Also, I will be posting last Saturday’s post sometime today or tomorrow. As I noted in last week’s delayed edition of Sunday Doodles (posted now), the combination of hosting the Spooktacular, playing a four-hour gig the following night, and staying up late on Election Day really sapped my energy this week, on top of my normal teaching duties. I’m playing catch-up on multiple fronts, but hope to have everything posted and done by the end of this weekend.
We’re still in an uncomfortable state of limbo as we await inexplicably slow vote counts in key States (well, we can explain them—Democrats are slow-walking returns to figure out how many fraudulent ballots they need to manufacture in those States). President Trump is right to challenge suspicious vote totals in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, etc., as those sudden bumps for Biden in the wee hours are statistically so improbable, there’s a better chance of finding an inhabitable planet within human reach.
That said, the race is going to be a close one, and conservatives ought to consider what comes next in either a second Trump term or—shudder—a Biden-Harris administration.
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With the election still in the balance—it may be decided by the time you read this post—and two formerly conservative Southern States up for grabs, I thought it would be timely to revisit this piece, “The Invasion and Alienation of the South,” which looks at Leslie Alexander’s post “Stranger in a Strange Land.” In that piece, Alexander writes about the hollow, joyless cosmopolitanism of living in Dallas—a stark contrast to the tight-knit cordiality and tradition of her native Louisiana.
While watching the election returns, it occurred to me that Georgia and North Carolina should not be risky toss-ups, and Virginia never should have been lost to hordes of Swamp People. It’s an irony of history that Washington, D.C., was placed next to Virginia so the ornery planters, suspicious of federal power, could keep a closer eye on the national government. Now, that bloated national government dominates politics in Virginia through its largess.
Meanwhile, transplants from up North have infested previously conservative States. Charlotte, North Carolina has become a wretched hive of globalist scum and villainy. During my online dating days, I would routinely get matched with babes from Charlotte; invariably, they were always from Ohio, or New York, or California—never actually true North Carolinians.
It’s one thing when local blacks vote Democratic. Fine—we’re at least part of the same(-ish) Southern culture, and we’ll help each other out. But then gentry white liberals start coming down here, ruining our politics and our cities.
Now, we live in a world in which Joe Biden might win Georgia, and North Carolina—NORTH CAROLINA—has become a nail-biter every four years.
Such is the price of our addiction to economic growth and convenience. What we’ve gained in luxuries we have lost in heart. We have paid for them with our souls.
With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday, the political world was thrown into hysterics. Democrats are threatening to set the Supreme Court building and the White House ablaze if President Trump attempts to nominate a replacement for the Notorious RBG before the November election.
Even if they were serious about their histrionic, treasonous threat, President Trump should do it, and Senate Republicans should act speedily to confirm his nominee. For that matter, President Trump should appoint the most stridently right-wing, pro-life, socially conservative, religious justice possible.
If the Kavanaugh hearings taught us anything, the Left will pillory any mildly conservative nominee to the Court. Kavanaugh is a Beltway Dudley Do-Right, and he was treated as a de facto stand-in for every unpleasant interaction a woman has ever had with a man. If the Left treated him so shabbily, why not go for broke and get the second coming of Antonin Scalia, or a young Clarence Thomas clone?
When I first heard the news, I remembered President Obama’s Merrick Garland appointment, and how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings. That was entirely constitutional, both for the president to nominate, and for the Senate to decline to confirm. McConnell’s rationale was that the Senate should not confirm a nominee during a presidential election year, so as to give the people a chance to vote for new leadership first.
My initial reaction was, “Well, screw it—just slam in a nominee and control SCOTUS for generations.” The Senate isn’t bound by an unwritten rule or custom, and the Left has broken so many rules (including threatening to impeach Trump for performing his constitutional duty to make an appointment), it’s time for us to do so to win.
