5. On Resisting Evil

ON RESISTING EVIL

ON RESISTING EVIL

September 1993

How can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of evil, fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century, we have been inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal clear to me that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the sake of ourselves, our loved ones, our posterity, our friends, our neighbors, and our country, to do battle against that evil.

It has therefore always been a mystery to me how people who have seen and identified this evil and have therefore entered the lists against it, either gradually or suddenly abandon that fight. How can one see the truth, understand one’s compelling duty, and then, simply give up and even go on to betray the cause and its comrades? And yet, in the two movements and their variations that I have been associated with, libertarian and conservative, this happens all the time.

Conservatism and libertarianism, after all, are “radical” movements, that is, they are radically and strongly opposed to existing trends of statism and immorality. How, then, can someone who has joined such a movement, as an ideologue or activist or financial supporter, simply give up the fight? Recently I asked a perceptive friend of mine how so-and-so could abandon the fight? He answered that “he’s the sort of person who wants a quiet life, who wants to sit in front of the TV, and who doesn’t want to hear about any trouble.” But in that case, I said in anguish, “why do these people become ‘radicals’ in the first place? Why do they proudly call themselves ‘conservatives’ or ‘libertarians’?” Unfortunately, no answer was forthcoming.

Sometimes, people give up the fight because, they say, the cause is hopeless. We’ve lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942 that socialism is inevitable, that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very successes, which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent intellectuals who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within. His critics charged Schumpeter with counseling defeatism to the defenders of capitalism. Schumpeter replied that if someone points out that a rowboat is inevitably sinking, is that the same thing as saying: don’t do the best you can to bail out the boat?

In the same vein, assume for a minute that the fight against the statist evil is a lost cause, why should that imply abandoning the battle? In the first place, as gloomy as things may look, the inevitable may be postponed a bit. Why isn’t that worthwhile? Isn’t it better to lose in thirty years than to lose now? Second, at the very worst, it’s great fun to tweak and annoy and upset the enemy, to get back at the monster. This in itself is worthwhile. One shouldn’t think of the process of fighting the enemy as dour gloom and misery. On the contrary, it is highly inspiring and invigorating to take up arms against a sea of troubles instead of meeting them in supine surrender, and by opposing, perhaps to end them, and if not at least to give it a good try, to get in one’s licks.

And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win! Think of the brave fighters against Communism in Poland and the Soviet Union who never gave up, who fought on against seemingly impossible odds, and then, bingo, one day Communism collapsed. Certainly the chances of winning are a lot greater if you put up a fight than if you simply give up.

In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two major forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most common and most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar with: the sellout. The young libertarian or conservative arrives in Washington, at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative aide, ready and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service to his cherished radical cause. And then something happens: sometimes gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness. You go to some cocktail parties, you find that the Enemy seems very pleasant, you start getting enmeshed in Beltway marginalia, and pretty soon you are placing the highest importance on some trivial committee vote, or on some piddling little tax cut or amendment, and eventually you are willing to abandon the battle altogether for a cushy contract, or a plush government job. And as this sellout process continues, you find that your major source of irritation is not the statist enemy, but the troublemakers out in the field who are always yapping about principle and even attacking you for selling out the cause. And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an indistinguishable face.

We are all too familiar with this sellout route and it is easy and proper to become indignant at this moral treason to cause that is just, to the battle against evil, and to your own once cherished comrades. But there is another form of abandonment that is not as evident and is more insidious—and I don’t mean simply loss of energy or interest. In this form, which has been common in the libertarian movement but is also prevalent in sectors of conservatism, the militant decides that the cause is hopeless, and gives up by deciding to abandon the corrupt and rotten world, and retreat in some way to a pure and noble community of one’s own. To Randians, it’s “Gait’s Gulch,” from Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged. Other libertarians keep seeking to form some underground community, to “capture” a small town in the West, to go “underground” in the forest, or even to build a new libertarian country on an island, in the hills, or whatever. Conservatives have their own forms of retreatism. In each case, the call arises to abandon the wicked world, and to form some tiny alternative community in some backwoods retreat. Long ago, I labeled this view, “retreatism.” You could call this strategy “neo-Amish,” except that the Amish are productive farmers, and these groups, I’m afraid, never make it up to that stage.

The rationale for retreatism always comes couched in High Moral as well as pseudo-psychological terms. These “purists,” for example, claim that they, in contrast to us benighted fighters, are “living liberty,” that they are emphasizing “the positive” instead of focusing on the “negative,” that they are “living liberty” and living a “pure libertarian life,” whereas we grubby souls are still living in the corrupt and contaminated real world. For years, I have been replying to these sets of retreatists that the real world, after all, is good; that we libertarians may be anti-State, but that we are emphatically not anti-society or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it might be. We propose to continue to fight to save the values and the principles and the people we hold dear, even though the battlefield may get muddy. Also, I would cite the great libertarian Randolph Bourne, who proclaimed that we are American patriots, not in the sense of patriotic adherents to the State but to the country, the nation, to our glorious traditions and culture that are under dire attack.

Our stance should be, in the famous words of Dos Passos, even though he said them as a Marxist, “all right, we are two nations.” “America” as it exists today is two nations; one is their nation, the nation of the corrupt enemy, of their Washington, D.C., their brainwashing public school system, their bureaucracies, their media, and the other is our, much larger, nation, the majority, the far nobler nation that represents the older and the truer America. We are the nation that is going to win, that is going to take America back, no matter how long it takes. It is indeed a grave sin to abandon that nation and that America short of victory.

But are we then emphasizing “the negative”? In a sense, yes, but what else are we to stress when our values, our principles, our very being are under attack from a relentless foe? But we have to realize, first, that in the very course of accentuating the negative we are also emphasizing the positive. Why do we fight against, yes even hate, the evil? Only because we love the good, and our stress on the “negative” is only the other side of the coin, the logical consequence, of our devotion to the good, to the positive values and principles that we cherish. There is no reason why we can’t stress and spread our positive values at the same time that we battle against their enemies. The two actually go hand in hand.

Among conservatives and some libertarians, these retreats sometimes took the form of holing up in the woods or in a cave, huddling amidst a year’s supply of canned peaches and guns and ammo, waiting resolutely to guard the peaches and the cave from the nuclear explosion or from the Communist army. They never came; and even the cans of peaches must be deteriorating by now. The retreat was futile. But now, in 1993, the opposite danger is looming: namely, retreatist groups face the awful menace of being burned out and massacred by the intrepid forces of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in their endless quest for shotguns one millimeter shorter than some regulation decrees, or for possible child abuse. Retreatism is beginning to loom as a quick road to disaster.

Of course, in the last analysis, none of these retreats, generally announced with great fanfare as the way to purity if not victory, have amounted to a hill of beans; they are simply a rationale, a half-way house, to total abandonment of the cause, and to disappearance from the stage of history. The fascinating and crucial point to note is that both of these routes—even though seemingly diametrically opposite, end up inexorably at the same place. The sellout abandons the cause and betrays his comrades, for money or status or power; the retreadst, properly loathing the sellouts, concludes that the real world is impure and retreats out of it; in both cases, whether in the name of “pragmatism” or in the name of “purity,” the cause, the fight against evil in the real world, is abandoned. Clearly, there is a vast moral difference in the two courses of action. The sellouter is morally evil; the retreatist, in contrast, is, to put it kindly, terribly misguided. The sellouts are not worth talking to; the retreatists must realize that it is not betraying the cause, far from it, to fight against evil; and not to abandon the real world.

The retreatist becomes indifferent to power and oppression, likes to relax and say who cares about material oppression when the inner soul is free. Well sure, it’s good to have freedom of the inner soul. I know the old bromides about how thought is free and how the prisoner is free in his inner heart. But call me a low-life materialist if you wish, but I believe, and I thought all libertarians and conservatives believed to their core, that man deserves more than that, that we are not content with the inner freedom of the prisoner in his cell, that we raise the good old cry of “Liberty and Property,” that we demand liberty in our external, real world of space and dimension. I thought that that’s what the fight was all about.

Let’s put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never. Let us act in the spirit of that magnificent hymn that James Russell Lowell set to a lovely Welsh melody:

Once to every man and nation

Comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

For the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God’s new Messiah,

Offering each the bloom or flight,

And the choice goes by forever

‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,

Yet ‘tis truth alone is strong;

Though her portion be the scaffold,

And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future,

And, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above His own.

GUILT SANCTIFIED

July 1990

Earlier in this century, Left-Liberalism came to Americans preaching the alluring gospel of Liberation from Guilt. Americans, they boldly proclaimed, are repressed, inhibited, guilt-ridden for giving in to their natural desires and impulses. We come to preach you a joyous removal of guilt, hammered into you by repressed ministers and priests. We preach hedonism, the end of guilt, following your desires, and to put it in a common rebarbative phrase of the 1960s Sexual Revolution: “if it moves, fondle it.” Sex, furthermore, is “only a drink of water,” natural and harmless.

