around anymore. He returned to private life after a decade and a half in politics, and it seemed that his story was over. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that there are no second acts in American life, but that often proves not to be the case. Donald Trump has had at least three acts – developer and tabloid staple in the 80s and 90s, reality TV host in the aughts, and then President of the United States after that. So it was with Richard Nixon. For many people, a biography consisting of a high-profile time in Congress, two terms as Vice President, and then a close and contested presidential campaign would have been enough to call it a day and ride off into the sunset. As much as his wife might have wished for a quiet retirement, Nixon could not sit back and watch his country fall to pieces.

After sitting out the disastrous Republican presidential campaign of 1964, Nixon returned to politics in the midst of one of the most eventful years in American history. 1968 saw the escalation of the Vietnam War with the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, race riots, and the violent protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The situation had gotten so bad that incumbent President Lyndon Johnson declined to run for reelection despite having won a massive landslide just four years earlier. While the Democratic Party was in disarray, Nixon quickly emerged as the consensus Republican nominee. “Nixon’s the One” was the rallying cry.

The 1968 presidential campaign was tumultuous. While the Democrats bore much of the ire of the antiwar protests, Nixon was not spared their vile rhetoric and dangerous threats. He saw a connection between the American protestors and the violent thugs who attacked him in South America just a few years before. “These were anarchistic mobs. As soon as the speeches began, they would start shouting, chanting simplistic and often obscene slogans, less to be heard themselves than to prevent the speaker from being heard. It was not an exercise in debate but a descent into hate.” As we have seen in the last few years, the tactics of socialists, communists, and anti-American activists have not changed. The same breed of angry communists that shouted down Richard Nixon also shouted down Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannapoulos on college campuses throughout the 2010s. They demanded free speech in the 1960s as a tactic to gain power, but now that they control our culture, they are quite happy to shut down our freedom of speech because it is a threat to their hegemony.

The 1960s taught the left that they could accomplish more social change in the streets than in the halls of Congress. The elder statesmen of the modern left are the very street thugs who committed violence and even murder in the name of their ideals back then. Bill Ayers, who set bombs in the 1960s, later became a respected college professor and even sponsored Barack Obama’s political career. Angela Davis was an accessory to the assassination of a judge, but now draws adoring crowds in college classrooms and is treated like a religious saint by the extreme left. Today, leftist politicians respond to leftist violence by agreeing with their aims and demanding social and political change. Senator Kamala Harris raised money to bail out rioters in the summer of 2020, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised their kinetic action. Even Republicans gave in – Senator Tim Scott introduced a bill to reform the supposedly racist police force in the wake of the George Floyd riots. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, understood the danger of allowing street thugs to direct our national conversation. “If a President—any President—allowed his course to be set by those who demonstrate, he would betray the trust of all the rest. Whatever the issue, to allow government policy to be made in the streets would destroy the democratic process. It would give the decision, not to the majority, and not to those with the strongest arguments, but to those with the loudest voices.”

Nixon was indeed the one in 1968, though the election ended up closer than it had seemed during the summer. He had campaigned on peace abroad and law and order at home, but soon found reigning in the federal bureaucracy to be almost as difficult as achieving peace in Vietnam. The federal government had been massively expanded by FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, and nearly all these executive employees were hardcore progressives. They did their best to stymie Nixon’s domestic policies and his desire to reform the bureaucracy. Like Donald Trump, Nixon found the business of governing a lot more difficult than simply giving orders and seeing them carried out.

Unlike Donald Trump, who was a true outsider to DC politics, Richard Nixon had been in government for more than two decades by the time he took the oath of office in 1969. However, he saw himself as an outsider of sorts:

“I won the 1968 election as a Washington insider, but with an outsider’s prejudices. The behind-the-scenes power structure in Washington is often called the “iron triangle”: a three-sided set of relationships composed of congressional lobbyists, congressional committee and subcommittee members and their staffs, and the bureaucrats in the various federal departments and agencies. These people tend to work with each other year after year regardless of changes in administrations; they form personal and professional associations and generally act in concert. I felt that one of the reasons I had been elected was my promise to break the hammerlock Washington holds over the money and decisions that affect American lives. I wanted to break open the iron triangle and start turning money and power back to the states and cities, and I wanted to throw the red tape out the window. But Washington is a city run primarily by Democrats and liberals, dominated by like-minded newspapers and other media, convinced of its superiority to other cities and other points of view; from the beginning I knew my chances of succeeding with the kinds of domestic reforms I had in mind were slim.”

What President Nixon described here is the Deep State, though not in those exact terms. It is the permanent bureaucracy that remains entrenched in Washington DC no matter who we elect as President or send to Congress. These bureaucrats think that they, not our elected officials, actually run our government. Nixon grew frustrated with his inability to expel the hardcore leftists in the bureaucracy: “If we don’t get rid of those people, they will either sabotage us from within, or they’ll just sit back on their well-paid asses and wait for the next election to bring back their old bosses.”

President Trump also came into office with plans to wrest control of our country from the permanent bureaucracy. In his Inaugural Address, he said, “What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” Once in the White House, however, Trump found it difficult to fight the Deep State, especially once the leadership of his own party refused to back him up. The GOP establishment had grown comfortable with the way things were, and did not take kindly to an outsider who wanted to shake things up.

Richard Nixon also grew impatient with how even Republican leaders did not take the problem of the Deep State seriously:

“Week after week I watched and listened while even the Cabinet members who had been in politics long enough to know better justified retaining Democrats in important positions in their departments for reasons of “morale” or in order to avoid controversy or unfavorable publicity. Looking back, I think that Eisenhower, because of his many years of experience with the Army, understood that the combination of human nature and the inertia of institutions will generally override even the most determined attempts to change them. Once the opportunity had passed, it was too late to correct this failure during my first term. I could only console myself with the determination that, if I were re-elected in 1972, I would not make the same mistake of leaving the initiative to individual Cabinet members.”

Donald Trump also saw too late that he had failed to do what was necessary to drain the swamp. After four years of leaks, insubordination, and dishonesty from his own Executive Branch staff, Trump planned to crack down harder in his second term, but it was not to be. The Deep State struck back hard, and stole the White House from this outsider that threatened their power.

It is difficult to run a government, much less reform it, when your own staffers are loyal to the other side. Imagine trying to fight a war when every enlisted man is fighting for the enemy. Both Nixon and Trump faced the issue of trying to control anonymous leaks from within the bureaucracy. Congressional and executive staffers were constantly leaking information to the press, in a selective manner that was meant to paint their side in a good light while attacking their opponents. LBJ had warned Nixon that this would happen. “The leaks began almost with the start of my administration, and before long I experienced firsthand the anger, worry, and frustration that Johnson had described. In the first five months of my presidency, at least twenty-one major stories based on leaks from materials in the NSC files appeared in New York and Washington newspapers.”

Leftist media will promote some leakers while condemning others, depending on who the leaks are intended to harm. Daniel Ellsburg, who published leaked files regarding the Vietnam War, has been portrayed as a saint by the press and Hollywood for fifty years. When Julian Assange of Wikileaks published information that embarrassed the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the Iraq War, the press similarly lionized him, but when he published stolen emails from the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, they turned on him, accusing him of being a Russian stooge, and celebrating his imprisonment without bail.

Nixon had worried that allowing Ellsburg to get away with publishing the so-called Pentagon Papers would be a green light to “every disgruntled bureaucrat in the government that he could leak anything he pleased while the government stood by.” The moment Donald Trump came into office in 2017, the members of the permanent bureaucracy began selective leaks intended to damage his ability to lead.

Not a month into the Trump Administration, anonymous leaks accused incoming National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn of lying about his contact with the Russian ambassador. A few months later, someone leaked that President Trump had used vulgar slang to refer to African nations in an off-the-record conversation. Newspapers later published leaked information about alleged collusion between President Trump and Russia, and FBI Director James Comey later admitted that he himself had leaked this in order to create demand for a Special Prosecutor – an endeavor in which he was successful.

The purpose of these leaks was to damage the Trump Administration as much as possible – both to sully its reputation in the eyes of the media and the American people, and to create the impression that Trump and his cabinet were engaged in criminal dishonesty.

President Nixon thought he could plug the leaks before they crippled his administration. He hired a team of young hotshot lawyers, including G. Gordon Liddy, to use clandestine methods to determine who was leaking secrets to the press. Many of these so-called “Plumbers” would end up indicted over the Watergate affair. In his memoirs, Nixon says that he authorized wiretaps on suspected leakers after being told by longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that this was standard procedure under the Johnson Administration. LBJ’s staffers later denied engaging in any such operations during their time in power, but I assume that every presidential administration bends the rules as much as possible. The lesson of Watergate was not that Nixon was an especially criminal president, but that the Deep State took a minor matter that was not vastly different from past administrations to destroy one that they despised.

One of biggest the reasons that the left hated Nixon was because he spoke plainly regarding their motives. Too many Republicans pretend that the disagreements between right and left are minor, and that most Democrats are good people operating in good faith. Nixon knew this was not the case:

“The extremists on the right of the Goldwater type would rather lose fighting for principle than to win by compromising principle. The extremists on the left, on the other hand, have usually shown that when the chips are down they will compromise principle in order to get power. This is why the communists usually beat the right-wingers, because the right-wingers are always fighting for principle, and the communists are willing to compromise principle until they get into power and then they, of course, crush out their opposition.”

The highest principle of the left is power. They will say anything, do anything, and even be anything to anyone in order to gain the power they seek. As the counterculture in the 1960s, the left demanded free speech and a seat at the table. Now that they have won the culture war, they reject the principles of freedom of speech and equal access to power. They have no problem censoring us and marginalizing us. Calling them hypocrites does no good because they do not care. They hold us to our own standards despite holding themselves to none. If conservatives are ever to win the battle of conserving our culture, they will need to stop pretending that the left acts in good faith. Nixon recognized this, perhaps too late, and Trump underestimated the willingness of the left to destroy the legitimacy of the government in order to oust him from power.

My friend Raheem Kassam of the National Pulse recently pointed out that despite screaming for four years about how the Trump Administration was breaking norms and precedents, they have been silent through two months of a regime that is anything but normal. Joe Biden is an obvious figurehead, completely removed from press access as well as the actual levers of power. As of this writing, he has yet to address Congress as most newly inaugurated presidents do. He finally gave a so-called press conference, more than two months into his term, and even that was a carefully choreographed affair with only the most pliable of media figures present. Our media assisted with a massive coup, one that involved misinformation, illegally changing voting procedures, and outright censorship, in order to get their party into office. Now they are covering the new regime with more slavish devotion than we ever saw with the Russian Pravda. This is the heart of left-wing political action – power at all costs.

Richard Nixon threatened that power. He had won a close election in 1968, but like Donald Trump at the beginning of 2020 he was cruising to a landslide in 1972 with plans to break the leftist stranglehold over our government and society.

“At the beginning of my second term, Congress, the bureaucracy, and the media were still working in concert to maintain the ideas and ideology of the traditional Eastern liberal establishment that had come down to 1973 through the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. Now I planned to give expression to the more conservative values and beliefs of the New Majority throughout the country and use my power to put some teeth into my New American Revolution.”

Nixon wrote in his diary at the time that he feared this would be the last chance to reign in the permanent bureaucracy before it became too large to control. I think the events of the last five years have sadly proven President Nixon correct.

Nixon’s attempts to reform the bureaucracy in his first term were stymied by the very entrenched interests he threatened, so he hoped that the overwhelming mandate of the American people that was seen in his 49-state landslide in 1972 would give him the political capital to take on these interests. Nixon recognized that the expansion of federal power in the New Deal and the Great Society only made the permanent bureaucracy stronger. “We finally moved to reorganize, reduce, or abolish the remaining behemoths of the Great Society that had done little to aid the poor, and which were now primarily serving the interests of the federal bureaucrats who administered them.”

Nixon grew frustrated with the seeming apathy in his own party regarding the permanent bureaucracy. “It was one thing for the Democrats to hold all four aces in Washington—the Congress, the bureaucracy, the majority of the media, and the formidable group of lawyers and power-brokers who operate behind the scenes in the city. It was another thing to give them the fifth ace of a timid opposition party.”

Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he had briefly considered creating a new party rather than deal with the spineless Republican leadership. This too sounds familiar, as many on the right have loudly condemned the Republican establishment for their own apathy regarding the contested 2020 election and proclaimed a desire to start a third party based on national populist principles. The story of Richard Nixon reminds us that we have been dealing with quislings on our own side for many years now.

Unfortunately, we all know what happened after the 1972 election. Rather than allowing President Nixon to eviscerate them, the Deep State turned on him, using the Watergate affair to destroy his administration. Most Americans know the basics of Watergate. Members of President Nixon’s reelection team broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. The Nixon White House attempted to cover up the burglary, and two years of investigations and hearings resulted in the resignation of the President of the United States. Yet the truth of the matter is much more complex than how it is portrayed in popular culture. The same journalists and Hollywood movie-makers who have told the story of the crooked Richard Nixon want us to believe that Donald Trump was a fascist white supremacist who nearly destroyed our country, and that all good people stood up to oppose him, narrowly saving America from his evil. As Nixon said, it depends on who writes the history.

Both Nixon and Trump are reminders of how complicated the life of a president really is. Unlike pundits, podcasters, or journalists, the President of the United States does not have the luxury of unlimited time to follow the news or research current events. His job is to oversee the executive branch of our government, to command our armed forces, to carry out diplomatic functions as head of state, and to act as leader of his political party. An effective president must delegate work to his staff, which means that whoever he picks as Chief of Staff will wield enormous power in his administration. For President Trump, men such as General John Kelly and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were able to control and filter the information that the president received. Knowing absolutely everything that goes on in the White House is simply impossible for one man. Conservatives quickly learned that the best way to get a message directly to President Trump was for Tucker Carlson to say it on his show.

So it was in the Nixon White House as well. President Nixon had appointed his friend and law partner John Mitchell as Attorney General, and then later the head of his reelection committee. Special advisor John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman also had enormous power to shape Nixon’s perspective on events. When the Watergate burglary occurred, Nixon trusted his staff’s assurances that it had nothing to do with anyone in the White House itself, and that it could be easily taken care of. When the scandal started growing, Nixon asked White House Counsel John Dean to get to the bottom of it, not knowing that Dean, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Mitchell were already up to their ears in the coverup. By the time Nixon himself realized how deep the problem went, his own words could already be used to implicate him in the coverup as well.

“We kept thinking that if we could only establish all the facts, then we could construct a way out of the situation that would minimize if not foreclose any possible criminal liability for the people involved. But we never felt confident of the facts, and every alternative course of action, from wholesale appearances before the grand jury to Special Prosecutors to presidential commissions, met with objections from one or the other of my aides and friends who suddenly found himself in a vulnerable position.”

The way Nixon tells it, he was just as adamant as the American people about figuring out the truth of the matter, but he seemed to have far too much faith in his own people. He trusted that Mitchell, Dean, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman were being honest and upfront with him, and probably waited too long to ask for their resignations. By protecting his men, Nixon would end up looking just as guilty as they were in the eyes of the American people. This perception gave the media and the Democratic Party just the excuse they were looking for. They could not beat Nixon in the election, they could not beat him in the polls, they could not beat him in the hearts of the silent majority, but they could beat him with Watergate.

“It was my belief then, and it is still my belief today, that the Democratic majority in Congress used the Watergate scandal as an excuse for indulging in a purposeful policy of ignoring and actually overriding the landslide mandate that my programs and philosophy had received in the 1972 election. Unfortunately, by the way I handled Watergate, I helped them do it.”

President Nixon eventually realized that the Watergate affair was not going to go away. His attempts to regain control of the country from what we now call the deep state bureaucracy had made him many enemies, and the press hated him with a passion not seen before or since – at least until the presidency of Donald Trump. Nixon saw that his enemies were going to use the Watergate scandal to utterly destroy him.

“And the instincts of twenty-five years in politics told me that I was up against no ordinary opposition. In this second term I had thrown down a gauntlet to Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the Washington establishment and challenged them to engage in epic battle.”

A DC judge convened a grand jury. The Democratic Senate began to hold hearings. White House Counsel John Dean stabbed Nixon in the back by testifying before Congress that the whole coverup had been masterminded by the president. The Department of Justice appointed a Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who turned the investigation into a fishing expedition.

“No White House in history could have survived the kind of operation Cox was planning. If he were determined to get me, as I was certain that he and his staff were, then given the terms of their charter it would be only a matter of time until they had bored like termites through the whole executive branch. The frustrating thing was that while I saw them as partisan zealots abusing the power I had given them in order to destroy me unfairly, the media presented them and the public largely perceived them as the keepers of the sacred flame of American justice against a wicked President and his corrupt administration.”

The press seized upon the Watergate affair as proof that their hated rival Nixon was a crook, and they ran with that narrative. The Senate hearings and Archibald Cox’s investigation turned the affair into a national circus as they desperately tried to find anything with which to destroy the president. They did not care about collateral damage.

Someone in the IRS leaked Nixon’s tax returns to the newspapers, and they published them without hesitation, implying all sorts of financial malfeasance that was later proven to be untrue. The IRS continues to be used as a political weapon today; recall that President Obama used the IRS to target right-wing groups during the Tea Party era. An IRS staffer later leaked some of President Trump’s tax returns to the left-wing Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, and the rest of the mainstream media predictably called it heroic.

The use of the IRS as a political tool frustrated Nixon: “The Democrats, while in office, had made little effort to camouflage their political pressure on the key government agencies. It seemed that even when they were out of power their supporters—particularly among the bureaucrats in the IRS—continued to do the job for them. I heard numerous reports—clearly too frequent to be coincidental—of close personal and political friends who had been subjected to constant and, in my view, vindictive, investigation by the IRS since the time I lost to Kennedy in 1960.”

The Deep State bureaucracy was mobilized not only against Nixon and Trump themselves, but against their families, their friends, and their supporters. President Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo faced hours of interrogation and testimony into his personal dealings, even those that had nothing to do with Nixon himself. It was as if the bureaucracy wanted to make examples out of the supporters of disfavored presidents, to warn the American people not to associate with them. President Trump’s son Eric recently spoke about the way the system came after them and their families. “I don’t think people realize what the Democrats tried to do to us. The way they weaponized the system. I got hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds of subpoenas. Every single day. The way they weaponized the legal system against us, the way they still do it. The way they are just out for blood. Anything they could do to take down our family, our friends. Anybody who came close to us.”

Nixon realized that Cox and his team were determined to destroy him by hook or by crook. He made the decision to fire the Special Prosecutor on Saturday, October 20, 1973. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned in protest rather than carry out the order, and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus did the same. The number three man in the Department of Justice, Solicitor General Robert Bork, disagreed with Nixon’s decision but believed he had the constitutional authority to do so, and so he carried out the order and fired Archibald Cox. Bork, of course, would later be nominated to the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987, but Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden would torpedo the nomination rather than allow a conservative constitutional scholar on the bench.

“Although I had been prepared for a major and adverse reaction to Cox’s firing, I was taken by surprise by the ferocious intensity of the reaction that actually occurred. For the first time I recognized the depth of the impact Watergate had been having on America; I suddenly realized how deeply its acid had eaten into the nation’s grain. As I learned of the almost hysterical reactions of otherwise sensible and responsible people to this Saturday night’s events, I realized how few people were able to see things from my perspective, how badly frayed the nerves of the American public had become. To the extent that I had not been aware of this situation, my actions were the result of serious miscalculation. But to the extent that it was simply intolerable to continue with Cox as Special Prosecutor, I felt I had no other option than to act as I did.”

Many historians believe that firing the Special Prosecutor sealed Richard Nixon’s fate. Of course, by the time Nixon fired Cox, he was already politically dead. Had he allowed him to continue eviscerating the White House in the name of finding the truth, he eventually would have come up with some crime with which to hang the president. It was a witch hunt, a fishing expedition, an attempt to fulfil the narrative that the president was a criminal. Compare and contrast Nixon’s experience with a Special Prosecutor with that of President Trump. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the Democrats and their media allies took action to cripple the new administration before it got off the ground. Crooked FBI agents used a perjury trap to oust Trump’s National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn. New Attorney General Jeff Sessions, still a southern gentleman who played by the rules and assumed his opponents were acting in good faith, recused himself from the investigation into Trump’s alleged connections with Russia. His deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a Special Prosecutor. Mueller would spend the next two years working with a team of anti-Trump partisans on a witch hunt not too different from that of Archibald Cox. Mueller’s appointment had been prompted after President Trump fired corrupt FBI Director James Comey, who as you remember had admitted to leaking information intended to damage the president. The media treated this firing as if it were Trump’s own Saturday Night Massacre, and warned that he would just end up firing Mueller as well. A bipartisan group in Congress even introduced legislation that would prevent Trump from exercising such control over an executive branch employee.

President Trump surely knew his history; he had seen the fallout that occurred when Nixon fired Archibald Cox, so he refrained from firing Mueller and let him complete his investigation. The crooked, senile old man let his staff continue investigating for months after he determined that there was no evidence of collusion with Russia. They managed to get indictments against tertiary officials such as Paul Manafort and Roger Stone for things that had nothing to do with President Trump. Mueller and his team deliberately withheld their findings until after the 2018 midterm elections, knowing that the uncertainty would help Democrats in close races. It worked, and the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 2010.