But then my younger brother informed me that a confirmation at this time would not be a breach of senatorial custom. The rule that McConnell invoked in 2016 only applies when the President is one party, and the Senate is controlled by the opposing party. Presidents who have attempted nominations in those conditions during election years have failed. Ted Cruz covers it beautifully in a short YouTube video:
“29 times there has been a vacancy in a presidential election year. Now, presidents have made nominations all 29 times. That's what presidents do. If there's a vacancy, they make a nomination.”https://t.co/ajV3LOhtE0
Of course, McConnell warned then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2009 when the Senate got rid of its requirement that sixty Senators were necessary to confirm Supreme Court nominees that it would one day come back to haunt the Democrats. The price of their political expediency could very well be—let us pray!—a conservative-controlled Court.
Sadly, it seems that the Democrats will keep moving the goal posts, as usual. The cry now is that if Trump gets his nominee before the election, the Democrats will engage in court-packing should they win the presidency and Congress; in other words, they’ll add Supreme Court seats to dilute the conservative majority.
Congress has the authority to alter the number of Supreme Court seats (when the Constitution was first ratified, the Court only had six justices, rather than the present-day nine). However, the last infamous example of court-packing—Franklin Roosevelt’s ham-fisted attempt to inflate the Court to fifteen justices from nine—was met with severe push-back from even his own party, which saw it for the transparently naked power-grab it was. Democrats nearly ninety years later are all too eager to engage in that power grab.
Therefore, even if President Trump gets his nominee confirmed before the 3 November election, it could all be undone with a Biden win and a “blue wave” seizing control of the Senate. That’s why it’s all the more imperative—especially in swing States—to get out and vote for Trump. The Supreme Court pick will be meaningless if Democrats take control of the levers of power again.
More importantly, it will—barring progressive court-packing—secure the Court for conservatives for at least a generation, and possibly beyond. If President Trump is reelected and Republicans maintain the Senate, it may then be advisable—as much as I hate to suggest it—for Justice Thomas to step down, thereby allowing Trump to appoint a younger conservative who can maintain the conservative majority for another thirty or forty years.
Big things are afoot. The Republicans and Trump may just have one last shot to save the Republic.
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In other words, there’s very little chance SubscribeStar is going to shut down a “star“—their term for their content providers—over groundless accusations. That’s one big reason I signed up for their service: I had confidence that they wouldn’t shutter my blog posts simply for thinking critically and questioning the prevailing orthodoxy.
This morning while getting ready for work I listened to a fascinating discussion between Milo Yiannopoulos and “groypers” Steven Franssen and Vincent James. I don’t know much about Franssen and James, other than that they are fairly prominent figures on the Dissident Right, but the discussion (which is available at Censored.TV to subscribers—I highly recommend forking over the $10 a month for a subscription) covered a broad range of topics, from 9/11 to the future of America and traditionalism.
Out of that far-ranging discussion came a brief debate between Milo and his guests near the end of the exchange. The gist of it boiled down to the question “what is civilization?” Milo’s contention—an interesting one—is that by abandoning our cities, we are, essentially, abandoning our greatest cultural products: our art, our architecture, our institutions. These cultural artifacts took the blood, sweat, toil, and ingenuity of the American people to build, so we’re capitulating to the Leftist mobs when we flee our cities instead of fighting for them.
In true Milo fashion, it’s a compellingly contrarian argument: why surrender what we fought so hard to build? I am a big advocate of normal, decent folks abandoning the cities in search of a better life in the country (to the point I think we should consider subsidizing families in rural areas), but makes a strong case. If we want to preserve our heritage, we shouldn’t hand it over to looters.
Yesterdaymy pastor’s sermon came from Psalm 13, a six-verse Psalm in which King David cries out in despair to God. Here it is in its entirety, from the King James Version (c/o Bible Hub):
1{To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.} How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
2How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?
3Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
4Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved.
5But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.
6I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me.
The title of the sermon was “What Do You Do When God Delays?” The whole point was that we’re always eager for answers and results now, and our tolerance for what we perceive to be as delays is pitifully short.
Of course, God isn’t delaying—He’s on His timetable, not ours. When everything is going well, we don’t think about it, but when things go wrong, we’re often desperate for life to return to normality; if it doesn’t do so immediately, we get impatient with God.
Lazy Sunday is rolling on with some more “Forgotten Posts” (check out Volume I and Volume II). Again, the criteria for selection is pretty loose—I scroll through my archives and find posts I don’t link to very often, or which I’ve largely forgotten that I wrote. Even that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.