The era of guiltlessness under our Left-Liberal culture lasted, as I remember, about six months. Now, the entire culture is characterized by massive collective guilt, and if anyone fails to give due public lip-service to a long list of solemnly avowed guilts, he is literally driven from public life. Guilt is everywhere, all-pervasive, and brought to us by the same scoundrels who once promised us easy liberation. A brief rundown: guilt for centuries of slavery, guilt for the oppression and rape of women, guilt for the Holocaust, guilt for the existence of the handicapped, guilt for eating and killing animals, guilt for being fat, guilt for not recycling your garbage, guilt for “desecrating the Earth.”

Note that this guilt is never confined to the specific individuals, say, who enslaved or murdered or raped people. (There are, I dare say, very few enslavers left in America today—say a Southern slaveholder aged 150?) Effectiveness in inducing guilt comes precisely because the guilt is not specific but collective, extending throughout the world and apparently for all time.

In the old days, we reviled the Nazis for their doctrine of collective guilt; now we embrace the same Nazi concept as a vital feature of our ethical system. For confining guilt to specific criminals would not do, because it would not fit with what Joe Sobran has brilliantly called our doctrine of Accredited Victimology. Some groups are accorded the status of Official Victims; everyone not in the Victim groups are, therefore, criminals and Official Victimizers. The Victimizers are expected to feel guilty about the victims, and therefore—because there is no point to guilt without a payoff—to pay through the nose in money, privileges, and “empowerment” forever and ever without end. Amen.

There is never a way of getting out from under. And this is what our liberators have brought us. In return for old-fashioned Christianity and guilt about sex, they have brought us a new religion of Victimology and of the Goddess Nature. And even sex, the last bastion of hedonism, is no longer guilt-free; with the onslaught of “sex exploits women,” and ravening condo-mania in the interest of “safe sex,” it might be better to scrap the whole thing and go back to Christian guilt. Certainly it would be simpler and more peaceful.

As in all other aspects of our rotten culture, the only way to save the day is to raise the banner high and engage in a frontal and all-out onslaught against the Left Guilt-inducers. In such an onslaught lies the only hope of taking back our lives and our culture from these malignant pests and tyrants.

“TOLERANCE,” OR MANNERS?

September 1991

Like ladies’ hemlines, there are changing fashions in libertarian writing. Libertarians, who pride themselves as individualists, are all too often lemmings following the latest trend. The very latest trend among libertarians is to write vehemently, indeed “intolerantly,” about the importance of tolerance, and how much they grrr, hate “intolerant people.” Every manjack and his brother is denouncing “intolerance” these days, along with a lot of gaseous pseudo-philosophic hokum about the relationship between one’s ideas and one’s “tolerance” toward the ideas of others.

There is a curious anomaly here that has gone unnoticed. One of the things that strikes a person who first encounters Modal Libertarians is their surpassing rudeness, their overwhelming boorishness, their total lack of manners. It is libertarians, and only libertarians, who will call you up, as a perfect stranger, and proceed to denounce you for various deviations, or for alleged contradictions on page 851. It is only libertarians who, learning a few syllogisms about liberty, and having read next to nothing, consider themselves perfectly qualified to harangue learned men on their alleged errors. It is only libertarians who conclude, simply by virtue of announcing themselves as libertarians, that your house is their house and your possessions their possessions: an implicit assumption of communism of libertarian possessions. And oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, the very people who are bleating most loudly against “intolerance” are some of the worst offenders. The “philosophy” is really a smoke screen, for the real problem is decent manners and their lack of them; and when some of us react against those boors, we are of course denounced for being “intolerant.” The ill-mannered wish to ride roughshod over the rest of us, and then howl about “intolerance” whenever we decide to resist. Note the typical Modal ploy: shifting the focus of attention from manners and behavior to abstruse discussions of philosophy. This move enables them to focus on the charge that we are intolerant of their “ideas,” that we are betraying our responsibility of engaging in continuing dialogue or “conversation” about ideas, when the real problem is them; their boorish “aggression” and lack of manners.

Manners are vital to the quality of life; civility is a crucial requirement of civilization. It softens edges, and makes social life worth living. Note that I am not calling for the punctilio of a seventeenth-century Spanish grandee: just ordinary decent behavior. But that is what is so sorely lacking. Much of the current wave of Political Correctness is a crazed attempt to continue and to justify swinish behavior, while trying to substitute a host of formal rules for decent politeness. But these formal rules are the reverse of manners, for they are used as clubs to impose one’s will on others, all in the name of “sensitivity.”

Thus, suppose that someone is talking or speaking, either at a gathering or a formal lecture, and happens to refer to Ms. X as a “distinguished actress.” The feminist language police are then apt to appear, shouting out that “actress” is an “insensitive” and sexist word and that the speaker must use the gender-neutral term “actor” (or who knows, maybe next it will be “actperson”). Here is a typical case where in the name of imposing “sensitivity,” the thought police are deliberately taking over in a power play, cowing the speaker through smears when everyone knows he was simply using standard terminology, and being unbearably rude and barbaric in the course of that takeover.

The thought police have only one virtue: clarity. At least you know what side they are on. But how about our “anti-intolerance” Modals? What would they have to say here? Would they condemn the feminists for being “intolerant?” Or would they condemn us for being “intolerant” of the thought police? Or maybe both? All is confusion. On the other hand, focus on decent manners and the answer becomes clear. The rude boors in this example are the feminist thought police. The philosophic tail-chasing that says, as one recent Modal writer put it, “we must be tolerant even of the intolerant” would be simply irrelevant here. For there is no obligation of any sort to be polite to rude people. On the contrary, those who have breached civility are “the aggressors,” and should be tossed out on their ear. To absorb and agree with this point, one does not need any high-flown philosophic theory: just plain common sense and a sense of decency.

It strikes me too that since Modal libertarianism is lifelong adolescent rebellion against one’s parents, one’s neighbors, and the bourgeoisie generally, that this revolt against good manners, and its displacement into bleating about the “philosophy of tolerance,” is characteristic Modal behavior. The Modal rebels against what used to be standard parental teaching about manners, and challenges such teachings with pseudo-profound blatherings about tolerance, metaphysics, and the theory of knowledge.

A final point about the private telling of jokes, which can be one of the great charms of social intercourse. Jokes, of course, almost always have some group or other as the butt of the joke: whether it be gender, age, religion, occupation, or ethnic group. The Politically Correct grinches, having no sense of humor whatever, are trying in effect to outlaw every joke as “insensitive” to some group or other, and therefore not politically correct. But hyper-sensitivity is one of the great barriers to civilized discourse and social relations, and can make such relations virtually impossible. Every such group, instead of being encouraged to bellyache, should get off its high horse. Modal Libertarians, of course, are up there with the anti-joke grinches, in the name of “tolerance” rather than “sensitivity.” The Modals are just as despotic and just as crippling of joy through rotten manners.

Suppose, for example, someone, Mr. A, is telling a joke of which the butt is Group G. Simple politeness and good manners would lead Mr. A not to tell the joke if one of his listeners, say Mr. B, is obviously a member of Group G. On the other hand, if A doesn’t realize it, or it turns out that one of B’s friends or relatives happens to be a G, it would be incredibly boorish for B to denounce A as bigoted, insensitive, and all the rest. Modals should be stuck here; for they would have to figure who to denounce: A, for being “bigoted” against Group G; B for being “intolerant” of A’s jokes; or both for being intolerant of the other. In practice, of course, we know how Modals come down, and it is invariably with the “sensitive” and the Politically Correct. The emphasis on manners, in contrast, would, in effect, tell B to pipe down, stop being boorish, and lighten up: humor is one of the great joys of the world.

EXHUME! EXHUME! OR, WHO PUT THE ARSENIC IN ROUGH-N-READY’S CHERRIES?

August 1991

So what if it didn’t work out? It was a great theory. Like Miss Clara Rising, I, a long-time fan of historical whodunits, had long been suspicious of the remarkably sudden death of Zachary Taylor, twelfth president of what used to be called These United States. The difference is that Miss Rising, a descendant of Old Rough-and-Ready, had the moxie to do something about it. Getting the necessary bureaucratic clearances, she plunked down $ 1,200 to get old Zack’s body disinterred and exhumed, to find out at last what done him in.

The facts of the case are these. Zack, though a man with no political experience, was inflicted on the country in 1848 by the increasingly desperate Whig Party, purely on the strength of his being a hero of the Mexican War. It proved, indeed, to be the last presidential election won by the Whigs. At a July 4 picnic, after eating a bowl of cold cherries in milk, he was taken violently ill and died several days later. As in every other case of a president dying in office, his death was minimized. The invariable rule has been: if a president is not visibly shot, then his death, though sudden, must have been by natural causes. If actually and visibly shot, then the perpetrator must have been a “lone nut.” God forbid that more than one person might have been involved in the assassination, because that, heaven forfend, would be a “conspiracy theory,” and we all know that the Establishment in the U.S. has virtually outlawed any such theory. Or, at the very least, it has been quite beyond the pale of correct thinking and permissible discourse.

To return to old Zack: his death had always seemed peculiar to me. If ptomaine or whatever had run rampant at this presidential picnic in the July heat of our nation’s capital, why is it that only Zack Taylor, of all the picnickers, had caught this disease? Was the stomach disease aimed only at him? In short, was he poisoned?