Despite this apparent exoneration, the media and their Democratic allies continued the witch hunt by any means necessary. Deep state toadies Eric Ciaramella and Alexander Vindman leaked information suggesting that Trump engaged in political quid pro quo in a phone call with the President of Ukraine. Despite Trump quickly releasing the official transcripts of the call that completely refuted these accusations, the Democratic House nevertheless impeached the president in one of the most insane farces our government has ever engaged in. President Trump was exonerated by the GOP Senate, but the years of investigations and attacks severely curtailed his ability to lead the nation. While Trump had some successes in foreign policy, namely détente with North Korea and peace in the Middle East, his bold plan to drain the deep state swamp was handicapped, just as Nixon’s was. The lesson here is that once the deep state decides to attack a president, there is little he can do to stop them. Once a Special Prosecutor is appointed, a Republican president does not have many viable options. He either allows him to waste time and resources on a witch hunt that will eventually turn up something the media can turn into a scandal, or he fires him and brings down the wrath of the media for supposedly interfering in a nonpartisan investigation.

In the leadup to his inauguration, President Trump had denounced the deep state, saying that the so-called intelligence community was out of control. Powerful Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York mocked him, saying “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Indeed, they did.

The final shoe to drop in the Watergate scandal was the White House tapes. According to Nixon, President Johnson had used a secret taping system, as had Kennedy before him, to record certain conversations in the White House for the benefit of posterity. JFK, for example, had secretly recorded Air Force General Curtis LeMay and others speaking candidly about their disappointment with Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Nixon thought this was a great idea. Not only would he have access to unaltered records of what was actually said, perhaps as a way to counter selective leaks to the press, but future historians would have access to those records as well. Unfortunately, a staffer let slip the existence of the taping system during Senate hearings on Watergate, and the race was on to subpoena those tapes. In his memoirs, Nixon wonders if he should have destroyed the tapes before a subpoena was issued, but that would probably have been just as harmful to his cause as the tapes themselves. The president fought all the way to the Supreme Court, citing privacy and executive privilege, but the Court was in no mood to defer to a president in his situation. They demanded he turn over the tapes, and once he did, they revealed that Nixon had been working to mitigate the political fallout from Watergate far earlier than he had admitted to the public. The press called it the “smoking gun”.

Richard Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974, preferring to spare the country the trauma of enduring a presidential impeachment. He spent the remaining twenty years of his life reforming his image as an elder statesman of the Republican Party and as one of the leading diplomatic minds in America. Hollywood and news media continue to treat him as the ultimate American villain, however, and continue making movies and stories about the brave reporters who took him down. John Dean, the White House attorney who took part in the coverup, then stabbed Nixon in the back, spent the Bush years as mainstream media’s favorite “Republican” who could always be counted on to trash conservatives.

There is a striking similarity between Nixon and Trump, and that is in their foreign policy successes. President Nixon oversaw an end to the Vietnam War, the beginning of détente with the Soviet Union, and the opening of relations with China after more than twenty years of isolation. President Trump was the first American president to meet with the leader of North Korea, successfully challenged China on trade, and had more success with peace in the Middle East than any US president in generations. Yet neither man received credit for these victories. The deep state and international globalist elites do not want peace, because they gain more power and influence through endless low-level war. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for absolutely no reason, and then continued our military adventures in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, using unmanned drones to kill hundreds if not thousands of people. Nixon too did not get much respect for his foreign policy. Despite opposition to the Vietnam War being the motivating factor for a decade of left-wing protests, the moment the war ended the same protestors continued to use any excuse to attack the president. The specter of Watergate has drowned out Nixon’s foreign policy in the annals of history.

Time will tell how history will treat Donald J. Trump. As Nixon said, it depends on who writes the history. Trump did not resign, rather he had his presidency stolen in a series of coups over the course of the fateful year of 2020. None of the scandals dreamed up by our hostile media managed to land on him, and he survived an unprecedented two impeachments. Unlike Nixon, who was on tape saying things that were contrary to what he said the American people, the Democrats and their media allies were never able to find a “smoking gun” against Trump. Their much-vaunted dossier turned out to be fiction and innuendo, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded his investigation with no evidence that Trump had done anything wrong or illegal.

Nevertheless, the media painted President Trump’s departure from the White House as if they had successfully defeated the worst fascist Nazi in American history. They are writing their skewed history as we speak. When the border wall is inevitably torn down, our media will treat it like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. When the Southern District of New York indicts Trump for whatever nonsense they conjure up, media will treat it like the Nuremburg Trials. They have already decided on their narrative. They will not allow Trump to present himself as an elder statesman as Nixon did. They will do their best to put him in jail, or worse, and they will do their best to brand as criminal insurrectionists anyone who supported him. They have already made their lists.

Richard Nixon’s biggest regret was watching his friends and family endure horrific treatment by the media and the Democrats simply for the crime of being his friends and family. The constant drumbeat of accusations from the media and the left, along with the ability of the Special Counsel and the Senate committees to subpoena anything and everything had a chilling effect on Nixon’s relationships. “Too many who had tried to defend me in the past had been burned, and many no longer felt sufficiently confident or motivated to take further risks for me.”

See again how the left uses this same tactic today. They used every lever of power at their disposal to make life miserable not only for President Trump, but for anyone who supported or even associated with him. Robert Mueller threw Paul Manafort in prison for the same crimes that John Podesta got away with. The FBI sent swat teams and CNN cameramen to Roger Stone’s house in an early-morning raid, as if a man near seventy years old was going to resist arrest. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski threatened to dox a random young man who made a meme of Trump punching the CNN logo. These are not the actions of an objective media, but one that considers itself an omnipotent ruling class.

Not only has American news media has appointed itself the fourth branch of government, but they also seem to think they rule the other three. According to Nixon’s memoirs, one of the Congressmen who was most outspoken in favor of impeachment later said that Nixon would never have been forced from office if the press did not desire it. Nixon also pointed out that after months of leaks, innuendo, and hysterical headlines, the media needed to destroy him to save their own credibility. Rumors about Nixon’s complicity in the scandal were front page above-the-fold headlines, while vindication was always buried on page thirty-nine. When we see the media use this same play today, remember that it is the same playbook they have been using for more than fifty years.

I suggest that there are three lessons to take away from the stories of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump:

The first lesson is that this war for the soul of America has been going on for far longer than we like to think. The deep state did not suddenly spring to life during the Obama Administration, and globalist control of American government is not a recent development. Nixon saw it, tried to stop it, and they destroyed him. The relative success of the Reagan Administration might have lulled us into a false sense of security regarding the danger posed by the permanent bureaucracy. The Deep State is content to work with any president, Republican or Democrat, so long as he carries out their will and does not threaten their power.

The second lesson is that the deep state will absolutely destroy anyone who threatens their power. Republican voters and pundits who think a kinder, gentler Trump might have had more success are fooling themselves – Trump’s fighting instinct is the only reason he had as much success as he did. Every political figure has potential scandals that can be turned into crises anytime the deep state and media want to – look at how the knives are coming out for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo now that they have decided to replace him with someone more compliant to their globalist aims. We should not look at the media narratives about Nixon and Trump and come away believing that they were crooks, rather that they were taking fire because they were over the target.

Finally, the most important lesson to take away from Nixon and Trump is that the right president will not necessarily save us. The problems of America have grown too large for one man to fix on his own. Repairing the damage done to the American soul by globalism and the deep state must start at the ground up, not the top down. Already I see people on the right debating who should run for president in 2024. Will Trump come back? What about Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida or Kristi Noem of South Dakota? Maybe a media personality like Tucker Carlson, or a billionaire like Peter Thiel. In my opinion, this is all an exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. America is a sinking ship, and Trump – for all his passion, all his instincts, all his accomplishments – only delayed the inevitable, and was in the end outmaneuvered by the very deep state swamp he promised to drain. What else can we expect from a president?

Despite the bully pulpit, executive orders, and the biggest megaphone in the world, the office of President of the United States is not all-powerful. Many on the right were disappointed that President Trump did not do more to stop the steal in 2020, such as declaring martial law or invoking the Insurrection Act. However, who knows what would have happened if he had tried? Would his staff have obeyed his orders? Would the military have carried out his commands? Would the Congress have allowed him to proceed, or would they have immediately impeached and convicted him?

Richard Nixon came into office in 1968, determined to dismantle the permanent bureaucracy that had grown through thirty-five years of depression, war, and tumult, yet rather than draining that swamp, he was consumed by it. Donald Trump came into office in 2016, when the deep state had been in power for the better part of a century, and he too fell short. Trump, like Nixon before him, did the best he could with the information and tools he had available to him, and it still was not enough.

History shows that no empire lasts forever, and America’s time is almost up. We cannot escape the fate of the Romans, the Mongols, the Ottomans, or the British. Like Rome in the 5^th century, the real power is not the titular emperor – or president – but instead the shadows behind the scenes who have the power to raise a man to high office, or to destroy him. We must stop looking for rescue from the White House, or from the DC establishment. Our temporal salvation will not come from the right person moving in to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but when each and every one of us steps up to protect our families, our communities, and our states from the tyranny emanating out of Washington DC. You will do a lot more good for your country and your posterity by getting involved in local politics than you will by donating to a Trump 2024 campaign fund. Nobody is coming to save us. Your future is in your hands.

On January 20th, 2021, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. took the oath of office as the 46th President of the United States.

However, all evidence shows that he is not the actual leader of this country:

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking calls with foreign heads of state.

White House staffers have cut video feeds to prevent Mr. Biden from facing unscripted questions.

First Lady Jill Biden is always standing by to make sure her husband sticks to the talking points.

Even prior to the election, many on both the right and the left worried about Mr. Biden’s apparent cognitive decline. Yet the Democratic Party cleared the field and presented Mr. Biden as the only alternative to a second term for President Donald Trump.

This issue transcends politics. Whether they agree with his policies are not, the American people deserve to know that the person who swore to protect and defend the Constitution is actually the person who is making the high-level decisions that affect millions of lives throughout the world. The President of the United States is supposed to be a leader, not only of the government but of his party, but the Democratic Party is treating Joe Biden as a figurehead.

President Harry Truman famously had a sign on the oval office desk that said, “The buck stops here.” Today, we have no idea where the buck stops. Who is making decisions about policy in the White House? Who is reviewing the dozens of executive orders that Mr. Biden has signed since his inauguration? Who is briefing Press Secretary Jen Psaki before her daily press conferences? Is it Vice President Harris? Secretary of State Anthony Blinken? Chief of Staff Ron Klain? Perhaps First Lady Dr. Jill Biden?

If, God forbid, America should face invasion or some other major catastrophe, who will make the ultimate decision about how to react? In the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton released an ad claiming that she would be prepared to take an emergency call at 3:00 am. Today, we cannot be sure that Mr. Biden is prepared to take emergency calls at 3:00 pm.

On Jesse Kelly‘s radio show last week, Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson suggested not only that Psaki had almost zero access to Mr. Biden, but that former Obama Administration official Susan Rice was running the show behind the scenes. I do not remember Rice placing herself before the American people as a candidate for the highest office in the land, do you?

The only place we can be absolutely sure the buck is not stopping is at the desk of President Joe Biden himself.

• Last week, Mr. Biden seemingly forgot both the name of his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as well as that of the Pentagon.
• During the campaign, Mr. Biden famously forgot the words to the Declaration of Independence – or, as he called it, “you know, the thing.”

Mr. Biden has been in office for nearly two months but has yet to face the media in a press conference. His predecessor, on the other hand, routinely spent hours answering questions from hostile reporters One naturally wonders if the Biden Administration fears that he is simply not capable of conducting a press conference on his own. If Joe Biden is not running the show, then who is?

When President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig caused a minor media tempest when he told reporters that he was “in control” at the White House, pending the return of Vice President Bush. Today, however, even in the face of tremendous evidence that President Biden is most assuredly not in control of his White House, the administration and their media allies continue to pretend that he is. Every day, Press Secretary Jen Psaki explains that the president is monitoring this situation or reviewing that one, as if everything is normal. Yet it is clearly not normal.

A figurehead president is not entirely unprecedented. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke after returning home from negotiations to end World War I. Mr. Wilson spent several months in bed, being seen only by a handful of trusted officials as well as his wife, First Lady Edith Wilson. Many believe that Mrs. Wilson was actually running the White House at this time, as she carried messages back and forth to her bedridden husband.

Vice President Thomas Marshall refused to declare President Wilson incapacitated, which would have allowed him to assume the duties of Acting President, perhaps for fear of appearing overambitious.

The presidency has changed greatly since 1919. In addition to his duties as Head of State, the President sits atop a vast federal bureaucracy that has immense influence over the daily lives of the American people. More importantly, however, every president since Harry Truman has carried the awesome responsibility for choosing if and when to use nuclear weapons. Cognizant of this, the Democratic Congress recently urged the White House to consider removing sole responsibility for America’s nuclear arsenal from the president. According to Politico, nearly three dozen Democrats wrote a letter suggesting that “…vesting one person with this authority entails real risks.” This has been true ever since the invention of atomic weapons – why bring it up now?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced a bill last autumn that would establish a committee that would have the authority to declare a president incapacitated and incapable of performing his duties, allowing the Vice President to assume the role of Acting President. Many in the media assumed that this was proposal was an attack on President Trump, who had recently been diagnosed with Covid-19, but in reality, this was laying the groundwork for a Joe Biden administration. “This is not about President Trump,” Pelosi stated at the time.

President Joe Biden is clearly not able to perform the duties required of his office. Everyone knows it, but the Democrats and the media continue to engage in a dubious charade. The American people deserve to know who is making decisions that will set the course of our country for the next four years, and more. The American people deserve a leader who is accountable to the voters, and that leader is the duly inaugurated President of the United States, not a shadowy group of staffers and bureaucrats who have propped up Mr. Biden like a puppet. It is time to tell the American people the truth about where the buck is stopping in the White House.

The balance of power in the American government has shifted over the course of history between an imperial presidency and an all-powerful Congress. Yet today we have an Executive Branch that is all-powerful, as Congress has abdicated its lawmaking responsibilities, but the head of that branch, the President of the United States, is a mere figurehead for the deep state bureaucracy. The Oval Office is vacant, and the decline and fall of America continues to accelerate.

(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)

Millions of conservatives throughout America are feeling disappointed, dismayed, and even demoralized in the wake of President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. I say “loss,” of course, but we all know the truth: it was a coup, from beginning to end. Everyone wants to know what we can do now. Many on the right are already trying to figure out how to get our guy back in the White House in 2024, whether it is Donald Trump himself, or someone else. If we can elect a true conservative, they say, then we still have a chance to save our country. However, I suggest that the lesson we must learned from the presidency of Donald Trump is that our nation has already fallen too far for one man to fix. Furthermore, the so-called conservative movement shoulders much of the blame for the decline and fall of our nation.

Many on the right have long complained that the Republican Party does not know how to win. In October 2016, when Republican leaders began turning on Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood tapes were leaked, Trump tweeted, “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win – I will teach them!” And teach them he did, winning a victory nobody thought possible. Even then, however, the Republican Party wasted another chance to fix our country.

While the Democrats use electoral victories to increase their own power, Republicans seem to have no idea what to do once they are in office. Sure, they speak boldly while they are in the minority – calling for term limits, repealing Obamacare, and challenging the progressive assumptions that guide our government. Yet the moment they are in power, they find themselves unable to put their money where their mouths are. A charitable explanation might be that as a small-government party, the GOP is naturally averse to anything that increases the power of government. But government power has grown inexorably no matter which party holds the reigns. The GOP seems to have little problem with government power for its own sake, they are just afraid to use it. For example, Senator John McCain campaigned for years on repealing Obamacare, but once the GOP controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2017, he joined with his Democrat friends to kill that very repeal. Why?

I contend that half a century in the political wilderness killed the fighting spirit of the Republican Party. Before the Great Depression, the GOP was stalwart and confident. Afterward, they became so focused on militarism and the Cold War that they allowed the left to run roughshod through our culture. By the 1990s, Republicans had fully adopted the globalist agenda, and after 9/11 they replaced Cold War militarism with the Great War on Terror.

Even worse, they adopted the very premise of the left: that history is naturally progressive. Consider the language used by progressive leftists. They often accuse us of being on “the wrong side of history,” they warn that our policies will “turn back the clock,” and that we impede social progress. This language reveals their worldview. They believe that history naturally trends toward their preferred positions and that we must simply keep up with the times. For decades, the GOP has allowed the Democrats to set the terms of every discussion and set the limits of every debate. The Republican Party of today is unable to articulate any reason for its own existence, preferring to slow the spread of progressivism rather than return us to a point in history before leftist gains. It is as if they see so-called progress as inevitable, so they do their best to manage it rather than to oppose it outright.

Such so-called progress has led to enormous social changes in a very short period of time. Consider how quickly we lost the debate over gay marriage. In the late 1990s, even the most outspoken homosexual activists were claiming that they did not want to force their view of marriage on the country, they merely wanted the same economic and social benefits that our laws accorded to married couples. In 2008, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton claimed that they wanted marriage to remain defined as being between a man and a woman. Yet just seven years later, the Supreme Court imposed gay marriage on the entire country, and President Obama celebrated by lighting up the White House in the colors of the gay pride flag. Once the battle over gay marriage had been won, the left immediately moved to the next battle, and are now working hard to normalize transgenderism.

Rather than trying to return society to a place of sanity, conservatives instead simply defend the progressive gains of the previous generation. The same conservatives who once protested gay marriage now defend it. Charlie Kirk’s TP USA celebrated when the Trump Administration convinced the government of Botswana to decriminalize homosexuality. Some conservative organizations have proudly promoted a Trump-supporting drag queen, as if that is a sign of victory over the degenerate left. Herein lies the fatal flaw of conservatism: they can only defend the status quo. They have little will or ability to advocate for a return to a better time, because they agree with the left that the past was racist, sexist, exclusionary, and bigoted. By adopting the premises of the left, conservatism failed before it ever began.

In 1955, William F. Buckley founded the conservative newsmagazine National Review with the intention to “stand athwart history, yelling stop.” One can argue that the modern conservative movement began at this moment. The Cold War was in full swing and the world, as well as our country, was being divided between free market capitalists on one side and Marxist-Leninist Communism on the other. Buckley defined conservatism as opposition to Communism, belief in small government, and resistance to world government.

However, neither National Review nor the conservative movement in general have done a particularly good job of standing athwart history and yelling stop. Instead, they stand athwart history and speak of compromise, slowing down, and not changing society too fast. They try to manage our leftward slide, rather than stop it, much less reverse it.

By the 1960s, few Republicans were willing to criticize the New Deal, nor suggest that we should roll back its programs. By the 1980s, even Ronald Reagan was unwilling or unable to reverse the Great Society programs of the 1960s. One could argue that he was constrained by a Democratic Congress, but that only supports my point that the Republican Party had forgotten how to win. Conservatives tend to speak boldly while in the minority – they even suggested erasing several cabinet positions during the 1980s – but once in power they are unwilling to rock the boat. The GOP has had control of both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency only four times since the Great Depression: They had a very slim majority during President Eisenhower’s first term, but they frittered away their political capital on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Communist agents in the government. (While McCarthy has, in my opinion, been proven largely right about Communist infiltration, the way he went about his investigation alienated his fellow Senators as well as many Americans.)

The GOP would not control both houses of Congress again until 1994 during the Clinton administration, when they won a surprise victory on the back of Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America. They briefly lost the Senate in 2000, despite winning the presidency, when Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched his party affiliation. However, President Bush was able to count on GOP control of Congress from 2003 to 2007. During this time, he just passed one piece of major legislation, a tax cut, but was unable to make any progress on other campaign promises such as Social Security reform or school choice, as the Great War on Terror took up all of the GOP’s political capital. Besides, the federal bureaucracy had grown far too large and resistant to reform, and the American people had come to count on entitlements such as Social Security. The Republican Party was completely unwilling to touch anything related to the Great Society, much less the New Deal. These things that had once been correctly seen as examples of tremendous government overreach were now taken for granted as part of the fabric of American life.

Finally, the Republican Party controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency one last time in 2017. President Trump had a Republican majority in Congress, but he faced a party leadership that was unwilling to work for his agenda. By now, the GOP had evolved into the right-hand side of the globalist uniparty, and so they fought his attempts to secure the southern border, limit refugees and immigration, fight a trade war with China, and withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and Syria. The Republican Congress could not even agree to repeal Obamacare, an issue upon which many of them had campaigned. Instead, they passed another tax cut, and promptly lost the House in 2018, and then the Senate in 2020.

The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and the presidency, and I predict that they will not be so hesitant to use their power. Everything on their agenda for the next two years is designed to consolidate their control of our society. HR1, currently being debated in Congress, would bring control of our elections under the federal government, preventing states from instituting voter ID or other systems to prevent fraud. Many in the Democratic Party advocate for packing the Supreme Court and the District Courts, greatly expanding their power over the interpretation of our laws. They also plan to extend statehood to Washington DC and Puerto Rico, which would give the Democrats four more Senators, ensuring their permanent majority.

