If one were looking for a reason for why the conservative movement failed so completely you would be spoiled for choice. Most people would point to the fact that despite having billions of dollars and majority support on key issues, conservatives managed to conserve nothing. Others would point out that many of the people claiming to be conservative were more concerned with maintaining good relations with their friends on the Left than advancing conservative policy.
Often this is where you hear some form of the Hoffer quote about great causes becoming religions, corporations or rackets. It is a great observations and certainly true, especially with regards to the conservative movement. Any system that produces a sanctimonious simpleton like David French has long since stopped being a serious political movement. Most of conservatism is a racket, while the rest is just a jobs program for philosophy majors.
While true, these are symptoms rather than causes. The real cause of conservative failure was the race issue. Once they conceded the moral high ground to the Left over the issue of race, the Right was forced to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism in order to make any sense of it. You cannot agree that unequal results are immoral if you also claim that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. You have deny nature in order to embrace the moral claim.
Once conservatives accepted the starting premise of the Left, they condemned themselves to forever embracing the Left’s conclusions. You can see this in the fight of the antiwhite pogroms called CRT and DEI. This recent National Review post claims that conservatives can win the race debate. That sounds good until you read the actual text of the post and see that the secret formula for winning is another version of the internet meme, “the conservative case for…”
Here are the key lines. “We must see racial disparities where they exist and acknowledge racial trauma as real, because for many Americans, it is real. Responding to the trauma of racial discrimination by simply expressing a commitment to a race-neutral ideal is a bad move.” In other words, the so-called conservatives have to accept the premise of the Left. They see winning as proving to their masters on the Left that they are properly trained on the issue of race.
Now, the author of the piece is an interesting character. We can be sure that his ancestors did not arrive on the Mayflower. He is an example of what conservatives tell us is the new model American. His people arrived recently and as if by magic they are not only as American as everyone else, but they now have a duty to criticize the errors of your ancestors and explain how you can make things right. South Asians have embraced the skins game with a passion.
There is another name for this. Isaac Willour is a fine example of the Ingrate-American, a new arrival who does nothing but lecture white people for not having done enough to make his stay comfortable. White Americans could be forgiven for wondering why in the hell they need to listen to this interloper about anything. Maybe instead of lecturing us about our ancestors, he should be thanking us for a life that the civilization of his ancestors could never provide to him.
Putting that aside, once you concede that racial disparities require your attention and that they are the fault of white people, you sign onto whatever pogroms the Left launches on white people. There can be no salvation for white people until those disparities are gone, but since that is an impossibility, the only choice left is a forever war on whiteness, which is a war on white people. This is the logical end of the conservative embrace of the blank slate.
One you concede that people are amorphous blobs that can be made into anything, the cause of observable disparity shifts from the individual to society. Once you buy into the idea that all men are created equal, you concede that any observed inequality must be the result of some malevolent force in society. Once conservatives signed onto these two concepts, they committed themselves to a war on the majority population in the name of equality, equity and justice.
This is how conservatives went from Bill Buckley arguing with James Baldwin over the issue of civil rights to a world where recent arrivals lecture the white population about the crimes of their ancestors. After all, if all you have is the claim that all men are created equal, endowed with natural rights, what argument can you have against some guy getting off his flying carpet and claiming to be your equal? As your equal, does he not have the right to judge you and your ancestors?
Of course, this degenerate thinking pollutes everything. After all, how can one oppose open borders when you owe such a huge debt to the world? How can one question the economic arrangements when the world is counting on your sacrifice? How can you oppose community wrecking policies when you wanting to live a peaceful life among people like yourself is clearly white supremacy? Once the blood libel gets going, it becomes the universal weapon.
This is why conservatism has been a failure in America. Once they signed off on the blank slate and egalitarianism, they had no way to dispute any of the claims made by the Left, so they were reduced to being their unwilling accomplices. Eventually, their masters lost patience and now conservatives compete with one another to see who can be the most enthusiastic for the latest progressive fad. Conservatism is a shadow that cheers as the Left flits from one cause to the next.
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I was directed to this article on Thursday from lewrockwell.com. Some thoughts: I don’t think it will ever be possible for racialist conservatives to be able to whip up enough popular sentiment against blacks in order to turn the political clock back to before the 1960’s. So many social realities are working against them. People like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer can harp all they want about black crime and Critical Race Theory. However, the problem is that most Americans don’t come into contact with the black underclass. You can live in a large metropolis like New York City or… Read more »
[…] Posted on January 3, 2023 […]
Men are equally created in the image of God, which means they have the same fundamental human rights, not equal ability or opportunity. Following Genesis 1, instead of Jefferson, these are life, family, and property, and later, the right to a just trial. Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness is basically the fight “to do what I will with what is my own,” as Jesus expressed property rights. Perhaps an atheist can only believe in “nature, red in tooth and claw.”
the right to, sorry about the typo
Could you enlighten me on where Jesus suggests the fight, ” “to do what I will with what is my own,”
His followers didn’t seem to get that memo. (Acts 2:42-44)
Isaac Willour — where is that mystery meat even from?
‘You cannot agree that unequal results are immoral if you also claim that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. You have to deny nature in order to embrace the moral claim.’
BOOM.
Thomas Jefferson was the source of the most unfortunate and destructive phrase in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, …”. In one fell swoop, a simple little throwaway phrase has been the Angel of Death for the society it meant to create. But the only thing Jefferson meant to convey by that phrase, is that someone born into a higher social class is not automatically judged by God to be a better man. In fact, the rest of the sentence, seen through 18th century grammar, makes the phrase undeniably… Read more »
Two most ballyhooed phrases in the English language:
“All men are created equal”
“In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek”
Again, that important word “in”.
Not the 2nd unfortunately, contrary to your supposed dig against an eternal truth. In Christ, those who act accordingly as being in Christ, there is brotherhood, according to the only authoritative word on the subject, being that of the Word of God, the Bible.
LOL. And yet Jews and Greeks go on stubbornly existing.
Lol boomer, stop evading reality and responsibility: just admit the error so we learn from the mistake and don’t repeat it. Jefferson screwed up, and he didnt screw up little. He plowed that mfer right into the wall like Senna at san marino. Quit trying to “definition of “is” is” us here. Any sort of equality is an antichristian Babylonian rebellion against God’s order. All efforts to impose equality are ultimately attempts by the Satanic to position themselves as equal to God. It is all evil and satanic in all forms and iterations. Even putting in “created equal” with your… Read more »
All men ARE INDEED created as equals in the eyes of God. Naked came I into this world, naked shall I leave it. THAT is the sense in which I always read it. INever in a million years could you find anything in other of Thomas Jefferson’s penmanship that should ever imply that he thought that all production, or lands, or anything should be taken from its owners and distributed equally to anybody who happened to live within certain geographical boundaries. Call out this BS twist on the phrase by the Left for what it is. It stinks with a… Read more »
Does POX “Isaac Willour” have his White trophy wife yet? Asking for a friend.