It’s peculiar that no one else seems to have even thought of this possibility. Miss Rising reveals that the Taylor family has long been rife with such speculation, but it took until 1991 for a family member to do something about it. The suspicion is that Taylor had been put under by a massive dose of arsenic, and the body was now exhumed to test for that poison.

Naturally, Establishment historians, as always, sniffed at the very idea. Take, for example, the reaction of Professor Roger Brown, distinguished expert, at American University, on the history of violence in the United States. “If you’re going to construct a theory of assassination, you’ve got to find somebody who would stand to gain from killing Taylor, I’m not sure that she has constructed a persuasive hypothesis about what somebody would gain.” Cutting through the convoluted English, this strikes me as an astonishingly silly remark. Look, Professor Brown: In any death of a president, there is always one person who clearly stands to gain: the vice president, in this case Millard Fillmore, who, because of these possibly lethal cherries vaulted to the august office of the presidency.

Is this being outrageous? But as everyone knows, in any murder or suspicious demise, the first suspect that the police investigate is the person who most stands to gain by the death. Who is the beneficiary of granddaddy’s will? Etc. Now, this does not of course mean that the main beneficiary was actually responsible for grandpa’s death. But at least the theory has to be investigated. So why not also in a sudden death of someone who means more to most of us than one wealthy individual: the president of the U.S.? Shouldn’t the vice president always be the first suspect, his whereabouts checked, etc.? So why has this never happened? Why, for example, did not Lyndon Baines Johnson immediately become the first prime suspect in the indubitable murder of John E Kennedy?

If anything, Miss Rising’s own theory of the assassination is a bit too broad. Zachary Taylor, though born in Orange County, Virginia and himself a slaveholder, surprised everyone by leading the battle to prohibit any admission of western slave states into the Union. He also opposed the Compromise of 1850, which managed to delay the War Between the States for a number of years. So Miss Rising postulates that Southern slaveowners bumped off this dangerous traitor to his region and culture. Well, that’s certainly interesting, but where’s the evidence? Surely Millard Fillmore is a more plausible a priori bet.

It turns out that the exhumation shows only normal trace quantities of arsenic in Old Rough-n-Ready’s remains. Shucks. The terrible thing is that this result might discredit the exhumation movement. It shouldn’t. Let’s find out, at long last. Let’s follow the path blazed by the courageous Miss Rising; let’s exhume the body of every president who died in office, and let’s take another more scientific look.

Let’s go down the list. First was “Old Tippecanoe” William Henry Harrison, another verdamte war hero (the War of 1812), who allegedly spoke too long at his inaugural, walked out in the rain, caught the flu, and died, only a month after his inaugural. Supposedly natural causes. Humph. Let’s exhume Old Tippecanoe and look for poison. Beneficiary? John Tyler, a Democrat when Harrison was a Whig. Another Southern Democratic plot?

Then came Zack Taylor. The third death in office, of course, was the sainted Abraham Lincoln. Oddly, even though his killing was clearly a conspiracy, the Establishment has injected into the popular consciousness the image of a lone nut, John Wilkes Booth, declaiming wildly after he shot Lincoln. Moreover, the conspiracy was hushed up, military courts delivering summary justice in secret. There is a substantial revisionist review that the major conspirator was Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who contrived to have every one above him in the line of succession to the presidency shot at (only the assassination of Lincoln was successful). I don’t know exactly how an exhumation of Lincoln’s body would help test the Stanton thesis, but since the body is being exhumed anyway (to test for Marfan’s Syndrome, and why should anyone care whether Abe had Mar-fan’s Syndrome or not?), they may as well poke around further and see what they can find. It sure can’t hurt.

Next came James A. Garfield, bumped off by someone eternally tarred with the epithet “disappointed office-seeker.” Another lone nut. Charles Guiteau was apparently driven off his nut by not getting a job in the Garfield administration, and this was then successfully used by the Establishment to inflict the monstrous Civil Service system on this country, protecting every bureaucrat for life in his invasion of the pockets and the liberties of the taxpayer. Let’s exhume and investigate. Beneficiary? Vice President Chester A. Arthur, a New York corruptionist and protectionist, opposed to Garfield’s relatively laissez-faire wing of the Republican Party. Or maybe the civil service reformers were responsible, using Guiteau as an excuse for pushing through their Civil Service.

Next president to die in office was William McKinley of Ohio, longtime Rockefeller tool. Another lone nut was responsible, the “anarchist” Leon Czolgosz, who, like Guiteau, was quickly tried and executed by the Establishment. Even though Czolgosz was considered a flake and was not a member of any organized anarchist group, the assassination was used by the Establishment to smear anarchism and to outlaw anarchist ideas and agitation. Various obscure anti-sedition and anti-conspiracy laws trotted out from time to time by the Establishment were passed during this postMcKinley assassination hysteria. Beneficiary? The vaulting to power of Teddy Roosevelt long-time tool of the competing Morgan (as opposed to Rockefeller) wing of the Republican Party. Teddy immediately started using the anti-trust weapon to try to destroy Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Harriman’s Northern Securities, both bitter enemies of the Morgan world empire. Exhume McKinley, and also start a deep investigation of the possible role of Teddy and the Morgans. Was Czolgosz only a lone nut?

Next sudden death in office was that of my favorite president of the twentieth century, Warren Gamaliel Harding, in the camp of the Rockefellers. His death was quickly dismissed by the Establishment as of natural causes, but Gaston Means, a Secret Service agent in the Harding White House, wrote a sensational book, The Strange Death of Warren Harding, charging that Harding was poisoned by his wife, for two possible, though somewhat contradictory reasons: (a) Harding’s notorious womanizing, and (b) to spare Harding the scandal of the Teapot Dome revelations, which were just emerging. Means’s charge was brusquely dismissed on the grounds that he was an unreliable character. Perhaps, but so what? Surely, the grounds for exhumation are overwhelming. Chief beneficiary of Harding’s death? Vice President Calvin Coolidge, member of the prominent Massachusetts family long in the Morgan ambit. (Hmmm. Another sudden death that replaced a Rockefeller person with a Morgan man?!)

The next presidential death in office was of course that of the revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is perhaps the most mysterious death of all. FDR’s health had long been swathed in layer after layer of official and medical lies. And when he died, in his fourth term, the official mystery was unprecedented: his coffin was covered, and an autopsy was never performed on the body. All sorts of rumors abounded: that he died of syphilis, or of a gunshot wound, either self-inflicted or inflicted by someone else. Was Mrs. Lucy Mercer there when he died? And what was the role of the mysterious Russian painter, Mrs. Elizabeth Shoumatoff? The cause of historical truth and justice cries out for exhumation and deep analysis of FDR’s remains.

Main beneficiary of FDR’s death was, of course, Harry S. Truman. In broader political terms, a pro-Commie president, manipulated as we know now by brain truster, top foreign policy adviser, and unregistered KGB agent Harry ‘the Hop” Hopkins, was suddenly replaced by the first launcher of the Cold War, at the behest of such venerable Establishment “Wise Men” (as they modestly called themselves): Henry L. Stimson, W Averill Harri-man, Dean G. Acheson, and John J. McCloy. Exhume, exhume!

Finally, of course, matching FDR in mystery is the last president to die in office; the shining prince of Camelot, whose shine gets more tarnished every year: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, allegedly assassinated by lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald, who in turn was promptly assassinated by another, independent lone nut: Jack Ruby! This is the shakiest, most convoluted Establishment theory of all: for the two lone nuts had to be independent, couldn’t have known each other so that this kooky official theory could work. So much so in fact that the mysteriously sudden deaths of all those who knew both Oswald and Ruby and who knew that the two were linked, is one of the most powerful counter-indications to the official doctrine. Here the number of books and investigations rebutting Establishment theory is legion, although orthodox writers still act as if dissenters are somehow tetched: powerful works from such writers as Mark Lane, the bullet-and-body revisionism of David Lifton (in his Best Evidence), the work of the smeared Jim Garrison, etc.

Here the case for a new investigation with subpoena power is overwhelming. Not only is there persuasive evidence that the Parkland autopsy report was to say the least deeply flawed, as well as the possibility that the Kennedy body was switched, but also we find that Kennedy’s brain is mysteriously “missing” from the National Archives. Hell, libraries lose books all the time, right? Exhume, investigate!

Beneficiary? As I indicated, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as Texan students of his career know, was not above using a little hanky-panky to advance his political career. And what about that intrepid Kennedy assassination researcher who, analyzing the motorcade with Zapruder, etc. films, concluded that Lyndon hit the deck of his car 2.7 seconds before the sound of the first shot? More broadly, the assassination of Kennedy removed from power, by force and violence, a representative of the “Yankee” Eastern Establishment, and replaced him by a leader of the Sun Belt (Florida, Texas, southern California) “Cowboys”—as explained in Carl Oglesby’s perceptive work, The Yankee and Cowboy War. On this analysis, the Watergate Affair consisted of a counter-coup leveled by the Yankees, installing Establishment rep Gerald Ford, and ousting Cowboy (southern California) Richard Nixon (see Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War, Kansas City: Sheed Andrews &McMeel, 1976).