The Democrats are used to winning and consider themselves to be the rightful lords of our nation – they see power as their birthright. If they happen to lose an election, Democrats and their friends in the media operate on the assumption that the Republicans must have cheated. To them, “democracy” means “Democrats winning”. Recall that leftists in Wisconsin attempted to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2012, only to see the governor actually increase his vote count from two years before. Rather than accepting the fact that they had been outvoted, leftist activists cried foul. One young man told a reporter that, “democracy died tonight!”

Much hay was made in the media over some Republican Congressmen and Senators objecting to the electoral vote count this year, but the Democrats had objected to every Republican presidential victory since the year 2000 with barely a peep from our media. The last Republican president that the left accepted as legitimate was George H.W. Bush, who was elected in 1988.

Why do elected officials on both sides of the aisle seem to think that the natural order of things is for the Democrats to be in the majority while the GOP remains principled losers? Why have conservatives implicitly adopted the premise of the left that history is naturally progressive?

Many of us on the right who study history consider Woodrow Wilson to be one of our worst presidents. I suggest that many problems America faces today were built upon the foundation of Wilson’s administration. The income tax, direct election of Senators, and the Federal Reserve all came about during his first term. He involved us in a European war, not because our own interests were at stake but because he saw it as an opportunity to shape a new world order. Wilson was the first American president to leave our country during his administration when he went to France to take part in negotiation for the Treaty of Versailles. He proclaimed that his goal was to “make the world safe for democracy.” He issued a statement containing the fourteen points upon which he intended to build his new world order, including the creation of a League of Nations that would have the ability to maintain peace in the world.

The Republican Congress back home saw things differently, however. Led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the GOP prevented ratification of the treaty and refused to allow the United States to enter the League of Nations. For all of Wilson’s high-minded talk, the Congress still saw themselves as American patriots, not citizens of the world. Their job was to protect and nurture the American people, not use their position to try to maintain peace in a world gone mad. Subordinating American sovereignty to any international body, no matter how well-intentioned, was unthinkable.

On the domestic side, Wilson indulged in every depraved characteristic that we have come to identify with authoritarian progressives. Using the war as an excuse, he censored the mail, imprisoned dissidents and journalists, and compelled private industry to shift production to military material. However, the Republican Party would not allow this tyranny to continue indefinitely. In the 1920 presidential campaign, Ohio Senator Warren Harding won a landslide victory after campaigning on a “return to normalcy”. This marked the first of three consecutive Republican victories, a record that has only been equaled once since. Under the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations, America returned to normalcy. The overreaches of the Wilson administration were erased, political prisoners were released, and the government stopped meddling in the economy. We even passed the 1924 Immigration Act, severely curtailing the number of foreigners allowed to enter to the United States. This pause allowed the previous three generations of immigrants to fully assimilate into a strong American culture that would persist for decades afterward.

The United States was able to survive the upheavals brought about by Wilson’s entry into World War I and his domestic tyranny because the Republican Party still had enough courage and political will to fight back. However, the seeds had been planted for many of the problems our nation faced over the next century. The 16th and 17th amendments and the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 had given the government tremendous power that could easily be abused during the next economic or political crisis. The 1930s provided both.

High school history textbooks like to contrast Herbert Hoover’s response to the onset of the Great Depression with Franklin Roosevelt’s by saying that Hoover adopted a so-called laissez-faire attitude of leaving the economy alone to fix itself while FDR used the power of government to fix the problem and save the American people. Reality was not so black and white.

Herbert Hoover was an engineer by trade. He had risen to prominence as a businessman during the Great War when he led a commission to provide food for millions of civilians left destitute by the ravages of war. He served as Wilson’s so-called Food Czar, then Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge. His background was not laissez-faire, rather he was one who thought that every problem had a solution. Contrary to what textbooks now say, FDR actually criticized Hoover in the 1932 presidential campaign for interfering too much in the economy.

The die was cast, however, and FDR won the White House in a landslide. The new president was determined not to let a crisis go to waste. Roosevelt’s New Deal completely redefined the role of the American government. The central planning that Woodrow Wilson got away with during World War I become the norm. The federal government went from being distant and rarely important to our daily lives to an ever-present help in our time of trouble. New technology assisted this transformation, as radio allowed President Roosevelt to speak directly to the American people. Despite the Depression continuing into 1936, he was able to convince the American people that he remained the only man who could possibly fix the problem and so won a second term with an even greater landslide.

The role of government was redefined from simply protecting our natural rights to taking care of our every need. FDR himself explained this new role when he spoke of the so-called “four freedoms” in 1941. The first two, freedom of speech and freedom of worship, were already guaranteed by the 1st amendment, but the other two, freedom from want and freedom from fear, required a government that had nearly unlimited power and authority to achieve. As many conservative commentators have pointed out through the years, a government large enough to give you whatever you need is large enough to take everything away.

The second great crisis of FDR’s administration was, of course, World War II. The American people strongly favored isolationism, and Congress passed a Neutrality Act in 1937 as war loomed ever closer on the European horizon. After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, President Roosevelt convinced Congress to amend the Act for what he called “Cash and Carry,” which allowed the US to sell military equipment to the Allies. By 1941, with France on the brink of defeat, Roosevelt and his Democratic Party wanted to amend the Act even further, proposing something called “Lend-Lease” which would allow the US to “lend” military equipment, even warships, to Britain without payment. Republicans in Congress strongly opposed this measure, warning that it would inevitably drag the nation into the war, but after ten years of the New Deal the GOP was very much a minority party. Lend-Lease passed along party lines, and the US was drawn further toward an apocalyptic war.

Unfortunately for the American people, we never experienced a return to normalcy after the massive reorganization of our society due to the New Deal and World War II. The GOP took control of Congress in 1946, but their majority was short-lived. They won the White House in 1952 behind General Dwight Eisenhower, but by then the redefinition of government was etched in stone. At home, the government was now a benevolent caretaker for the American people, and in foreign affairs, the United States was the guardian of the new world order born out of World War II.

From 1932 through 1948, the Democratic Party won the White House five consecutive times. Even during President Eisenhower’s eight years in office during the 1950s he often had to contend with Democratic control of the House, the Senate, or both. I suggest that these long decades of being in the minority left a lasting mark on the psyche of the Republican Party. In 1937, for example, the Democratic majority in the Senate was an astounding 75 to 17. By the 1950s, few Republicans, if any, remained from the caucus that was willing to stand up to Woodrow Wilson’s globalist ideas. Few Republicans during the Eisenhower administration were willing to criticize the New Deal or suggest that it should be dismantled, nor were they were willing to stop the militarization of America and the new focus on maintaining the postwar world order. Ike himself warned of the growing power of the military/industrial complex in his farewell address in 1961, but both his would-be successors had campaigned on expanding the use of American blood and treasure to save the world from Communism. This position inexorably drew Presidents Kennedy and Johnson into the quagmire that was Vietnam.

The Vietnam War is where our current ideological battle lines were drawn, and the decisions we made then continue to echo more than half a century later. Whereas World War II remains the “good war” in popular culture, Vietnam is seen as unnecessary at best, and even by some as outright villainy by the United States. The Baby Boomers had grown up in the relative peace of the late 1940s and 1950s, hearing tales told of the great things their fathers had done fighting in France, Italy, and the Pacific, as well as the high ideals for which they fought. Many enlisted in the military out of sense of patriotism, of honor, and of loyalty, both to their heritage and to their country. What they found in Indochina was not the heroism of their fathers, and if they were lucky enough to come home, they were not given the heroes’ welcome of their fathers either. The reaction to the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s and 70s created the modern divide between conservatives and progressives.

During the Cold War, both political parties believed it necessary for the United States to intervene in nations such as Korea and Vietnam in order to stop Communism from spreading throughout the world. President Eisenhower did not want to get involved in another war, so he sent millions of dollars of foreign aid to the South Vietnamese government instead. Despite privately believing that involvement in Vietnam was bad news, President Kennedy continued sending aid, along with sixteen thousand American military advisors, hoping to bolster the South Vietnamese military and political leadership. After all, the Soviet Union and Communist China were sending money, arms, and advisors to the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong guerillas, so what other choice did we have? The idea of simply leaving Vietnam to fall to Communism was considered unthinkable. The domino theory, which was the prevailing view of politicians and pundits on both sides, predicted that if South Vietnam fell to Communism, then they would continue into Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, and eventually to Burma, Pakistan, and perhaps even India. Eventually, they warned, the forces of Communist revolution would be landing on our own shores. “We must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here,” they said. Does that sound familiar?

Battle lines were being drawn throughout our society. As American casualties mounted in the mid-1960s, an anti-war movement developed. However, that movement became strongly identified with other social movements of the time, encompassing ideas such as free love, drug use, and socialism. Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968 by promising to win victory with honor. To accomplish that, Nixon actually expanded the war, bombing targets in Cambodia and Hanoi even as he withdrew US ground troops. Thus, the conflict started by Democrats JFK and LBJ became associated with the Republican Nixon, and the antiwar movement became associated with the far left.

There was division within the antiwar movement. Some were truly pacifist, believing that war was wrong no matter what. Some loved America but believed that involvement in Vietnam was against our interests. However, many in the movement were outright anti-American, believing that our country was evil to the core, racist, sexist, imperialist, and capitalist. These were the protestors who did not just want the US to withdraw her troops, but actively supported North Vietnam and hoped for a Communist victory not only in East Asia, but in the United States itself. The most outspoken of the antiwar protestors often took this position, and terrorism by groups such as the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers made sure to keep these extremists on the front page of the newspaper. Many celebrities seemed to identify with the far left; recall Jane Fonda traveling to Hanoi and posing with North Vietnamese soldiers.

While most musicians supported the antiwar movement and wrote songs protesting the war, a few took the opposite position. In 1969, country singer Merle Haggard recorded two of his most famous hits. In “Okie From Muskogee” he contrasted the humble and hardworking people of America’s heartlands with the crazy hippies in San Francisco who did drugs and burned their draft cards. In “The Fightin’ Side of Me” he complained about protestors who criticized the Vietnam War, lumping them in with the extremists who sought to overthrow the US government and impose Communism in America. The political situation of the late 60s and early 70s demanded that you choose between those two sides. If you loved America, you had to support the troops, which meant you had to support the Vietnam War.

As the 1972 election approached, the divide in our country became even more stark. South Dakota Senator George McGovern ran for president on an explicitly antiwar platform, promising to immediately withdraw the troops if he was elected. It is interesting to look back on this era through the lens of popular culture, because so many of the people who create our culture were on the antiwar side back then. Movies, music, and popular history tend to emphasize the antiwar protests, and the unpopularity of Richard Nixon personally. 1972 was the first presidential election in which 18, 19, and 20-year-olds could vote, after the passage of the 26th amendment a year prior. Clearly this age group, who were at risk of being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam, would oppose the president who was prosecuting the war, right?

Yet that is not what happened. President Richard Nixon had earlier appealed to what he called the “silent majority” of Americans who were still conservative and traditional, who did not support the drug use, free love, socialism, and everything else associated with the hippies and the antiwar movement.  In 1972, that silent majority made their voices heard as Nixon won a 49-state landslide, one of the largest electoral victories in American history. Just a few days after his second inauguration, Nixon announced the Paris Peace Accords, and the end of the Vietnam War. Soon his own fortunes would be tied up with the fallout from the Watergate break-in, and Vietnam would quickly fade into the past.

Yet the scars from that era persisted for a long time in American politics. The 1992 presidential election was a contrast between the incumbent President George H.W. Bush, who was a World War II hero, and Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who had avoided fighting in Vietnam by getting draft deferments in his youth. Republicans naturally made an issue out of this since they had long ago associated support for the Vietnam War with support for America in general. Yet Clinton won the election. The same thing happened in 1996, when the draft-dodging Clinton ran for reelection against Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, another bona fide war hero. Clinton won in a landslide.

Whether or not someone fought in Vietnam remained a campaign issue in the next three elections as well. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore claimed to be a better veteran than Governor George W. Bush of Texas, but both had fairly flimsy war records. Both Gore and Bush were scions of powerful political families, and both their fathers used their connections to keep their sons safe. Gore had indeed been to Vietnam, but as a journalist, and was somewhat safe from the harshest combat. Bush never went to Vietnam, completing his tour with the Texas Air National Guard. At least he served, however, which is more than could be said for Bill Clinton. Nevertheless, Governor Bush won a very close and contested election.

In 2004, the Democrats nominated Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. In contrast with the incumbent President Bush who spent the war stateside in the National Guard, Kerry had been decorated for his tour on a swift boat with the Navy. When he returned home, however, he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and accused his comrades of horrific war crimes. The Democrats tried to play both sides during the campaign, presenting Kerry to the far left as a principled antiwar protestor, while presenting him to moderates as a faithful soldier who did his duty. Some other swift boat veterans who served alongside Kerry in Vietnam collaborated on a book claiming to expose his shameless hypocrisy, accusing him of inflating his service record, even while he was in Vietnam, for future political gain. In any case, Kerry lost a close election and President Bush won a second term.

2008 saw the last time Vietnam arose as a presidential campaign issue, thirty-five years after the last combat troops withdrew. The Republicans nominated Senator John McCain of Arizona, who had not only served in Vietnam but had famously been shot down and captured, enduring torture as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. The Democrats, on the other hand, nominated Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who was only a child during the Vietnam War and had absolutely no military service. Obama won, if not a landslide, at least a comfortable victory.

Considering the extent to which support for our troops has become equated with support for America on the conservative right, it is striking that in all five elections from 1992 to 2008, the “least veteran” candidate won all five times.

The Vietnam War faded from public discourse by the second decade of the 21st century. The 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections each featured candidates who had no military service. Today, the youngest Vietnam veterans are at retirement age, and for most voters, Vietnam is ancient history. But the dividing lines in our culture remain the same. After the September 11th terrorist attacks in 2001, President Bush declared that American military policy would be to preemptively strike any nation that could possibly threaten the United States or her interests abroad. He sent the military to Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, the Islamic extremists who had harbored Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Two years later, he ordered the invasion of Iraq, which had allegedly been developing weapons of mass destruction. Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, formed what President Bush called an Axis of Evil.

Once again, our leaders told us that we must fight our enemy “over there” to prevent them from coming to fight us over here. Conservative Republicans by this point had firmly fused the ideas of patriotism and love of country with unconditional support for military adventurism. Support for the war became the biggest characteristic of the conservative movement. Three decades of pop culture taught us how badly our troops had been treated during and after Vietnam, so conservatives made sure to loudly and publicly express support for our troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. I recall patriotic conservatives decorating freeway bridges with yellow ribbons in support of our troops. Support for the troops became synonymous with support for the wars, and so criticism of the wars was considered by many on the right to be unpatriotic at best, and treasonous at worst. In retrospect, this proved to be a major distraction from the conservative charge to stand athwart history and yell stop.

I believe that something changed with the conservative movement in the decades after William Buckley founded National Review in 1955. A cadre of men and women who were once leftist, and even socialist, immigrated to this country and made common cause with American conservatives to take down international Communism. For many of these new conservatives (or neo-conservatives, if you want to be fancy) the social issues that motivated conservative Christians were not so important as defending the free market and free trade. They recognized that issues such as abortion and gun rights were important to their would-be allies, and so publicly adopted those positions, but I do not believe their hearts were ever in those battles. They wanted to harness American conservatism to defeat Communism, and in this they were extraordinarily successful.

The Reagan era, beloved by Republicans for the past thirty years, was all about defeating Communism. Unlike his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, President Reagan drew a hard line against Marxism-Leninism, calling the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire”. Reagan increased military spending, forcing the Soviet Union to bankrupt themselves to keep up. At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Reagan implored the Soviet Premier Mikael Gorbachev to come there and personally tear down the Berlin Wall.

On the economic front, the energy of the neoconservative leadership was directed toward tax cuts and deregulation. President Reagan’s economic team of Paul Volcker, Art Laffer, and Alan Greenspan unleashed the stagnant economy they inherited from President Carter and created the greatest period of American prosperity since the 1950s. Despite a couple of short recessions, momentum from the Reagan economy propelled America into the 21st century.

Despite success in foreign policy and economics, however, little progress was made on social issues. For all his greatness, President Reagan did nothing to roll back the New Deal or the Great Society. In fact, like the rest of the GOP he simply tried to slow the progressive takeover of our country. As governor of California, he signed one of the first no-fault divorce laws in American history. As president, he signed an amnesty act in 1986 that allowed millions of illegal aliens to remain in the country. The Democratic Congress had promised to work on immigration enforcement in exchange for the amnesty, but we all know how that game is played.

George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, despite representing opposite parties, both worked to transition the United States out of the Cold War and into an explicitly globalist future. Both supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, both supported increasing foreign aid, both wanted more openness with China, and both used the American military in foreign adventures – Bush in Iraq, and Clinton in the former Yugoslavia. The differences between the two on social issues, as well as between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were merely window dressing in the end. Bill Clinton supported legalized abortion, while George W. Bush opposed it, yet abortion remained legal throughout their combined terms. Bill Clinton banned semi-automatic rifles, and while Bush allowed the ban to lapse, he did not reclaim any ground in the gun rights sphere.

In truth, the leaders of both parties had adopted the globalist perspective. Ever since the early 2000s, our presidential elections have presented a false binary choice. Parents and teachers know that a good trick for ensuring compliance by children is to present them with a false choice. For example, instead of telling your child to brush their teeth before bed, offer them a choice – do you want to brush your teeth now or after your book? If you want them to play quietly, ask if they want to play with the cars or the trains. By giving them the appearance of a choice, you get them to buy into what you want them to do in a way that simply commanding them will not. Our leaders treat us like small children. Every four years they give us the choice of a red globalist or a blue globalist. We argue over the margins, while the endless wars, free trade, and open borders continue to sap America’s soul.

There were few politicians willing to call for a return to nationalism and cultural conservatism. Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan was one of them, and he gained a loyal following in the early 1990s. After challenging President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Republican presidential primary, Buchanan spoke at the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. In a speech that became famous, or infamous depending on who you ask, Buchanan exposed the social changes that were being engineered by the Democratic Party. Buchanan boldly warned that the left-wing agenda would bring about radical feminism, normalization of homosexuality, pornography, and abortion, indoctrination in public schools, pushing women into combat roles in the military, and environmental extremism that would “put birds and rats and insects ahead of families, workers, and jobs.” Buchanan said, “there is a religious war going on in this country. It is a culture war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

Over the years the left has lambasted Buchanan for this speech, calling him sexist, racist, and homophobic. Many on the right, especially the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, find themselves embarrassed by this sort of rhetoric. They would much rather ignore social issues entirely and focus on military adventures and the economy. It is obvious, however, that Buchanan’s warnings have all come true. Everything he told us would happen has happened. One can certainly blame eight years of Bill Clinton in the White House for the moral and spiritual decline that followed, but the truth is that our culture was already on the downslope by the 1990s. America was no longer Christian in any real sense, though organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition still had some political power back then.

In the early 2000s, the neoconservative establishment began trying to wean American conservatives away from social issues. They had successfully replaced the fight against Communism with a new fight against Islamic terrorism as the primary characteristic of conservatism and seemed embarrassed that many in the Republican Party still held to old fashioned beliefs about abortion, gay marriage, and other tenets of Christianity. Whereas the conservative movement once championed free markets as the moral alternative to godless Communism, capitalism had now become a god unto itself, with GDP the only measure of morality. Mitch Daniels, who preceded future Vice President Mike Pence as governor of Indiana, famously tried to move the GOP away from social issues and focus entirely on the economy. After all, “It’s the economy, stupid!” had been the slogan of Bill Clinton’s successful campaign in 1992.

The danger of focusing entirely on the economy and foreign affairs is that it becomes easy to take the American people for granted. Globalists, sipping champagne in their ivory towers, look down and see no difference between American citizens and everyone else in the world. We are all just interchangeable cogs in a vast economic machine to them. Once you abandon the moral framework of Christianity that this country was founded upon, how can you make a moral argument against outsourcing thousands of jobs from Detroit to China? Patrick Buchanan warned us not to forget the American people. Referring to Americans who were losing their jobs in the early 90s, he said, “These people are our people. They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns we come from. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams. They are conservatives of the heart.”

The conservative movement, however, did not heed his warning. When Donald Trump offered a hand to the downtrodden white working class in 2016, the leaders of the conservative movement scoffed at him. These people had seen their jobs exported to foreign countries, their communities gutted by the opioid epidemic, and their young men scarred by endless wars halfway around the world. Rather than showing compassion for these destitute people, writers like Kevin Williamson of National Review derided them. In March of 2016, Williamson wrote, “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.” Basing your moral worldview entirely upon GDP numbers is sociopathic, but that is exactly what our conservative leadership did over the course of thirty years.