Given the recent rash of homosexual marriages among the National Review staff, it is a mere assumption “Isaac” will end up with a “wife.” The White bit? Absolutely.
Oh have I enjoyed the dram in the house today. but really we are here, time to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeHkaSH0Xw8
and of course we are here too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjeceveczCc
and BTW Z , you are 100% correct about conservatism
Regarding GOP, Inc and the whole leftist hive infrastructure in yesterdays post: They are either willing accomplices or they are cowards. I’m not sure which is worse.
How TF did NR find this guy? He’s a freaking college student at a no-name college. One can find fault with Bill Buckley but at least he was a highly educated, intelligent, worldly adult. How far they have fallen…
Every school attracts TLA recruiters. Fortunately mine was more interested in “chickenhawking” me than recruiting me, so his pitch was revoltingly sexual.
School is the core of our enemies’ being, the only way they know how to live. It’s why they love Harry Potter. It’s why their belief in hierarchy is stronger than all conservatisms’ combined. It’s why they love snitching.
It’s why they don’t know anything.
I know. Hard to imagine Bill having this Issac chappy out on the yacht in Narragansett Harbor. It’s one thing to import a bunch of Africans to pick cotton or Chinese to build railroads or Mexicans to harvest crops, and many would probably repent those decisions in hindsight; but why did anyone feel this guy would be of use to America?
Given my tendency to look for tribalism, I can’t help but wonder what role Ramesh Ponnuru played in landing that NR job for Willour. Probably not, because I’m sure that everyone at NR is incentivized to bring aboard non-whites, but I can’t help but wonder.
There’s a good chance that some white man at NR gets to announce proudly at his next performance review, “I promoted diversity by inviting Isaac Willour to write for us. Please don’t fire me.”
I always thought that the proper interpretation of the phase “all men are created equal” was that aristocracy would be banned in the new United States of America. It was meant as statement of that prohibition and had nothing to do with natural rights or biological reality.
That’s a great reframing, sort of like the Scandinavian Jante’s Law: Your not to think you’re anyone special, or that you’re better than us. It’s focus isn’t on the inferiority of others, but against the assertion of superiority. More of a call to humility rather than equality.
It was meant as equal treatment under the Law and recognition that each human was of the Creator.
Yes, nothing to do with actual physical/mental equality, equality of outcome, or such gibberish.
Looked at the author. It figures that the AEIR has taken him on. His credentials as a, “rising junior”, are classic Hive credentials. I hear we have a shortage of welders and strawberry pickers.
Isn’t that the rub? Our ancestors came here and did the crap and dangerous jobs and they come here and get student loans and lecture us about things they know nothing about. As long as the debt regime lives, endless armies like this author will continue to destroy the civilization that was built on sacrifices to provide them with the perfect nest to crap in.
Human beings love to attack weakness and at the same time show pity. The latter is a mask for their viciousness. We’ve got a situation in this country where both of those impulses play out in a very complimentary dance. Pity them who are a victim of those evil ones over there. The ones to be pitied have, in fact, a blood libel and an addiction to using pity to get things for nothing. So, like all things in Left world, reality gets inverted. Nobody is going to pity us. What needs to happen is we need to stop being… Read more »
That’s usually what I’d hit normiecons over the head with, that, just like the left, they believe that the plight of the “duskier” racial groups is due strictly to external factors, they just disagree with what those factors are (with the ooga-booga factors used by the left having the upper hand since they are magical and thus not factually disprovable).
I think it is more that they have to, “renounce their racism”, before they do anything. They renounce it by announcing that they are colorblind and that they are committed to the creed of the new founder, MLK. Of course, watch the TV ads, and you see how committed they are to being colorblind. Never mind. We might score a touchdown! Another ten yard gain closer to extinction in the meantime. The dark side of this is that they have surrendered before taking the battlefield. All of the other groups admit they are not colorblind. In fact, they embrace their… Read more »
So it is true. Every time a bell rings, another Conservative Inc. writer gets a job with WaPo or NYT.
https://www.nytco.com/press/david-french-joins-the-times-as-an-opinion-columnist/
Proof positive that the NYT is a rightwing rag.
SARC~just in case
From Z’s essay yesterday [What if They Believe It?]: “Every FBI agent is sent to the ADL for brainwashing, so the selection pressure strongly favors the sorts of people who believe in the woke conspiracy theories.” David French was SELECTED to play the role which he is playing in this artificially-staged drama precisely because his personality-type checked off all of the prerequisites required by the SELECTORS. If the SELECTORS were not 110% certain that David French was a shabbos goyische toady who would not just dutifully but enthusiastically write & submit for publication precisely what the SELECTORS wanted him to… Read more »
Every time a bell rings?
More like every time a man dresses in drag.
Every time a “neo-vagina” heals shut.
Since the spoiled children are intent on defining the constitution and the founding as white supremacy, it shouldn’t be all that difficult to attribute “all men are created equal” to that same white supremacist source.
Ooh. I like this.
“The guy who said ‘all men are created equal’ was a white slaveowner!”
Accepting the premise of the Left- hey, that’s what they wanted, right?
“Any system that produces a sanctimonious simpleton like David French…”
Who has just been announced today as the NYT’s next opinion columnist.
If you suck hard enough, and long enough, you will be rewarded.
Maybe it’s just me, but I parse those “key lines” from National Review as being quite straightforward. To me it says that there are real racial differences, and the error is pretending they don’t exist. It is worth mentioning that “trauma” will exist whether or not the differences are real.
Flip and flip again: jewjitsu.
The effort is not to gain honest accuracy, but to maintain moral superiority in any stance.
A slight divergence of topic; but one which sticks to the general theme of race: A thought which Z-man voiced in last Friday’s Power Hour— and which I don’t recall ever being discussed on this forum— is the notion that we White legacy Americans do owe something to Black people. I’ll begin the discussion by admitting that I’m about as thoroughly ‘race realist’ as a person can be: I believe that, by most metrics, sub-Saharan Africans, considered as a group, are indeed inferior to the rest of humanity. And I can back that belief up with facts: by pointing to… Read more »
Bill, forgive me for focusing on a small piece of your worthwhile post. As you mentioned, in Z Man’s last podcast, he referred to our responsibilities to blacks in this country. Ann Coulter writes about this on occasion as well. I was surprised because I guess that one of Z’s primary motivations is the loss of our right of association in general and irritation with blacks in particular. I think that he did a podcast last summer in which he named “racial autonomy” as our highest goal. Me? I don’t feel any responsibility to blacks. I want to separate from… Read more »
“Some obligation” is key here. If I have a duty to you, I cannot fulfill that duty if I do not exist, so my first duty must always be to myself. Otherwise, my duties and obligations are meaningless. Collectively, our first obligation is to ourselves, but after that we can certainly have some sense of duty to others.
That said, I think we have a duty to police the ghetto, for example. Throwing open the jails is a dereliction of duty.