All this is not only of fascinating interest to the history buff. Who knows: there might come a time when yet another beloved president dies, unexpectedly and quite suddenly, in office. What we need to adopt is a mind-set that, if and when such an event occurs, we better be prepared to cast a cold eye and ask all the right and the upsetting questions.

BEHIND WACO

November 1993

These days, when the Respectable Media form a virtual monolith, rehashing government press releases and confining the Respectable Spectrum of opinion to the tiny distance from left-center to right-center, truth can often be found only at the “extremes” whether left or right, where anti-Establishment people dare to stray beyond these prescribed limits. So we have to thank leftist Alexander Cockburn, in his column in The Nation (Oct. 18), for straying into Forbidden Ground in reporting on the story behind the terrible Waco massacre.

Cockburn cites the report of Nancy Ammerman, of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, who was recruited by the Justice and Treasury Departments to review internal documents on the Waco case, in preparation for their own whitewash report on Waco. Professor Ammerman ignored sound cautionary advice from religion experts and from the FBI’s own Behavioral Science Services Unit. Instead, the BATF and FBI relied heavily on the sinister Cult Awareness Network (CAN), which kept goading the federal authorities to use maximal force against the Branch Davidians. Thus, in April, before the Waco holocaust, CAN president Patricia Ryan was quoted in the Houston Chronicle as calling for the arrest of David Koresh, using lethal force if necessary.

Particularly ominous is the crucial role played at Waco by a leading “deprogrammer”; “deprogrammers” are professional brainwashers who kidnap “cult” adherents, and then use brainwashing techniques to “deprogram” them, thereby allegedly setting them mentally free. Since deprogrammers are felons who are often convicted and sent to jail, CAN has to have an arms’-length relationship with them, but even so their joint connections to Waco are disturbingly intertwined. Thus, the man whom the BATF and FBI relied on most heavily for advice on the Branch Davidians was Rich Ross, whom Professor Ammerman says “clearly had the most extensive access to both agencies of any person on the ‘cult expert’ list and he was apparently listened to more attentively.” Ross, who boasts of performing many “deprogrammings,” was frequently quoted by the media during the Waco siege, and he was featured in the Waco Tribune-Herald series on the Branch Davidians that began at the end of February. Ross, a convicted jewel thief known as such to the federal authorities, is now facing charges of unlawful imprisonment arising from one of his deprogrammings in Washington State.

Rick Ross, who admits to hatred of all religious cults and whose aim is to destroy cults, was hailed by Cynthia Kisser, executive director of CAN’s national office, as “among the half dozen best deprogrammers in the country.” Ross got much of his information on the Branch Davidians from a deprogramming session held at the Los Angeles home of Priscilla Coates, head of the Southern California CAN. Someone, either Ross or a colleague, “deprogrammed” a former Branch Davidian member, David Block, at these sessions, and information from the brainwashed Block was featured heavily in the initial BATF search warrant presented to a Waco judge.

Professor Ammerman concludes that major sponsors of the first bloody and unjustified assault on the Branch Davidians included people such as Rick Ross and CAN, who “have a direct ideological [and financial] interest in arousing suspicion and antagonism against what they call ‘cults.’“

It is horrifying that the acolytes of the “therapeutic state” are increasingly turning to coercive brainwashing techniques, ranging from “sensitivity training sessions” to kidnapping and “deprogramming” for stamping out the Politically Incorrect. Our “soft” totalitarian liberals are increasingly taking on “harder” and rougher trappings. This trend must be combated and uprooted, and one important step would be a deep investigation of the Cult Awareness Network. Who are these people? And how did they acquire their power?

AMERICA’S MOST PERSECUTED MINORITY

August 1994

Quick: which is America’s Most Persecuted Minority? No, you’re Wrong. (And it’s not Big Business either: one of Ayn Rand’s more ludicrous pronouncements.)

All right, consider this: Which group has been increasingly illegalized, shamed and denigrated first by the Establishment, and then, following its lead, by society at large? Which group, far from coming out of the “closet,” has been literally forced back into the closet after centuries of walking proudly in the public square? And which group has tragically internalized the value-system of its oppressors, so that they are deeply ashamed and guilty about practicing their rites and customs? Which group is so browbeaten that it never thinks of defending itself, any attempt at which is publicly condemned and ridiculed? Which group is considered such sinners that the use of doctored statistics against them is considered legitimate means in a worthy cause?

I refer, of course, to that once proud race, tobacco-smokers, a group once revered and envied, but now there are none so poor as to do them reverence.

So low has this group sunk in the public esteem that, in rushing to their defense, I am obliged to point out that I myself am not and never have been a smoker. Can you imagine having to put in such a disclaimer against special pleading in behalf of the rights of blacks, Jews, or gays against oppression?

The crusade against smoking is only the currently most virulent example of one of the most malignant forces in American life: left neo-Puritan-ism. Puritanism was famously defined by my favorite writer, H.L. Mencken, as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” The major problem with the Puritans is not so much that they were a dour lot, but that they were believers in the dangerous Christian heresy of “post-millennialism” that is, that it is man’s responsibility to establish a thousand-year (give or take a few centuries) Kingdom of God on Earth as a precondition of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ. Since the Kingdom is by definition a perfect society free of sin, this means that it is the theological duty of believers to establish a sin-free society. But establishing a sin-free society, of course, means taking stern measures to get rid of sinners, which is where the rub comes in.

Now I recognize that in being obliged to depict the crusaders as neo-Puritans, I am in a deep sense not doing justice to the original Puritans. The original seventeenth-century New England Puritans were not so much crusaders as people who wanted to establish their own sin-free Kingdom in their own new settlements, their own “city on a hill.” The original Puritans, too, were Calvinists, who believed in Christianity and a Christian commonwealth as a strict code of Biblical and God-determined law. But over the years, the original Puritanism was replaced, especially by a wave of pietist revivalism in the late 1820s, by a far more crusading and hence menacing version of Protestant Christianity: what is technically known as “post-millennial evangelical pietism” (PMEP). This PMEP took particular root among the ethno-cultural descendants of the old Puritans, people who became known as “Yankees,” and who had migrated from New England to populate such areas as upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois. (No, “Yankees,” as in “damn Yankees,” did not mean simply “Northerners.”)

This new, and malignant, form of PMEP, of neo-Puritanism, which literally dominated all the mainstream Protestant churches in the North for literally one hundred years, had the following traits: (1) Creed, or liturgy, is formalistic and unimportant. So long as you are a Protestant, it doesn’t matter what church you belong to. Churches don’t matter; the only thing that matters is the individual’s salvation. (2) To achieve salvation, the individual must believe and must be free from sin. (3) “Sin,” however, is very broadly defined as virtually any practice that is enjoyable, in particular, anything which might “cloud your mind” so that you might not achieve salvation: in particular, liquor (Demon Rum); any activity on the Sabbath except praying, reading the Bible, and going to church (and not the Roman Catholic Church, the instrument of the Antichrist in the Vatican); (4) Since each individual is weak and subject to temptation, his salvation must be aided by the government, whose theological duty it is to stamp out such occasions for sin as liquor, activity of any secular sort on the Sabbath, and the Catholic Church. As one historian aptly summed up the PMEP attitude toward the State: “Government is God’s major instrument of salvation.” After all, how are liquor or Catholics to be stamped out by persuasion alone? (5) (the crucial icing on the cake): You will not be saved unless you try your darndest to maximize everyone else’s salvation (i.e., get the government to stamp out sin).

Armed with this five-point world-outlook, the neo-Puritan PMEP hurled himself (and herself, and how!) into a devilishly energetic, hopped-up, unrelenting crusade to stamp out these evils, and to set up paternalistic Big Government on the local, state, and national levels to crush sin and to usher in a perfect sin-less Kingdom. In politics, this meant a full century of crusading against liquor, and to keep the Sabbath Holy. (Do you know that in libertarian, anti-neo-Puritan Jacksonian America, the Post Office used to deliver the mail on Sundays?) But since it would be clearly unconstitutional to outlaw the Catholic Church, the PMEP substitute was to try to force all children into a network of public schools, the object of which was to inculcate obedience to the State and, in the popular slogan of the day, to “Christianize the Catholic” kids, since Catholic adults were clearly doomed.

It took archetypical neo-Puritan Woodrow Wilson not only to bring Prohibition to America, and thereby fulfill the PMEP’s most cherished dreams, but also to take PMEP crusading on to a world scale. For after the Kingdom was established in America, the next holy step was to bring about a worldwide Kingdom. (The Prohibitionist crusaders, however, soon found their dreams of a liquor-free Europe dashed beyond repair.)

The ethno-religious group that felt the most severe oppression from the fanatical harridans of the PMEP (for yes, the most fanatic crusaders were Yankee women, especially spinsters) were the German-American Catholics and High-Church Lutherans. Both of these groups imported into America the charming and admirable custom of going to church on Sundays with their family in their best finery, and then repairing to a beer garden in the afternoon, where they could drink beer and listen to their beloved oom-pah-pah bands. You can imagine the reaction when hordes of PMEP harridans descended upon them crying “Sin! Evil! Smash!” for committing what to the Germans was harmless, but what to the PMEPs was the grave double sin of drinking beer, and on Sundays! And, furthermore, both the Catholics and the German Lutherans wanted to bring up their kids in their own parochial schools, and not in the secularist (or rather, PMEP) public school system!

