A Neat Piece (as we say in NZ) on the Influence of Rush Limbaugh

How Rush Limbaugh Made Millennials Like Me Conservative

Along with the one-on-one time with my dad, three hours of Rush Limbaugh’s observations, wit, and humor provided everything I needed for a foundation in conservative thought.


Nicole Russell
The Federalist

I grew up in Minnesota, the heart of the Midwest: a blue state of really nice, hard-working people who love winter, lefse, and Al Franken. Starting at about 13 years old until college, I worked for my dad, a successful remodeling contractor, over school breaks.

I hated the work. Often the only female on a construction site or a hotel in the midst of remodeling, I felt awkward. I got dirty. I wasn’t good at painting or wallpapering. The hours were longer than anything I’d ever experienced, and we rarely ate out during the day. (Somehow cold granola bars just added to the laboriousness.)

I know, I sound like a wimp. I was. I gained great respect for hard-working men and blue-collar workers during that period. The only glimmer of happiness in the job was that I got quality time with my dad and this other guy: Rush Limbaugh, who recently announced he has been diagnosed with “advanced lung cancer.”

At every job site, the routine was the same: I’d dress in painters’ clothes, drive to the site with my dad, and along with all the tools we set up, we plugged in the radio set to AM 1500 KSTP. If memory serves, Limbaugh didn’t come on until 11 a.m. The next three hours were a respite of opinion, intellectual stimulation, and philosophical and political concepts I’d barely thought of yet.

As other workers labored nearby, I forgot the sounds of construction and my self-pity faded. Over time I started looking forward to this part of the day more than anything else.

Weed The "Woke" Mob Out . . . One by One

MP Daniel Kawczynski’s Trial by Media

A Witch Hunt Against Conservatives

Calvin Robinson
Breitbart London


UK Conservative politician Daniel Kawczynski is the focus of an intense witch-hunt by left-leaning elements within his own party for attending a National Conservativism conference in Rome.

Kawczynski’s trial-by-media pursuers are demanding the Polish-born Tory MP is suspended for speaking at a European conference. The event was attended by social conservatives such Viktor Orban, the pro-family, anti-mass migration Prime Minister of Hungary; and Matteo Salvini, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior in Italy, best known for slashing illegal migration through an Australia-style “stop the boats, stop the drownings” policy during his time in office.

Fellow Conservative parliamentarian Andrew Percy, cheerleaded enthusiastically by BuzzFeed UK political correspondent Alex Wickham, who previously attempted to “cancel” the late conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, appears to be leading the public charge to have Kawczynski censored for associating with European political leaders — who hold many political positions in common with, no doubt, the vast majority of ordinary Conservative voters.

Wickham’s reports hinge in particular around allegations of antisemitism on the part of Prime Minister Orban and Mr Salvini, supported by some Jewish groups, such as the Jewish Labour Movement.

The pair are not short of supporters among Jewish leaders, however, with the World Jewish Congress has commended the Hungarian government for its action on antisemitism in the United Nations, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has praised Prime Minister Orban as being “at the forefront” of the global fight against antisemitism and described Mr Salvini as a “great friend of Israel”.

The Gift Horse Now Inside Troy's City Walls

Conservative values? That now means forcing your children into sex lessons

By PETER HITCHENS

Mail on Sunday

PUBLISHED: 12:40 AEDT, 3 March 2019 | UPDATED: 13:34 AEDT, 3 March 2019

Revolutionaries love to indoctrinate children. You can look up yourself who said these words: 'When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side', I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on.  Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.' '

But it does not really matter who it was. It is horribly true, and it is what all these meddlers think and why they are all so keen on getting control of schools and youth movements.

+6

Revolutionaries love to indoctrinate children. You can look up yourself who said these words: 'When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side'

This week, they took a great step towards their goal, which is the eradication of all that is left of conservative Christian opinion in this country.

