Sunday, May 21, 2023
Robust One-Nation Conservatism Is What Woke Globalist Elites Fear Most, Heritage Foundation President Tells London Conference
Slightly surprising that Roberts did not mention Disraeli. Dizzy was a great advocate of One-Nation Conservatism and rode it to great electoral victories. The idea is that an ideal of the nation is put forward that everyone can be proud of. Trump had the same idea but his unattractive personal manner limited what he could achieve.
I note also that Roger Scruton saw a large overlap between conservatism and patriotism. So unashamed praise of the great assets of one's own country should be a large part of the conservative message. Leftists despise the society they live in so a patriotic message gives a clear and popular alternative to them
Cultural crises and crumbling Western institutions can only be remedied by a broader conservative movement that remains focused on the renewal of national identity and the ultimate ends of its policy means, the president of The Heritage Foundation told a London audience Tuesday.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in London on what he called “one-nation Burkeanism,” a reference to famed 18th-century conservative British statesman Edmund Burke. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Roberts laid out the case that conservatives in the West must not only stand athwart the increasingly totalitarian globalist Left, but must also promote a positive agenda that strengthens the building blocks of society—family, church, and communities.
That movement begins, but doesn’t end, with protecting the concept of nationhood itself.
“Like the election of Donald Trump in the United States that same year, Brexit lifted the hopes and expanded the horizons of a more nationalist conservatism across the West,” the Heritage Foundation chief said. Brexit (shorthand for “British exit”) was the June 2016 referendum in which the British voted to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union.
Unfortunately, Roberts explained, despite the momentum created by Brexit and Trump’s election, center-right parties failed to translate those victories into a “reimagined governing agenda.” He said that the failure to come up with a comprehensive policy program is catastrophic for those parties, especially given the single-minded obsession of the Left to impose its ideas on societies.
The “greedy, woke, elitist, and globalist” New Left has forsworn many of the ideas espoused by their predecessors, such as “democracy, equality, diversity, justice,” Roberts said. “Their goal is not to win political contests, but to end them altogether, to sweep away dissent and any subversive institution.”
What most effectively impedes this wokeist nightmare is the kind of conservatism espoused by the likes of “Donald Trump and [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis, Brexit, [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban, and this conference,” Roberts said, adding:
The institution of the nation is the source and reservoir of the power globalists need to achieve their goals, and one of the most resistant to elite capture.
Unlike corporations, governments, and even churches, nations have no C-suites to cajole or HR departments to bully. They have cultures, loyalties, and loves prior to mere policy—and [with] these, the power to defeat globalist ambitions.
It’s those traits that make national conservatism a more implacable bulwark than “establishment conservatism,” whose leaders “crave elite approbation” or “blinkered libertarianism,” which is susceptible to the material outlook common on the Left’s home turf, Roberts said.
He said that conservative parties since the Cold War have been adrift, having lost sight of the “permanent things” they were created to preserve.
“Somewhere along the way, conservative leaders forgot that markets, globalization, individualism, [gross domestic product] growth, and foreign alliances were means, not ends,” he said, and this made for ineffectual opposition to the Left, which has no such confusion and works relentlessly to do battle against those who defend “faith, family, flag.”
In that sense, national conservatism isn’t a departure from the ideas of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, Roberts said, but an affirmation of what those leaders and the movements that championed them really stood for. And what they stood for were concepts such as “democracy, the rule of law, free speech, religious devotion, marriage and family, ordered liberty, property rights, and yes, the real free market,” he said.
The current ruling class ultimately stands in opposition to those things while despising even the idea of nationhood, he said, and “thus did yesterday’s fruitful one-nation conservatism beget today’s sterile, no-nation globalism.”
So, in the place of national institutions, the “woke industrial complex,” as he called it, creates a kind of elitist totalitarianism through the European Union and the United Nations. He said that the globalist elites seek to destroy the “little platoons” of society, as Burke called them, because they are rivals to that power.
“To the globalist elites, Burke’s ‘little platoons’ are terrorist sleeper cells,” Roberts said.
He returned to his message about how one-nation national conservatism stands athwart the globalist ethos and directly challenges its power.
“Leaving the European Union and formally detaching itself from the EU elites’ masquerade ball was precisely the right thing for the United Kingdom to do,” Roberts said, referring to Brexit. However, that triumph shouldn’t be seen as the ultimate victory, since “wars are not won by evacuations,” he said, referring to Winston Churchill’s famous speech about the Battle of Dunkirk.
The Heritage president then returned to the main theme of his remarks:
The question since 2016 has not been whether the British people have the power to navigate the 21st century as an independent nation-state. Clearly, they do.
Nor is the question whether global corporate, political, and cultural elites will let them, because in the real world, they have almost no say in the matter.