This week’s selections come from June 2019. The summer is always a slow month for new; ergo, it’s a slow month for blogging. But with a self-imposed daily post requirement, I’ve gotta come up with something. Here’s a taste of those somethings:
“The Price of Freedom: A Good Attorney” – This post explores the concept “that the process is the punishment.” For conservatives, that usually means blowing tons of cash on attorney’s fees to prove one’s innocence in a justice system that increasingly assumes guilt, tainted as it is by social justice bromides. Lawfare is, more and more, how the Left imposes its agenda on an unwilling population, so it’s good to see the Right fighting back. Owen Benjamin’s recent victory against Patreon is one excellent example. But freedom isn’t free; it bills at about $200 an hour.
“FreeSpeech.TV Lineup Announced” – Gavin McInnes’s excellent video subscription service is now called Censored.TV, because another company apparently had the trademark or copyright or some such to “FreeSpeech.TV.” The new name is really even better, as many of its contributors—Laura Loomer, Soph, Milo, and Gavin himself—have been banned from YouTube and other platforms (Loomer continues to struggle with Big Tech censorship, even as she’s the front-runner in her Florida congressional race!). It’s definitely worth $10 a month to subscribe (my younger brother and I split the $100 annual subscription).
“SubscribeStar Saturday: Christians Protect Other Faiths” – While we’re talking about subscriptions, why not subscribe to my SubscribeStar Page, hmm? I’m no Gavin McGinnes, but you get exclusive content every Saturday (and Sunday, if you’re shelling out $5 a month). If you’re subbed for $1 a month or more, you can read “Christians Protect Other Faiths“—one of the earliest subscriber-only posts. In this post, I was addressing the big split in conservatism in 2019 between the David French-style neocons of National Review and the Sohrab Ahmari traditionalists at First Things, specifically Ahmari’s powerful critique of noodle-wristed neoliberalism/neoconnery, “Against David French-ism.” I also looked at a now thirty-three-year old piece by a Jewish rabbi arguing that American Jews were wrong to denigrate American Christians, as the latter were the protectors, not the enemy, of the former. Upon rereading my scribblings, I think it’s definitely worth a buck to read!
There’s another Lazy Sunday in the books. Speaking of books, I’ll be cracking them pretty hard this week, as school resumes this Thursday. It’s going to be an interesting year. Wish me luck.
Yesterday was the last session of the Summer 2020 History of Conservative Thought course. This summer marks the second run of the course, and it was a fantastic class. I had three young men enrolled, all quite eager to dive into the material.
I try to avoid lengthy lectures in HoCT, giving the basic background information and scaffolding necessary to put the readings into context. I want the works to speak for themselves, and for the students to the do the heavy lifting of sussing out meaning and the author’s ideas. Each week students wrote a short essay or answered a few different guided questions, then we would come in and discuss the material.
With this summer’s group, that model worked very well, as two of the young men in particular loved to plunge into discussions and ask questions. One of the students was concurrently taking a colleague’s popular Terror and Terrorism course, which leads off each summer with the French Revolution. That always dovetails nicely with our discussion of Edmund Burke, as we read several excerpts from his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke comes on the heels of our discussion of Russell Kirk’s conservative principles, and helps frame the early portion of the course in the Burkean tradition.
In July, we left the nineteenth century and began looking at the modern conservative movement, with a heavy emphasis on William F. Buckley, Jr., and the notion of fusionism. Buckley’sNational Review catches a good bit of flack on the Right these days, including from this blog, but it truly shaped conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century. Before National Review, conservatism was a disorganized, disunited hodgepodge of various ideologies, movements, and issues—it was, as Lionel Trilling put it, a “reactionary impulse,” a grumpy attitude about the way things were, but without a cohesive understanding of how to combat the dominance of New Deal liberalism.
For all its noodle-wristed hand-wringing and desperate virtue-signalling today, National Review created the modern conservative movement by giving conservatives their voice, their publication. It also gave conservatism a politically viable platform of issues that could win in national politics. That focus on nationalism certainly cuts against the Kirkean/Burkean mold of organic, ordered liberty, but it was the reality of post-war American political life.