The high-water mark of PMEP crusading was, of course, the outlawing of all liquor (and by constitutional amendment, no less!). The result used to be common knowledge in America; absolute disaster: tyranny, corruption, black markets and more alcoholism as people went underground to get more intense “fixes” such as hard liquor rather than beer before the cops could close in. And, of course, organized crime, which was almost non-existent before Prohibition. But now, only groups willing to be criminals were available to supply a much desired and demanded product.

This grim lesson used to be known to all Americans, but it has been lost in the enthusiasm for recent neo-Puritan crusades; against drugs, and now against smoking. What is little realized is that the current reason for the crusade was also present during the old PMEP war against liquor. As the decades wore on, the neo-Puritans used both theological and medicinal arguments; liquor will not only send you to Hell, but would also ruin your temporal body, your liver, your body-as-a-temple. Liquor would cause you to beat your wives, have more accidents, and, a little later, injure yourself and others on the road. Increasingly, over the years, the PMEPs married theology and Science in their crusade.

So what happened to the aggressively Christian features of neo-Puritan-ism, to the emphasis on salvation and on the Kingdom? Interestingly, over the decades, the Christian aspect gradually disappeared. After all, if as a Christian activist, your major focus is not on creed or liturgy but on using the government to shape everyone up and stamp out sin, eventually Christ fades out of the picture and government remains. The picture of the Kingdom of God on Earth becomes secularized or atheized, and, in the Marxist version, the secular sin-free Kingdom is brought about by the terrible swift sword of the “saints” of the Communist Party. We have arrived at the grisly land of Left Puritanism, of a Left Kingdom which proposes to bring about a perfect world free of tobacco, inequality, greed, and hate-thoughts. We have arrived, in short, in the land of The Enemy.

And so, smokers! Are you mice or are you men? Smokers, rise up, be proud, throw off the guilt imposed on you by your oppressors! Stand tall, and smoke! Defend your rights! Do you really think that someone can get instant lung cancer by imbibing a bit of smoke from someone sitting twenty feet away in an outdoor arena? How do you explain the fact that millions of people have smoked all their lives without ill effect?

And remember, if today they come for the smoker, tomorrow they will come for you. If today they grab your cigarette, tomorrow they will seize your junk food, your carbohydrates, your yummy but “empty” calories. And don’t think that your liquor is safe either; neo-Prohibitionism has been long on the march, what with “sin taxes” (revealing term, isn’t it?), outlawing of advertising, higher drinking ages, and the neo-Puritan harpies of MADD. Are you ready for the Left Nutritional Kingdom, with everyone forced to confine his food to yogurt and tofu and bean sprouts? Are you ready to be confined in a cage, to make sure that your diet is perfect, and that you get the prescribed Compulsory Exercise? All to be governed by a Hillary Clinton National Health Board?

Smokers, if you have the guts to form a Smokers Defense League, I will be happy to join a Non-Smokers Auxiliary! How about smokers as one important mass base for a right-wing populist counterrevolution?

HUNTING THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

August 1994

Watch out, Johnnie and Janie, the Christians are out to get you! There is nothing that gets liberal dander up so much as a witch hunt. (Is that because there aren’t any witches or because so many liberals are part of a coven?) And the big rap against Joe McCarthy and other anti-Communists in the old days was that they were engaged in a witch hunt (presumably because there were no Commies, although recent revelations by ex-KGB biggies tell a very different tale). But now the left-liberals in the media and among the Democrats are off on a new and bigger witch-hunt of their own: a Christian hunt!

(Readers over 40: did you ever think that, in America, a “Christian” would be an object of reproach, of shame, of pointing-the-finger?)

You see, the problem is that Christians—those sneaky devils!—are on the march; they’re taking over, in particular, the Republican Party. And, once again, as they have done effectively so many times, left-liberals, who wouldn’t be caught dead voting Republican, are rushing, dewy-eyed, to try to save the wonderful old GOP from those terrible, extreme, Christians.

The left-media hype approaches the Christian “invasion” or “takeover” in the vein of that grand old-science-fiction-horror movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (The Don Siegel-Kevin McCarthy original of the 1950s, not the later gory imitators.) Look! They look like people! They go to precinct meetings like people! They claim they’re Republicans! But they’re really, down-deep, Christians! They are “stealth candidates.” They’re taking over!

So what’s wrong with these Christians, anyway? They’re “extremists!” Oooh! On what? Well, they’re single-issue types: they’re only interested in abortion. Soon, it turned out patently that that wasn’t true: for example, the Christian right (for they indeed, are the Christians under attack) are also passionately interested in saving their children from multicultural, socialistic, condomaniacal, anti-Christian public schooling.

And so the anti-Christian left retreated to another line of attack: they’re “creationists”! They’re interfering with the separation of church and state! They want voluntary prayer in the schools! But why is even discussing a Christian view in the schools a breach in this holy wall of “separation of church and state,” while presenting all sorts of New Age propaganda, channeling, pantheistic mysticism, etc. is not a breach in such a wall? It is pretty clear that the only separation of religion from the public schools that left-liberals are interested in is from Christianity, not from religion in general.

The liberal media have spun an entire web of disinformation and lies around the Christian right. First, there is the notion that there are two types of Republicans: the Christian right only interested in “social issues (bad), and economic conservatives interested in safe issues like taxes and economic controls (good). Or, alternatively, that there are three types of Republicans: the Christian right (bad), the economic conservatives (so-so), and the “moderates” (wonderful), who are left-liberal on all issues, or who are willing to cave into the left everywhere.

All this is baloney. The Christian right might well have been inspired into activism by abortion or by the horrible state of the public schools, but by this time the nature of the Enemy is clear, and they have become “conservatives” on all issues, anti-tax and pro-free market as well as cultural rightists. Recently some of the media left have tried to take this glaringly obvious fact into account. Note the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” way they’re going about it: “they’re pretending to be economic conservatives too, but they’re really still only social conservatives.” Come again?

Hey, I think I see the liberals’ problem: they’re believers in the “conspiracy theory of history”!

And then of course there is the Orwellian rewriting of history: blaming the disastrous Bush defeat on Pat Buchanan’s and Pat Robertson’s speeches at the Houston convention. Ooh, they were so “negative,” so “hate-filled.” Even little Danny Quayle, in his recent apologia, has bought into this nonsense. Actually, the Bush campaign went up in the polls after the Buchanan and Robertson speeches; the campaign fell again later as Bush fumbled everything, took no stand, and failed to be “negative” on any important issue. Hence, the collapse.

No denunciation of Christians or the Christian right would be complete without the good old canard of “anti-Semitism,” and sure enough, leave it to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith [ADL], which has been peddling this nonsense for half a century, to step up to the plate. But this time, in its booklet smearing “The Religious Right,” the ADL has gone much too far, and its hatred of Christianity, now out of the “closet” so to speak, is bound to cause a powerful backlash. For the ADL now takes after Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, probably the most prominent group on the Christian right. But how in the world can the ADL smear Robertson as “anti-Semitic” when he and his group have been slavish supporters of Israel, largely on pre-millennialist religious grounds? Dropping its automatic Seal of Approval for pro-Zionists, in the interest of a greater cause, the ADL attacks Robertson because one of his major assistants is a Jewish convert to Christianity! Aha! The agenda revealed! For is it indeed “anti-Semitic” for a Jew to convert to Christianity, or for Christians to place him in a position of responsibility? Similarly, the ADL attacks the prominent evangelical minister Louis Sheldon, because his mother was an Orthodox Jewess. If the ADL is indeed taking the position that for a Jew to convert to Christianity is “anti-Semitic,” it should proclaim such an absurd position loud and clear: because no one, except a few Jewish religious fanatics, is going to go along with such an argument.

The ADL, in its booklet, goes on to condemn a number of Jews for endorsing and allying themselves with the Christian right, making it, at least to some extent, a Christian + Jewish religious right. Long-time conservative syndicated columnist Don Feder is attacked for supporting the Christian right, and Orthodox Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of an interesting new Seattle-based group, Toward Tradition, is denounced by the ADL for being “too strident.” So, are these nonconverted Jews also to be considered “anti-Semitic” because they praise the Christian right? To such a depth has the ADL sunk, a depth that is so idiotic as to lose it all credibility. And that couldn’t happen to a more deserving organization.

In taking on Rabbi Lapin, by the way, the ADL has gone up against a formidable figure. Tough, bright, savvy, and libertarian, Rabbi Lapin is an impressive person who should be better known on the conservative scene. One of Rabbi Lapin’s central organizing principles is defense of the Christian right, and to form a new kind of Christian-Jewish dialogue on rightist principles.