Rather, the question is whether the Conservative Party—like the Republican Party in the U.S.—can follow through on their 2016 victories and build a new, governing majority out of a new, one-nation conservatism.
That’s the kind of nationalism and populism the elites truly fear, Roberts said. Its principles, he said, boil down to the idea that the United Kingdom belongs to “her people” and that its “political, corporate, spiritual, and civic institutions should serve them and not the other way around.”
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The Left and Right Live in Two Different Worlds
The idea of a national divorce has been floating around a lot lately, and while it may be appealing as we watch Democrats go to the mattresses to protect the ability of adults to mutilate the genitals of children, it’s not particularly practical, at least not right now. It may end up being the best option soon, however, considering just how diametrically opposed the two parties are on fundamental issues and, honestly, just how morally repugnant the left has become. But before we get to the stage of actually dividing up the plates and glasses, we should take a look at how we got here. To do that honestly, we have to admit that we’ve been living in two different worlds for some time now.
Vice President Kamala Harris loves Venn diagrams, just loves them. Every chance she gets she rambles on about her love for them, likely to avoid talking about her deficiencies in every other area of her public life. For those of you who don’t know what a Venn diagram is, they highlight the overlap of two or more groups of things, usually people. For example: there are people who love The Beatles more and those who love Elvis more, but there are also people who love both equally. A circle representing both groups of people would have an overlap of, for the sake of argument, 10 percent who love them both equally. A Venn diagram exists to show that overlap.
There is very little “overlap” left between liberals and conservatives when it comes to how we view reality.
This didn’t happen overnight, we’ve been working our way towards it for some time. The 2016 election is seen as the breaking point for many, but there was a lot of years of bending before that snap.
Now, you can watch a night of Fox News or MSNBC and get the impression that you’re watching a television feed from different planets – what rates as the most important story of the day doesn’t even warrant mentioning on the other, and vice-versa. There are still Democrat viewers of MSNBC who would swear on the lives of the children they didn’t abort that Donald Trump was only elected because the Russian government hacked voting machines and changed votes from Hillary Clinton. Hell, there are TV personalities in the employ of NBC News who would do the same, though you’d have to imagine they actually know better and just choose to lie because their choir needs to be preached to for the sake of ratings (looking at you, Rachel Maddow).
Whatever the case, we learned yet again this week that the Russian collusion scam was created by the Hillary Clinton campaign in an attempt to smear Donald Trump and distract from her own email scandal. We learned again that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were well aware of this at the time and played along. We learned again that the FBI was weaponized by Democrats to protect Clinton, and made things up completely – no idea was too absurd to include. Then we learned the former Director of the FBI only briefed the then president-elect on those rumors and the document containing them so it would be leaked that the briefing took place, thereby giving it the thin veil of newsworthiness needed to get the bogus story rolling in the public. From there, not a single act of journalism was ever committed.
Every minor attempt to “verify” the story failed because you can’t prove a lie. But that didn’t stop the liars from reporting the lies as fact. Anonymous sources, many of whom now sit as paid employees of the media outlets they lied to, spur pile of BS after pile of BS, all of which were immediately and unquestioningly spit out on television and in newspapers. When reporters were burned by lies so obvious they could no longer be told, no “source” was ever outed for their fraud – you don’t tell on your teammate for cheating when the game is on the line.
There isn’t an aspect of the Russia hoax that hasn’t been exposed as a political lie, but when this latest retelling of the story came out, MSNBC didn’t miss a beat. Airhead Nicole Wallace dismissed the findings of the 300+ page report less than a half hour after it was released, even after admitting she’d read none of it.
There was no discipline for lying to her audience, it’s what NBC News has to do in order to keep them. On Fox, the Durham report was the biggest story of the day, maybe even ever. On the other alphabet networks it was a blip they moved past like a homeless man passed out on the sidewalk they step over on their way to work. Same is true for the report the previous week on the fortune Joe Biden’s family managed to amass from foreign entities and adversaries while possessing no skills and providing zero goods or services for their millions – it happened and was ignored.
If you watch MSNBC you would be justified in believing Joe Biden is the most righteous man ever to walk upright, and he’s also smart as a whip. If you watch conservative media you see evidence he and his family got rich selling access to his positions and watch clip after clip of a man clearly suffering mental decline.
Two different worlds.
How can those two worlds live together? The truth is they can’t, at least not indefinitely. The left is committed to their story and the audience is locked in, airtight, so any inconvenient facts won’t seep in.
That leaves those of us who live in reality with two options: fight or flight. I’d rather see the RNC (and every right of center group) run ads on television everywhere with 30 seconds of truth (not hyperbolic ads trying to raise money, but to inform people who’ve not been exposed to reality in a while) rather than fighting over who gets custody of the dogs.