In 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona was running for president to succeed George W. Bush. McCain had built his political career on the image of a maverick, someone who was willing to break with the Republican Party if his principles demanded it. He was very pro-war, supporting intervention all around the world, yet as a survivor of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese he opposed the harsh interrogation methods that had been approved by President Bush for use on Islamic terrorists. The mainstream media had promoted him for many years for these reasons, but in 2008 they savaged him as a far-right extremist in comparison to their golden boy Barack Obama. Now McCain was of course a globalist like Bush and Obama, but he still surely wanted to win. So, he decided to do something crazy, and picked a woman as his running mate. Former Vice President Walter Mondale had tried the same gimmick in 1984, when he knew he had no chance to defeat President Reagan. McCain’s campaign searched for a woman that would make the ticket look good without rocking the boat. Unfortunately for them, they picked Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska.

In the first Rocky movie, Apollo Creed’s trainer warns him that Rocky “…doesn’t know it’s a show. He thinks it’s a fight!” So it was with Governor Palin. She did not seem to understand that her place on the ticket was a gimmick. She did not seem to understand that the Republican leadership did not really believe in the social issues they sold to their voters. She thought she was really campaigning against a crypto-socialist in Barack Obama, so she attacked him. She boldly proclaimed her belief in the nuclear family, in the right to life for the unborn, and in an unabashed belief in the reality of Jesus Christ.

This was embarrassing the McCain campaign. Despite the fact that they were leading in the polls after Palin’s convention speech, campaign staffers sabotaged her, setting her up to look bad in interviews and leaking unflattering stories about her to the media. When McCain lost the election, the GOP establishment was quick to place all the blame on Palin, despite the fact that McCain was a terrible candidate himself. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager, apparently absolutely despised Palin. It was no surprise when he reappeared as one of the leaders of the NeverTrump movement.

The campaign and presidency of Donald Trump exposed many of the neo-conservatives for the grifters they always were. For three decades they had led the conservative movement by paying lip service on social issues in exchange for our support for military adventures, free trade, and open borders. They grudgingly allowed Republican leaders like George W. Bush to make small efforts to restrict abortion in exchange for unleashing the military-industrial complex. Trump was the first president in many years who seemed to not only genuinely believe in the socially conservative positions he advocated during his campaign, but also to come out against the very things that the neo-conservatives valued the most.

Suddenly, all their lip service to social conservatism went out the window. They had demanded that we support politicians such as John McCain and Mitt Romney, even if we did not agree with them on much, because they would appoint conservative judges and promote small government, tax cuts, and cut regulations. When the tables were turned in 2016, and we demanded they support Trump despite their disagreements on militarism and free trade, because he too would appoint conservative judges, they took their ball and went home. Many conservative pundits and politicians openly denounced Trump, even after he officially became the Republican nominee. Some of them even went as far as to endorse his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Ironically, many of those pundits, chief among them Jonah Goldberg of National Review, had spent the last decade warning about the peril to our country of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

The NeverTrump wing surely believed that Trump himself had no chance of victory. They expected that we would all come crawling back to them on hands and knees after Hillary’s inevitable landslide, begging them to take us back into the conservative movement. That did not happen. Donald Trump shocked the world and won the White House in 2016. Some of the NeverTrumpers saw which way the wind was blowing and jumped on the Trump train – see Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk, and even Glenn Beck. Yet many more refused to support a man who promised to bring our troops home, enforce immigration laws, and put the American people first.

To the globalists, there is nothing special about the American people. The purpose of the United States, in their eyes, is to service the international order and to provide blood and treasure for their various schemes. Working-class Americans were just part of the international GDP machine. President Trump was having none of that. He proudly called himself a nationalist. He said, as you hear in every podcast intro, “We will no longer surrender ourselves or our people to the false song of globalism.” This was completely unacceptable to the neoconservative globalist establishment, so they did everything within their power – legal or not – to destroy him.

The same neoconservatives who once demanded we stop worrying about social issues and focus entirely on foreign affairs and the economy loudly proclaimed that their principles demanded they work to effect President Trump’s defeat. Men such as Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, David French, Justin Amash, and George Will found wealthy donors to finance new publications and political organizations that were dedicated to taking down Trump at all costs. The Dispatch, the Bulwark, and the Lincoln Project joined existing GOP establishment media like National Review in attacking the president, and even in endorsing his Democratic opponents.

As I record this, the Lincoln Project is on the verge of collapse in the wake of sexual harassment and assault allegations against one of its founders, John Weaver. Weaver was a top advisor to John McCain and helped manage his presidential campaign in 2008. It had been long rumored that Weaver would sexually harass young men in politics, hoping to trade them jobs in exchange for sexual favors. Ryan Girdusky broke the story, and when mainstream media picked it up, the other members of the Lincoln Project disassociated themselves from Weaver. Despite his predilections being an open secret for nearly twenty years, his colleagues feigned ignorance. These are the sorts of people who once led the conservative movement. These are the sorts of people who failed to conserve anything. These are the sorts of people who would be embarrassed by Patrick Buchanan’s culture war speech, and demand that we focus on the economy. These are the sorts of people who lost our country.

In 1992, Patrick Buchanan called upon the Republican Party to fight back: “…we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” Rather than fighting back, we continued to surrender ground, to fall back. Despite the election of President Trump in 2016, the truth is that we had already lost the culture war. Every major corporation is firmly in the leftist globalist camp. Most major newspapers and other news outlets are left-wing. Schools, colleges, and universities are all engaged in left-wing indoctrination. Entertainment is rabidly socialist. Even many of our churches are bending the knee to the new woke religion – the Southern Baptist Convention, once the bastion of Christian conservatism, has now gone all-in on identity politics and Critical Race Theory. How was one man supposed to fix this? Maybe a Pat Buchanan White House in 1992 or 96 could have stopped our decline, but we were undoubtedly too far gone by 2016. For all his strengths, for all his populist and nationalist instincts, not even President Trump was willing to fight the culture war. He supported gay marriage, was ambivalent on transgenderism, and while he made a big deal of saying “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” his Christianity seemed to be cultural rather than heartfelt. Trump did not share Pat Buchanan’s strong beliefs about the nature of American culture. In fact, in 1999 Trump strongly denounced Buchanan, saying:

“Look, he’s a Hitler lover. I guess he’s an anti-Semite. He doesn’t like the blacks. He doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.”

Donald Trump was basically 1990s Bill Clinton, albeit one who was pro-life. The absolute hysteria with which our globalist elites reacted to Trump’s administration shows how far our country has collapsed since the Clinton era. We are not the same people we were in the 1990s, much less the 1960s.

Speaking about the effect of the Vietnam War on American culture, historian James White said, “I think it demonstrated both some of the delusions of a postwar world that there was a sense that it was somehow our responsibility to deal with every problem everywhere, but also did represent a real strength and commitment on the part of a lot of Americans. We’re asked to serve our country, and we’ll do it.”

The generation of young men who volunteered to fight in Vietnam did so because they had inherited a love of country and trust in their government from their World War II veteran parents. Yet what of our society today? The war in Afghanistan is approaching its 20th anniversary later this year. Young men who signed up to fight after 9/11 completed their tours, came home, settled down, raised a family, and now watch their sons sign up to fight in the same place. Eight years of Vietnam was enough to break the psyche of America, but twenty years of endless war in the Middle East has become just a fact of life. Our military bases throughout the world are simply accepted as outposts of our Empire, as normal for our soldiers as basic training. A burgeoning antiwar movement during the Bush administration fizzled out once Obama came to power, and now both political parties and the mainstream media adamantly support the endless wars. Why is our Vietnam different than our grandfathers’?

For one thing, we no longer have a military draft. The armed forces have had no issues maintaining the troop levels necessary for their various missions, perhaps because of the high levels of benefits they offer to potential recruits. The draft was a hugely motivating force for the antiwar protests of the 1960s, as young people feared being forced to fight in the jungles of Indochina against their will. With no draft, there is less motivation to protest our current wars. Nobody is in Afghanistan against their will today – they all signed up, and they all presumably knew where they might be sent.

Second, our troop levels in Afghanistan and the other deployments of the Great War on Terror have never matched the numbers we sent to Vietnam. Half a million American fighting men were in Vietnam at the peak of the war, and we lost nearly sixty thousand of them over eight years. Twenty years in Afghanistan have resulted in a tiny fraction of that number – less than three thousand. As I record this, there has not been a combat death in Afghanistan in more than a year. While every death in these adventures is a needless tragedy, the relatively low number of casualties makes it easy to forget that these wars are still ongoing. World War II and Vietnam affected all Americans. Everyone had a son, a brother, a father, a neighbor, or a friend who served in those wars. Today, millions of Americans live their entire lives without any exposure to military families.

In the early 2000s, supporting the wars was synonymous with being conservative and patriotic. Division over the wars in the late 2010s was one of the major wedges between the old neoconservative leadership and the growing nationalist movement in the Republican Party. Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who lost an eye in Afghanistan, has become one of the most outspoken supporters of the endless wars. Another supporter is Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House served to illustrate this growing division, as shown when Liz Cheney voted to impeach President Trump a second time, shortly before he left office on January 20th. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who ran for president in 2016, voted to convict Trump in his Senate trial, and also supports the endless wars. Do you see a pattern yet?

A civil war is brewing in the Republican Party. The same conservatives who conserved nothing are fighting to maintain control of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America. The priorities of Christian conservatives are not the priorities of the neoconservatives. They want to define conservative principles to mean endless war, open borders, free trade, and low taxes. The writing is on the wall, however. More than seventy-five million Americans voted to re-elect Donald Trump not because he was an establishment conservative but because he was a populist nationalist who spoke for the forgotten men and women of America. These nationalists are not going away. Many of them recognize how useless the conservative movement has been. They hear pundits like Kevin Williamson telling them that they deserve to die, while populists like Donald Trump actually listen to them.

While our cultural dividing lines might have been drawn in the 1960s, today is a different time. The Baby Boomers grew up in the shadow of World War II and the subsequent American prosperity, but the following generations were not so lucky. Generation X grew up in the cynicism that followed Vietnam, Millennials grew up in the spiritually decadent 90s, and Generation Z is coming of age in the dumpster fire that American culture has become.

The anonymous blogger AntiDem recently wrote a great piece about how our society has changed since 1968. His premise is that America survived the turmoil of the 1960s because of a tremendous reserve of social capital that our country had stored away. However, that social capital has been depleted over the past half century. AntiDem defines “social capital” as “the bond that exists between people within a certain society; it is their sense of mutual trust, loyalty, obligation, and responsibility; it is what makes us say “We are one; we are all in this together”. These are the ties that bind a nation; that bind a people together. Once these bonds are severed – once the reserve of social capital reaches zero – then there is nothing that can hold things together but brute force. And this is where conflict begins.”

Americans of the 1960s still believed in themselves and believed in their country. They trusted their government, trusted the press, and trusted their neighbors. America remained bound by a common heritage, common beliefs, and common values. As Charles Murray explains in “Coming Apart,” the division between the upper and lower classes in America grew tremendously between 1960 and 2005. The two groups of people had once interacted, gone to the same churches, attended the same schools, belonged to the same fraternal organizations, and even served in the military together. Today, the lives of the rich and powerful bear no resemblance to the lives of the poor, or even of the middle class.

The divide between left and right has grown as well. Whereas most American politicians of the 1960s might have disagreed with each other on policy, they all believed in American exceptionalism and greatness. Today, the globalist left considers the United States to be a fundamentally racist and sexist country, whose supposed greatness was just white supremacist hagiography, which needs to be completely dismantled and rebuilt in a cultural Marxist image. Rank and file conservatives, on the other hand, believe that America remains the greatest nation in the world, and many are still convinced that it is not beyond saving.

The generation that fought in Vietnam grew up in a time of prosperity. They had heroes to look up to: presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy; industrialists and philanthropists like the Fords and Rockefellers; classy celebrities like Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and athletes like Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays. Even when these heroes had less than heroic privates lives, as was the case with JFK, the press considered their job to be to sweep such unsavory things under the rug so as to keep the image of the president larger than life. Most people assumed that their president and congressional leaders were serious men who could be trusted to do what was best for the American people. Trust in the press was high as well; most Americans believed that Walter Cronkite and his colleagues were telling them the whole truth about what was going on in the world.

Contrast that with today. Every president is despised by at least half the country, and mercilessly criticized and mocked. Congress has even lower opinion ratings than the president, and trust in the press is at an all time low. Celebrity culture is a race to the bottom, as they seem to compete to see who can live the trashiest public lives. Americans are depressed, neurotic, and either perpetually angry, or simply tuned out. What changed?

Vietnam itself obviously disillusioned an entire generation. The young men who came back from those jungles had learned the hard way that war is not all honor and glory. Unlike their fathers who fought in World War II, they could not even tell themselves that they had fought for a great cause. When Saigon fell in 1975, it made all those years of fighting, all those lives lost and destroyed, seem for nothing. That is enough to turn anyone into a cynic.

Watergate was another stop on the road to disillusioned cynicism about our society. While President Nixon might not have done anything differently than his predecessors, the press decided he was guilty, and both parties moved in for the kill. The Watergate scandal did not just take down a president, it destroyed the integrity of the office in the eyes of millions of people. Rather than reflecting the best of America, our leaders seemed to reflect its worst.

In 1992, FBI agents raided the property of a man named Randy Weaver, who lived with his wife and children in rural Idaho. Depending on who you ask, Weaver was either a villainous white nationalist who was plotting violence against the government, or simply a man who wanted to be left alone. When Weaver did not show up for a court hearing on a weapons charge, agents besieged his property, and ended up killing Weaver’s wife Vicki and fourteen-year-old son Sammy. An FBI agent was also killed during the siege. For many Americans, the Ruby Ridge siege was a wakeup call that the government did not necessarily have their best interests at heart.

Less than one year later, FBI and ATF agents besieged a compound in Waco, Texas. The government suspected the Branch Davidian cult of stockpiling weapons and possibly holding people against their will. After several firefights, the siege ended on April 19 when government agents assaulted the compound. A fire started – some say it was due to the FBI tear gas canisters, while others say cult members set the fire deliberately. Either way, seventy-six people were killed, including twenty-five children.

While the 1990s were, on the surface, a time of relative prosperity and optimism, the American people were becoming more jaded and cynical than ever. What was the conservative answer to this cynicism? What did the conservative movement offer people who were losing their jobs, their families, and their faith in America? Tax cuts and broken promises.

The conservative movement fully accepted the premises of the left that America was progressing toward a more globalist utopian future. Rather than heeding the warnings of Patrick Buchanan, they instead accepted the premise that America was fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic, and that it must not only change and progress, but forever apologize and atone for its past sins. In doing so, the conservative movement lost the ability to advocate for America itself. They cannot criticize anti-white racism; the most they can do is find a black person to speak out on behalf of white people. They cannot criticize the full-on assault on masculinity that our culture has engaged in. They have almost given up arguing social issues entirely, preferring to confine their discussions to “stopping socialism” in America, as if it was not already here. Conservatives could not even conserve the women’s restroom.

The conservative movement is a failure because it could never articulate a reason for its own existence. When the left is demanding we drive off the cliff at full speed, while the right meekly suggests that half speed might be more prudent, then of what purpose is the right wing? The left supports their extremists, while the right censures theirs. The left uses government to expand their own power, while the right uses it to constrict theirs. President Obama used his last day in office to pardon terrorists, while President Trump pardoned rappers who hate him. When Representative Maxine Waters of California urged her followers to harass Trump supporters in public, the media shrugged, and her party cheered her on. When Representative Steve King of Iowa urged us to preserve Western Civilization, the media attacked, and his party dutifully stripped him of his committee assignments and then supported a primary challenge against him.

The biggest example of the GOP’s failure to win was seen in the contrasting reactions to the Black Lives Matter and antifa protests of 2020 versus the MAGA protest at the Capitol on January 6th. All summer long, BLM and antifa rioters burned, looted, and even murdered their way through dozens of cities. They caused billions of dollars in property damage, and hundreds of small business owners lost their livelihoods. The response of the left? Celebration and promotion. Kamala Harris raised money to bail rioters out of jail. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the point of protests was to make people “uncomfortable”. Leftist media fell over themselves trying to be the first to repeat Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that “riots are the language of the unheard.” Every corporation in America solemnly intoned that black lives matter, and they donated billions to far-left political organizations.

Republicans tried to thread the needle between denouncing the violence while not appearing to be racist in the eyes of the media. Many proclaimed their belief in the cause that the rioters were supposedly fighting for while also claiming that the violence was caused by a few outside agitators. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina sponsored a bill to reform the supposedly racist police. The truth that George Floyd died of a drug overdose, not from the actions of an allegedly racist policeman, was considered impolite, yet every Republican spoke his name.

Contrast that with the reaction to the Capitol protest last month. As I record this, the only death that we know of that was directly caused by the protest was that of Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran and Trump supporter who was murdered for no apparent reason by a member of law enforcement. Nevertheless, Democrats called this protest an “insurrection” promoted by “domestic terrorists” and instigated by President Trump himself. They impeached the president, announced a 9/11 style commission to investigate, and prepared a bill to crack down on supposed domestic terrorists – that is, Trump-supporting conservatives.

How did the Republican Party respond? By echoing every Democratic talking point. No Republican stood up for their own people who were caught up in the events of that day. No Republican politician spoke the name of Ashli Babbitt.

The Democratic Party supports the most extreme members of their own constituency, even when they tear down statues and burn down buildings. The GOP, on the other hand, is embarrassed by their base. In fact, I think many in the Republican leadership actively hate their own voters. They would rather lose than have to face constituents that they consider to be too uneducated, too religious, and too patriotic for their own sensibilities.

The Republican Party and the conservative movement have failed to save this country, and in many ways, they have abetted its decline. The lesson of Trump is that our country has declined too far for us to save it through political means. The burgeoning MAGA movement must avoid the mistakes of the past. It is not enough to simply conserve the previous generation’s progressive gains – the American right must become explicitly reactionary. We must be bold enough to say that we have to go back to a better time, that the progressive gains of the last twenty years, the last fifty years, even the last century, must be reversed if we are to have any hope of reclaiming our country. We must reject the premise that history moves in only one direction. Instead, we have to go back.

C.S. Lewis had some thoughts on this premise many years ago. “If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it’s pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We’re on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back.”

We have to go back, folks. America has been going the wrong way for a long time. We can return to an era where men were masculine, women were feminine, and children were innocent. We can return to a time when a man trusted his neighbor, and where our leaders and journalists told the truth. We can return to a time when the American people believed in American exceptionalism. The conservative movement has neither the intention nor the ability to take us to this promised land. We must reject the progressive view of history and recognize that our ancestors, for all their human faults, were good people who knew a thing or two about life. We must reject the temptations of modernity and return to time-tested tradition. The new society we create must be explicitly Christian, explicitly reactionary, and full of people who believe in its ideals, and who are willing and able to defend them.

In his inaugural address in 1961, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Let us return to an era when we had a country worth preserving.

A few days ago, before the unauthorized tour of the Capitol Building this week, I had the privilege of chatting with John from Australia on The JJ Podcast. We talked for two hours about the general decline of Western Civilization and of the United States in particular, how we got here, and where we might be headed.

John divided the chat into two parts, so be sure to listen to them both:

Part 1

Part 2

Make sure to check out his other episodes while you’re there. I thank John and appreciate the opportunity to share my thoughts with his audience.

In the two months since Election Day, the Trump campaign has revealed tremendous evidence of fraud throughout the country. Ballots have been counted multiple times, signatures were forged, and voting machines skewed the results. Mail-in voting broke the chain of accountability for our ballots. The “pause” in vote counting on Election Night has never been satisfactorily explained. Yet every court challenge has been denied. Why?

While leftist NPCs claim that our justice system says there was no fraud, what has really happened is that courts have dismissed Trump campaign lawsuits without ever examining the evidence. Instead, they claim that the plaintiffs have “no standing” to contest the certification of votes. When the State of Texas sued several other states, claiming that their vote fraud violated the constitutional right to equal protection under the law, the Supreme Court again dismissed their suit for lack of standing.

What is standing? It means that a plaintiff has the right to demand satisfaction for a wrong that has occurred. If your neighbor cuts down a tree on your property, you have the right to sue for damages and compensation. However, if I live across town from you, then I do not have that right, as I am not the injured party.

Standing is an important part of American jurisprudence. However, these recent dismissals have made little sense. In some cases, courts have dismissed claims against mail-in voting or Dominion vote counting machines by claiming that plaintiffs should have filed their lawsuits earlier, when these things were first implemented. Of course, we all know that lawsuits at that time would have been dismissed as well, with courts claiming that plaintiffs must wait until actual injury – in the form of fraudulent votes – has occurred. What a useful catch-22 for the establishment.

The doctrine of standing has become a cheap excuse for courts to avoid difficult subjects. The State of Texas clearly had standing to sue the states, because fraud in one state clearly impacts the voters in other states. In fact, when one state has a dispute with another state, the Supreme Court is the only constitutional forum for them to argue their case. By dismissing the case for lack of standing the Supreme Court is clearly showing that they simply want no part in this disputed election. They surely know that the facts of the case would demand a ruling in favor of Texas, however they are loath to go out on a limb and overturn what our media has declared is a finished election.

The idea of using “standing” to avoid controversial issues is not new. Every American schoolchild has heard of the Dred Scott case. In 1857, the Supreme Court heard a case about a slave named Dred Scott whose master had died after moving with him to the north, where slavery was illegal. Since his master was dead, and he resided in a free state, should Scott not be a free man? This touched upon many of the controversial issues that would lead to Civil War within the next decade. Rather than taking a stand, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Scott had no standing since black slaves were not citizens of the United States. He completely avoided the issue.

