Diana West: The Conscience of a Conservative

With journalistic skills honed over decades, skepticism toward received opinion, a graceful literary style, and considerable courage, Diana West has been contributing to the preservation of America’s heritage of liberty against its enemies, foreign and domestic. She’s been doing this by defending American philosophy, culture, and history—and common sense—in essays, books and, lately, videos.

Her contribution, unfortunately, is not as widely known as its high literary quality would lead one to predict. The Left have mainly ignored her, but false friends on the Right have vilified her, arrogating to themselves the right to determine how far the defense of liberty may go and whose sacred cows may not be blasphemed along the way.

In the words of ex-Communist journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), West detects a red thread of continuity between his era and ours:

. . . [R]ecounting his experience as a German Communist in the 1930s, [Arthur] Koestler is nonetheless describing the post-Communist, postmodern, post-9/11 American condition. It is the sinister overhaul of language and thought . . . that he personally engaged in, and that was and is the primary tool of Marxist and Islamic subversion. “Not only our thinking, but also our vocabulary was reconditioned,” he explains. “Certain words were taboo.” Certain other words became telltales by which to identify dissenters or enemies. Literary, artistic, and musical tastes, he writes, were “similarly reconditioned” to support the renunciation of independent thought and logic necessary to submit to ideology.[1]

Sounds familiar? She calls for a “cultural reexamination” of the process by which Americans were force-fed one “blue pill” of lies after another and, for the most part, they swallowed them willingly, casting into outer darkness those who spit them out and sought the “red pill” of unpleasant truth.[2] Continue reading “Diana West: The Conscience of a Conservative”

“By any means necessary” revisited

That linguistic barbarism continues to spoil America’s discursive landscape. Once a mere hint of violence sporting the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability, it has evolved into a preferential option for “direct action” exercised by wide swaths of the populace, with its predictable vandalism, firebombing, assault on person and property, and usurpation of legitimate authority.

Below is this blog’s first post, dated October 3, 2018. Reference to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh dates it only slightly (in my opinion; you may disagree). The logic of the deranged behavior that was on display two autumns ago is now being played out to its dystopian conclusion. I continue to hope that a majority of Americans will pull the country back from the brink this coming November 3rd—indeed, that they will be permitted to pull it back—but events have not allayed my fear that “we are probably living through the run-up to a civil war.”—Anthony Flood

“By any means necessary”: pragmatism on stilts

First published October 3, 2018

Malcolm X’s contribution to the erosion of American political rhetorical standards lives on, most recently in President Trump’s speech at a rally in Tennessee. But at least he was characterizing the expediency of his enemies.

In 1963 Communist-sympathizer Jean-Paul Sartre penned the words that in English become “by any means necessary.”

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Ernesto Che Guevara, 1960, Cuba

Their African-American popularizer employed it to everlasting effect the following year. (He was assassinated the next.)

Conflating the necessary with the sufficient, it’s literally nonsense. “Any” doesn’t go with “necessary.”

There is, for example, more than one way to get to Times Square from Grand Central. One can walk a few blocks; or hop on the westbound M42 bus; or take the subway, either the shuttle (one stop) or the No. 7 (two). Each of them will do, but none is necessary.

The seductive power of the phrase overrides logic. “By the one means necessary” or “by any means sufficient” lacks punch. What the hackneyed phrase’s users mean is: “What I want is imperative, and whatever achieves it is permissible.” “Whatever it takes,” or “The end justifies the means,” which evacuates “justifies” of meaning.

Continue reading ““By any means necessary” revisited”

The Blitzkrieg the Berserkers Have Coming to Them. A review of David Horowitz’s “Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win”

Blitz was published on June 2, 2020; this review was published on Amazon on June 7th. Bill Vallicella gave it a “thumbs up” here. (Thanks, Bill.) If you found the review “helpful,” please vote accordingly. Thanks.—Anthony Flood

The Blitzkrieg the Berserkers Have Coming to Them

“The virus and its consequences will eventually be resolved. Far more ominous for the future of our country is the war described in the pages of this book.”

Thus David Horowitz, in a note penned as this book went to press, anticipated this question: how will Trump meet the challenge of the virus-predicated lockdown, now aggravated by the Left’s violent (and lockdown-undermining) assault on America’s institutions?