The United States is worth fighting to save, but it’s not worth handcuffing ourselves to a suicide bomber over. If the left wants to destroy itself, eventually we have to let them and make sure we don’t go down with them. If the time does come for that national divorce, so be it. Just make sure we get the east so the left can’t further destroy our history, the Great Lakes for the water and a lot of farm land and oil country, they can have the rest. They’ve pretty much ruined it all already, and when they age themselves out of existence through sterilization and mutilation – when they rediscover how gender and biology work far too late to matter – we’ll just take it back anyway. So, think of it less as a divorce and more of a trial separation; irreconcilable differences between two worlds that simply can’t exist simultaneously.
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Conservative Senators Succed in getting noxious provisions out of Child Abuse Bill
In a rare show of bipartisanship last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill to combat child sexual abuse material online and establish reporting requirements for online platform providers. The bill also reactivated a decades-old provision obligating certain organizations and professions to report suspected child sexual abuse. But it wasn’t just the bipartisanship of the bill’s passage that made it notable. It was what it took to get to bipartisanship in the first place.
While it was originally littered with problematic language that opened loopholes for tracking and reporting religious entities and parents who might object to “gender transition” procedures or abortions for minor children, conservative senators worked hard across the aisle to make the bill one that both parties could support.
Sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Strengthening Transparency and Obligations to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment Act, or the “STOP CSAM” Act (S. 1199), creates a user-friendly system for reporting and removal of child sexual abuse material online.
It requires that all internet platform providers report occurrences of child sexual abuse material on their platforms to law enforcement’s cyber-crime tipline within 60 days of discovery. It also creates a civil cause of action against both the perpetrators who create the material and the online platforms that host it if they fail to report the material to the tipline.
STOP CSAM updates the 1990 Stop Child Sexual Abuse Act, which laid the foundation for child abuse reporting, but senators saw a need for certain updates to address new technologies being used to promulgate the prohibited material.
While the central goal of the bill is laudable, the original text contained certain noxious provisions, including the expansion of the definition of child abuse to include “psychological abuse” (including “coercion” or “intimidation”) without clearly defining those terms. As the parent of any teenager will tell you, minors feel “coerced” a lot. We can think of a few who feel coerced into taking out the trash or keeping curfew, for example.
The dangers associated with such an expanded definition of “abuse” aren’t theoretical. Medical journals have already called for parents to be held criminally liable if they refuse permission for their children to get what is euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care” (genital-mutilating surgeries, puberty blockers, and other harmful “transgender” procedures). State delegates in Virginia have introduced legislation to criminalize parents who don’t agree to such procedures.
Additionally, under the STOP CSAM’s original text, parents who choose to counsel teens away from having an abortion could potentially have been flagged for physical abuse under these expanded definitions.
Existing federal law establishes robust child abuse reporting requirements on federal lands and in federally funded or contracted facilities. It also establishes certain categories of professionals required to report suspected abuse—those who would naturally engage with children in the course of their work, such as medical personnel, mental health professionals, teachers, and law enforcement officials.
Beyond that, certain child abuse reporting requirements were narrowly extended only to individuals involved with youth athletics. As Durbin joked in the mark-up of the bill (the committee’s amendment process), existing child abuse reporting requirements applied to baseball teams but not the Cub Scouts. What he didn’t mention was that his original text tried to expand these requirements to many new entities, including religious schools, but not public ones.
The original text of S. 1199 would have expanded the child abuse reporting requirements set up in the 1990 law to any entity that received $10,000 or more in federal funding at any time in history. However, it specifically carved out formula grants to states, and that would have excluded public schools that receive federal grants from these reporting requirements. What’s more, “federal funding” in the original bill text included any grant, contract, subsidy, loan, or insurance received through the federal government by any entity, including faith-based entities.
Therefore, any religious school that received funding from, for example, a reduced-fee school lunch program could be required to report any employees who provide “religious guidance” regarding the harms of abortion or transgender treatments as committing child abuse. Or, for example, if parents take their child to a therapist who participates in the Affordable Care Act insurance program, the therapist might be forced to report those parents if they seek to prevent their minor child from undergoing a medically unnecessary, “gender-affirming” double mastectomy if the therapist considers it “coercive.”
Thankfully, Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, realized the impact this language could have on well-meaning parents and organizations or employees who provide “religious guidance” and were able to secure a delay in the bill’s mark-up to discuss the problematic provisions.
After a few weeks of negotiations and drafting of various amendments, these senators were able to secure an agreement between Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham to apply an appropriate fix. Ultimately, the bill passed out of committee by a vote of 20-1, picking up co-sponsorships from Cruz and Sen. Josh Hawley along the way.