Democrats In Deep Trouble

The Origins of Progressive Agony

Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

What has transformed the Democratic party into an anguished progressive movement that incorporates the tactics of the street, embraces maenadism, reverts to Sixties carnival barking, and is radicalized by a new young socialist movement? Even party chairman Tom Perez concedes that there are “no moderate Democrats left,” and lately the rantings of Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez confirm that diagnosis.

Obama, the Fallen God

Paradoxically, Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and 2012 and yet helped to erode the old Democratic party in the process. He ended up in opulent retirement while ceding state legislatures, governorships, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court to conservative Republicans.

Obama had promised leftists — in his prior brief tenure in the Senate he had compiled the most partisan record of his 99 colleagues — that his social-justice methods and agendas would lead to a proverbial “permanent Democratic majority.” Do we remember the February 2009 Newsweek obsequious cover story “We Are All Socialists Now”?

Supposedly, changing demography, massive illegal immigration, and identity politics had preordained a permanent 51 percent “Other” whose minority statuses, as defined by gender and race, had now become a majority, given the destined demise of the white working classes. If Obama had not existed, someone like Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, or Kirsten Gillibrand was supposedly foreordained to be president anyway.

But while Obama sermonized about our predestined “arc of history” and how its moral curve bent this way and that, he managed to lose both his supermajority in the Senate and the House itself by 2011. By 2015, the Senate lost its Democratic majority.

Ruling by pen-and-phone executive order only took the country more leftward. And it came at the price of stagnating the economy, acerbating social, cultural, and racial differences, raising taxes, and recalibrating foreign policy.

Obama bequeathed to his successors neither a popular progressive record nor a robust economy nor a stellar foreign-policy success.

The Great Debate: Burke Versus Paine, Part III

The Enlightenment and Its Tyranny

Most Western political philosophers from the Greeks through to Enlightenment liberals and their successors have a view that the origin of a state or nation is critical.  There is an emphasis upon the founding of a nation: whether it be in the form of a "Declaration of Independence" or a Constitutional Convention producing founding constitutional documents.

This emphasis upon the beginnings of a nation is a reflection of what is found in Scripture.  In the Bible, it becomes apparent that God is a covenant making and a covenant keeping God.  A covenant in Scripture is a solemn, formal agreement between parties which provides the foundation, the "basic law" or "higher law" of how the nation will cohere together.  It sets the goals, the motivation, and the standards which will govern the various parties.

Thus, when God called Abram and his household from Ur of the Chaldees, He made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants.  [Genesis 17: 1-2]  After God delivered Israel out of Egypt, He re-made His covenant with Abraham's descendants [Exodus 19:5].  Then, again, at the end of the wilderness wanderings over 40 years, He remade the covenant again with Israel, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

Thus, when nations make covenants to define the fundamental structures, processes and laws of their nation, they are reaching back to a biblical construct.  The creation itself and the world of mankind are made to operate within covenantal structures.

A Step Back Towards the Future

Gorsuch--A Principled Conservative Choice

Two world views, two realities.  Most people acknowledge there is deep division in the United States over ideology.  The existence of such an ideological or philosophical clash is strange to many throughout the West.  For many, there is no clash of civilization.  Countries like Germany and France and Belgium (that is, old Europe) are reflexively held in the grip of just one of the world views.  In other words, there is very little ideological war in such countries.

Consequently, when politicians suddenly emerge from the consensus to express ideas more consistent with Christendom they are immediately branded as extremists, right through to being called neo-Nazis.  But in the United States the conservative position is more widely held.  The ideological struggle is more real, more evenly balanced.

One of the battles has been the nomination (and now confirmation) of Neil M. Gorsuch to a vacant seat on the Supreme Court, left by the untimely death of Antonin Scalia.  The Left hated him--nothing personal, you understand--it's just a clash of views regarding civilisation itself. There have been some very unusual aspects to his nomination.