Line, I can’t say I feel any sense of obligation to ‘Blacks in general’; to any and every Black person. I certainly don’t believe that Whites “owe” Blacks anything. And in a general sense, I do believe that Blacks— as a group— are a scourge on American society. That’s not even a value judgment; merely an acknowledgment that a group which comprises one-eighth of the population, while routinely committing over half of all crimes— and in addition, is disproportionately represented in venereal disease, out-of-wedlock births, and welfare dependency— that group is creating problems which everyone else has to deal with.… Read more »
It doesn’t seem to me like a conundrum. One does not have to “have it out” for blacks in order to become realistic and stop bending society over backwards trying to turn them into something they aren’t.
It’s the opposite really. It’s OUR society which has been turned upside-down and inside-out in order to accommodate and cater to them. Whites have bent over backwards for the good graces of blacks.
The blacks have stayed the same and they have not shown any appreciation.
“How do we remain cognizant of these very real group racial differences, and all they imply; while still treating the individual Black people we encounter with fairness, and— until shown otherwise— respect?”— The Real Bill How is this *not* exactly what we are doing now? In other words, what is it that I do, hypothetically, that is keeping the Black man down? I have no power over any minority—except to separate myself from them, and that is problematic in the current political climate. Every action that I can think of that I might undertake to keep the Black man “down”… Read more »
Compsci, I agree with pretty much everything you say. I agree that Whites are not the problem; and I certainly didn’t intend to imply otherwise. My only point was, that some Blacks I encounter are deserving of my respect. Not because I owe it to them out of some twisted sense of racial guilt; but because they’ve earned it. I’ve met plenty of Black people who were more deserving of my respect than plenty of White people I’ve known. I’ve known Black people I would trust my life to, and White people I’d be afraid to turn my back on.… Read more »
No one has argued for disrespecting anyone that I can remember. Some are more dubious than others, but the worse I see is that folk would ignore Blacks and other minorities rather than interact with them. They would interact and help their own race. Can you blame them? Is such thinking from Whites only? I can certainly recount numerous Black “intellectuals” touting the same from their podiums to their people—and of course the disingenuous Whites who bow down to their outrageous demands. No one here, to my knowledge, has promoted and supported, by name, more Blacks than I. Good ideas,… Read more »
“And you can imagine what a drag it must be for law-abiding Blacks, when they’re lumped-together with their criminal cousins. How do we encourage the best in Black people, while not committing the progressive mistake of assuming that they’re all wonderful?” You were doing really good up until here. Although, what you stated in that wall of text are axiomatically obvious truths to anyone with a functional frontal lobe, a set of eyes, and even minor interactions with blacks. That wall of text you posted was also openly discussed in public just as you listed it within living memory. It… Read more »
J, here’s a new article for you: Disparities in Advanced Math and Science Skills Begin by Kindergarten January 3, 2022 https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4120667/posts Our new study finds that 13% of white students and 16% of Asian students display advanced math skills by kindergarten. The contrasting percentage for both Black and Hispanic students is 4%. These disparities then continue to occur throughout elementary school. By fifth grade, 13% of white students and 22% of Asian students display advanced math skills. About 2% of Black students and 3% of Hispanic students do so. Similar disparities occur in advanced science skills. What explains these disparities?… Read more »
Good catch, Apex. You cannot capitalize “black,” and be operating in good faith. What are these guys doing?
So…. do you capitalize ‘Asian’? Do you capitalize ‘Hispanic’?
Doesn’t it make a lot of sense to start also capitalizing ‘White’ and ‘Black’, when you’re using them to refer to race?
If I was capitalizing ‘Black’, but leaving ‘white’ uncapitalized— like the woke media often does— you’d have a point.
But to suggest that I’m not “operating in good faith”, because I’m choosing to capitalize Black— where the fuck do you get that?
Because it’s an affectation that began only a few years ago, and is just another in a long line of flexes on whites. No one should play along with their own cultural genocide.
Predator, I’ve always capitalized ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic’. So at some point it seemed logical to start capitalizing ‘White’ and ‘Black’ as well. >>> If you’re imagining that my doing so is any indication that I’m close to being ‘woke’, you clearly haven’t read much of what I’ve written! And when I talked about encouraging conservative law-abiding Blacks, I certainly wasn’t thinking about those ridiculous commercials with the happy interracial couples and Black female physicians. Pandering to Blacks— pretending they possess qualities they don’t— is not helping anyone. And I agree too with what I take to be your central point:… Read more »
Fair enough, you qualified your position, I respect that. You are clearly very thoughtful and intelligent as you put a great deal of effort into your posts. I will never take that away from anyone, and you craft cogent responses and are clearly wide awake about how reality works. My only point of contention is that a single person’s anecdotal evidence does not a trend make. You riffed on this w/ 3g4me below. You’ve had, for whatever reason, statistically rare experiences with blacks. The whole rub here is the law of averages. I also have black friends and some are… Read more »
I don’t want them shtupping my girls. That’s the starting point. Ending my lineage so they can uplift theirs is not my obligation.
Bro, who cares? They kill Whites by the truckload and you’re worried that some black, somewhere, is not getting a fair shake? This is what you’re worried about?
The real Bill: I utterly reject your very premise. No White American owes any black – of whatever lineage – anything. Black demands for endless reparations and set asides and lowered standards aren’t based on ‘individual’ judgments nor any ‘respect.’ They are based on tribe versus tribe. Human judgment begins by noticing patterns – and while you’re welcome to take the time to decide if any random black is one of your numinous ones, I’ll stick with the safer assumption that any black I am unfortunate enough to interact with would happily see me and mine vanish from the earth.… Read more »
3g4me, Clearly, I didn’t do a very good job of expressing myself. I completely agree that Whites don’t owe Blacks anything. That’s not at all what I was saying. What I was saying was that I’ve met individual Blacks who deserved my respect; and that I felt it incumbent on me to give it to them; just like I would give it to any other person of any race who had earned it. And while I don’t disagree that the picture you paint of Blacks is true of many, perhaps most, of them— I worked for three years in a… Read more »
Literally refuse to engage with anyone who capitalizes “black.” You should be banned.
The biography of the Brainard family — mid 18th century missionaries to the Indians of the eastern seaboard — describes the manners which were expected of the young boys, who were raised under the influences of Connecticut Puritanism. They were expected to show ostentatious deference toward nearly all humans they encountered but in particular, “special punishment was visited on [them] if they failed to show respect for the aged, the poor, the colored, or to any persons whatever whom God had visited with infirmities.” Perhaps the New England Yankees did have things in their proper perspective at one time. Coloreds… Read more »
That sounds a lot like “The White Mans Burden”.
Why do we and why should we have to walk that fine line?
We aren’t to blame for their disfunction and we shouldn’t saddle our society or our children with having to carry that burden.
“Conservatism” is a failure just by its name.
American right was just the moderate version of liberalism. The true north-american right died with Loyalists.
I don’t know if it can appears by itself on a land overdominated by “the founding fathers”.
I guess it can, but not certain of it.
The American Revolution did not fundamentally reset society like the French and Russian revolutions. Conceding that America was founded in the fires of social revolution is not only false, but also concedes the game.
It is even worse than capitulation on the race issue.