We have learned to defend ourselves from the Democrats, from the biased and destructive liberal media; we must now learn to guard against the worst foes, the traitors from within Republican ranks. It was the French Marechal Villars who is supposed to have said: “Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.” And so the worst enemies of the right are those Republican left-liberals (so-called “moderates”) who stab in the back, who refuse to accept the results of fair political contests within the Republican Party. Thus, in late June the Iowa Republican Party invited various possible Republican presidential candidates to speak at a fund-raising dinner, and then took a straw poll of the 1350 delegates. The important point is not the inclusive very early poll, but two speeches which viciously attacked the Christian right, echoing the absurd attacks by the media and the Democrats. One was by left-liberal former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean; another, and particularly reprehensible, was by Pennsylvanian Arlen Specter, who has compiled one of the most left-wing voting records among Republicans in the Senate. Specter denounced the Christian right “takeover” in the Texas party by stating that “it was wrong philosophically because it violated the basic American principle of separation of church and state.” Look, being tough on Anita Hill is about the only conservative deed ever performed by Specter; one good deed in a lifetime of liberal hackery is scarcely enough.

I’ll say it only once more: it does not violate the separation of church and state principle for Christians to get involved in politics, or to take political stands. Or even for Christian ministers or priests to do so. For people who use this absurd argument, this point should be thrown into their face: All right, are you prepared to repudiate all the political activities of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King? Or of all the other black ministers? Are you prepared to condemn Catholic Bishops when they agitated for civil rights legislation? And if not, why not? And if not, please inter this idiotic argument once and for all. The blatant hypocrisy of left-liberals on this entire matter is a stench unto one’s nostrils. They must not be allowed to get away with this intellectual fraud.

THE “BIG TENT”

During the month of June, the Christian Right allegedly took over the Republican Party in three important states: Virginia, Texas, and Minnesota. We shall examine these states in turn. But first, let us consider the Republican Party as the vehicle for the right-wing populist counterrevolution (and let us assume for the moment that it is), then, the right-wing task is two-fold: one, to battle within the Republican Party to control that party and to name its candidates and write its platform; and two, to support loyally whoever wins within the Republican Party against the evil Democracy in the general election. In this view, the Republican Party is indeed a “big tent” in that we welcome all votes against the Democracy, and also a “big tent” in that we are willing to support whoever wins within the party in November. But it is in no sense a “Big Tent” in which we are supposed to abandon fighting for our principles and for those who will represent them within the party. In short, we battle to control the party and its platform, as much as possible to mold that party into the vehicle of counterrevolution, of returning to the Old Republic; but we support whoever wins against the Democrats. I don’t know why this should be so difficult a strategy to understand or explain; indeed, this has always been the basic strategy of most ideological groups within either party.

So evidently proper is this strategy, in fact, that we can only consider the hysterical attacks on the “religious right” for being narrow, for employing litmus tests, etc. as willful misrepresentations of the Christian right’s strategy by its enemies: media, Democrats, and leftist Republicans. Indeed, it is instructive to compare Pat Buchanan’s strategies during his run for the presidency in 1991–92 to the traitorous course of the Official Cons and neoconservatives. First, Pat ran as the voice of the conservative opposition against the crumbling Bush presidency in the primaries; during that period, all of Pat’s enemies, liberals, Official Cons, and neocons, denounced Pat for treason to the Republican administration and betrayal of President Bush. Then, after Pat’s loss in the primaries and the convention, he took what used to be considered the normal strategic course (such as we are advocating here), and came out wholeheartedly in favor of Bush’s reelection; for consider the alternative! But then, the very same neocons and Official Cons who had denounced Pat for betrayal, themselves stabbed President Bush in the back at every opportunity, some openly jumping the fence to side with the “New Democrat” Clinton (only “new” if new means “worse”), and others doing their best to undercut and sabotage the Bush campaign from within. Which strategy was more honorable? Or more defensible in the long run?

VIRGINIA

Let us now take the three Christian takeover states in turn. Virginia, of course, was the most famous, as Ollie North repelled the hysterical attacks of the entire Republican Establishment, from Ronald Reagan on down, and won a smashing victory among the mass of activist delegates at the Republican convention. The media and the Establishment, down to the wire, claimed that the Establishment candidate, Jim Miller, might well win; the polls had North ahead by 53 to 47 percent; and the liberals slyly pointed out that the ballot would be secret, so that Miller might win—implying, of course, that many delegates pledged to North could vote their conscience free of intimidation by Christian nightriders. In the actual event, however, reality once again showed up liberal ties: for the final count was a smashing 55 to 45 percent victory for North, even more than the polls had estimated.

How did the Republican opposition react to the North victory? Did they loyally get behind Ollie once the votes were taken, as the Christian right loyally got behind such non-Christian-rightists as Paul Coverdell in Georgia and Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas propelling them into the Senate? To give them their due, most of the Republican Establishment did the right thing, and came loyally to Ollie’s support: including Jim Miller, Governor Allen, Dick Cheney, Haley Barbour, Phil Gramm, Bill Bennett, and Jack Kemp (although Kemp waffled on Minnesota).

But not Bob Dole. High-tax Bob, Mr. “Compromise” (i.e., surrender to Democratic schemes). Off attending D-Day celebrations in Europe, Dole was out of town and out of touch. He was off together with the evil, prune-faced, traitorous, left-liberal Virginia Republican Senator John Warner. Warner, who did not bother attending his own state party’s convention, had led the vicious attack on North; he had already made it clear that he would bolt the ticket and sponsor an independent candidate for governor this year: former State Attorney-General J. Marshall Coleman. After the convention, then, Dole made public noises about possibly bolting North and endorsing the Coleman race. Well, everything hit the fan, and Republican biggies as well as people all over the country informed Dole in no uncertain terms that, if he persisted, he could kiss the presidential nomination goodbye in 1996. It took him almost a week, but Dole finally came around to support North. But it’s a good bet that this flirtation with Coleman has put the kibash on a Dole for President race in 1996. And high time, too; do we need to nominate one of the few Republicans almost guaranteed to lose to Clinton in ’96?

And talk about losers: the highly touted J. Marshall Coleman is precisely that. The bland, colorless Coleman is a three-time loser; twice he ran for governor of Virginia, and once for lieutenant-governor, and every time he lost. Write him off, even in a tangled four-way race.

As for Warner, he comes up for re-election in 1996, and it is absolutely vital that he be punished and retired to private life. Anyone but Warner! In addition to having a voting record almost as leftish as Specter, traitors must be disposed of, and fast. Warner, by the way, liked to take the High Moral Ground on Ollie and say that he lied to Congress. Ooh, unforgivable! But Warner is a two-time traitor, because he also sabotaged the heroic Mike Farris, who was on the Republican ticket for lieutenant-governor last year. Farris, a young attorney of sterling integrity, never lied to anyone; but he was openly sabotaged by Warner because Farris is an “extremist,” and of the “religious right” to boot. Farris’s “extremism” is the fact that he is one of the national leaders of one of the most hopeful, inspiring, and yes—libertarian—movements in America today: the home schooling movement. America is groaning under a massive, rotten, oppressive, socialistic, multicultural, aggressively degenerate institution: the public school system. There are many excellent ideas among the Christian Right on doing something about the public schools, to roll them back, to restrict their horror, but the most consistent, most radical, and best plan is to dump them altogether, and the best way to dump them is through home schooling. There is talk that Farris might run against the monster Warner in ’96, and it would be poetic justice for Farris to take his place in the U.S. Senate.

Warner, by the way, is a millionaire country-club Republican, who only got elected in the first place during the year or two he was Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.

There will be a four-way race in Virginia, because Democrat Governor L. Douglas Wilder is running as an independent, in order to destroy his mortal intra-party enemy, Senator Chuck Robb, who is running for reelection. Robb, like Clinton a phony “New Democrat” who is simply a left-liberal, has severe morals problems with babes and coke reminiscent of Slick Willie himself. Wilder should get the black votes, and in the melee, the chances for Ollie to enter the U.S. Senate look very good indeed.

TEXAS

In Texas, too, there is a lot of liberal wailing and gnashing of teeth at the “takeover” by the religious right. The big fight was over state chair. A liberal lady from Houston, and Congressman Joe Barton, backed by the Gramm-Hutchison establishment, were overwhelmed by the religious right candidate, Tom Pauken, who was backed by Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition.

However, from friends in Texas, I find that, once again, the idea of religious fanatics or theocrats taking over the Republican Party is a typical liberal smear. Actually, Pauken, a Catholic and a former Reagan administration official, is an upstanding person who made open overtures to libertarians within the Texas Republican Party. Indeed, Pauken’s anti-gun control assistant is a man who co-founded the Texas Libertarian Party over twenty years ago. What distinguishes the Paukenites is that they are anti-Establishment populists; they embody a new wave in the Republican Party, of conservatives-and-libertarians, of paleos if you will, rising up to challenge the quasi-sellout, country-club Republican establishment. Again, Phil Gramm, who is nothing if not shrewd, quickly absorbed his loss and praised Pauken and his new populist movement.

The Texas Republican Party is, at this point, a “Big Tent” coalition. Rightists have to support George W Bush for governor in the interests of dumping the horrid, wise-cracking, whiskey-soaked Ann Richards from the gubernatorial post. But the Texas Party machinery is now in good hands.