Letter From the UK (About A Relic That May Revive)

Peter Hitchens Shouldn’t Give Up the Fight Just Yet

Peter Hitchens, Twitter

by Benjamin Harris-Quinney

Breitbart London

It is true that Peter Hitchens is one of the last public conservatives allowed to exist in Britain. The establishment is apparently willing to tolerate him as a relic, but eagerly waits to consign him to history and prevent any successors from reminding us of the inconvenient foundations of politics in philosophy and ideology, rather than the pointless pursuit of power and status quo.

I was surprised to see him appear in Owen Jones’s latest attempt to wheel out curiosities who have not yet conformed to the metropolitan liberal consensus.

In speaking to Jones and the Guardian, Hitchens is somewhat guilty of putting pearls before the swine, he seems to justify it in cheerfully acknowledging his relaxed acceptance that Britain is finished in anything other than name anyway, and he may be right. But that doesn’t mean conservatism is finished, in fact it is engaged in a global culture war that many more in Britain are capable of taking part in, if they had the basic tools to engage with the debate.

Hitchens is now reduced to reminding us in his sadly seldom screen appearances of the definition and basic concepts of liberalism, socialism and conservatism. Not because that is all he is able to do, but the political debate in Britain has become so debased it is necessary for serious commentators to have to walk Guardian columnists through the ABCs of political theory while their eyes bulge in shock to learn that David Cameron is not a conservative.

Almost Everyone is a Progressive Now

Unholy Trade-Offs

An insightful piece from Patterico, explaining why conservatives and classical liberals end up being cheer-leaders for "progressive" (i.e. statist) solutions to social issues.

How does the Leviathan of the federal government grow in size and power every year? One reason is that, when government “solutions” are offered to a problem, it apparently becomes impossible for most people (including conservatives) even to imagine addressing the problem in a different way.

Take health care for poor people. We used to have a well-developed system of charity care, premised on the principle that doctors were expected to do a certain amount of work without compensation, simply because it was needed and the patient could not afford it. LBJ came along with Medicaid and largely destroyed this centuries-long tradition.

Now, it is taken for granted, even by “conservatives,” that if we were to restrict or eliminate Medicaid, we would not be advocating a market solution (i.e. a better, more efficient, higher quality solution) to the problem of health care for the poor. No, we would simply be against health care for the poor. Period.

Easier to Make Vague Noises

Conservatism Without Doctrines

We were intrigued recently to read this description of the Conservative Party in the UK.

Most Conservative politicians have little grasp of policy or its importance, but are captivated by the prospect of office.  It is also because most political Conservatives are rich enough to be immune from the rougher parts of the state school system, and from any regular contact with the officious insolence of local authorities and other government agencies.  A large income can and does buy exemption from many of the worst aspects of the New Britain.  So most Tories have no real idea of what it is like, and no burning desire to reform it.

They camouflage this lack of political understanding by pretending to be Edwardian country squires and roaring with fake masculinity about how Toryism is a "disposition and not a dogma".  This may have been true, when Tories truly were rubicund, weather-beaten, port-soaked countrymen but it is not true of their pasty, suburban successors.  [Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning  (London: Continuum UK, 2009), p. xv.)

The UK elites long ago lost their faith.

The Ugly Leftist

How Happy is That Man . . . 

Chris Trotter, arguably New Zealand's most prominent left wing columnist/theoretician, has recently written the following:

I once concluded an editorial in the NZ Political Review with the following observation:

“There is a paradox here. Conservative political culture, whose raison d’etre is the preservation of social inequality and economic exploitation (not to mention the institutional violence these things create and upon which ruling class power rests) tends to produce individuals of considerable personal charm and genuine liberality. While radical culture, which sets its face against the violence and injustice of entrenched privilege, all too often produces individuals who are aggressive, intolerant and utterly indifferent to the suffering which their relentless quest for justice causes.
“In short, the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit.”

Somewhere there must be an algorithm that delivers the best of both worlds.