The American Revolution was the logical extension of British Colonial culture and government evolution. It can traced to the founding charters of the colonies, not to some revolutionary pablum. That a fraction of the original Congress included flowery language does not change this.
No, Tykebomb. PASARAN is right. I hope I have some time later to explain well.
This is all true. Con, Inc., signed on to equalism more than a century ago. What really did them in was that they put all their chips on globalism after WWII. They were going to overwhelm the Left, who had the albatross of organized labor around their necks, with the riches generated by globalism. Then Bill Clinton happened. Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council flanked the Repubs on the right. The global bankers and capitalists discovered that they like the Left, with its internationalism and centralization, more than the tepid “lower taxes and less regulation” that the Repubs were offering.… Read more »
“ Once they conceded the moral high ground to the Left over the issue of race, the Right was forced to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism in order to make any sense of it.” I agree that the blank slate is at the root of the problem but the causality goes the other way. The embrace of the blank slate made it easy, even compulsory, to accept egalitarianism. Starting from “all men are created equal” through natural law theory and the 20th century rejection of eugenics because of the excesses of a failed Austrian painter, the blank slate became… Read more »
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes (1937)
Ironically, the Left was all-in for eugenics in the early 20th century.
It was 1927, not 1937, of course.
The painter based his eugenics programme on the progressive ones in California and New York
[…] Willing Accomplices […]
From Z-man: “Once you buy into the idea that all men are created equal, you concede that any observed inequality must be the result of some malevolent force in society.” I left a post last week saying that the line from the Declaration of Independence was not “all men are equal”, but “all men are created equal”, and I wondered what was the significance of that word “created”. I have always thought it meant that whatever created me (whether that’s God, the big bang, or mom and dad having sex) is the same thing that created you, him, her, everybody.… Read more »
I was taught as a kid that “all men are created equal” was merely the rejection of the divine right of kings to rule.
Hardly matters now. As Gregory Hood of AmRen likes to say, “ideas get taken to their logical conclusion,” and like it or not, the ideas of natural rights, Christianity, and the Declaration, ***as they are commonly understood***, make authoritarian egalitarianism inevitable.
Makes you wonder who influences how things are commonly understood.
If you say all men are equal i take it to mean that all men have equal endowments.
If you say all men are created equal then i take that to mean that all men are created by the same process.
All men are created by the same process, cellular replication, but that does not mean that all men are equal.
A Chevy and a Ford may be created by the same assembly line process, but they are different cars.
Earl Scheib used to advertise, “I’ll paint any car, any color, for $99.99.” In other words, all car paint jobs are equal. But does that imply all paint colors are equal? A tatted-up, blue-haired land-whale would still look like a freak if she were thin and shapely.
WCiv911: Angels dancing on the head of a pin. In Klown World the words niggardly, master bedroom, pregnant women, and fair are verboten, and you want a debate about what was commonly understood among Virginia planters in the 1770s? Best of luck.
My opinion? The authors of the Declaration were wrong.
Ostei: The authors of the declaration and the thinkers of the Enlightenment were all wrong – because they made pronouncements about all of human nature that were based on on the subset White men – of various different nations – but from the same genetic base. Once any of their prognostications and pronouncements were extended to blacks or indios or orientals, the falsity of their magisterial pronouncements were easily seen.
Vinny, You received your answer last week. Line in the Sand repeats it succinctly below. Your understanding is incorrect. So simply stop repeating it. The DoI was penned by Jefferson. He meant equal, as in equal under the law and with common “rights”—nobility and commoner alike—the law/rights applies to everyone. Never did any Founder believe in equality of men as in regards to ability. I assume they all believed in creation by God—if they believed in God—but that has nothing to do with the Declaration. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of… Read more »
Compsci, My reason for repeating it was Z-man’s line “Once you buy into the idea that all men are created equal, you concede that any observed inequality must be the result of some malevolent force in society.” I can buy into the idea that all men are created equal without disagreeing with your interpretation of equal under the law. I can’t buy into the idea that all men ARE equal, and, yes, I know the founders didn’t intend that, though that’s how it’s widely misunderstood today. Unfortunately, I have to go along with Line in the Sand about the way… Read more »
The point is that you pull the quote from the DoI. Your interpretation was not in Jefferson’s mind when he penned that. If you want to reinterpret or rather add meaning to Jefferson’s Declaration, fine. But state so plainly. You are not really arguing against Z-man as he acknowledges—subtlety—that his equality remark is in error, but reflects common erroneous understanding. So his commentary is not really in error wrt DoI.
The point is that you pull the quote from the DoI. Your interpretation was not in Jefferson’s mind when he penned that. Yeah, I’m not so sure of that anymore. Your interpretation is definitely the standard normie con one. That i argued myself for years. But the rub is that Jefferson was definitely a man of the enlightenment and one of the central premises of the enlightenment was that humans were born tabula rasa. Jefferson in other writings professes such. On the other hand, he was a slave owner so he obviously did not practice what he preached, so to… Read more »
Another big factor is that capitalism, especially global capitalism “free markets/trade”, is not in the LEAST conservative.
Those that we think of as powerful “liberal” villains, are really globalist/corporatist villains who have long had their hand over the real levers of power like media and finance.
If you don’t encourage and engage in international trade with brutal one party dictatorships, then you are not an American.
“Designed in Cupertino, manufactured by third world slaves.”
Luckily, all of the workers in the Dell factories in Texas and Motorola plants in Illinois got new, high paying coding jobs.
Capitalists can be either Leftists or rightwingers. However, capitalism as an economic system inevitably mows down tradition and custom in a singleminded drive to accumulate the heavy wad. For this reason alone, I can only muster one-and-a-half cheers for the free market even though it is unquestionably the best known economic system for generating broad prosperity.
Buckley conservatism was 90% a Cold War project, tied somehow to the CIA. The equality stuff was to appeal to Third World peoples to keep them from the Soviet orbit. Once the Berlin Wall fell, Buckley should have folded up NR and gone sailing. He was too vain not to. He stuck around, purged Sobran, Buchanan, Francis, and others, promoted Neocons like Frum, and left behind rubble.
“Honk, honk,” to quote.
As usual, Z-man is correct: the issues around blank-slate radical egalitarianism, evolution-based human biodiversity, and race/”anti-racism”— which, as he points out, is really one subject— is the dividing-line between what we might call ‘true conservatism’ or ‘dissident-right conservatism’, and the faux-conservative ‘neoconservatism’ which is so eager to agree with its progressive brothers and sisters. So it’s probably not a coincidence that progressives are making such a huge issue around race; that the one understanding which separates true conservatives from everyone else, is the place where progressives have chosen to take their stand. It’s not a coincidence that the ‘egalitarian anti-racism’… Read more »
I think it might have been Pinker, or maybe someone else who once said something like this: In movies and books, intellectuals tend to scoff at and ridicule stories that have happy endings, where everything ends up nicely gift-wrapped with a pretty bow.
But in real life, the same intellectuals expect racial differences to defy nature, and insist on equal and happy outcomes, as if they’re saying “give us schmaltz!”