MINNESOTA

I have the most personal knowledge of the situation in Minnesota, a classically left-wing state where the Christian right victory in the Republican Party has been attacked almost as much as Ollie North’s in Virginia. For decades, ever since the Harold Stassen-Luther Youngdahl tradition got established, Minnesota Republicans have been nearly as left-wing as the notoriously leftist Minnesota Democracy. (It wasn’t always that way. During the 1940s and 1950s, Minnesota’s magnificently Old Right Congressman Harold Knutson was the outstanding opponent of high taxes in the Congress.) For the past four years, by a fluke, Minnesota has been stuck with a left-wing Republican governor, Arne Carlson, whom Human Events has properly characterized as a “Ted Kennedy Republican.” It’s not just that Carlson is leftish on social or moral issues; he’s also high-tax, high-control, high-spend. The conservative rebellion within the Republican Party is led by Allen Quist, a farmer and former state legislator. In mid-June, at the Republican state convention, Quist accomplished the feat of crushing a sitting Republican governor, by a vote of 69 to 31 percent. Unfortunately, the two will have to face off in a September primary, but the convention endorsement should give Quist a hefty boost for the primary battle.

I was invited to give the keynote address to the Minnesota Young Republican Convention two weeks before the state party meeting. I was enormously impressed by the devotion to principle, the intelligence, and the organizational savvy, of the Minnesota YR leaders, who were a driving force in the Quist campaign. Of the 200 or so people who turned out for my after-dinner talk, all the top conservative candidates were there, from Quist on down to several conservative possibles for U.S. Senate (won at the convention by Congressman Rod Grams), and conservative candidates for Congress and other posts. Several of the leading Minnesota YR cadres are enthusiastic Triple R subscribers (always a great sign), and knowledgeable paleos.

I was slated to speak on the Clinton Health Plan, and was urged by the organizers to hold nothing back. That was the only encouragement I needed! I gave a slam-bang address, holding nothing back in escalating from the health problem to call for a right-wing populist counter-revolution against the Menshevik social democratic elite who have foisted their evil socialist program on America. I denounced the typical Republican program of consolidating previous socialistic gains, and called for a rollback to Take Back America. I was delighted to find that no one gasped in horror; everyone loved it, and cheered for more.

Perhaps the single point I made that drew most fervent support was to say that the real problem in America is not the so-called “religious right” or “Christian right”; the real problem is the monstrous religious left: the collectivist, egalitarian, condomaniacal, communalist New Age-“Christian” left: it is this left that has virtually taken over the country and the culture, and must be rolled back!

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

The Christian Right is doing very well, and is on the march in the Republican Party. Hence, the torrent of abuse and smear, from media, Democrats, and traitorous Republican “moderates.” It is important for Christians not to wilt under the abuse. It is high time for Christians to stop being shamefaced. Christians should come out of the “closet,” and proclaim, “we are out and we are proud!” They have the principles, they are becoming all-round conservatives and libertarians, and they are acquiring the necessary organizational and political savvy. And they should no longer allow their enemies to “define” them, to say that they must not carry religious or moral principles into the political arena, or that they must confine themselves to “conserving,” but never take the offensive to return to the old American Republic. Christians should have the courage to be “right” and to be “radical right,” let the radical left, or “radical wrong,” try to make the most of it.

Christians must also refuse to let their enemies set their agenda. The left is already saying that it is terribly wrong to use such terms as “evil” in relation to one’s enemies. No, no, say they, we should only use terms like “cost-ineffective” or “too rapid.” Well, too bad, because there is only one way to fully portray the socialistic, degenerate program that the Clintonians are trying to foist upon America. And that word is “evil.” What other word can best sum up Slick Willie, and “St. Hillary,” Doc Joycelyn and the rest of that scurvy crew?

THE MENACE OF THE RELIGIOUS LEFT

October 1994

All the hysteria thrown up about the “religious” or the “Christian” right by left-liberals serves as a convenient cover for the real menace to America and even to the rest of the world, not only of our time but of the last few centuries: the deadly threat of the “Religious Left,” a left which began, in the Middle Ages and even earlier, as a hellish Christian heresy, and by now can only be considered “Christian” in the most remote and twisted sense. This menace, which reached its most influential early form in the views of the charismatic and highly influential late-twelfth century Calabrian Abbot, Joachim of Fiore, is “postmillennial”: that is, it struggles to bring about, either immediately or as quickly as possible, a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth, a “perfect” and sinless world, a world which would be Communist, collectivist, and egalitarian, although that “equality” would be supposedly assured by the totalitarian rule of a cadre or vanguard of “saints,” presided over by a self-proclaimed Messiah or proto-Messiah, whose reign would supply the pre-conditions for the eventual Second Advent of Jesus Christ. Private property would be stamped out, and all “heretics,” that is, any dissenters from this messianic rule, would be slaughtered.

After Joachim, there came waves of these heretics, including the Amaurians, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the left-wing of the Czech Hussite Revolution. But before the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church was able to contain this plague successfully. Say what you will about the Reformation, even Martin Luther came to acknowledge that he had opened Pandora’s Box, that he had unleashed, perhaps forever, the furies and crazies of fanaticism and horror.

In 1520, young Thomas Muntzer, a Lutheran pastor in southern Germany, unleashed upon Western Europe the scourge of what came to be known as Anabaptism: the imposition by force and terror of an alleged Kingdom of God on Earth, with a cadre of rulers, headed by himself, communizing all persons and property and killing all “heretics” who might dissent from his rule. For a brief but frenzied fifteen-year period, there was a real danger of Germany and Holland falling sway to groups of Anabaptist fanatics. Fortunately, when Muntzer urged Luther to join him in this messianic crusade, arrived at by alleged divine revelation, Luther immediately saw the deadly danger; at the end, the Anabaptist movement was crushed by an alliance of Catholic and Lutheran princes.

Movements can be stamped out, but ideas, good or bad, often keep marching on, and the same was true of the idea of imposing a totalitarian Kingdom. In troubled times, the idea popped to the surface: among the Familists, the Diggers, the Ranters, and the Fifth Monarch Men during the English Civil War of the Seventeenth Century; and before and during the French Revolution. By the early and mid-nineteenth century, the main carrier of a Communist Kingdom was the burgeoning “socialist” or “Communist” movement in Europe. (In those days, before the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the two concepts were considered by all adherents to be identical.) What is little realized today is that at the time of the flourishing of Karl Marx as a socialist-Communist leader, at least half of the Communist movement was heretically Christian, the other half following Marx’s atheized version of the search for an apocalyptic and secular Kingdom. The victory for Marx’s atheist version was not preordained; it was touch and go, until Marx’s superior organizing ability and the dispersals following the failed revolutions of 1848 led to the complete triumph of Marxian atheism within the socialist-Communist movement.

Indeed, the Marxist Communist utopia is virtually a replica of sixteenth-century Anabaptism: once again, private property is stamped out, all resources—and people—are owned in common by a cadre of “saints,” a vanguard headed by a messianic leader, and all dissent to this collective organism is crushed. Marx’s theoretical problem was that since he could not rely on God, Providence, or some mystical force to bring about the allegedly inevitable Kingdom, he had to seek out “material forces”—the class struggle, productive forces, the “dialectic” of history—to constitute the inevitable engine of social change.

But the idea of messianic, Christian Communism never disappeared, and during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries it showed up in various forms: as Christian Socialism, the Social Gospel, and other variants of left-wing Christians and Christian leftists. Perhaps most fascinating and most blatant was the widely beloved East German Stalinist Ernst Bloch, whose widely known three-volume The Principle of Hope was translated into English in the late 1980s. Early in his lengthy career, Bloch—in common with many other Marxists—wrote a laudatory study of Thomas Muntzer, whom he hailed as magical or “theurgic.” The inner “truth” of things, wrote Bloch, will only be discovered after a “complete transformation of the universe, a grand apocalypse, the descent of the Messiah, a new heaven and a new earth.” For Bloch, mystical ecstasies and the worship of Lenin and Stalin went hand in hand. Thus, Bloch’s culminating work, The Principle of Hope, contains such remarkable assertions as: “Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem” [“Where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem”] and that “the Bolshevist fulfillment of Communism” is part of the “age-old fight for God.”

How is all this seemingly bizarre stuff relevant to the present day? My contention is that, bizarre and weird and horrifying as all this may be, we are not dealing merely with erratic oddballs or with irrelevant history. My contention, ever since the Clintonian Democrat convention in New York in 1992, is that the Clintonian movement is not “centrist,” or simply erratic, confused, or evasive, but that it is in essence a dedicated movement of the “Christian” or religious left. It is an attempt to impose, not immediately as in the case of Muntzer or Lenin, but over a period of years, and as quickly as politically possible, a Kingdom of God on Earth, at least in the United States. The horrifying New York convention had very definite religious and even messianic overtones. The Kingdom, of course, is not the orthodox Christian Kingdom: it is collectivist, egalitarian, multicultural, and “multi-gendered”; it deliberately overthrows and “transvalues” our entire structure of traditional or “bourgeois” Christian values and principles.

It might be thought that one crucial difference between the current left and the medieval or post-Reformation heretical Christian left is that the current movement of course trumpets the glories and even the superior morality of various sexual what used to be called “perversions,” but are now worthy and even morally superior “alternative families” or “alternative lifestyles.” But that isn’t new either. The Anabaptists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the rest were aggressive “antinomians,” that is, claiming to be saintly, quasi-divine or even divine and therefore without sin, they believed in publicly demonstrating and even flaunting their alleged sinlessness by committing all manner of sins imaginable, including adultery, theft, and murder. The Clintonians have nothing on these older “Chrisdan” movements.