We ended with another mid-century conservative, but one fitting far more into the spiritual and moral mold of Burke and Kirk, and far less in the neoliberal and materialist mold of Buckley-style fusionism: Richard Weaver’s seminal Ideas Have Consequences, which I consider one of the greatest books ever written. Indeed, I’m a bit of a Weaver fanboy, as he’s been featured twice on my Summer Reading Lists, first in 2016 for Ideas Have Consequences, and again in 2020 for his collection of Southern Essays.
For the course, we just read the “Introduction” to the book, which I try to read every August before school resumes. It reminds me why I teach, and what is at stake. Reading Ideas Have Consequences—first published in 1948—today reads like prophecy fulfilled. Weaver’s core focus on William of Occam as the source of modernity and its related ills might seem a bit far-fetched, but that’s merely the germ from which the analysis of modernity’s fallen view of the world grows.
The real heart of Ideas Have Consequences is the abandonment of the transcendental—of God—in favor for navel-gazing particularism, a constant focus on lower, material concerns. Unbound from any obligation to or belief in a transcendental moral order, men are left adrift in a world full of isolation, alienation, confusion, and meaninglessness.
The 2020 election is looming, and while Trump is struggling at the moment, I am praying that he can pull out another victory and another four-year term. The stakes are high: a Trump victory, at minimum, allows us to forestall a progressive Armageddon for another four years; it also undermines both the Never Trumpers (who can no longer write off Trump’s 2016 victory as a “fluke”) and the ultra-progressives. I don’t think the modern Democrat Party has much of a moderate wing left, but that small, dying minority might be able to convince the Party that going full-on progressive is a bad move.
A Trump defeat, however, would be catastrophic. Z Man wrote Tuesday that a “Democratic sweep” would essentially mean the end of elections in America—at least, the end of meaningful national ones:
More important, there is no electoral option either. The Democrat party is actively cheering on this lunacy. Joe Biden is running an extortion campaign, where a vote for him means an end to the violence and Covid lock downs. How realistic is that when his party is cheering for the mayhem, promising to take it to a new level after they win the final election. It is not hyperbole to say that a Democrat sweep in November means the end of elections. What would be the point?
Trump’s defeat would also embolden the Jonah Goldberg/David French neocons of Conservatism, Inc., who are essentially abstract ideologues offering token resistance to the Left. There’s a reason the joke “The Conservative Case for [Progressive Goal Here]” exists, because National Review tends to put up tortured, weak resistance to the progressive fad of the moment, before finally caving and accepting the latest lunacy as a “bedrock conservative principle.” What conservative site goes around pitching “magic mushrooms” as conservative—and has done so repeatedly? The conservative publication of record possesses the quality and depth of a college newspaper.
Regardless, Trump’s defeat would mean not just Biden’s marionette presidency, in which ultra-progressive handlers pull the strings; it would also mean a return to boring, ineffectual, tired, defeated neoconservatism. National conservatism, social conservatism, traditionalism, populism—these movements and others, which have enjoyed a renewal since 2015, would wither on the vine—or see themselves pruned from “respectable” Beltway “conservatism.” That would only hasten the victory of progressivism in the absence of any real opposition.
But there is hope. 2020 looms large, but 2024 is is not that far away. On the Right, there is a good bit of speculation about who will fill Trump’s shoes. VDare offers one compelling option: Tucker Carlson.
Way back in 2001, good ol’ John “The Derb” Derbyshire wrote a column for National Review called “Hillary’s Style Crash.” That was back in the days before NR kicked Derb to the curb for writing his controversial piece for Taki’s Mag “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” in which Derb dropped some unpleasant nuggets of wisdom. That piece went up during the first round of the past decade’s worth of race riots, back before most of us realized it was mostly ginned up controversy.
Regardless, while I don’t agree with Derb’s race realism overall, he does offer up some remarkably insightful commentary. His weekly podcast is often the highlight of my Saturday mornings, and he comes across as an intellectually curious, gentle man who sincerely cares about his adopted country. His best commentary involves cultural matters, and that 2001 piece offers up a great insight: conservative girls are prettier, but progressive girls are easier.