The real Bill: They’ll never acknowledge ‘the truth’ about racial differences, just as they’ll never acknowledge the truth about their magic vaccines. They’ve already banished bad thinkers from speaking and publishing. They’ve rewritten history. All the scientific experiments and surgeons are on board that race is merely a social construct. They’ve even despaired of AI because it can instantly identify race with even the fuzziest of xrays or via the examination of a single internal organ. Language is sanitized, books are abandoned, and the young are all media-schooled. Every error and false theory throughout history is repurposed generation after generation.… Read more »
I think Charles Murray said they won the political battle but lost the scientific battle.
Based on the increasing censorship at the NIH and censorship of genetic databases, it looks like the plan is more of the same, a controlled demolition of every scientific field in the continuation of the high (billionaire) + low (underclass of turd world) “democracy.
Isn’t Buckleyite conservatism all but dead? The National Review is far more ignorant and and detached from reality than in the past, but it seems representative of the twitching corpse of conservatism, which has a narrow “intellectual” range from Rich Lowry to Sean Hannity (moron to retard). Could a W or a Romney, assuming electoral fairness, even break thirty percent of the vote now? That’s generous if anything. The ludicrous Republican Party more or less died with W and Trump just kept the plug from being pulled a few years–to his discredit. Never asked is why the execrable Willours and… Read more »
The great path is Leftism -> Liberalism -> Conservatism -> DR?
Some (most) will never get beyond Conservatism. Some even have reverted, e.g. Liberalism -> Leftism. Conservatism is dead. It has been shown to not be an acceptable end point. DR has not accrued enough power to make a judgement upon, and as we’ve seen has had birthing pains.
This is why the nuances/flavors of Conservatism, mean nothing to me. It’s not an end point, no matter how it appears to morph.
“The ludicrous Republican Party more or less died with W and Trump just kept the plug from being pulled a few years–to his discredit.”
A big, big point. Trumpism in a nutshell, the Warp Speed Project of Murica First.
Jefferson: born to wealth, rhetorical genius, tormented soul.
Hamilton: ambitious immigrant, effective soldier, money man.
Somehow the two are still at it.
This observation is quite correct, and it’s the reason that you can really trace the decline of America to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Future Chinese (or Mexican, or Islamic, or cyborg-American) historians are going to look at this legislation and say “There! That was it, right there. The Civil Rights Act stands across American history like a wall – before 1965, American almost never lost, at anything, and after 1965, it almost never won. Seeming post-1965 triumphs, such as the Moon landings and victory in the Cold War were the results of movements and energies stemming from prior… Read more »
Altitude Zero: Take your point to its solid and logical conclusion. Who wrote the 1965 immigration act? What were their stated motivations going back many decades? What people were they prioritizing – yours or their own? The Civil Rights Act was the natural follow-on to the immigration act, and all were the outgrowth of America’s ‘second founding’ as revealed by Harry Jaffa, so that his people and Ayoub’s people and Ndebele’s people and Rajeesh’s people could all be magic and equal and Americans. Because if anyone can be noticed as different in any biological way, that opens the door for… Read more »
Once again, all true. ConInc cannot save us. Nor voting harder-harder. Nor wishing upon a star for a savior-messiah to be elected in 2024. But everything changes on the day of the collapse. The illusion of rules becomes irrelevant as desperation rises and hunger becomes the sole motivator. No one will be reading The Spectator or American Conservative, nor paying any attention to the backstabbing RINOs in DC. The countryside will remain relatively calm and stable, but big cities will burn. Hardship and fitness selection will reemerge with a vengeance; long overdue and nature’s only cure for what ails us.… Read more »
I sincerely doubt there is any “day” of collapse. There is a process of collapse. Which we have been witnessing for a long time now. Looting at the dollar store in Buffalo is a sign of collapse. Drag queen story hour is a sign of collapse. 30 years ago the rise to popularity of the Jerry Springer Show was a sign of collapse. I’ll stop here, since I could go on forever.
There’s a lot of ruin in an empire.
That line doesn’t cut it anymore
Why not? It means to me anyway, that the timelines for collapse are difficult to predict. Historians still argue about the fall of Rome—timeline, major events, causes. Yet we are certain Rome is no longer with us and the process was very slow—even for ancient times.
It strikes me as confirmed each day Zombie America staggers on.
“Day of collapse” was rhetorical flourish, so you are correct that the transition from order to disorder will likely be more gradual. But the Soviet bureaucracy collapsed within a few days and societal chaos was clearly evident within a few weeks, particularly as food deprivation took hold in the bigger cities. The wisdom of this insight is that the fog will arise in different places, at different times; therefore opportunism will become an important tactic when the wheels begin to come off.
That’s because the USSR had a central government in charge of everything economic. Central planning left a single point of failure for the society. A decentralized society can be expected to fail at a different rate on a different manner—but there will be signs, lots of them. It’s just the intersections of these failures we have a hard time imagining. But the puzzle will be clearly seen when assembled.
CNN is trying to make the case that the player is injured just as a result of tackling the ball carrier. I wonder how many people will fall for it. If it was just a tackle on an otherwise healthy player, players would be dropping like flies in NFL games, and would have been dropping like flies ever since football was invented.
The billionaire owned media, which is all connected to the pharma cartel will not even mention the jab requirement for NFL players, and the extremely high rates of myocarditis in young men.
A Kumbaya singer in my IG feed who I haven’t purged yet made a long post about now is the time to change the rules of football so that men never hurt their heads. It will still be an amazing game, but men will no longer get concussions.
People see what they want to see. The Left always sees and jumps on the next opportunity de-wild the world.
Emotion is a strong motivator. Allow the spirit to cool and you’ve lost the opportunity.
RealityRules: Just as “Stay safe” has now become part of the lexicon. Whereas I used to say regards, or respectfully, or even ‘warmly,’ I occasionally concluded missives with ‘take care.’ This was a general term referring to the subject’s life in general – health, wealth, family, etc. But now AWFL feminized thinking rules AINO so the prime directive is not grow, learn, explore, challenge, create, but instead “Stay safe.” A pox on anyone who uses that damned term – along with kommooonitttee and the whiny, helpless conception of ‘elderly.’ I’m old, dammit, and I don’t want anyone to ‘stay safe’… Read more »
they already have that game , it’s called soccer.
‘The real cause of conservative failure was the race issue. Once they conceded the moral high ground to the Left over the issue of race, the Right was forced to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism in order to make any sense of it.’
This is the core of it and this point should be hammered into the conservative head repeatedly like it were John Henry driving in a railroad spike.
“We must see racial disparities where they exist and acknowledge racial trauma as real, because for many Americans, it is real. ”
Maybe we could stop picking and rubbing salt into that particular wound to let it heal?
Even taking that quote at face value, what is not mentioned is we as a society do everything we can to inflame and infect that wound, assuming it even is a wound. We do everything imaginable to induce resentment and anger at our history rather than trying to smooth it over. It’s not solved because nobody wants it solved.