The Clinton Inaugural was, of course, a horrifying display of a neopagan, multicultural, New Age religious left at work, a fact, which was only discerned by the liberal but highly perceptive New York humorist Fran Lebowitz, who struck a delightfully sour note, saying that even watching the Inaugural orgy of religious leftism on television had driven her to “a new planet of fury.” Then, in the crucial early months of the Clinton administration, Michael Kelly wrote an insightful and quickly famous article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (May 23, 1993), entitled “Saint Hillary,” replete with a painting of Hillary on the front cover dressed as Joan of Arc, significantly wearing a sword but not a cross. After a lengthy and discerning interview with Hillary, the article, which was carefully neutral in tone but all the more effective, pointed out that Hillary thought of herself as leading the charge for “something on the order of a Reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life.” Hillary, the article explained, had set out “to make things right,” to “make the world a better place,” to install a “politics of virtue” or “politics of meaning.”

Hillary was converted to her current grandiose stance, first by her hometown Methodist preacher, who introduced her to “alienation,” the Social Gospel and Paul Tillich, and then to the admonition of that other trendy left Protestant theologian of our century, Reinhold Niebuhr, that we must never be reluctant to wield Power in the service of The Good. An admonition that the power-mad Hillary took to as a duck takes to water. Hillary’s most recent guru, of course, is the socialistic pro-war (Gulf War that is) peacenik, Michael Lerner, editor of the pretentious glossy magazine Tikkun and notorious coiner of the phrase “the politics of meaning.”

Armed with an all-encompassing ideology, and with what many interviewers have noted as her arrogance and complete self-assurance and self-righteousness, Hillary was now ready to wield total Power in the service of her own hellish conception of The Good.

It was reported that Hillary and her camp in the White House were furious at the Kelly article and its important revelations, and since then she has said not a word about the importance of remaking all of America by wielding State power. But the goal and the means are, unfortunately, still there.

And Slick Willie, too, Hillary’s co-president and ideological puppet, underlying his continuing stream of lies, evasions, and tactical changes to front, is deeply committed to the very same goal. Considering his rotten character, does the Slick One’s commitment to anything seem improbable? But consider two points. First, each and every one of his programs, regardless of attractiveness of label, whether it be “crime” or “welfare reform,” is designed to increase the power of the State, that is, the federal government, and to diminish the liberties and the property rights of every American.

And finally, ponder this: Remember that weekend in August when Willie began his frantic and febrile, but unfortunately successful, drive to reverse his House defeat on the crime bill? He gave a speech in Maryland before the grandiosely named Full Gospel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. What the media reported Clinton to proclaim was odious and blasphemous enough: that “God wants us to pass the crime bill,” and that his, Clinton’s “ministry” (?!) was devoted to that task. But he said something else in that speech, of far greater purport, that received almost no publicity. He said that the goal of his “ministry” was to bring about no less than the “Kingdom of God on Earth”! Yes, he said it, he actually said it! Now I have no idea how Clinton’s “parishioners” reacted to this phrase, or what the almost uniformly secular media people thought they were hearing. Maybe they thought they were merely hearing a grandiloquent metaphor for improving society.

But we know what he said, and it is our business to inform America of its import before it is too late. We know that William Jefferson Blythe “Clinton” IV, that Monster in the White House, was at last revealing, perhaps in a typical moment of unguarded vainglory and exuberance, the cloven hoof, the face of pure evil, the unholy mission of himself and his Lady Macbeth. We know the truly diabolic nature of the Kingdom that the Clintons are trying to put over on an unsuspecting America.

And still the liberal media wonder: Why do so many people hate this charming and wonderful couple and with such intensity?

SAINT HILLARY AND THE RELIGIOUS LEFT

December 1994

For some time I have been hammering at the theme that the main cultural and political problem of our time is not “secular humanism.” The problem with making secularism the central focus of Opposition is that, by itself, secularism would totally lack the fanaticism, the demonic energy, the continuing and permanent drive to take over and remake the culture and the society, that has marked the left for two centuries. Logically, one would expect a secular humanist to be a passive skeptic, ready to adapt to almost any existing state of affairs; David Hume, for example, a philosophic disaster but quietly benign in social and political matters, would seem to be typical. Hardly a political and cultural menace.

No: the hallmark and the fanatical drive of the left for these past centuries has been in devoting tireless energy to bringing about, as rapidly as they can, their own egalitarian, collectivist version of a Kingdom of God on Earth. In short, this truly monstrous movement is what might be called “left-post-millennialist.” It is messianic and post-millennialist because Man, not Christ or Providence, is supposed to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth (KGE), that is, in the Christian version, that Christ is only supposed to return to earth after Man has established the 1,000 year KGE. It is leftist because in this version, the KGE is egalitarian and collectivist, with private property stamped out, and the world being run by a cadre or vanguard of Saints.

During the 1820s, the Protestant churches in the Northern states of the U.S. were taken over by a wave of post-millennial fanatics determined to impose on local, state, and federal governments, and even throughout the world, their own version of a theocratic statist KGE. A “Yankee” ethnocultural group had originated in New England, and had migrated to settle the northern areas of New York and the Middle-Western states. The Yankees were driven by the fanatical conviction that they themselves could not achieve salvation unless they did their best to maximize everyone else’s: which meant, among other features, to devote their energies to instituting the sinless society of the KGE.

These newly mainstream Yankee Protestant churches were always statist, but the major emphasis in the early decades was the stamping out of “sin,” sin being broadly defined as virtually any form of enjoyment, and included (for theological reasons) slavery. By the later years of the nineteenth century, however, economic collectivism received increasing attention by these left millennialist Protestants, and strictly theological and Christological concerns gradually faded away, culminating in the explicitly socialistic Social Gospel movement in all the Protestant churches. While every one of the Yankee Protestant denominations was infected and dominated by left millennialism, this heresy prevailed almost totally in the Methodist Church.

SAINT HILLARY

Which brings us to our beloved First Couple. I have already mentioned that Slick Willie, in addressing a black Gospel church in Maryland on behalf of God’s alleged commandment to pass his crime bill, revealingly told the assembled congregation that the goal of his “ministry” is to bring about “the Kingdom of God on earth.” That should have sounded the fire alarm throughout the nation. Unfortunately, to an American public possessing little knowledge of history or theology, Clinton’s remarkable statement went unreported.

But, as we all know, it is Hillary, not Slick Willie, who is the hard-core ideologue in the White House. Hillary’s theological agenda was perceptively unveiled recently by the knowledgeable, if admiring and liberal, Kenneth L. Woodward, religion editor of Newsweek. (Kenneth L. Woodward, “Soulful Matters,” Newsweek (Oct. 31, 1994) pp. 23–25) In a lengthy exclusive interview with Hillary, Woodward reports that our Lady Macbeth simply considers herself “an old-fashioned Methodist.”

Hillary’s pronouncement is not as absurd as it might first seem. Hillary Rodham was born in northern Illinois Yankee country, in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. Her grandparents told stories about their Methodism in early-nineteenth-century England, not many generations removed from the founding of Methodism by John Wesley. Hillary’s family were pious Methodists, and Hillary herself was inducted into the Social Gospel by the Rev. Donald Jones, the then youth minister at her Park Ridge First United Methodist Church. I am sure that we are all gratified to learn how Hillary got her start in the cause of “social reform”; as Woodward fondly puts it, the Rev. Jones “developed his privileged suburban students’ social consciences by taking them to visit migrant workers’ children.”

The most important passage in Woodward’s article is his explanation of the importance of Methodism within the American Protestant spectrum: “More than other Protestants, Methodists are still imbued with the turn-of-the-century social gospel, which holds that Christians have been commissioned to build the Kingdom of God on earth.”

Only a few brush-strokes are needed to complete the picture. The Rev. Jones, a frequent visitor to the White House, but who seems at least to have a sense of humor and perspective that the arrogant and self-righteous Hillary totally lacks, puts it this way: Even today, says Rev. Jones, “when Hillary talks it sounds like it comes out of a Methodist Sunday-school lesson.” And: “Hillary views the world through a Methodist lens. And we Methodists knew what’s good for you.”

Now obviously, and of course, a lot of this is Hillary’s drive to “reinvent” herself, that is, to create a duplicitous false image, to make herself less threatening to the angry American public. And surely the late-nineteenth-century Social Gospelers would be horrified at the current multi-gendered, condomaniacal Clintonian left, to say nothing of the rapid revolving of poor John Wesley in his eighteenth-century English grave. But there is definitely a direct line of descent from the Methodist Social Gospelers of the nineteenth century to St. Hillary and the monstrous Clintonian left. Mix into “old-fashioned Methodism” liberal doses of Marxism, the New Left, the pagan pantheist New Age, and the multicultural and sexual revolutions, stir briskly, and you get the current ruling horror that we all face, and are trying to roll back out of our lives. We face, in short, regardless of what hairdo or persona she affects next week, the evil Witch in the White House.