Most historians agree that the Dred Scott decision was one of the worst in the history of the Supreme Court. What will future historians think of the John Roberts court handwaving away the claims of Texas and others? Electoral fraud is a major problem. If American citizens do not have standing to contest a stolen election, then what good is American citizenship? Earlier this year, the ACLU filed suit against the Trump Administration claiming that the policy of excluding illegal aliens from the census was discriminatory. Rather than dismissing it for lack of standing, courts heard the case. It is a sad commentary on our society that our courts are able to find standing for illegal aliens and foreigners before they allow actual citizens to demand accountability in our elections.

Our soapboxes are being censored by Big Tech. Our ballot boxes are being defrauded by big city Democratic machines. Our jury boxes are closed due to “lack of standing”. Perhaps all this is why cartridge boxes are becoming so expensive.

(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)

Imagine for a moment that a major American corporation, say Walmart or McDonalds, decided to enforce an official religion in its office. From now on, anyone working for these companies would be required to take the Eucharist every morning, recite Muslim prayers in the afternoon, or wear a yarmulke when on the job. Imagine that the government itself mandated that you must follow the tenets of one religion or another. That would be absurd, right? The very first amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from establishing a religion in the United States, and our courts have applied that to most employers as well. However, there a new religion that has taken over America in the guise of secularism. Call it wokeness, or social justice, or equity; whatever it is has become the de facto official religion of this country, and of the entire western world. Refusing to participate in its rituals and incantations can result in ostracism, unemployment, and censorship. Who is enforcing the tenets of this new religion? Who has established it as the new law of the land? Not our government. Not our elected leaders. No, the enforcers of this new faith are unelected, unaccountable, and they hold themselves above governments and nations. These are the technocrats, the rootless cosmopolitans who believe that their expertise gives them the right to rule. The very concept of the sovereign nation-state is being erased before our eyes in favor of a globalist technocracy based on the religion of wokeness.

While it is not true to say that religion is the primary cause of war, religious differences can contribute to strife between peoples. By the 17^th century, the Protestant Reformation had torn at the fabric of medieval Europe by challenging the supreme authority enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church for over a thousand years. The Thirty Years War initially began as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire, but it eventually evolved into a bloody brawl that left millions of people dead. Europe would not see slaughter on such a scale until World War I nearly three centuries later. The series of treaties that concluded the Thirty Years War are collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia. These treaties did more than end a war; they established the very system of international relations that we take for granted to this day. Most importantly at the time, the Peace allowed kingdoms within the Holy Roman Empire to choose whether to be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist, without interference from the Emperor, neighboring kingdoms, or the Pope in Rome. Furthermore, subjects who followed a different Christian denomination were guaranteed the right to practice their faith without fear of persecution.

The consequences of the Peace of Westphalia extended far beyond denominational disputes, however. For the first time, the kings of Europe agreed that nation-states were a thing. The borders of pre-Westphalian Europe were in constant flux as kings and nobles fought to control land and resources, and they all understood themselves to be under the ultimate authority of the Pope in Rome. Popes often used their authority to interfere in the affairs of kings and kingdoms, such as when Pope Innocent III excommunicated King John of England in a dispute over who could appoint the Archbishop of Canterbury. In another example, Pope Sixtus V induced Spanish King Philip II to invade England in retaliation for their embrace of the Protestant Reformation under Queen Elizabeth I.

Westphalia changed this paradigm. Now, European leaders recognized that nation-states were sovereign entities, neither bound to the authority of the Pope nor subject to interference from their neighbors. This concept of national sovereignty remains the cornerstone of international relations to this day. Our grandfathers took it for granted that the internal affairs of foreign nations were none of our business. The idea of invading another country to convert them to your religion or force them to accept your laws and customs became unacceptable in the new international order. Henry Kissinger describes the Peace of Westphalia as a situation where “…each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religious vocations of its fellow states and refrain from challenging their existence.”

While it might be too much to say that the Peace of Westphalia created the modern world, it certainly recognized the structure that world would take. The wave of independence movements throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries was inspired by the idea of national sovereignty. If European nations were not supposed to interfere in each other’s affairs, then what right did they have to interfere in South America, Africa, or Asia? Slowly but surely, the Westphalian nation-state became the norm throughout the world. Sometimes this process went awry, such as when British and French diplomats tried to create nation-states out of diverse Arabic tribes in the former Ottoman Empire; the arbitrary borders that they drew a century ago are still causing strife today.

It was in the wake of World War I that the Westphalian system began to falter. US President Woodrow Wilson joined the war not so much to defend American territory as to “make the world safe for democracy”. If “democracy” was a religion, rather than an ideology or a system of government, then Wilson would not sound very different from the most zealous Crusaders of medieval Europe. Despite Wilson’s idea for a League of Nations failing to gain congressional approval at home, the leaders of Europe went ahead and formed the organization themselves. While the main purpose of the League was to make war obsolete, it utterly failed to do so; nevertheless, it laid the groundwork for the United Nations that was born out of the Second World War two decades later. The UN Charter claims that “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” However, the very purpose of the UN is to establish a higher world authority than national sovereignty. Whereas our Founding Fathers appealed to heaven for the redress of their grievances against their sovereign lord King George, today we appeal to the UN Security Council.

As usual, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and a charitable look at the crafters of the postwar world order suggests they at least had good intentions. There must be some mechanism to stop the powerful from trampling over the weak, or some way of stopping sovereign nations from engaging in human rights abuses within their own borders. What is to be done if a sovereign nation engages in genocide? The leaders of Europe regretted not intervening in Germany sooner; perhaps they could have prevented the Holocaust. None of them wanted to let that happen again, so they went all-in with the United Nations. The first major use of the UN as a peacekeeping body was to intervene in the civil war in Korea. The Soviet Union and newly Communist China both intended to spread their ideology throughout the world, and so they supported communist North Korea with money, weapons, and training. What was the civilized world to do but intervene?

The new world order constructed after World War II was an explicitly globalist order. Whereas Westphalian nationalism held that each country was its own sovereign unit, postwar globalism instead held that certain concepts such as liberal democracy and civil rights were universal to all humanity, and therefore any nation that restricted such things lost the protections of sovereignty. In 1991, US President George H. W. Bush announced a war against Iraq, which had invaded and occupied the neighboring nation of Kuwait. In his speech that night, he said:

This is an historic moment. We have in this past year made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and cold war. We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order — a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful — and we will be — we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders.

Nearly every American and European leader since World War II has accepted the axiom that world peace requires international organizations that can, in some cases, supersede national sovereignty. Anyone who speaks approvingly of Westphalian nationalism, such as Patrick Buchanan, is derided as backwards and archaic. Conventional wisdom had long held that increased centralization of power was inevitable, the “arc of history” so to speak. The European Union, for example, was only expected to grow larger and more powerful, subordinating national governments to the new Tower of Babel in Strasbourg and Brussels. The idea of a country withdrawing from such a union was considered lunacy, until Britain did just that. The reaction to Brexit by the globalist class has been one of outright hysteria. They cannot believe that the citizens of a 21^st century nation would seriously want some level of sovereignty. It goes against everything we have been taught for the past seventy-five years.

At some point, the United States ceased to exist as a sovereign nation-state and instead became, as Mencius Moldbug put it, an international free trade zone. We took the idea that America was a “nation of immigrants” to the extreme, coming to believe that there is no such thing as a core American nation. Capitalists and businessmen who once served the American public no longer feel any loyalty to this country. They incorporate in offshore havens to avoid paying taxes, they outsource manufacturing to developing nations whose citizens will work for pennies on the dollar, and when they claim to “give back” to their communities, it is generally in a way that diminishes the historic American nation in favor of immigrants and refugees.

Tax dollars are now prioritized for foreigners rather than American citizens. We began handing out foreign aid during the Cold War to keep other countries on our side rather than letting them become part of the Communist bloc. We were a rich country, and we could afford to share the wealth. Despite the end of the Cold War in 1991 and our own skyrocketing national debt, foreign aid has only increased in the past thirty years. We have been doing it for so long that nobody in Congress can even remember a time when we spent our money on the priorities of the American people. Like globalism itself, the use of American capital to prop up the rest of the world has become so ingrained in our political system that any criticism is looked upon as crazy talk.

President Trump recently signed a budget bill that was included as part of a so-called covid relief package, after spending a week denouncing the massive waste contained therein. This budget includes billions of dollars for foreign nations, or, more accurately, for the non-governmental organizations that claim to act on behalf of those nations. For example, the bill allocates $10 million to the country of Pakistan for something called “gender programs”. Like missionaries spreading the Gospel of Christ throughout the world in the 19^th century, today’s NGOs spread the ideologies of modern America: feminism, globalism, and LGBTQ supremacy. The American people did not vote for this. We never held a referendum on spending money to promote feminism or homosexuality in foreign nations. We were not asked our opinion about sending half a billion dollars to Israel or hundreds of millions of dollars to Nepal, Myanmar, and Cambodia. In theory, the American people exercise control over our government by electing new leaders and representatives, yet there are few in Washington of either party who are interested in halting the foreign aid racket. No matter who we send to Congress, they continue to vote for these things without a second thought. America really is nothing more than a free-trade zone, and the purpose of the American worker is to fund the globalist agenda throughout the world.

Why do the American people seem to have such little control over the actions of our government? Why are our elected officials not accountable to us for how they spend taxpayer money? The logical conclusion is that they do not serve the American people, but instead take their orders from someone else. Who?

Big Tech and social media giants certainly exercise outsized influence in our society. Social media has grown into the de facto public square in 21^st century America, but the companies that run these networks have become increasingly hostile to free speech. This kind of censorship began with provocative personalities such as Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannapolous, but it did not stop there. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube now routinely ban anyone who steps beyond the bounds of their nebulous community standards. Establishment conservatives and libertarians who haughtily proclaim that private companies have the right to do whatever they want are whistling past the graveyard. Like monkeys hoping that the crocodile will eat them last, these naïve conservatives think that they will be fine if they just agree to ritually denounce anyone to their right. They always seem so surprised when they find themselves targeted by the censors as well.

Twitter has censored or placed disclaimers on President Trump’s tweets more than five hundred times since Election Day, while Joe Biden has never suffered such an indignity no matter how crazy his statements. Twitter also censored the New York Post when it published damning information about Hunter Biden, information that likely would have swung the election in Trump’s favor had it been allowed to spread. Now that the election is supposedly over, mainstream news has suddenly found time to talk about the Hunter Biden story, despite claiming it was “Russian disinformation” just weeks ago. Twitter is surely preparing to ban Donald Trump from the platform the moment he is no longer President of the United States.

Google and its subsidiary YouTube are heavily engaged in censorship as well. Conservative YouTubers who have built their livelihoods on producing video content find themselves demonetized and banned with no recourse, simply for disagreeing with Big Tech’s positions regarding the elections, Covid, or vaccines. Big Tech claims to use so-called “authoritative sources” as the basis for their censorship, but these sources are often incredibly biased and dishonest. Google deliberately tweaks YouTube’s algorithm to hide conservative content while elevating mainstream or progressive content in its place. Google does the same thing with its search engine, which is the lens through which millions of Americans see the world. Some social scientists have estimated that Google’s influence is enough to shift 5-10% of the vote to the left.

Facebook also uses its influence to censor conservative thought. Many people, especially of the Baby Boom generation, use Facebook as their primary source for information about the world. Facebook’s supposedly independent fact checkers are, unsurprisingly, far-left activists. Even more insidious, however, is the way in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg chose to involve himself in the recent presidential election. In the guise of improving voter participation, Zuckerberg invested tens of millions of dollars in outreach, voting machines, and dropboxes – almost entirely in heavily Democratic regions. This too might have been enough to swing the election.

These three Big Tech companies, along with others such as TikTok, Nextdoor, and Pinterest, have tremendous influence over how the average American citizen sees and interprets current events, and they are using that influence to fundamentally transform our society. Republican politicians have made noise about reigning in the oligarchs of Big Tech, to no avail. The social media giants donate millions of dollars to politicians on both sides, ensuring that nothing of substance will happen no matter how many hearings and campaign promises to crack down on censorship they make. Google spreads millions of dollars to politicians and political organizations, including supposedly conservative organizations like National Review, ensuring that they enjoy favorable press no matter how evil they act. This is on top of Google’s near monopoly in the field of internet advertising. These companies have tremendous amounts of cash, pervasive influence in our society, and little to fear from government oversight.

These social media companies do not consider themselves beholden to US law; they see themselves as above such petty things as borders or patriotism. They span the globe, enforcing their community standards as a quasi-world government, much in the same way that the Catholic Church once did in medieval Europe. Our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but Big Tech will censor you if you engage in wrongthink. Our Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but a teacher seeing a gun on a student’s wall in a Zoom class thinks she has the right to suspend him. Our Constitution guarantees us the right to due process, but Big Tech can eliminate your social persona and even your livelihood with no recourse. The telephone system has been regulated as a “common carrier” by the government for nearly a century, which means that companies such as AT&T or Verizon do not have the right to cut off your service if they disagree with what you say on the phone. Yet this is exactly what Big Tech companies do every day.

Twitter is the social network on which I am most active, so it is the one I am most familiar with. Over the past ten years, Twitter has become one of the most important methods of communication between politicians, journalists, and regular citizens. President Trump has used his Twitter account in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt used radio: to bypass the gatekeepers and speak directly to the American people. It is for this reason that Twitter is often the first social media battlefield between the new censors and advocates for free speech. In early 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared with Vijaya Gadde, the head of Twitter’s Orwellian “Trust and Safety Council” on Joe Rogan’s show to discuss the issue of censorship. While Dorsey seems to support free speech in the abstract – he once referred to Twitter as the “free speech wing of the free speech party” – It is the Indian-born Gadde that is the real power behind the censors. She and her team decide what to allow and what to ban not based on western ideals of free expression, but instead on a new quasi-religious paradigm.

I try to be careful with my own Twitter account, lest I find myself running afoul of the woke censors that make up their “Trust and Safety Council”. Yet when I did finally receive a ban, it was not for anything objectively offensive, but rather an innocuous comment about how Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were being erased in the name of racial tolerance. Rather than serving a 24-hour suspension, I appealed, and was therefore locked out of my account for two weeks until they responded and upheld their original decision. If you do not obey, then the process becomes the punishment. Unlike American law, where we have a constitutional right to confront our accuser and have a trial by a jury of our peers, those targeted by the “Trust and Safety Council” have no recourse, and there are no specific people to whom we can take our case. The censors on this shadowy committee are nameless, faceless, unaccountable, yet all-powerful. To put it another way, Big Tech and the social media giants are imposing a totalitarian-style justice system on a people who have always taken American jurisprudence and English common law for granted. What happens when Big Tech becomes even more powerful than the governments that are supposed to protect our liberties?

If you will recall from my recent essay about the Great Reset, globalist technocrats are using the chaos of this past year as a mechanism for instituting their vision of the future. Big Tech is an important part of that vision. Rather than taking a principled stand to protect our American rights of free speech and freedom of conscience, they are cheerfully enacting a Chinese-style social credit system, deciding who can take part in society based upon their political opinions and views. The standard by which we are judged in this social credit system is not based upon the traditional Western ideals of freedom and liberty, but is instead a new secular religion based on wokeness, on social justice, on equity. The guiding principles of this religion are those of Critical Theory, and its demonic offspring Critical Race Theory, which demands that we tear down every structure of society to build a new inclusive utopia.

If an older and more established religion had come to America intending to control the daily lives of our citizens, they would have been stopped immediately. Forcing people to take the Eucharist, recite Muslim prayers, or wear a yarmulke would have been correctly seen as an immoral and unconstitutional establishment of religion upon a free people. However, forcing people to participate in rituals to denounce their own “white privilege”, to recite the tenets of Critical Theory, and to wear Black Lives Matter branded t-shirts is considered acceptable, and even laudable. By pretending that the new woke religion is not a religion at all, merely good manners, the technocrats have created a monstrous new universal faith, with its own priests, acolytes, doctrines, inquisitions, and even devils.

If you do not believe that wokeism is a fully-fledged religion, consider the following: In the weeks and months after the death of career criminal and drug addict George Floyd, his visage was painted on murals across the country, in the same manner as a saint in the old days. Pilgrims flocked to the street corner where he died, and some make-believe pastors even baptized people there. Consider that an ultra-left wing black church once replaced the bread and wine of the Eucharist with skittles and iced tea in worshipful memory of Trayvon Martin. Consider that schools, universities, and corporations have demanded that their employees obediently intone the holy words “black lives matter,” and anyone who refuses is summarily fired. Consider that employers from large corporations to the federal government itself have instituted mandatory training sessions based upon Critical Race Theory that compel white men ritually denounce themselves in the manner of Chinese Communist struggle sessions. If this is not a religion, it certainly looks like one.

The new religion of wokeness has its prophets and priests as well. Domestic terrorists like Angela Davis are given places of honor in this faith, and their every utterance is treated as the words of a god. So too are those of critical race theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ibram Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. There is a hierarchy at work here, one based upon race and other characteristics. “Intersectionality” is an absolute dogma of this religion. A disabled black woman has, by virtue of her ethnic and social status, secret knowledge that is unattainable by an able-bodied white man. This explains why they claim that two plus two does not necessarily equal four: we must be open to “other ways of knowing” besides the empirical tradition of Western Civilization. After all, what is observation and the scientific method compared to the “rich lived experience” of an “oppressed” person of color? I say this facetiously, but they take it very seriously.

Like most religions, wokeism has its own devils as well. The current chief demon is none other than President Donald Trump. In their eyes he is evil, racist, sexist, a dictator, and the source of everything that is wrong with the world today. The acolytes of wokeism dream of setting up formal inquisitions to judge and punish anyone who ever supported President Trump. They already control unofficial inquisitions in the form of social media mobs that demand blood whenever a public figure says something disrespectful about their faith, such as “all lives matter” or “it’s ok to be white”. These acolytes feel a thrill at the prospect of depriving American citizens of their jobs, their livelihoods, and even their lives.

In the end, wokeism is a perverse parody of Christianity, growing parasitically on the ruins of Christian America. In a piece for Humanitas this month, Michael Vlahos writes:

…today’s woke religion is a mocking, empty caricature of Christianity, like earlier, Marxist heresies of the last century.

So here we are. After four centuries of the Westphalian nation-state, international borders are once again becoming fluid and amorphous. Rather than a supranational Roman Catholic Church making itself the highest earthly authority, we have Big Tech implementing a religion of wokeness on everyone, no matter their citizenship. This alliance of globalist technocrats and Big Tech commissars has become more powerful than our elected government, and they answer to nobody but themselves. Or do they? It is time to talk about the ten-ton elephant in the room: The Peoples Republic of China.

The relationship of China to the West has always been complicated. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Chinese people chafed under colonial interference from western powers such as Great Britain. Throughout the 1930s they fought a long and bloody war with Japan that only ended when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao Zedong had previously launched a Communist revolution but was forced to work together with nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to fight their common enemy. With Japan defeated, however, Mao resumed his revolution, defeating Chiang and establishing the Peoples Republic of China in 1949.

Nearly half a century ago, US President Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao and his premier Zhou Enlai. This historic trip ended twenty years of isolation between Communist China and the western world. Nixon and his advisors believed that engaging with the Chinese communists would be better, in the long run, than allowing them to remain an isolated enemy. Every American president since then has agreed with this view. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter granted China “most favored nation” trading status, on the condition that they improve their human rights record. Despite the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, we continued to push for more openness. In 1994, President Bill Clinton rhetorically asked, “Will we do more to advance the cause of human rights if China is isolated?” In late 2000, Clinton signed a law that permanently normalized trade relations with China.

The idea behind openness with China has always been that our liberal democracy would prove attractive to the Chinese people, causing them to demand more freedom and liberty rather than authoritarian control. After all, this idea seemed to work with the former Soviet Union. In 1989, future Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited the United States on a goodwill tour and stopped by a Texas grocery store to see how the common people lived. In contrast with the sparse shelves and long food lines in Communist Russia, the American store was overflowing with food. When Yeltsin saw this, he knew that the Communist system was doomed. He said at the time, “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev.” Just two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

China, however, is not Russia. The China that President Nixon visited in 1972 was a mostly agrarian society, still reeling from the triple punch of World War II, the civil war between the Communists and the nationalists, and the Cultural Revolution, not to mention the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. It was easy for Nixon and his advisors to see how western-style capitalism might appeal to a population of peasants and poor farmers. Yet China seems to have found a third way. Mao’s successors Deng Xioping and Jiang Zemin allowed a capitalist economy to grow under the supervision of the Chinese Communist Party. Businessmen are permitted to make money, and even to grow wealthy, so long as they obey the CCP. The cheap trinkets that have come to define American prosperity in the past four decades do not impress the Chinese, especially considering most of them are manufactured in China itself. China uses modern technology to effectively control its population in ways that the old Soviet Union could have never dreamed of. Facial recognition and AI maintain the social credit system, and dissenters are quickly and quietly dealt with. The Chinese Communist Party has an extensive propaganda system that extends from teams of young people making pro-China social media posts to organizations such as the Confucius Institute which has integrated itself in public school systems throughout the United States and Europe.