“We must see racial disparities where they exist and acknowledge racial trauma as real, because for many Americans, it is real. ”
So we must see men can become women as real because for many Americans it is real.
The bullshit never ends.
Even the courts acknowledge the BS when it comes to “feelings”. What’s “real” to you is “nonsense” to me. We can not reshape society to protect everyone from hurt “feelings”. Stick with what is observable reality and measurable, otherwise we’ll soon revert to a mob of 5 yo’s in a daycare center—if we have not already.
WTH?
Deja vu all over again ?
Anyway, Happy New Year
Show people, don’t just talk at them.
Trump was having success showing the country how everyone would benefit from his policies. They had more income, more household formations, greater community stability and those are all tangible results. They were drifting away from the Dems and that was terrifying to the DC machine.
Huey Long was even better. Listening to some of his speeches, I’m amazed at how powerful his descriptive narration was, all given in clear, concrete pictures the listener can easily see and grasp. He painted a vivid, complex world and told how things were, and how his policies would change the world for the better.
Now it’s a word salad of “freedom”, “democracy”, “racism”, and other empty abstractions that put everyone to sleep.
Trump went on a cuck-fest over the weekend, clucking on about how abortion lost the election. It is a cuckservative impulse to frame winning as losing. They finally got a major win on one minor issue and now they want to claim winning was just a bridge too far and invigorated the left and cost them the election. It never occurs to them that they lost because they ran a bunch of finks, cucks and freakshows. Frankly, this is embarrassing.
I guess he finally got tired of all the winning.
Yeah, he’s totally lost the thread. I don’t totally blame Trump for his failure in office; all though he certainly didn’t help himself with the people he surrounded himself with. He just didn’t understand what he was up against and prepare properly at all. But I have noticed that he NEVER backs up the people who stick their neck out for him. Whites vote and cheer for him? Do the platinum plan as suggested by Kardashian. His voters chased and beaten? Cut a deal the Dreamers. His supporters are set-up and put in gulags and a woman DIES for him… Read more »
TARS! stop it right now! the gop lost the elections because the dominion voting machine programmers said they should. are you really saying that the democrat candidates were NOT also a bunch of finks, cucks, and losers?
Reply: Sure bub, just as blacks and mestizos were always natural conservatives. Best black employment rate evahh ergo maga! Because winning!! means success for everyone, rather than prioritizing one’s own people.
Paah.
Unfortunately, rejecting the blank slate and egalitarianism isn’t enough. The Steve Sailer crowd accepts HBD but still manages to end up at colorblind civic nationalism, which lacks the backbone to stand up to the Cultural Marxists. They argue that, yes, there are group differences but that within each group, individuals land up and down the bell curve on any metric; therefore, while you can say that groups are unequal, that doesn’t apply to individuals. They always use the “who would you rather have as a neighbor, Thomas Sowell or a dangerous redneck” as their go-to example. Colorblind CivNats love, love,… Read more »
“Of course, they’re factually correct”
No, over time they also are wrong on this point. The “dangerous redneck” will have offspring far less likely to rape and murder your kids than Thomas Sowell’s mostly black progeny, even though they will be mulattoes. We have to acknowledge most non-Whites, regardless of how successful in the moment, over time will revert to the mean and ignorance and savagery. It is who they are.
it’s like dogs reverting to wolves. just how dna works is all.
It is worse with blacks. We know dogs evolved rapidly from wolves, in a sense that’s a species man created. Increasingly, genetics and hard sciences are, without much trumpeting for obvious reasons, indicating blacks had a very different primitive hominid ancestor in their admixture along with homo sapiens. Whites and Asians were admixtures of Neanderthals and homo sapiens. In a very real sense, this is the difference between dogs and raccoons, no pun intended. The folks who long ago claimed blacks were not human as we understand it may have been motivated by the much-ballyhooed “hate” but science appears to… Read more »
Agree. Along with a myriad of things, the Sailer crowd conveniently ignores regression to the mean. They ignore a lot of things to keep their head in the sand – and to feel intellectually and morally superior to the rest of us.
They’re worse than cowards.
Bingo! You can’t profess one aspect of HBD science and not accept the other. I admit, regression to the mean is a conundrum. Nonetheless it should be discussed openly among adherents to HBD science.
@Jack
“We have to acknowledge most non-Whites, regardless of how successful in the moment, over time will revert to the mean and ignorance and savagery. It is who they are.”
I could not agree more with this statement. This is also why I purged all black acquaintances from my life. There is no such thing as “a good one”. No matter what they may lead you to believe, they will always be black first, ALWAYS. When it comes down to it, if it came to protecting one of their own vs. washing you down the drain, down you go.
Tired Citizen: True words.
The problem is you will never find anyone in or close to the mainstream with these views. Politics is downstream from culture. Our degenerate culture cannot allow White men proud of their people and cognizant on whose team they are on and advocating for their team. Everything which makes culture is in the hands of people who hate us. Imagine if we controlled just one of the 3 major TV networks and a few national papers and radio stations. A major Hollywood studio could pump out pro-White movies. The public school system is also in the hands of people who… Read more »
The entire system is based on whites never gaining any form of positive identity. The system completely collapses if even 20% of whites start thinking of themselves as a team; hell, maybe 10%.
It’s why our rulers are so hyper-focused on preventing it. It’s the only thing that matters.
“Politics is downstream from culture.”
…and culture flows from media. In our age of constant connectedness, culture is practically dictated by the media. To an alarming degree, the media dictates the morals and beliefs of even relatively high IQ whites.
There is a group that exercises effective control of the media and this group has, generally speaking, a hostility towards traditional whites.
I believe that until this problem is solved, we get nowhere.
True indeed. Everything that generates culture is under the control of people who hate us and have an intense sense of group belonging and advocating for that group.
The “talented Tenth” are far outnumbered by the felonious third.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/jun/8/percentage-americans-felony-convictions-increases-especially-blacks/
“Talent” by the way starts at an IQ of 104 for these people.
Why do I prefer to live, work, marry, socialize, and interact with white people? Because they’re white. And I’m white. They’re my people. And I want us to do well. Simple as. Using facts and logic, and hiding behind feigned concern for other groups’ well being, to try and prove some vaguely pro-white point is so cowardly and transparent. And it cedes to the prevailing leftist morality. For example, they say that Whites commit less violent crime than blacks so we need to stop immigration. Following that logic, Chinese commit less violent crime than Whites, so we should just import… Read more »
“ Zimbabwean blacks never said “hey, these Rhodesians have a lower crime rate and higher income than us….”
Zimbabwean Blacks never said anything, they were too stupid. Their leadership told them all the White success they saw around them was stolen from them. Thieves—even in Africa—are not celebrated. So logically, the Whites had to go, the farms were appropriated (mostly given to cronies) and the land reverted to dust.
“Of course, they’re factually correct, but their argument lacks a morality and, more importantly, a feeling of team to fight back against the Cultural Marxists.”
Yes, blacks (and the rest) are (and have been) fighting AS blacks against whites explicitly. That leaves NO CHOICE but to respond in kind or be destroyed.
