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December 2022

What American Conservatism Exists to Conserve by Christopher DeMuth

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/what-american-conservatism-exists-to-conserve/

EXCERPT

Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation, as if by design? Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within—elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.

But my program would also address causes of national political disorder in which recent conservative politicians have been fully complicit. This would include returning to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirecting federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defence and infrastructure; withdrawing the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; and instituting a stable currency—not 10 per cent or 5 per cent inflation, nor even the current goal of 2 per cent inflation that quintuples prices in a single lifetime, but 0 per cent.

And my nationalist program would include not only measures that reinstitute the historical tried-and-true but also thoroughly modern innovations. These include universal school choice, which would give all parents the wherewithal to direct resources to the schools they think best for their children, and initiatives to mobilise science and enterprise to dominate China in advanced computation, communications and weaponry and to repatriate production of national essentials such as pharmaceuticals.

Vaclav Havel on Defying a System of Lies by Gary Furnell

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/vaclav-havel-on-defying-a-system-of-lies/
“The Soviet bloc fell apart rapidly and unexpectedly, in large measure collapsing under the weight of its own dysfunction. Any system built on lies will eventually collapse, but it will cause great harm before this collapse and what replaces it may not be any better. Throughout, decent people will need to protect their own humanness by developing virtue and bravely living in truth.”

Written fifty years ago, Czech writer—later Czech president—Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless reads as if it was published yesterday to caution Australia today. I read and then re-read it during the Covid lockdowns when pervasive surveillance via QR codes, restrictions on association and movement, and—in most states—intolerance of even peaceful protests against official policies gave an alarming taste of the punishing control that government plus technology plus coercive policing and propaganda can achieve. Even without the Covid experience, it’s evident the social policies of state and federal governments—for example on gender equality, gay rights, the environment, indigenous matters and abortion—are broadly shared by domineering corporations, leading to a new type of societal levelling and mass-formation.

Fortunately for those who want to maintain some semblance of independent thought and some commitment to truth, Havel’s valuable book is compact (154 pages) and easy to read. It’s shrewd in its examination of politics and any society unfortunately soaked—and darkly stained—by stubborn, heavily-bureaucratised politics.

Havel, a poet and playwright, wrote The Power of the Powerless after the Soviet-instigated repression of the 1968 Prague Spring—an attempt to form a native Czechoslovakian socialism that worked for people rather than against them. A leader of Charter 77—a group associated with this gentler aspiration—Havel was harassed for years afterwards by the communists: his Prague apartment bugged, his movements followed, his plays banned. To survive, he worked in a brewery. 

The Elites’ War On Food

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/02/the-elites-war-on-food/

A few months back, stories of “suspicious” fires at food-production plants raged across the media. The narrative said the sites were being sabotaged to disrupt the food supply. And it was most likely wrong. But that doesn’t mean there is no effort on the part of Western elites to put the peasants on a strict diet.

Most by now have seen reports that Dutch officials are closing as many as 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value even though it’s only slightly larger than Maryland, to comply with crackpot European Union carbon dioxide emissions rules. It’s possible that eventually more than 11,000 farms will be shut down, and 17,600 forced to sharply cut their livestock numbers.

On our side of the Atlantic, the malefactors are also busy. Just the News is reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly quadrupling the regulatory cost of carbon emissions in a new war on fossil fuels, which is, of course, also a war on the food supply.

“If you think about the fact that they would impose this damage factor, let’s say on farmers, because it applies to fertilizer,” Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murill said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Fertilizer emits nitrous oxide. So fertilizer is a big contributor. If every family farmer now is going to have to pay more to obtain fertilizer to fertilize crops that feed us, well, what’s that going to do to the price of food?”

Are these mere coincidences, entirely unrelated, isolated events?

Biden’s Venezuela Oil Dealings: Dumb and Dumber Andrew Stuttaford

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-venezuela-oil-dealings-dumb-and-dumber/

The White House has combined disdain for human rights with a degree of geopolitical stupidity impressive even by its own dismal standards.

It’s not exactly news that, so far as the Biden administration is concerned, climate policy trumps both human rights and America’s strategic interests.

Even so, with its latest opening to Venezuela, the White House has combined disdain for human rights with a degree of geopolitical stupidity impressive even by its own dismal standards.

A columnist at the Wall Street Journal explains:

At the United Nations climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, the U.S. agreed to pay environmental reparations to developing countries. Days later it emerged that the Biden administration would issue a new license to Chevron to resume operations in joint ventures with Venezuela’s oil company, PdVSA.

The U.S. government thinks you’re a fool, dear reader. And not only because it waited until Americans were en route to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving to let news slip of a deal to increase heavy-crude output from joint ventures controlled by a dictatorship allied with Iran. Or that it expects you to believe that Venezuela is considering a return to free elections in exchange.

Presumably you also haven’t noticed Team Biden’s effort to impede the development of huge reserves of light sweet crude from Guyana, a U.S. ally.

Eric Adams Should Act Preemptively Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/eric-adams-should-act-preemptively/

It would be wise for the mayor to increase NYPD presence in Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods for the foreseeable future.

I expect Kanye West’s pro-Hitler comments on Alex Jones’s program today to confirm in the minds of nearly everyone that West is in desperate need of mental-health intervention. That is, I expect most people, even most of the disaffected black radicals who have recently defended Kyrie Irving, to back away from Kanye West, not support him.

But, given recent threats against synagogues and the appalling pattern of street violence targeted upon Jewish men in New York City, particularly Orthodox Jewish men, it would be wise for Mayor Eric Adams to increase NYPD presence in Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods for the foreseeable future if he hasn’t already.

One way to avoid becoming Paris — where Jewish institutions have to be guarded constantly — is to remain vigilant against the violence before it becomes endemic.

Matt Taibbi, Douglas Murray Dominate Trust-in-Media Debate Ari Blaff

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/matt-taibbi-douglas-murray-dominate-trust-in-media-debate/
The 39 point swing in favor of Murray and Taibbi’s position is the largest ever recorded in a Munk debate.

Conservative commentator Douglas Murray and veteran reporter Matt Taibbi soundly defeated their opponents in a Wednesday evening debate on the question of whether to trust the mainstream media, convincing a significant segment of the audience to abandon their faith in an institution they say is hopelessly compromised by bias.

The debate, held at Roy Thomson Hall in downtown Toronto and sponsored by the Canadian cultural non-profit Munk Debates, featured Taibbi and Murray squaring off against the tremendously popular non-fiction author Malcolm Gladwell and New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, who made the case for continued trust in major American and Canadian outlets.

Pre-debate polling showed the audience virtually split 48 to 52 percent on the question of whether to trust the mainstream media.

However, over the course of nearly two hours, Taibbi and Murray compellingly persuaded over one-third of audience members (39 percent) to abandon their prior allegiance to the position championed by Gladwell and Goldberg.

To date, Taibbi and Murray won by the largest margin ever recorded at a Munk Debate. The result stunned the sold-out crowd of 2,630 viewers normally accustomed to smaller swings.

“I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter. My stepmother was a reporter. My godparents were reporters. Every adult I knew growing up seemed to be in media,” Taibbi said during his opening remarks to start the debate. “I love the news business. It’s in my bones. But I mourn for it. It’s destroyed itself.”

Taibbi’s opening remarks echoed those raised in his most recent book Hate Inc., in which he explores how the mainstream American media abandoned its commitment to neutrality in favor of fan service. Taibbi argues the change was driven by an effort to retain a niche audience of like-minded readers and viewers who remained after the industry was gutted by tech-driven changes in the advertising market.