At the conclusion of President Nixon’s visit in 1972, the United States and China issued a joint statement outlining their differences that has come to be known as the Shanghai Communique. In this statement, the Chinese delegation stated that, “Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution–this has become the irresistible trend of history. All nations, big or small, should be equal: big nations should not bully the small and strong nations should not bully the weak. China will never be a superpower and it opposes hegemony and power politics of any kind.” In 1972, it seemed obvious that China would never be a superpower; despite being the world’s most populous nation, they were still technologically and industrially backward compared to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Europe. Yet the first two decades of the 21^st century have shown that China does indeed desire to be a superpower. The fall of the Soviet Union left a vacuum in the world, a vacuum that China hopes to fill. If the 19^th century belonged to Britain, and the 20^th to America, China is determined to make the 21^st century the Chinese century. Whether they can accomplish this or not is still an open question – many experts consider the Chinese economy to be built upon smoke and mirrors. But they are undoubtedly trying. Xi Jinping appears to be the most ambitious of his country’s leaders since Mao himself.

Scott Greer pointed out on a recent podcast that China learned well the lessons of Russia’s failure. Rather than proclaiming their desire to impose Marxism-Leninism on the whole world, China has instead played the American game of capitalism, using money and investment to gain influence across the globe. China already controls a significant amount of manufacturing, especially in the medical and technology fields. US corporations discovered that it was cheaper to pay Chinese workers than their American counterparts, and so they began building factories over there instead of over here. The profit margins were so great that these corporations were willing to do whatever the Chinese Communist Party demanded in return for cheap labor. While American companies like Apple and Google feel free to criticize US government policy, to the point where they will boycott states that have laws that they consider to be “anti-transgender,” they are all too happy to bow and scrape before their Chinese masters. The same Big Tech corporations that enthusiastically embraced the Black Lives Matter movement have lobbied against a bill that would condemn China’s alleged genocide of the Uyghur people, fearing it might disrupt their access to cheap Chinese labor. I do not believe that President Nixon could have envisioned American companies simping for China while at the same time undermining American democracy back home.

China has also been quietly buying land and infrastructure all around the world. Chinese ownership of land and buildings in places like Vancouver BC is a well-known joke, and their management of factories, ports, and even military bases throughout Africa worries many international observers. Most troubling is their ownership of buildings and companies in the United States. We might consider these Chinese investors to be private companies, but there is no such thing when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party. Every corporation based in China or Hong Kong is made to serve the ultimate goals of the CCP.

In 2013, one of our largest meat processing companies was acquired by a Hong Kong holding company. This drew some attention during the initial phases of the coronavirus pandemic when they were forced to close several plants in the United States. One might be forgiven for wondering why we would allow a belligerent rival to control a significant portion of our food supply. In 2012, China-based Cosco (the shipping company, not the warehouse chain) signed a contract with the city of Long Beach, California to operate their port, one of the busiest in the world. This was part of what China calls the Belt and Road Initiative, a project to take over as much of the world shipping infrastructure as possible. While the Obama Administration had no problem with China taking over one of our biggest ports, the Trump Administration forced them to divest it from their holdings. However, even President Trump has not stopped all of China’s ventures. Earlier this year, a Chinese-based investment group purchased over a hundred thousand acres of land in Texas, ostensibly to develop a wind farm. Not only is this land near several military bases, but it is also quite close to the Mexican border. We know that China has been surreptitiously smuggling fentanyl and other drugs into the United States; allowing them to control a section of our border seems dangerously foolish. Yet our politicians seem to be inviting Chinese control. Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia recently recorded a video begging China to invest in his state, complete with a Chinese Communist flag as a backdrop.

Victor Davis Hanson recently published an article for National Review explaining how China is looking forward to a more compliant America under the Biden/Harris administration. He writes,

Europe has been apologizing for its 19th- and early-20th-century imperialism and neo-colonialism for 75 years. Yet China proudly boasts of its new brand of exploitation, the Belt and Road Initiative, to develop abroad infrastructure, harbors, ports, rails, industry, power grids, and highways. The aims of such a vast $8 trillion project are multifarious. Beijing seeks to establish control over the world’s commercial choke points (from Suez to the Panama Canal) that will offer advantage in times of tensions and war.

The Chinese Communist Party is taking the fight for the 21^st century very seriously. The aforementioned Confucius Institute teaches western grade school children about the glories of China, while their Thousand Talents Program has an unlimited budget with which to lure western scientists and researchers to work for the Chinese Communist Party. Oftentimes these researchers are persuaded to turn over their proprietary research to their new Chinese bosses as well. Some of these researchers are now in prison for this treason. After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a technological race to make the best missiles, computers, and spacecraft. Both nations were focused on victory; the United States had no problem recruiting Nazi rocket scientists to ensure we were the first nation to land on the moon. Today, we do not seem to realize we are even in competition. Our leaders show little concern about the prospect of China winning the AI or nanotechnology race, or of becoming the first nation to perfect quantum computing or genetic engineering. A Soviet satellite scared us out of complacency in 1957, but China’s single-minded determination to win the future does not faze us at all. We remain distracted while our leaders promise that Chinese hegemony is nothing to be feared. Even a recent leak that disclosed the identities of two million members of the Chinese Communist Party who had infiltrated institutions throughout the world barely made the evening news.

The same politicians and journalists who have found a Russian bogeyman under every bed for the past five years seem remarkably blasé about China’s constant interference in our society. Why is that? Could the answer be so banal as money? Hunter Biden received millions from several nations, including China, while his father was Vice President. Were they simply buying a major political figure, someone who had a chance to become President of the United States, at a bargain price? Maybe it is sex as well as money. Congressman Eric Swalwell of California, one of the most outspoken believers in the Russian collusion hoax, turns out to have had a relationship with a bona fide Chinese Communist Party spy named Christine Fang. Not only did she bag Congressman Swalwell, but she also apparently had relations with several midwestern mayors as well. While this story gained traction on right-wing websites, mainstream media sees nothing worth reporting, and as of this recording Swalwell retains his seat on the House Intelligence Committee. Remember when we learned that California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s longtime driver was a Chinese spy? The media quickly forgot about that story as well.

There is also the matter of American leaders and oligarchs who married into Chinese families. I would not suggest that the simple act of marrying a Chinese woman is inherently suspicious, of course. In some cases, however, it is enough to at least raise some eyebrows. Longtime Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is married to Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan before emigrating to the United States as a child. That would not necessarily mean anything, but for some reason she was appointed to cabinet positions in not one but two Republican presidential administrations. She served as Secretary of Labor during all eight years of President George W. Bush’s term and has served as Secretary of Transportation for President Trump. In addition to that, Michelle Malkin has documented Chao’s numerous ties to powerful businessmen and oligarchs in China. Her father gave Mitch McConnell millions of dollars during the 2008 financial crisis, and the Chao family has also established a forty-million-dollar scholarship fund to send ethnic Chinese students to Harvard University. Again, none of this in isolation is evidence of anything, but it should provoke greater scrutiny by the American people.

As Victor Hanson points out, China has learned the language of Critical Theory and anti-racism and uses it to their own advantage. Any criticism of China’s actions or motives is dismissed as “racism”. Chinese ownership of American corporations is promoted, and even subsidized, as “minority ownership”. China will take its turn on the UN Human Rights Council next year and will surely use that pulpit to lecture us about our supposed racial sins even as they engage in a fully-fledged genocide of the Uighur people.

During the Cold War, the United States constantly undermined democracy in nonaligned nations. We often put our thumbs on the scales of elections in foreign countries, and even instigated coups at times, to elevate leaders who were friendly toward us rather than toward our rival the Soviet Union. In 2020, we discovered that the shoe was on the other foot. The story of 2020 is how the Peoples Republic of China unleased a global pandemic and then used that to install their preferred leader, Joe Biden. If they are successful, this would be the culmination of a long project by the Chinese Communists to gain influence over our government. I am old enough to remember the minor scandal of illegal Chinese donations to the Clinton/Gore campaigns of the 1990s.

A Chinese academic named Di Dongsheng recently said, “…we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.” If Joe Biden takes the oath of office as the 46^th President of the United States, China will have carte blanche to do whatever they want, not only in the Asia/Pacific region but throughout the world. For example, the United States has guaranteed the safety of Taiwan against Chinese aggression since 1949, but do you really think that Joe Biden would take a stand against his Chinese masters? When Great Britain turned over governance of Hong Kong to China in 1997, they did so with the understanding that China would respect the rights and liberties of the people of Hong Kong. However, the world watched and did nothing over the past two years as China overruled those liberties and ruthlessly crushed dissent. Who is going to stop them? Like Hitler in the 1930s, China knows that their own will to power is greater than any will to hinder them.

Besides, globalism means not having to take a stand for anything. If we are all citizens of the world, then what does it matter who ultimately rules Taiwan, Hong Kong, or anywhere else? If borders are imaginary, then what does it matter if a factory is in China, Korea, Mexico, or the United States? The only thing that matters is that the elites maintain their wealth and power while we peasants are satisfied with cheap trinkets. If China is willing to pay Joe Biden millions of dollars, laundered through his worthless son, then why should he care about the plight of white Americans from Ohio? Proclaiming oneself above such petty things as borders or patriotism might sound good to the rootless cosmopolitans who write for Vox or the New York Times, but it is really just a cheap excuse to avoid caring about your fellow countrymen.

Victor Hanson concludes his piece with this:

China believes the current U.S. elite is unlike those who won World War II or sent a man into space. In their contempt, they believe instead that our best and brightest have grown naive, flabby, relativist, globalist, easily guilted, eager for repentance, decadent, and greedy — and can continue to be, and do, all that, while still becoming even richer with China.

For Chinese dissidents, whether in Hong Kong, Taiwan, on the mainland, or abroad, the 2020 United States presidential election has been vitally important. Donald Trump is the first American president to take a firm stand against the Chinese Communist Party, while Joe Biden is wholly owned by them. If you were a Chinese dissident, who would you rather have in the White House? I remember receiving an unsolicited copy of the Epoch Times newspaper earlier this year, describing in great detail how the coronavirus pandemic originated in China. They also recently published a documentary describing how the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. It turns out that the Epoch Times is funded by Chinese dissidents and Taiwanese investors, some of whom have also partnered with former Breitbart editor and Trump advisor Steve Bannon. What is going on here? This election is existential for those in China who still believe in freedom and liberty. Why would they not do whatever they could to support the only American president who is willing to fight against our common enemy? It is ironic that the United States, the sole world superpower since 1991, has become a battleground in a Chinese cold civil war.

Openness was supposed to spread American-style liberty to China, but instead it has spread Chinese-style authoritarianism to America. Globalist technocrats use China’s controlled totalitarian society as a model for their would-be utopia. Every revolutionary knows that they have to erase the old system before implementing the new one. The French Revolution tried to erase France’s Catholic heritage in favor of a new society based upon rational secularism. The Chinese Cultural Revolution tried to erase traditional Chinese culture in favor of Marxist-Leninist socialism. Here in the United States, our own cultural revolution is already underway. It started with Confederate statues, but now even the names of American heroes such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington are being erased from public life. This is not about tolerance or inclusivity, but is instead a form of genocide, no different from the way the ancient Assyrians used to reduce enemy cities to rubble to show their dominance. We are being conquered from within and many do not even realize it. The unique heritage of the United States of America is being erased in favor of a new technocracy.

The future that our globalist technocratic overlords envision is one with no borders, no Bill of Rights, and a Chinese-style social credit system keeping the peasants in line. While most students of history look at the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its show trials, children turning in their parents, and struggle sessions, with horror, the technocrats consider it a noble experiment and a good start. A doctoral student at Purdue University named Habi Zhang emigrated to the United States in search of the freedom she was denied in China but found that Chinese authoritarianism had already preceded her. In an essay for Law & Liberty last month, she wrote:

American schools increasingly resemble the authoritarian Chinese schools that aim at transforming human beings into an instrument that serves the state. What I find more chilling is that the American replication of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is engulfing academia, media, the schools, the tech sector, Hollywood, sports, and government—that is to say, everywhere in society. And I wonder: how long will it take before the revolution creeps into households and regularly has people turn on one another?

Zhang concludes her essay with a warning:

For a decade, the Chinese Cultural Revolution thoroughly wrecked the economy, uprooted traditions, destroyed social trust by turning family members on each other, and worst of all, killed well more than a million people. One can only wonder how far its American replication will go.

One might wonder why globalist technocrats would be conspiring with the Chinese Communist Party to undermine our liberties, but it makes sense. They are not so much conspiring together as they are working toward a common goal. The liberty-minded peoples of the United States and other places throughout the world must be brought to heel both to ensure Chinese dominance of the 21^st century and to enable the technocratic utopia. If this alliance of convenience were to succeed, both sides would undoubtedly attempt to annihilate the other. Perhaps the globalist technocrats would work to undermine China in the same way they have undermined the United States and Europe; perhaps China would crush the technocrats once they gained worldwide hegemony. In any case, as far as they are concerned, Western Civilization must first be dismantled.

A Joe Biden administration will hasten the end of our national sovereignty. President Trump did his best to regain that sovereignty by withdrawing us from the Paris Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, drawing down our troops deployed across the globe, and urging our allies to take a more balanced share of the maintenance of NATO and the UN. Unfortunately, a President Biden can erase those gains on Day 1. Additionally, Big Tech will now have an ally in the White House, who will allow them to march unimpeded to the Chinese-style social credit system they have been building. Most pundits assume that Biden will step down at some point in his term in favor of Kamala Harris. I can think of no better demonstration of the subordination of the American Republic to an international technocracy than for a half-Indian, half-Jamaican anchor baby to occupy the highest office of our land.

For four hundred years the Westphalian system allowed people to form sovereign governments to, as Thomas Jefferson explained, protect their God-given natural rights. This is an impediment to the aims of the globalist technocracy. The technocrat does not consider himself evil, rather he looks at the inevitable problems of human life and decides that he can solve those problems if only he had enough power. Freedom means we sometimes make the wrong choices, and the technocrat believes that he knows better how to run our lives than we do. Despite dressing like a Sith lord, World Economic Forum president Klaus Schwab surely believes that his Great Reset will make life better for the seven billion people who live on earth today. The technocrat believes he can solve every problem in the world, and if it costs our freedom and liberty then so be it – most people would probably vote for ultimate security even at the cost of our last freedom. Those of us who resist are labeled as malcontents and wreckers who would never be happy anyway, and so it is necessary for the greater good that we be silenced, imprisoned, or otherwise destroyed. They look on us as helpless children who need to be guided and controlled by a government with unlimited power and authority.

There will be no hiding from the technocracy. We call them “totalitarians” for a reason – they demand total participation in their new world order. Like all totalitarian states, they will demand complete control of society at every level. They cannot allow children to be raised believing in a Christian worldview and individual liberties – wokeism will be the established ideology of all public schools, and alternatives such as private schools and homeschooling will be banned. They cannot allow true worship of a Being higher than government – wokeism will be the primary doctrine of our churches, and any that do not get on board will be persecuted. Chinese Christians have experienced this persecution for decades. Any dissenting voice will be censored. This will all be done, of course, for our own good. C.S. Lewis saw it coming almost a century ago:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against ones will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

The administration of President Donald Trump was only going to be a speed bump on the road to technocracy, whether he served four years or eight. With him apparently out of the way, the last brake has been released. How can we hope to stop this runaway train when even our Republican leaders think that the purpose of the American worker is to finance globalist NGOs? We cannot count on our government to save us, because most of them are in on the plot. We cannot count on the Constitution to save us, because it failed to prevent the problem from arising in the first place. The only way to preserve our freedom is to start with ourselves, our families, and our communities.

The goal of our cosmopolitan technocrats is to keep you atomized, isolated, and fully dependent upon government. You must not let them succeed. Build strong families. Form communities of like-minded people who will be there for you when the world comes crashing down. No matter what happens to our nation, to our world, it is communities like this that will be the building blocks of a renewed American nation. Take heart and keep the faith. Western Civilization and Christendom survives in you and in me.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So wrote John Adams, founding father and second President of the United States, in 1798. The Constitution, you will recall, was a compromise between proponents of a strong central government and those who wanted states to have the larger share of power in the new nation. The purpose of the Constitution was to establish a government that could protect the God-given liberties of the American people. The question before us as 2020 draws to a close is this: Do the Constitution and the government it created still serve that purpose?

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the purpose of government was indeed to protect our God-given liberties, and furthermore that any government that becomes destructive of those ends should be altered or abolished. Jefferson later said that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” In 1776, the American colonists believed that King George and his Parliament had crossed the line from good governance and into tyranny through their excessive taxes, regulation, and violations of their rights as freeborn Englishmen. Today, however, we have multiple layers of government that make King George look positively libertarian by comparison.

Conservatives have complained about government regulation and overreach for years, while doing little to curb it. Whereas the federal government of John Adams’ time was a small and remote organization, its successor is a beast, a leviathan that devours billions of dollars of American capital while intruding into every relationship. Government is the silent partner in every business arrangement, a third party in every marriage, and the decision maker in every doctor’s visit. The government can tell farmers how much to grow, businesses what they can sell, and local schools what they must teach our children. The Constitution was unable to prevent the government from assuming this much power.

Federal laws are literally byzantine, with so many overlaps and contradictions that a talented prosecutor could charge you with crimes you have never heard of, forcing you to plea bargain to avoid length prison sentences. The government uses its discretionary power to refrain from charging certain people or interest groups, while throwing the book at others. Police can arrest mothers taking their children to the park while allowing violent rioters to burn, loot, and topple statues with no penalty. Activists and journalists who expose monstrous crimes by the federal government are prosecuted, while those in government who commit such crimes can retire with full pensions and million-dollar book deals. The Constitution was unable to stop the rise of this anarcho-tyranny.

Mayors, governors, and unelected bureaucrats are infringing upon our freedom of movement and assembly using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse. Small businesses are being driven to bankruptcy by authoritarian lockdowns. Health departments are arbitrarily closing stores and restaurants and forcing people at the point of a gun to wear masks when out in public. Pastors of churches who defy the lockdowns have been arrested, while the governors who order the arrests enjoy lavish parties at expensive restaurants. The Constitution could not prevent this tyrannical overreach in the name of public health.

In the name of public health, our voting systems were compromised, allowing untold electoral fraud with little accountability to the American people. Mail-in voting allowed the Democratic Party to turbocharge their existing cheating operations, resulting in the brazen theft of the presidential election. President Trump’s campaign has filed suits in several states, but the odds of winning every single suit and overturning Joe Biden’s apparent victory are slim. The Constitution was not able to keep us from this precipice.

No matter if President Trump manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat and win reelection this year, the damage to our moral, social, and political fabric is terminal, and neither the president nor the Constitution can save us at this point. Boomer-aged Christians who post 2 Chronicles 7:14 on Facebook miss the point – our country was on its way down before they were even born. The Constitution was made to protect our liberties, but after nearly a quarter of a millennium it has utterly failed to do that. As President Adams said, the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and America is anything but that today.

The Constitution could not stop the severe decay of America’s morality over the last half century. Talk show host Jesse Kelly likes to point out that we are not fighting the culture war – we already lost. We put up very little fight as the godless left marched through our institutions. Gay marriage, which was considered absurd as late as 1995, is now the law of the land, and few Christians or conservatives are still willing to speak out against it. Prayer in schools was once an important issue for the Christian right, and now few people really care anymore – the public schools have been entirely ceded to the left. Of all the culture war issues, perhaps only abortion yet remains as a hill that Christians and conservatives are willing to fight and die on, but even that issue is receding. Many people have woken up to the fact that the Republican Party has been using abortion as a campaign issue for nearly half a century while doing little to stop it once they are in power. Scott Greer recently suggested that abortion has become a proxy for all the various issues that once animated the social conservative Right, but which we no longer feel comfortable speaking of in public.

Even Christian conservatives no longer speak of morality as a virtue. Chastity is a joke, even in churches. Few people take oaths and vows seriously, whether in marriage or in the courtroom. The average Christian conservative is too busy watching Netflix and football to lead his family or take a stand in his community. Rather than boldly preaching the truth, many churches simply say what their congregants want to hear, exactly as the Apostle Paul warned.

There are many conservatives who believe that an Article V Convention of States, called to rewrite the Constitution, is the answer to all our problems. This seems naïve, however. Rather than restoring America to the vision of our founders, rewriting the Constitution would open the door to all sorts of modern anathemas, because the left would have a say too. The same conservatives who could not conserve the women’s restroom would not be able to stand up to people demanding a new constitution that codifies diversity quotas and special rights for various ethnic and interest groups.

I do not have all the answers; however I am becoming increasingly convinced that some form of secession is the only way to save a remnant of Christendom in America. The fatal flaw of democracy is evident in America today, as tens of millions of people now support godless socialism. One thing is clear, however: the current system cannot go on much longer. America is transitioning from Republic into Empire; going back to 1950 (or earlier) is just not an option. President Trump might have slowed the decline, but the fall is inevitable. The tree of liberty looks mighty parched these days.