A group of disparate individuals with “shared values” aint a team.
Citizen: Finally, someone here with both sense and racial loyalty. Very well said.
Sailor is not correct for a number of reasons. First of all, the Sailor crowd is oblivious to Lewontin’s Fallacy. Richard Lewontin argued that there is more variation within a specific individual allele (variant of a particular gene) than there is between different alleles. This has since come to be known as Lewontin’s Fallacy, because it ignores correlation among clusters of alleles as the basis of racial differences. The truth: Races are differentiated not by the ranges of same alleles, but by specific groupings of associated alleles. I.e., races are differentiated by the frequency of certain alleles at specific grouping… Read more »
Once you accept the premise that the Government is responsible for equality of outcomes, there’s just no practical limit to Government size and ambition. This leads inevitably to tyranny. This is the root of the failure of modern “Conservatism”. Zman nails it.
Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron”
Exactly. Making all folks equal—as in raising ability and accomplishment—is impossible. We tried, but Mother Nature is a bitch. However, you can always degrade the high achievers such that there is a great leveling and thereby achieve equality. Equal mediocrity that is.
We now see this in the highest and most important institutions of our society—military, university, politics… Sigh.
Listen to the crybaby. What goes around comes around. The wars that whites have fought and won against non-whites are now the wars that whites are losing with our own contrivance. History, like the gods, won’t be mocked. “Unto the fourth generation” says Scripture re: the sins of the “fathers.”
We’re getting what we deserve. With this awareness, we who are so proud of our ancestors can, like they did, start building for the future far from the Madding crowd that’s running Western Civ into the ground. That would take courage, not complaints.
“Listen to the crybaby.” I don’t hear any crying, I read an analysis that gets to the root of the issue.
“We’re getting what we deserve.” I agree with your statement but your tone makes me wonder if you have come to hate your people.
Derb coined a term “ethno-masochism.”
Good post this morning and it happens to hit my personal hot button issue. I am beyond fed up with the blax, and their privileges and preferences, and them blaming us for their woes. All my life I watched as they were constantly escorted to the front of the line only to f%ck it up in every way possible. I have grown to despise them immeasurably. If not for our ancestors and what they built, the vibrants would be drinking piss and living in mud huts while trying to breathe with a bone in their nose. Instead, I now go… Read more »
I understand your anger, but always remember that blacks couldn’t run a lemonade stand. They are just the tool of others and, in particular, one group who run the show.
They are their pets indeed.
The NR piece by Isaac looks like the launching of a war against colorblindness, which was always considered the virtuous position by conservatives, including Tucker Carlson (“It’s just skin color!”) With the flaws of colorblindness (not based on race realism), at least it’s a more peaceful ideology than the Ibram X. Kendi model that the left has embraced, where RACE is going to be forced on Whitey at all times, until equality (or superiority?) is achieved. Isaac has some quibbles with Kendi, but essentially that’s the road he wants to follow. As usual, the same road as the left, just… Read more »
Yeah, getting lectured by a**hole Indians, with their caste system etc., is just the final ironic insult of Conservatism Inc.
Indians are better Americans than Americans, as proven by the higher salaries they command compared to white people.
Hispanics are better Americans than Americans, as proven by the lower wages they demand compared to white people.
This is the entirety of American conservatism.
I would love to upvote this a thousand times.
It would be interesting to know what hand that Ramesh Ponnuru had in Isaac Willour writing for National Review and if Ponnuru pulled strings, is he conscious of the role that tribalism played in motivating him?
The author looks like an Aborigine.
Checked his LinkedIn:
Executive Council Chair: American Enterprise Institute:
Skills: Event Marketing/Booking · Strategic Communications · Social Media
Not even a dig on this guy, but this is the worst case of title inflation I’ve ever seen in my life. Executive Council Chair is how they describe a guy who basically makes a few social media posts and makes sure hotels are reserved? What’s the title of the budget guy “Supreme Number Architect Commander”?
Defining mediocrity up, I’d say. Could this be because of our incessant need for Black validation?
AEI is Con, Inc., at its griftiest. That’s the job description of an office gofer.
Has the American right ever been anything other than “the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition”? Robert Lewis Dabney writing in 1871 as Republicans prepared to concede the high ground on womens’ rights.
Certainly not since the Civil War. Before then, most national politics seem to have been driven by regional concerns – which was appropriate.
Makes me think of Robert Lewis Dabney.
Paraphrasing him, northern conservatism will not conserve anything, it’s functions as a shadow of progressivism.
And boy are we ever going to need those states rights that got eliminated at Appomattox.
Beat me to it by 1 minute! 🙂
Good thinkers think alike😊
I am reading The Machiavellians by James Burnham, 1943, he completely dismisses Machiavelli using race explain differences between different cultures as nonsense and actually says there’s no biologic reality to it.
It’s amazing how often you see this in books written before 1950. I’ve read books written in the late 19th century by the leading scholars on the Incas and the Australian aboriginals that are just the biggest woke nonsense you could imagine. It makes it very understandable why the universities look like they do today.
Tom Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech gets into a lot of the thought processes of these mindsets. The academics that gain prominence in academies do so by being around, politicking with other academics and creating nice, tight, and clean theories that are universal. Even the founding myths you hear of intrepid academics who travelled in search of truth, like Darwin to the Galapagos islands, aren’t actually that impressive. Rest assured, none of the professors espousing racial integration in the 1960’s had lived in the ethnic communities who knew first hand what would happen if blacks reached a certain percentage of the… Read more »
Actually studying the natives in their natural habitat means that they come across pretty well because this is the world they created for themselves, this is the world their biology demanded and they function in it well and can be happy and content even though they’ll probably have some bizarre customs we’re not into. That’s the problem they don’t function in the world we made
“Hate was just a legend
War was never known
People worked together
And they lifted many stones.”
A dullard like Neil Young didn’t come up with crap like that on his own.
I finally felt the sting of his spotify boycott last week. He is a puke, no doubt. But I love major7th chords, and for some reason, as I was driving, I wanted to hear “Lotta Love.” Alack! I finally felt the sting when I couldn’t get the original on spotify.
Eloi: I hated that whiny droning voice even when I first heard it in junior high. Later – when all the self-styled ‘smart but also cool’ kids listened to him, I knew why I hated his songs.
The “conservatives” you refer to, are people the mass media chooses to talk about, and allows you to hear and read about. It’s the billionaire owned and controlled mass media that sets the rules on discourse, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, NPR, Time and Life magazines, NYT, Boston Globe, LA Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, I could go on. In my lifetime they have been lying about real conservatives such as Robert Welch, and ignoring scholars such as Ludwig von Mises and those who have followed them. It’s the billionaires who have set the limits of acceptable debate. David French isn’t… Read more »
“The billionaires are our enemies.” It’s surprising that you make this point, given that you label yourself a libertarian.
I entertain the idea that there should be a 100% tax on the income or wealth of any person or company beyond the point that would allow them to buy a congressman.