This type of scenario has played out many times before on Capitol Hill but with very different results. In an increasingly polarized Congress, seemingly bipartisan bills addressing commonsense issues like maternal mortality or youth mental health hide obscure textual provisions that have potential widespread, detrimental implications on issues like abortion, gender ideology, religion, and parental rights.
Generally, such provisions that are buried in the text go unnoticed until bills are signed into law. In this respect, getting things done quickly means sacrificing the hard work that ensures things get done “right.”
But the STOP CSAM Act is a perfect example of good political teamwork: Early and clear communication about problematic provisions can lead to truly bipartisan solutions—or at least it can slow the pace of movement of fast-tracked legislation to allow for more deliberation.
It takes members of Congress like Lee and Cruz, however—politicians who are willing to slow down so-called must-pass bills—in order to patiently and deliberately assess the legislation, identify concerns, draft appropriate fixes, and build a coalition for support among committee members.
While it may not be a regular occurrence in the Senate Judiciary Committee mark-up process, bipartisanship is possible.
It just takes determined leaders willing to do what’s right.
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Kevin McCarthy is right, ‘it’s not a revenue problem, it’s a spending problem’ after more than $6 trillion printed, borrowed and spent for Covid
“[I]t’s not a revenue problem, it’s a spending problem.”
That was House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaking to reporters on May 17 following a meeting with President Joe Biden and Congressional leaders in both parties, attempting to reach an agreement on increasing the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling and budget spending levels, outlining the unsustainable trajectory of federal spending despite near-record-setting revenue levels.
“We have now borrowed more than a trillion dollars this year; that’s the fastest we’ve ever accumulated that much debt that quickly. How much is too much? When are you going to look at for the American public that we’re spending more than we’ve ever spent in history but on an average in more than 50 years? We’re much higher than we ever [have been]. At the same time we’re bringing more money into government than at any time in history,” McCarthy explained.
In addition, McCarthy noted the nation had “added six trillion dollars that created inflation.” And while he unsurprisingly blamed Democrats for the additional spending in 2021 as the severity of the Covid pandemic was waning, there was also plenty of spending in 2020 under former President Donald Trump, too, when the budget deficit hit an all-time high of $3.1 trillion as revenues stalled and spending ballooned amid the economic lockdowns.
It’s fair to say we got here on a bipartisan basis, and to navigate it will ultimately, barring either party gaining supermajorities in upcoming elections to overcome a Senate filibuster, also have to be done on a bipartisan basis.
But on the overall point, McCarthy is right. Since 1929, as a percentage of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, federal spending outlays are the highest they’ve been since World War II, when all of the nation’s resources were being marshalled in the war effort to defeat the Axis Powers and liberate Europe and Asia.
In 2022, at $6.27 trillion of spending, according to President Joe Biden’s White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), that is 24.6 percent of the $25.46 trillion economy. The only years it was higher was from 1943 to 1945, when it reached a high of 40.7 percent in 1944, and in 2020 and 2021 for Covid, when it reached 31.1 percent and 29.2 percent, respectively.
And while spending is down from its 2021 peak of $6.8 trillion to its current $6.27 trillion level, we are still spending much more as a percentage of the economy than we were prior to Covid. In 2019, spending was just $3.4 trillion, that was only 20.8 percent of the then $21.3 trillion economy.
As for revenue, 2022 was a record year, collecting nearly $4.9 trillion, an all-time high. And at 19.2 percent of the economy, that is the fourth all-time greatest tax collection in modern American history. The only years greater were 1944, 1945 and 2000, when revenues reached 19.5 percent, 19.8 percent and 19.76 percent, respectively.
Yet, despite record tax collections—which OMB projects will slow down dramatically in 2023 along with the economy, which slowed down to 1.1 percent annualized growth in the first quarter of 2023 — the budget deficit was still $1.37 trillion. In the meantime, spending will keep increasing, to $6.37 trillion 2023 and $6.88 trillion in 2024, as the budget deficit again increases to $1.55 trillion and $1.73 trillion, respectively, over the next two years alone.
Since Covid, the spending has proven to be inflationary, causing more than $6 trillion to be printed. During Covid in 2020 and 2021, the Federal Reserve set interest rates to near-zero, Congress spent and borrowed more than $5 trillion and the M2 money supply dramatically: it went from $15.3 trillion at the end of 2019 to the peak of $22.05 trillion, a 44 percent increase.
At the same time, the global economy was locking down, slowing down production and the government was paying people to stay home, literally too much money chasing too few goods, a perfect recipe for inflation, which peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and is now down to 4.9 percent over the past 12 months, according to the latest data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
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