What happens when you push the most ambitious, clever, and powerful man of his generation into a corner? What happens when you close off all legal avenues to salvation and promise to destroy his livelihood, his family, and even his very life? Would you expect such a man to meekly submit, or to fight for his life?

Julius Caesar faced this very situation in January of 49 BC. He had made him some powerful enemies in the Roman Senate over the years, including his former friend and ally Pompey, but his positions as consul of Rome and later proconsul of Gaul made him immune to legal prosecution. However, his term as proconsul had come to an end, and Roman law required him to resign command of his legions and reenter the capital as a private citizen. Would such a man as Caesar submit to such a humiliation and possible execution in the name of maintaining traditional norms? Would you? Caesar, of course, refused. He led his legions into Rome itself, forcing Pompey and his allies to flee for their lives. Caesar started a civil war that left him the undisputed master of the Roman Republic, and after his assassination in 44 BC his nephew Octavian ascended to the imperial throne as Caesar Augustus.

One can never tell how things might have happened differently in history, but it is always interesting to speculate. What might have happened if Pompey and the rest of Caesar’s enemies had not threatened to destroy him upon his return to Rome? Could Caesar have returned and continued to work through the legal process without starting a civil war? Julius Caesar was ambitious, and might well have done so anyway, but we will never know.

The United States of America is facing a Rubicon moment of its own this year. The Democratic Party has clearly engaged in electoral fraud in order to recapture the White House after Donald Trump’s stunning upset in 2016. President Trump is pursuing constitutional and legal challenges to the apparent electoral results, however success is not guaranteed. Extraordinary measures might be required to save this country from those who wish to fundamentally transform it into a globalist province.

The alliance of the Democratic Party, the Republican establishment, and the globalist activists of the Deep State bureaucracy have been fighting President Donald Trump since before his inauguration in 2017:

• They spied on his campaign, transition team, and his administration.
• They pressured electors to pick someone else.
• They ignored his authority over the Executive Branch.
• They impeached him over a phone call.
• They used the coronavirus pandemic to create the most elaborate electoral fraud operation in American history.

All the while they have threatened to destroy him, his family, and his supporters the moment he is out of office:

Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell, who is chairman of the powerful House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Oversight, plans to prosecute not only President Trump but also his “enablers”:

Leftist activist posing as objective journalist Jake Tapper threatened that anyone who continues to support President Trump should be blacklisted from employment:

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising star of the socialist left, wants to create lists of Trump supporters for future reprisals:

Former Clinton Administrator Labor Secretary Robert Reich wants to set up an Orwellian “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” to re-educate Trump supporters:

Is it any wonder that President Trump is fighting so hard to win this election through any legal means available? The radical left would love to see Trump hanged on the South Lawn of the White House while anyone who supported him is sent to the gulag. This fight is not merely political; it is existential!

The question remains: What if Trump fails? What if his legal challenges to this obviously fraudulent election are not successful? What if the mainstream media’s framing of the election convinces legislators and judges to accept the fait accompli? What if Trump campaign legal advisor Sydney Powell’s kraken ends up being more of a guppy? Will President Trump meekly step aside and allow the radical left to not only destroy him and his family, but the country he loves?

Alexander Macris argues that Trump can cross his own Rubicon without resorting to civil war:

Unlike Caesar, Trump can cross the Rubicon legally. He need violate no sacred law. He has all of the legal power he needs to act and win. Congress has given it to him. All he needs to do is invoke the Insurrection Act.

Macris’ argument is compelling, and it goes without saying that using the authority available to him in this matter would be just as destructive as personally leading an army into Washington DC to seize power. The American left already considered President Trump’s first term to be illegitimate, so using such extraordinary powers to ensure a second would drive them insane with rage. The thugs who have been terrorizing our city streets for eight months and counting would come out in force, and anyone with a Trump hat or even an American flag on their home might find themselves targets of the mob. Even though invoking the Insurrection Act is within the president’s authority, actually doing so would likely set off the very civil war that it is intended to avoid.

Macris agrees:

If Trump calls on the unorganized militia to save the Republic from voter fraud, a militia will come. So too would an anti-militia or resistance. In fact, lots of people who are willing to fight are fighting on the streets already. It seems likely that if Trump crosses the Rubicon, he will trigger a civil war, just like Caesar triggered a civil war.

Yet even civil war might be better than the alternative. We long ago departed a time of easy choices, and no matter how much the Mitt Romneys or Jonah Goldbergs of the world long to return to a pre-Trump “normalcy,” that ship has sailed. Pompey was never going to restore the Roman Republic of Cincinattus or Scipio by simply removing Caesar no more than we can restore the American Republic of Lincoln and Roosevelt by removing Trump. President Trump did not cause our current crisis; he was just the natural evolution of where our society has been moving for several decades. It made perfect sense for traditional and conservative Americans to turn to a leader like Trump who promised to fight for us, rather than simply negotiate our surrender to the left as countless Republican leaders had been doing for decades.

If the “resistance” is successful in stealing the election of 2020, the Biden/Harris Administration will use their executive power to ensure that they are never again threatened by a national populist like Donald Trump. They will fully commit the United States to the Great Reset, once and for all erasing the liberty and sovereignty that made America the greatest expression of the ideals of Western Civilization. If we do not fight now, we might not have another chance.

Macris concludes his piece thus:

This is not a drill. This is where we are. If Trump is standing on the banks of the Rubicon, it’s because the leftist machine has purposefully widened the Rubicon River until it reaches his feet.

President Donald Trump faces the same choice that Julius Caesar made more than two thousand years ago: Surrender and allow himself and his people to be destroyed, or fight. For the sake of his family, for the sake of his voters, for the sake of our posterity, we need him to cross the Rubicon and fight for America.

(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)

In November of 2016, shortly after the election of President Donald Trump, the World Economic Forum published an article describing eight predictions for the year 2030. In their tweet promoting the article, they said “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” The article goes on to suggest that we will also be tracked 24/7 for our own good, that America will have receded on the world stage, that meat will be a rare treat, that over a billion refugees will be integrated into western nations, and that western values will be diminished in a global society.

The WEF is at the forefront of several globalist organization working to transform society. A few weeks ago, TIME Magazine published a cover story about what they called “The Great Reset,” a reordering of society in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. This story compiled ideas from various globalist organizations about what they want the world to look like in the coming decades. Chief among these was the founder of the World Economic Forum himself, Klaus Schwab, who wrote about how we need to “re-imagine capitalism” to create a “better economy”. The rest of the articles concerned climate change and racial justice. The overriding theme was that of building back better. Not coincidentally, “Build Back Better” was Joe Biden’s campaign slogan.

“Build Back Better” is the overriding theme of a large alliance of globalist activists throughout the world. In addition to Joe Biden, the phrase has also been used by Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, who just imposed a harsh lockdown on his people. It has been used in Canada. The slogan was being used in the United Nations as far back as 2015, and by former President Bill Clinton as early as 2006. The fact that they have had it ready to deploy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic this year is curious, no?

You must understand that they have been planning this so-called great reset for a long time now. The Frankfurt School developed Critical Theory in the 1920s, which demanded that we tear down every edifice of society to rebuild it in a modern, secular, socialist image. One can imagine the original philosophers of the Frankfurt School saying that we need to “build back better”. After World War II, the purveyors of Critical Theory made their way into positions of influence in western societies – this was the long march through our institutions that I have mentioned before. The post-World War II order created by the victorious Allied Powers was a globalist order, where national sovereignty was slowly but surely subordinated to international organizations. These organizations have little accountability to the citizens and voters in each nation. Our leaders told us that this was all necessary to prevent the nations of the world from falling one by one to an expansionist Communist state. However, when the Cold War ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, our leaders doubled down on globalism rather than once again putting America First. President George H. W. Bush proclaimed the dawn of a “new world order” – you can hear his very words in the introduction to every podcast. Both Republicans and Democrats pledged billions of dollars and untold American lives to the globalist project, which ranged from ushering China into the World Trade Organization, to bombing Serbia in the late 1990s, to invading half the Middle East in the first two decades of the 21^st century. All the while, we quietly surrendered our sovereignty to a new international technocratic order.

Remember that the globalist position is that national borders are obsolete, and that national sovereignty is an impediment to world peace. Despite all their talk about diversity in the abstract, globalists see different people and different cultures as entirely interchangeable cogs in a great big GDP machine. All the postwar international organizations such as the UN, the European Union, the World Health Organization, the World Back, the International Monetary Fund, etc. were built with the aim of ensuring greater peace and cooperation between nations, but in nearly every case they result in the erosion of national sovereignty and the rule by fiat of unelected technocrats.

These globalist technocratic elites have long been seeding their ideas into popular culture. Look through any fashion magazine over the past five years and see stories about happy Millennials living in tiny pods, eating bugs, and living entirely atomized lives. Just like the WEF’s predictions, these articles present a future where you will not own a car that you can drive anywhere you want, but instead use ride-sharing or mass transit to go where you need in your city. Instead of owning a house, you rent a bed in a co-living space, sort of like a sailor’s bunk on a battleship. Instead of settling down and building a traditional nuclear family of father, mother, and children, you will live with friends and colleagues. Hookups will have entirely replaced marriage and even dating. Any children born into this environment will be communal property. Mainstream media has been publishing articles glamorizing polyamory over the past few years, each one showing effete beta males sharing an overweight woman, trying to normalize this perverse arrangement.

This all sounds like a dystopian horror to you and me, but to the technocrats, it is the ideal society in their new world order. We will eat bugs and like it, while the elites continue to eat steak at the World Economic Forum headquarters in Davos, Switzerland.

The desire to remake the world to fit our modern ideas is hardly new. Perhaps the most obvious example comes out of the French Revolution, which kicked off shortly after our own war for independence in America. Whereas we established a republic in the New World, based on freedom and liberty, France’s attempt to do the same thing in the Old World ended in disaster. Men such as Georges Danton, Maximillian Robespierre, and Jean-Paul Marat wanted to start from scratch, wipe the slate clean, and build a new society without any remnant of the old. They reset the calendar so that the revolution was literally Year Zero, they renamed days and months, they forced Catholic priests to swear an oath of loyalty to the new nation rather than to God and the Church, and finally they replaced the alter in Notre Dame de Paris with a so-called “goddess of reason”.

Of course, this attempt at creating a new society quickly degenerated into mass murder. Anyone who did not agree with the direction of the Revolution soon found themselves facing the guillotine. Danton, Robespierre, and Marat each experienced a violent death at the hands of the vicious Revolution they had nurtured. We see this same effect in Soviet Russia, in North Korea, in Cuba, and in every other nation where all-powerful leaders attempt to wipe away the past and build a new society from nothing but their imaginations. Communist China attempted to do the same thing. Chairman Mao wanted to erase the old traditions and long memories of the Chinese people, because he felt they were holding them back from creating the perfect society. Families were torn apart as children were enlisted to inform on their parents. People who had done nothing wrong were forced to admit all sorts of guilt in public “struggle sessions”. Millions of Chinese people died, and in the end the Cultural Revolution was a failure.

For our globalist elites, the French Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution are not warnings about what happens when you try to restart society from scratch, rather they are good-intentioned attempts to fix a broken world. Modern globalist activists do not look back at the millions of people who died in these experiments and say, “Let’s not do that again,” rather they say, “Let’s do it right this time.” Michael O’Fallen, host of the Causes of Things podcast, called today’s globalist technocrats the “new Jacobins,” after one of the primary groups involved in the French Revolution. His episode on the Great Reset is fantastic, and I recommend you watch the whole thing.

These “new Jacobins” are content to be patient. Slowly but surely, they modified the United States government after World War II, changing its primary mission from that of caring for its own citizens to one of outreach to the world. Nearly every governmental and non-governmental organization is now run by globalists. We still think of the State Department and the CIA as being filled with old white men in suits doing the dirty business of ensuring American hegemony. Today, however, these organizations are full of extreme leftist activists, the sort you would expect to see at the Berkeley student union building or the Harvard faculty lounge. They do not see their job as protecting American interests, but instead to export gay rights and transgender protections to foreign nations while subordinating America to a vague international order. They are missionaries not of the gospel of Christ, or even a secular gospel of American-style freedom and liberty, but of degenerate propaganda.

A prime example of the globalist mindset infecting American institutions is in the person of John Brennan, former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Obama. Here is a man who was hired by the CIA despite being an out-of-the-closet communist. The CIA had been founded primarily to protect America from Soviet communism, yet it was so inept at that job that it was eventually run by an actual communist. Senator McCarthy was, if anything, too kind! John Brennan was involved with illegally spying on American citizens, as revealed by Edward Snowden nearly a decade ago. He was involved with spying on President Trump and his team, not only during the campaign but also in the leadup to his inauguration. To this day he considers himself a patriot of the real America, an America that exists only to serve the needs of a rootless cosmopolitan elite. To that end, he is feted by cable news.

Even though the United States was founded by mostly English people, we have long had a conceit that anybody from anywhere on Earth could become American. In the mid to late 1800s, immigrants came to America from Ireland, Italy, Russia, and many other places. For the most part, these immigrants assimilated into American culture. They learned English, they adopted American traditions, they left behind, for the most part, their old ways and became Americans. Not so the post 1965 immigrants. Many of these new Americans did not leave their old ways behind and assimilate into American culture, but instead carved out little enclaves of their former nations inside America’s borders. Rather than learning English, they demanded that government print signs, brochures, and ballots in their native language. Rather than adopting American traditions, they demanded that America change to fit their needs. It is this conceit that feeds into the globalist project. Globalists do not consider themselves to be citizens of a specific nation, but rather of the whole world in general. The United States of America does not have any special meaning to them, rather it is simply a rich and prosperous land that they can use to their advantage. If you have no loyalty to a people, or to a place, then there is nothing stopping you from simply strip-mining that place and enslaving that people to ensure your own wealth and power. America is like a dying hippopotamus on the savanna being slowly torn apart by hyenas, jackals, vultures, and anyone else who wants a piece. This is why globalist leaders have had no problem outsourcing America’s industry to China and other developing nations. What are a few million blue-collar jobs for American citizens compared to a bump in GDP?

Perhaps the most obvious exemplar of this rootless cosmopolitan mentality is found in Kamala Harris, who, depending on the outcome of this contested election, could well be one Joe Biden stroke away from the presidency. Harris’ parents were both foreigners: her father was a graduate student at UC Berkeley from Jamaica while her mother was an undergraduate from India. Harris was born in 1964 to these two foreign students – she was literally an anchor baby. Anyone born on US soil is considered to be an American citizen, no matter the citizenship status of their parents. This is due to a certain reading of the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, which established citizenship for former black slaves. The writers of the amendment excluded obvious cases such as foreign diplomats who have their children in the United States, and so they surely could not have imagined that foreign students, tourists, or guest workers would give birth to American citizens.

Kamala Harris has no loyalty to the United States of America. Everything we love about our country is simply raw material for her rise to power. She got her start in politics not by volunteering for a campaign, or by running for school board or city council, but by becoming the mistress of powerful San Francisco politician and kingmaker Willie Brown. While they were dating, he appointed her to several state boards, which served as a platform for her later run for San Francisco District Attorney. When Harris accused Joe Biden of being a “racist” during the Democratic primary debates, she had no experience of racism in her own life, or that of her parents, to draw from. None of her ancestors were slaves in the antebellum south, neither were they oppressed by Jim Crow laws. When Kamala Harris plays the race card, it is completely cynical, self-serving, and disingenuous.

Tariq Nasheed, a black activist who is no friend of conservatives, worries about the effects that someone like Kamala Harris will have on his own people. The descendants of African slaves surely have more claim on the United States of America than anchor babies like Harris, however they are often used as pawns in the globalist game. Reacting on Twitter this week to a report that a Biden/Harris administration will offer citizenship to Indian nationals, Nasheed said, “While Kamala Harris boldly told black people what she is NOT going to do for us. Kamala and the Biden just announced they are going to use our tax dollars to allow half a million immigrants from Kamala’s homeland to the US. And they are bringing their anti-black racism with them.”

Because of our history, Americans think that homelands and cultures can be changed as easily as a pair of pants. Yet that is not the case. Another Indian American, Republican Nikki Haley, has been very open to the idea of allowing millions of Indians to come to American for work, and eventually citizenship. Recall that Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a key witness in President Trump’s impeachment trial, showed more loyalty to his homeland of Ukraine than to the United States – that nation was even considering making him their Secretary of Defense. How many Jewish elected officials have dual citizenship in the United States and in Israel? If they had to choose between the two, are you sure they would choose America? Kamala Harris surely feels more affinity to her native cousins in India and Jamaica than she does to the descendants of America’s founding fathers. She has no loyalty to us. If she becomes President of the United States, we will be nothing to her. In her eyes, we are just evil white racist Christians who deserve to watch our heritage be erased before our very eyes. She will have no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of white men contemplating suicide or giving in to opioids, or for the millions of families feeling hopeless as the jobs that once sustained them are exported overseas, or given to cheap foreign workers. She will not hesitate to use the American military to play geopolitical games in the Middle East, or to launch a genocidal war against Russia to distract from problems at home. For all his faults, President Trump at least recognized the forgotten men and women of America, and that is why they have become so loyal to him.

President Trump’s election in 2016 was an unexpected setback on the globalist timetable. They thought that Hillary Clinton could coast into the White House after a mock campaign waged by globalist Republicans like Jeb Bush or John Kasich, then set about completing the job that US presidents had been working on since the end of the Cold War. President Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” our country, and he did just that throughout his eight years in the White House. The Paris climate deal, the Iran nuclear deal, our involvement in Syria, the way our intelligence agencies helped overthrow the government of Ukraine – all of these had pushed America further and further into a globalist future.

But President Trump put a stop to many of these globalist endeavors; in some cases, he even reversed them. In only four years, with only tepid support from Republicans in Congress, he refused to start any new wars in the Middle East, and in fact he withdrew tens of thousands of troops that were already there. It is telling that the only time President Trump ever received praise from mainstream media was when he launched an airstrike on Syria, after accusations that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on Syrian rebels. The same media figures that cheered when Obama promised to bring our troops home castigated Trump when he actually did it. In fact, many in our media and political class have been more vociferous in opposition to President Trump’s troop withdrawals than they were to President Obama’s troop deployments. Why? Because withdrawing the troops does not advance the globalist agenda.

President Trump nearly shut down the refugee racket, where NGOs and other supposed non-profits import migrants into our country in exchange for big government grants. He shut down the H1B pipeline, where US corporations were importing millions of foreign workers, mostly from India, to replace American employees. He worked with the Mexican government to significantly decrease the number of illegal border crossers. He used an executive order to shut down the use of Critical Race Theory in federal government offices, which forced white employees to sit through struggle sessions that said they were evil simply because of their skin color. President Trump stood up to China, imposing tariffs to stop them from undercutting the market for US goods.

China is the elephant in the room. China is not necessarily interested in the globalist aims of people like Kamala Harris or the World Economic Forum, but they will happily make common cause with them so long as it diminishes the power and influence of the United States. For their part, China has used international bodies such as the World Health Organization to expand their influence while curtailing ours. Remember how the WHO spent the early part of this year spreading Chinese propaganda about the coronavirus outbreak? President Trump was right to cut off funding for such a traitorous international organization. Yet even American institutions are not safe. Harvard University’s School of Public Health, which sets the tone for much of our national discussion on health and safety, was renamed in 2014 to the T.H. Chan School of Public Health following a massive donation from Gerald and Ronnie Chan. According to a recent article on the Harvard Crimson, while Gerald Chan was the public face of the deal, his brother Ronnie has numerous connections to the Chinese Communist Party. Several articles have detailed the way in which the CCP uses money to buy western scientists, researchers, and organizations – I even wrote one myself for the National Pulse. Now we have a compelling case that China bought one of our premier health foundations, one that has taken a leading role in the discussions about mitigating the coronavirus pandemic. When you hear pronouncements about masks, lockdowns, or anything else that is supposed to save us all from the pandemic, did you ever consider that you might be hearing Chinese Communist propaganda that has been laundered through elite American institutions?

President Trump was a real threat to the plans of both the globalists and the Chinese Communist Party, so they worked together to defeat him. China would be much happier with Joe Biden in the White House – after all, they were eager to work with him as Vice President, and spent millions of dollars on his son Hunter to curry favor and gain influence in the Obama Administration. While the American taxpayer was bankrolling a two-year investigation of how Russia supposedly interfered with the 2016 election by buying a handful of Facebook ads, the Chinese Communist Party has been pulling our puppet strings for years. Consider this: on Election Day, when it appeared that President Trump would coast to reelection, the Chinese yuan tumbled against the dollar. In the following days, when it began to look like Biden might win, the yuan skyrocketed. Investors know that a Biden White House is very good for the Chinese Communist Party.

China, in fact, has been the beneficiary of US foreign policy since the Nixon Administration. The philosophy of the American government towards China, even after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, has been that more openness will lead to more liberalization and human rights in that country. The opposite has proved true, however. Our openness with China has not made the Chinese people freer, but it has made the American people less so. Globalists look at the Chinese Communist system that controls every facet of society as an ideal to live up to rather than an evil to be dismantled. Hollywood, the NBA, and Big Tech have all prostrated themselves before China, helping them cover up genocides and atrocities, all the while signaling their virtue to American leftists by denouncing President Trump’s travel bans or boycotting states that enforce male and female bathroom rules.