I love free enterprise and I want to see innovators rewarded but we cannot let anyone amass enough wealth that allows them to control our governing of ourselves.
Response?
There are possibly a few exceptions, but I think that most if not all of the billionaires got to be so wealthy because they made special deals with governments. Very few got so rich by competing in a free market. A prime recent example would be the creep who was given a monopoly on the Mexican cell phone business by the Mexican government. Carlos something or other. He’s become filthy rich as a result and bought into the New York Times, 25% ownership I think. Government special favors can take many forms. One of the worst is patents and copyrights.… Read more »
The incredible ingratitude of the poc population, particularly joggers, is what really, and I mean really pisses me off. Ok, so they had a tougher row to hoe for the most part, but it’s pretty much undeniable that living here, despite that, was orders of magnitude better than Africa for the vast, vast majority. The big beef is being treated like fourth class citizens (which they are) and realizing how pathetic their race is relative to ours. No amount of wealth, which they’d never have acquired in da muddaland, will ever sate them.
“The concept of envy — the hatred of the superior — has dropped out of our moral vocabulary … The idea that white Christian civilization is hated more for its virtues than its sins doesn’t occur to us, because it’s not a nice idea. … Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel… Read more »
David Wright
To condense Sobran’scomment;
Dey hate us, cuz Dey ain’t us.
“Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league… Read more »
I remember that my daily newspaper carried Joe Sobran’s syndicated column many years ago. They suddenly they dropped him in favor of some neocon type. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was sometime around 1997. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the Sobran quote above is from 1997.
Why would they be grateful?
Birds aren’t grateful when you feed them. They just keep coming back for more.
And producing more poop as a bonus!
Brilliant. Can’t find it now, but in the last week or so I read a piece on American Greatness or American Conservative claiming the blacks are the only ones with the “moral authority” to call an end to the racism screeching; it is, therefore, the duty of conservatives to blah blah blah party of Lincoln. And of course one sees the morons on Instapundit always “decrying segregation” or blaming the problems of the POC community on “democratic governance.” It’s really completely pathetic.
The real cause of conservative failure was the race issue. I’m going to disagree here. The problem is that “the conservative movement “ in the US is bifurcated between the elites leading “the movement” and the mass of people that supported it over time. The elite leaders have been members of the oligarchy from the beginning of the modern movement in the 1950s. The mass of people that have supported those elites over the years have been cultural border landers and middle Americans in ever shifting alliances. When viewed this way, the conservative elites have been spectacularly successful at conserving… Read more »
Acknowledgment of biological reality is the foundation, where everything starts. If you get that wrong, you get everything else wrong.
The National Review author, Isaac, does not acknowledge that there are differences between the races. The assumption he’s working with is that we’re all the same, therefore everything he says is nonsense, because it’s based on magical thinking.
That’s why the conservatives are worthless. Their starting point is racial equality. Except for Steve King, who once blurted out that the Emperor has no clothes, and became a “bad person.”
You make a lot of good points but I think that both what you say and what Z says are true.
In 2016 what I found interesting was that a lot of Trump supporters second choice was Bernie. There was a lot of common ground between them. That was before Bernie sold out.
Such a coalition would scare the hell out of the ruling class.
Mmm, I’m pretty sure if one can “find” the votes needed to “fortify” an election after the fact, the ruling class has nothing to worry about anymore.
Dinodoxy, You do make a good point. I agree that one dynamic which impels conservative politicians to cave-in and join their progressive colleagues on the other side of the aisle, is that they realize what a sweet thing they they *all* have going on. They love the status and prestige, the attention, the fact that they’re making a pretty good living without having to actually do anything. So the reality soon becomes that their main concern is maintaining their position: getting reelected. And whatever they see as advancing their prospects of getting reelected, is what they’re going to do. Everything—… Read more »
A real “conservatism” must reject the Enlightenment in its entirety. That means turning the clock back to at least 1500, if not 1500 BC. When Aristotle said that “man is the political animal,” he didn’t mean homo sapiens sapiens; he meant “Greeks,” and really probably “Athenians” (but don’t tell that to his most famous student). On the other hand, Thomas Hobbes, the guy whose “social contract” is the basis for all subsequent political philosophy, really did mean H. sap. He had to, since he regarded his work as political science in the truest sense — proven like a geometry theorem.… Read more »
Yeah I’ve been hammering on that for a while. The liberal-enlightenment is the source of social dysfunction. And its nearing its ultimate conclusion and collapse. Its an open question how many of us will survive that collapse. As a practical matter, I don’t think its possible to turn the clock back five hundred years. So whatever replaces the L-E will be new. Unfortunately, the animating spirit of Christianity is dead. It would be a real miracle if it was revived in a meaningful way. In a way the L-E is a heretical form of christianity that became dominant and led… Read more »
Definitely. And example I for the failure of Enlightenment polity should be Napoleon Bonaparte, who in the name of the “revolution” unleashes nearly two decades of war across Europe, killing at least three million between soldiers and civilization. Example II is, of course, Abe Lincoln. The Enlightenment and it handmaiden “democracy” has wrought nothing but evil and destruction and elevated the worst in society to positions of leadership.
“And since the starting point for all his reasoning was that men are all equal in the state of nature”.
That sentence is an abomination to anyone who can see and experience nature with their own eyes and senses.
The notion that equality exists in nature,naturally, is quite laughable.(I wish I knew how to do a face palm emoji).
The Elk being run down by a wolf could not be reached for comment.
True, but… there it is. Pretty much ALL political philosophy in the West, 1651-present, is an attempt to use Hobbes’s premises and method while rejecting his conclusion (funny how “all men are equal in the State of Nature” results in the most absolute monarchy that could ever possibly exist. Or maybe not so funny, since Hobbes’s *reasoning* isn’t the problem). And the great thing is, the Liberal Enlightenment paradigm is being rejected most vocally by the persyns who depend on it for their very lives. “Equality” is simply not possible when you can change your “gender” at will, depending on… Read more »
Umm…. Hobbes didn’t argue for tabula rasa or equality in state of nature (as we think of equality now). What he meant was that even the strongest man can have his throat slit while sleeping by the weakest. That was the equality he meant – equal opportunity for Death. And there is nothing ironic about an absolute monarchy arising from it – that is what he argued for.
Locke is much more the philosopher of the modern Left – soft authoritarianism.
No, he didn’t, but just as “man is the political animal” was soon taken to mean “homo sapiens is a political animal” or “all men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence soon came to mean “ALL men are created equal,” so Hobbes’s little thought experiment became Locke’s tabula rasa, almost within Hobbes’s own lifetime.
I guess we should get moving soon, that’s a whole lot of backpedaling to do.
isn’t the enlightenment already (and for a good while) being rolled back?
The murder-cult has run out of victims and has turned in to a suicide cult. The reason the Enlightenment will go away is that there will be no one left alive to believe in it.
Completely agree. But the entire American concept is a child of the Enlightenment. So there is simply no way for some guy with We The People tattooed on his arm to conceive of a way to fix what ails us.
But, for that matter, it’s the entire arc of history in the West that has the same problem.