I’m still looking.  (H/T Kiwiblog)

Apart from Chris's continuing quest for  the Holy Grail--for which we wish him bon chance--what are we to make of his observations?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

On the Rounded Upper Part

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 8:10 am  

Douglas Wilson

Alan Jacobs asks a question here that he does not answer. That question concerns whether he is a conservative or not.  “So is there any sense in which I might plausibly be called a conservative? I don’t really know; I’ll leave that to others to decide.” With such a kind invitation, how could I turn away? The answer is yes, Jacobs is a conservative. The three touchstones he sets out are a consistently pro-life position, a commitment to subsidiarity, and a respect for tradition.

To be fair, he offers some evidence to the contrary — he thinks, for example, that Obamacare was at least an attempt at something well-intentioned, and not, for example, what it was, which was the largest assault on the principles of subsidiarity in the history of mankind. But this just means that he is a conservative who is not being cynical enough. But such things take time — conservatives like to age in the cellar, like so many fine wines, with a thin layer of dust on their rounded upper part.

The Iron Lady

Not For Turning

The tributes are flowing for Margaret Thatcher.  British Prime Minister, David Cameron said that she would be remembered as Britain's greatest peace time Prime Minister.  Maybe.  Possibly the greatest of the twentieth century.  The Daily Mail cites the former Prime Minister, John Major:

Former Conservative prime minister Sir John Major described Baroness Thatcher as a 'true force of nature' and a 'political phenomenon'.  He said: 'In government, the UK was turned around under - and in large measure because of - her leadership.  'Her reforms of the economy, trades union law, and her recovery of the Falkland Islands elevated her above normal politics, and may not have been achieved under any other leader.  'Her outstanding characteristics will always be remembered by those who worked closely with her: courage and determination in politics, and humanity and generosity of spirit in private.'

Thatcher was an Establishment outsider, which meant that she owned few favours, had made few compromises on her way to the top.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

7 Rules for Reformers 

Political Dualism - Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 24 September 2012

A generation ago "community organizer" Saul Alinsky famously penned his Rules for Radicals, and it is my conviction that those interested in reformation should match his craft and self-awareness without trying to compete with the speed and depth of his revolutionary destructo-vision.

Some revolutionaries are patient and some are not. Gramsci argued for the "long march through the institutions" and Lenin wanted the massive meltdown all at once. Most revolutionaries have what Billingsly described as a "fire in the minds of men," but some are willing to go for the slow burn. So more than just simple patience is required to distinguish a revolutionary from a reformer.

So what are the basic rules for reformers?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Homo Republicanus 

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, 26 August 2012

I sometimes think that secularists, including the conservative ones, have never heard of Venn diagrams. The concept of overlapping spheres of thought continues to elude them. The idea of layered hierarchies is floating above their heads, just out of reach. 

If you point out the incoherence of secularism (or say that you do such a thing repeatedly, over the course of years), they will just come back at you with what they think is a deep Jeffersonian retort ("separation of church and state!"), but which is actually just another coup manqué from the historical/political illiterati, which is actually a degree field at Harvard now.

Here is an article, rich with examples of such fruitesqueries.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Jesus and Conservatism 

Theology - N.T. Wrights and Wrongs
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, 12 July 2012


Everyone must stand somewhere in order to say anything. And even if what he wants to say is that the previous sentence is not true, he still has to stand somewhere to say it. We can run, but we can't hide.
If one of the things I want to say (or confess) is that Jesus is Lord, I have to stand somewhere to say that, and that somewhere is determined by my testimony. Where was I on the road when the Lord called me? And where does He want me to be on the road right now?

When I describe some of where I am, there is no intimation that anybody else has any obligation to be at that same place -- a Wilson, an American, a male, a blues aficionado and so forth. To accept differences of this sort is to rejoice in a triune God who did not make us all the same. Trying to "fix" the differences of others like this is to fight for a boring world. Celebrate diversity, man.