China has been building something called a social credit system for their own citizens. Here in the United States, we have credit reports compiled by companies such as Transunion and Equifax that can be used by banks, mortgage houses, and credit card companies to determine our creditworthiness. The Chinese social credit system is the same thing, but it includes not only your financial habits but your political and social views as well. Combine this with China’s high-tech facial recognition system, and you have Orwell turned up to eleven. In China, publicly expressing the “wrong” viewpoint can get you blacklisted from everything from airline travel to public transportation. The worst part? Globalist technocrats want to bring the social credit system here.

Last April, law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona published an essay in The Atlantic calling for Chinese-style social control. The headline says, “Internet speech will never go back to normal. In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was largely wrong.” In the article they suggest that censorship, speech control, and surveillance are all inevitable, and that the government should use the coronavirus hysteria to impose more of these things rather than restrict them. They go on to say that, “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.” Of course, when they refer to “society’s norms and values” they do not mean the traditional values of Christian Scripture and Greek empiricism that have built and sustained Western Civilization for nearly two thousand years. No, they mean globalist values of libertinism and degeneracy for the common people, ruled by a global technocratic government of unelected and untouchable bureaucrats.

The authors of this article point out that this social control has been imposed in the west not by governments but by corporations, and this is true. While we still have a Bill of Rights in the United States, it is increasingly rendered meaningless by the globalist corporations of Big Tech. Sure, we have freedom of speech, but disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement on social media can get your account banned and can even get you fired from your job. Sure, we have the right to bear arms, but if your teacher or coworker sees a rifle on your wall during your Zoom meeting, you might get suspended or fired. Sure, we have a right to privacy, we are merely required to give it up if we want to engage in any form of business or commerce.

This is the technocratic future: atomized people dutifully following the rules laid down by unaccountable committees in Big Tech firms. President Trump and the Republican Party have complained about Big Tech censorship, but thus far they have not done anything about it. If Joe Biden prevails in this contested election, it will be too late. To paraphrase Orwell yet again, the future will be an algorithm stamping on a human face – forever.

*****

The election of President Donald Trump was only a temporary speed bump on the road to globalist utopia. While some on the left lashed out in anger and despair, the new Jacobins at the World Economic Forum simply took a deep breath and planned their next move.

In Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Watchmen,” the ultimate villain is a former superhero turned entrepreneur who hatches a plan that will kill tens of millions of people but could also lead to lasting world peace. Before he leaves for his secret base to implement his plan, he leaves a memo for his marketing department to phase out his “nostalgia” products, which had people longing for a past golden age, in favor of a “millennium” series that influences consumers to look forward to a bright future. While the new Jacobins are hardly superheroes, they do play the long game, and I am completely convinced that they seed pieces of information into our culture to prepare the ground for their plans. Hence the PR blitz over the last two years for eating bugs and living in pods, among other things. They want to make their vision of the future look cool, hip, and trendy. We see pictures of happy Millennials on their laptops in their bunks and are supposed to think that the future is bright indeed.

Even the pandemic was foreshadowed. In 2019, Bill Gates hosted a forum discussing options for handling the next pandemic, which included lockdowns and mandatory vaccines. I do not necessarily believe that the globalist technocrats engineered the coronavirus pandemic, only that they were prepared to take advantage of it. Nasty viruses like SARS, H1N1, and Ebola come and go, so all they needed to do was have a plan in place for the next inevitable outbreak. China was a willing partner in the propaganda blitz – remember the crazy pictures coming out of Wuhan? We saw people dropping dead in the streets, whole cities being sprayed with disinfectants, sick people being welded inside their own homes. That was scary, wasn’t it? We certainly did not want that to come to our communities. So, we locked down. “Fifteen days to stop the spread,” they said. “Flatten the curve,” they told us. We dutifully did what we were told. After all, this could have been another Black Plague or Spanish Flu. Like the ancient Romans, we willingly handed our leaders supreme power to handle a crisis, expecting them to hand it back when the crisis was done.

Yet we did not learn from history. Rarely do dictators return power to the people, rather they make sure that the crisis never ends. “Fifteen days to stop the spread” has turned into eight months and counting. Some so-called public health experts are suggesting that we will have to remain locked down for years! We have also seen the rules unequally applied. Church services, funerals, and family gatherings were shut down, while Black Lives Matter protests were not only tolerated but encouraged, even by the “heroic” front line health workers who demanded we stay in our homes. The mayor of Washington, DC ordered that anyone traveling out of state quarantine for fourteen days, yet she exempted all the political leaders who left the city to attend John Lewis’ funeral.

Meanwhile, petty authoritarian governors like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gavin Newsom of California abused their power to shut down whatever they felt like – department stores, restaurants, house parties, and more. Newsom went as far as to threaten to shut off utilities to John MacArthur’s church building. Tinpot totalitarian Mayor Bill De Blasio of New York City sent his gestapo to arrest orthodox Jews at synagogue, all the while calling President Trump the next Hitler.

In Australia, police are using drones to track your movements and cite you if you go further from your house than you are supposed to. They will also break down your door and arrest you if you disparage the lockdown on social media. The United Kingdom just enacted a draconian new lockdown that has police issuing fines and even arresting people for stepping outside their doors. The government laid out new guidelines for what social activities are permissible, going so far as to regulate conjugal contact between adults – not out of a sense of morality, but simply because they can.

It is insane how quickly western democracies shifted from taking their freedom for granted to accepting autocratic oppression over our freedom of movement and our right to peaceably assemble. Perhaps the most insidious public health initiative crafted in response to the pandemic is that of contact tracing. Under this system, our phones or smart devices would track our every move, and algorithms would determine if we came into contact with anyone who might have had the virus. Governments are promising millions of dollars to hire contract tracers to track us, and even to forcibly test us if they think we might have been exposed.

In a move that is surely a sign of things to come, Ticketmaster is considering forcing anyone who attends one of their events to carry proof of vaccination before being allowed entry. Should this trend continue, we might find ourselves unable to conduct any sort of business in the new economy without showing our digital papers. It sounds almost apocalyptic, does it not? Some of the same left-wing activists who have long protested government surveillance have turned on a dime and are now welcoming that very surveillance under the umbrella of public health. All our technocratic overlords had to do to get us to willingly give up our freedoms was to say that it is necessary because of the pandemic.

The most consequential effects of the coronavirus response are perhaps in the presidential election of 2020. Citing concerns about the pandemic, Democratic lawmakers pushed for mail-in voting. Unlike absentee voting, where registered voters manually request a ballot that they return before polls close, mail-in voting simply carpet-bombs ballots throughout the whole state, often without any verification. In the weeks before Election Day, social media was full of stories about ballots arriving at the wrong house, or people getting multiple copies of ballots.  Despite even mainstream media sources having once admitted that mail-in voting was prone to fraud, those claims disappeared down the memory hole when it became clear that mail-in voting was going to be the method by which the Democrats and the globalists could regain control of the American government. Twitter, taking a page from Orwell’s 1984, propagandized mail-in voting, even going so far as to ban users who suggested that mail-in voting was anything less than 100% safe and reliable. Democrats even tried to push all-mail voting on the entire country in an amendment slipped in to one of their COVID stimulus bills.

You could make the argument that Washington and Oregon, which shifted to all-mail voting several years ago, did not have any obvious problems. However, those states have had time to perfect the system, while other states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have not, and their systems were clearly not prepared for the number of ballots they not only had to count but to verify. Besides, consider when was the last time a Republican won a statewide election in Washington or Oregon?

Recounts, audits, and court cases regarding the 2020 election are still playing out as I write this, and the ultimate outcome is very much in doubt. It is clear, however, that the pandemic, lockdown, and mail-in voting put the Democrats in a position to defeat President Trump. As of January of this year, Trump was on his way to a landslide rivaling that of Richard Nixon in 1972 or Ronald Reagan in 1984. Then the globalists and Democrats fired every weapon they had, and the only chance remaining for President Trump to win reelection will be in the hands of the Supreme Court.

Manipulating elections is not unheard of for the new Jacobins. During the Cold War, the CIA used to instigate coups in communist nations to install governments that were more friendly to the United States. During the 21^st century, the CIA has been engaged in all sorts of shenanigans in foreign nations. These coups have become collectively known as “color revolutions,” as each one has its own colorful codename. The protests in 2009 against the Iranian regime were called the Green Revolution. The first revolt of the so-called Arab Spring was the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. The uprising that forced out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 was labeled the Lotus Revolution. In 2014, the CIA was surely involved in the overthrow of the pro-Russian president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. Several Obama Administration officials were involved with the movement to depose the previous president and install someone who was more friendly to the European Union. It was these same officials who were involved with spying on the Trump campaign, transition team, and administration just three years later. The switch to mail-in ballots, which are easily manipulated, was all part of the same soft coup that our Deep State bureaucrats have been working on since before President Trump was even inaugurated. Former White House official Darren Beattie was warning all summer that the globalist Deep State was preparing its own color revolution for America, and what happened on Election Night seems to have proven him correct.

Beyond the election, however, the pandemic response has damaged our economy and the very fabric of our society. Tens of thousands of small businesses went bankrupt this year. The restaurant industry was hit hard, and only the national chains are going to weather the storm. Your local family-owned diner is gone, while Amazon and Walmart have reported record profits. Tens of millions of people are out of work, for no other reason than the government forced their employers to close their doors. This total economic control by an all-powerful central government is what we would have expected in Soviet Russia or Communist China, not in the land of the free and home of the brave.

Worse than the lockdowns themselves, however, is the response of the American people. Some, mostly on the right, are fed up, and have vowed never to wear a mask or take a vaccine, but the rest of America is slowly becoming used to the new normal. They have become acclimated to the point where they welcome further lockdowns and mask mandates in the name of public health. Anyone criticizing these mandates is derided as selfish, someone who does not care about his neighbors, and wants elderly people to die. Social shame becomes almost as powerful as the mandates themselves. The whole country is being conditioned to accept these outrageous intrusions on our liberty. New York state is instituting border controls and will refuse entry to American citizens who do not have proof of a negative COVID test. As soon as a vaccine is released, you can bet that presenting proof of vaccination will become necessary for all sorts of business, from employment to entry into a grocery store. We all thought that the dystopian nightmare of a masked policeman demanding to see your papers could never happen here, but it is about to, and half the country will welcome it.

Social trust and cohesion have been damaged as well, perhaps irreparably. The weekend before the election I was passing out campaign literature in my neighborhood. My Millennial and Generation X neighbors were mostly fine with that, but my Boomer and Silent Gen neighbors looked askance at me, as if I were a leprous pariah who had no business coming to their door. One elderly woman was panicked, refusing to even touch the paperwork I had in my hand, lest she be exposed to the Wuhan Flu. I have acquaintances who have become so anxious about COVID that they have canceled their usual Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers. All this for a virus that has a 99.99% survival rate – slightly worse than the standard flu.

Yet it is exactly this sort of social distrust that is part of the Great Reset itself. Traditional society is built from the ground up, as people form families, and families form communities. The bonds within these communities are the foundation of a nation, a civilization. Totalitarian regimes have always despised these bonds, which is why they have always hated rural communities and loved big cities. In a rural community, men can take care of themselves, and they work with their neighbors to do whatever is necessary. In big cities, everyone depends on centralized infrastructure and government social services.

In Soviet Russia and Communist China, people are moved around to break up potential resistance centers. Remember the propaganda from the World Economic Forum: atomized people living in pods, eating bugs, living in giant cities where they take mass transit to their jobs? Atomized people are easier to control than strong families and strong communities. The globalist dream is for all your needs to be met by an omnipotent, benevolent, government. Consumerism will replace community. Who needs community when you have a million followers on Instagram? Who needs a tribe when you can order toys from Amazon and have them delivered by drone? Who needs land to live freely on when you have virtual reality?

There is a racial component to the Great Reset as well. The TIME Magazine feature that I mentioned earlier has more than one article that talks about so-called racial justice. In the globalist worldview, white Americans and Europeans are an illegitimate people. We have no homelands, no heritage, no culture, and no rights to exist. We are made to apologize for slavery, for colonialism, for imperialism, for the holocaust, and even for our very existence. Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project teach that every social structure in our society was built for the purpose of upholding white supremacy while oppressing anyone with a different skin color. These philosophies demand that our whole society be torn down in the name of racial justice. This too is part of their “Great Reset”. Our children are taught that they are guilty of the original sin of racism, and only by giving up everything their fathers bequeathed to them can they even approach absolution.

Earlier this year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture published a poster showing what they called aspects of white culture in the United States. Some of their many examples of so-called white culture include rugged individualism, the nuclear family, the scientific method, a love of history, the Protestant work ethic, planning for the future, and justice based on the English common law. One might be tempted to point out that all these things are good values that enabled our ancestors to build the greatest civilization in human history, but that would be racist. In this new anti-racist paradigm, lauding hard work is offensive and expecting justice to be blind is wrong. Recall that the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement once called for the destruction of the nuclear family, before bad PR convinced them to erase that bit from their website. This is not racial justice; this is the great communist reset wearing a racial costume, in the same manner that it wears a feminist costume or environmentalist costume. Underneath each one is the same desire to remake society, to remake human nature itself, no matter the cost.

Ironically, the black family in America was beginning to heal after centuries of slavery just as the welfare state came along to put the nail in its coffin. What was helping the black family were very things that are now being labeled as white supremacist – hard work, the nuclear family, and planning for the future. Welfare destroyed all that by kicking black men out of the home and replacing them with the government dole. Every attempt to reform welfare has only made the problem worse. Whole generations of black people are growing up entirely within the welfare system. For many of them, work is for chumps – you make less than you get while on welfare, and you have to follow all those white supremacist rules like showing up on time and having a good attitude.

More than fifty years ago, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan drafted a report on the black family for President Johnson. In this report Moynihan warned that white families were preparing to go down the same road, and history has proven him correct. The nuclear family in America is crumbling, and children are being raised by single parents, or two mothers, two fathers, or no parents at all. This too is all part of the plan of the Great Reset. Whereas the Roman orator Cicero correctly identified marriage and the family as the first bond of society, globalist technocrats see the family as an impediment to their plans. Families are loyal to each other, while rootless individuals are only loyal to the state. Families change your perspective. A childless Millennial might be content to live in a tiny house, share his living space with ten other people, eat reprocessed bugs, and use mass transit every day. On the other hand, a man with a wife and children must think beyond himself. He must think ahead to what sort of world he will leave to his posterity. It is exactly this sort of forward thinking that creates civilizations and is therefore exactly what the Great Reset seeks to erase.

Look at the technocrats themselves and see what their own families are like. Kamala Harris is childless. So too are Angela Merkel of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France. The Clintons have one child, who also has one child. These rootless childless Jacobins have neither loyalty to the past nor any investment in the future. They talk about making the world better for future generations, but that desire is entirely abstract; because they have no skin in the game, they end up leaving things worse instead.

Now look back at the year 2020 with all of this in mind. In January, President Trump was coasting to reelection on one of the best economies in American history. Nationalism is rising, not only in America but throughout the world. The forgotten men and women of America are coming together in a shared movement, exactly what the globalist left has been trying to prevent. President Trump promised that “we will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” and he was working toward that end.

With their long-planned revolution in danger, what is a globalist technocrat to do?

Along comes a pandemic. It turns out to be a very viral disease that can kill the elderly or people with comorbidities. Ten or twenty years ago we might have let it run its course, maybe do a PR campaign reminding people to wash their hands and suggest that people more at risk should take extra precautions. Instead, however, we locked down our economy, forced people to wear masks, provoked millions of layoffs, and introduced an entirely untested and vulnerable mail-in voting system. Weddings, funerals, and Thanksgiving dinners were discouraged or even banned, while BLM riots were encouraged. The country was left on a knife’s edge.

Many on the right are almost looking forward to a hot civil war, thinking we can finally defeat our enemies and take our country back once and for all. However, even a hot civil war can still be used for globalist aims. A civil war invites international intervention, and China – ever the globalist ally – stands ready to take one side or the other. Civil war or secession mean more international involvement in America’s affairs, not less.

So, what is a patriotic American nationalist to do?

First, we must be realistic. At the time of this writing, President Trump has filed lawsuits alleging voter fraud in several swing states. If he is successful in court, he wins the election and remains in office for four more years. However, there is no guarantee that he will succeed. As distasteful as it sounds, we must be prepared for a Biden/Harris administration that will undo many of the gains that Trump made on our behalf. We must be prepared for a return to Obama-era globalism, now on steroids. There is no hidden plan to save our country, there is no Q out there sharing hints about top secret information for those who know how to read his cryptic messages. There is only you, me, and the rest of the seventy-five million people who have supported President Trump in his efforts to return America to the forgotten men and women of this country. We cannot simply sit back and wait for someone to rescue us, as if we are a damsel in distress. Even if President Trump is successful, we still live in a nation more divided than it has been since the Civil War, and every political contest will be a battlefield for America’s future.

Next, we must be focused. The reason the left is so much better at organization and political action is because this is their focus, this is their life, this is their religion. Not so for most conservatives. We have families, we have jobs, we have church. Many of us would rather sit back and watch the football game than do the hard work of organizing. I have been heartened to see so many people come out to the Trump rallies, as well as the Stop the Steal rallies in the state capitols earlier this week. However, it is difficult to sustain this level of energy for long. Eventually our regular lives will beckon. We survived eight years of Bill Clinton, we survived eight years of Barack Obama. How much worse can Joe Biden and Kamala Harris be, some might ask. Remember, though, that these people have promised to finish the job Obama started in fundamentally transforming our society. The green new deal will destroy American businesses, and even driving a car might not be affordable in the near future. Wokeism will continue to infect everything, from entertainment to music to sports to your own job. Joe Biden has already promised to rescind Trump’s executive order banning Critical Race Theory struggle sessions from government jobs; in fact, he will likely find a way to extend it to all of us. We just want to be left alone, but the globalist agenda will not let us live in peace. They are interested in us, and in our children.

Further, we must direct our focus to the local level. We should hope and pray and do everything else we can to help President Trump succeed in this contest, but we cannot neglect our states, our counties, and our communities. One of the ways in which left was able to achieve so much power was by taking control at the local level. City councils, state legislatures, district attorneys, secretaries of state – these positions all exert influence over our daily lives, as well as the direction of our country as a whole. The reason that the McCloskeys were persecuted for brandishing firearms on their own property is because their district attorney is a left-wing extremist. The reason the Democrats were able to commit so much electoral fraud in big cities is because they control the state election boards. Run for local office. If you cannot run, then support like-minded people who can. Write letters to your council members, your legislators, and your governor. A Biden/Harris administration would be bad for America, but we have a tremendous opportunity to establish safeguards for freedom and liberty in our own states and communities.

We must be ready for anything. It is easy enough to say that we should be ready for a hot war, but it is easier said than done. Get out of the cities – they are bad for your soul anyway, and if a shooting war does start, they will not be safe. Move as far into the country as you can and learn to take care of yourself. Every one of us should know how to maintain a car, fix a broken pipe, make electricity work, use a computer, and communicate in an encrypted manner. We should all be getting to know our neighbors and know who will have our backs when times get tough. We must be in good physical condition – put down the chips and breadsticks, cut the carbs, and start lifting weights. We must be in good mental and emotional condition too. Turn off the TV, cut off your addiction to sports, stop giving money to people who hate you, who use it to demoralize you and propagandize your children, and pick up something useful. Read the classics. Read helpful non-fiction. Read your Bible.

We must also be prepared to take on the role of dissident. I believe God has a plan for our country, and for each one of us, but that plan might not be what we wish it were. God’s plan for us might be to be like the underground church in Communist China, having clandestine services and keeping the true Word of God alive beneath the nose of an oppressive government. It might be that of the Spanish Reconquista, to slowly win back the territory that Christendom has lost over the centuries. It might be that of the early Christians in the Roman Empire, who showed their faith even as they were mercilessly hunted down and killed. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that the time of living comfortably is over. A century of comfortable living in America has created a church that is fat and lazy, sloppy with the Word of God, and all too accommodating of modern immorality and degeneracy. The Church of God is due for a winnowing, and I pray that God will find us faithful, and allow us to be part of the remnant He always promises to leave.

Globalism cannot coexist with Christianity. Globalism is the religion of the builders of the Tower of Babel, who sought to capture heaven for themselves. The fact that the EU Parliament building in Strasbourg, France was deliberately built to resemble classical depictions of the Tower of Babel is no accident. We are witnesses yet another rendition of the same supernatural battle between good and evil that has been playing out on our world for untold millennia. The globalist aims of organizations like the World Economic Forum are the same demonic ideas that have plagued the people of God since time began. Like the French Revolution, like the Communism of Marx, and the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China, the Great Reset is yet another attempt to erase the Christian heritage of our world, and with it all knowledge of our God.

We know that our God is greater than the god of this world and all his minions. We know that our God wins in the end. The question is, are you ready to step up and join the fight?