A few days after Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win was published, the answer came: millions of jobs were created in May 2020, more than any analyst predicted. (They predicted job losses.) That would have been impossible had the economy’s fundamentals had not been as sound as they were in early March—which they wouldn’t have been had Trump not been at the helm of state for the preceding three Marches.

Following up his best-selling Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, Horowitz surveys the landscape of Trump’s vindication, recording the genuine (i.e., anti-“progressive”) progress America has made in the face of past onslaughts and those that threaten us a season away from the general election.

For divide, sabotage, resist is the battle plan of the anti-American contingent we call the Left. Truth means nothing to them; power, everything. They align with every movement that holds out the promise of “transforming” America: environmentalism, Islam, solicitude for criminals (homegrown or foreign trespassers). Continue reading “The Blitzkrieg the Berserkers Have Coming to Them. A review of David Horowitz’s “Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win””

Black Americans and the GOP: An Inflection Point?

The following review was published on Amazon today. If you find it “helpful,” please take the link in the previous sentence and rate it accordingly.

Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, Coming Home: How Black Americans Will Re-Elect Trump, New York, Humanix Books, 2020.

Mention the Black Republican vote, and a certain smugness (or despondency) almost always colors the conversation: it never cracked 20%, so goes received opinion; it never will. But one liberal pundit on FoxNews confessed that the African-American outreach of President Trump’s re-election campaign keeps him up at night. Coming Home lays out reasons for liberal concern and conservative hope in sixteen engagingly written and information-packed chapters.

Conservative activists Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, who were at first skeptical of Trump, don’t overstate the increase in Black support for the GOP in general and for Trump in particular. They do, however, show how it put him over the top in 2016 in Pennsylvania, a swing state, garnering 20 electoral votes: 140 thousand Black Keystone Staters gave him his margin of victory. That gets the skeptical reader’s attention.

Blacks may be only 12% of Pennsylvania’s population, but more than 20% of them voted for Trump. That was “not supposed” to happen; he was “not supposed” to be the Republican nominee; once nominated, “not supposed” to win the general election. Should Trump replicate this inroad across America by election day 2020, the authors argue, he’ll win re-election in a landslide. (All things being equal, of course, which COVID-19 ensures are decidedly not). To beat him, Democrats will have to do more than intone, “But that’ll never happen.” Republicans need shave only a few points off the Black voting bloc to reduce the Democrats to minority-party status. President Trump Addresses 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit At White House

“One of you will be president!” Donald Trump, Young Black Leadership Summit, White House, October 25, 2019

Continue reading “Black Americans and the GOP: An Inflection Point?”

To govern is to steer: demonstrably, we cannot govern

“Look also at ships: although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds, they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires.” James 3:4

Ships of state are ever careering off the courses set by their human pilots.

Their “governors” can hold things together for, maybe, a generation and stave off annihilation; at worst, they steer the people, wittingly or no, into armed conflict.

By a kind of dialectical irony, they inexorably undermine the very order they depend on.

They manipulate currencies, thereby distorting the signals of markets. They do all of these things for perceived short-term gain.

And the governed go along with their governors whom, ironically, they sometimes have the high honor of electing to high office.

President Donald Trump, America’s kybernesis (1 Corinthians 12:28), is attempting to decelerate social and civilizational decline and reverse certain evil tendencies. Enjoying partial success, he may get re-elected.

(I don’t deny the relevancy to Trump of the Apostle James’s next verse: “Even so the tongue is a little member and boasts great things.”)

But the transient enjoyment I experience is a function of my self-centered projection of my expected lifespan. I’m hoping that the worst possible outcome will occur only after I’m safely dead.

Beneath the waters on which Trump steers the ship of state from one superficial “victory” to another, however, is an undertow of evil. It consists of (to name but a few horrors): slavery, including child sex-trafficking; the African diamond trade; drug trafficking; the predations and designs of the fascist ethnostate of China; radical Islamic terrorism and its state enablers. Let’s not forget the barbarism-promoting communists who are currently vying to replace Trump. There is no permanent escape from any of these scourges in this dispensation.