But there is a difference between honoring the differences that God placed in His world and trying to honor the differences that sin brought in. The former is Trinitarian, and the latter is rebellion.

In Memory of Edmund Burke

The Soaring Falcon

An excellent essay on Edmund Burke has appeared in The American Scholar.  Written by Brian Doyle (editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author most recently of the novel Mink River.)

One of the frustrations surrounding Burke is that so little of his output was on the printed page.  Most consisted of powerful rhetoric in the House of Commons.  So he is hard for modern readers to access.  However, Reflections on the Revolution in France remains a tour de force in Western political philosophy.  It is a work written out of a thoroughly Christian world view.  It can teach the Church a great deal.  Burke was one of the last great political philosophers and politicians of the First Christendom. 

Some choice excerpts from Doyle's essay are reproduced below:

Letter From the US (About Canada)

Steady Gradualism Can Deliver

An article published in National Review Online by John O'Sullivan compared three conservative political leaders in the Anglo-world: Tony Abbott (Australia), David Cameron (UK) and Stephen Harper (Canada).  The author's point was to highlight how he sees Cameron's stint as Prime Minister to be a disaster for the UK and for conservatism.  Cameron shapes up as Labour Double Lite.

What we found more interesting--since we in New Zealand are familiar with the usually charming eccentricities of Tony Abbott and somewhat aware of the insipid nature of Cameron's leadership--is the account of Stephen Harper in Canada.  The progress Harper has made and his accomplishments are all the more significant since Canada was well on the way to becoming an Orwellian state: a holiday camp for Western secular liberals. 

So, let's hear some good news:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Alinsky Ball

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 06 March 2012

Recent days have seen the media and/or new media in an uproar over a couple of incidents that invite a bit more investigation from the intellectually curious. I refer to Rush Limbaugh's insult of Sandra Fluke, and Kirk Cameron's gracious response to a question from Piers Morgan about homosexuality.

Now in the interests of accuracy, it should be noted that Rush has apologized for calling Ms. Fluke a slut, and so we should address the apology first. I confess I haven't mastered all the details of this important situation as I ought to have done, but if Ms. Fluke indicated multiple guys, then the comment should stand. That's what a slut is. But if she has a steady boyfriend, and she is faithful to him, then it really was uncalled for to call her that. She would be something more like a concubine.

Of sociological interest here is the same reaction for very different behavior, and different reactions for very similar behavior.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

A Dog With Two Tails

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Thursday, January 05, 2012

Rick Santorum has said that those who are critical of his so-called "big government conservatism" are wrong, and they are libertarians to boot. Since he is not a libertarian, he rejects the label -- he reasons that if you are a virtual anarchist, then everything is going to look like big government to you. That's true enough, but there is more to it.

As Republicans have done their go-along-get-along thing for the last several decades, an awful lot of territory has opened up between the mainstream Republican right and the libertarian right. This is not the result of the libertarians moving. As the spending has grown, so the distance between the two has grown. There is a lot more distance than there used to be. If you were to show the editorial board of National Review (from 1965, say) what kind of budgets the 2012 conservatives were going to be urging, their temptation would be to sell their magazine and spend all the money at the dog races.

But Santorum's comments to the contrary, there are still conservatives around, not libertarians, who see him as too easy with the checkbook.

The Iron Lady

Wonderfully, Conservatively Subversive

Rebecca Cusey

Conservatives have nothing to fear from the controversial and wonderfully subversive Margaret Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady.” Because the creators, whatever their personal political beliefs, had the artistic integrity to let Thatcher be Thatcher, the film becomes a rousing call to those who believe that “those who can do, must get up and DO.”

The film opens today in New York and Los Angeles, a common practice to make end of year films eligible for the Oscar race, and expands nationwide on January 13. Meryl Streep plays Thatcher, the powerful former leader of Britain who rose from humble roots to lead her country through economic turmoil, Irish Republican Army terrorism, military engagements, and the end of the Cold War.

The controversy stems from the framework of the film,