Richard Hoste

Robert A. Taft is generally seen by the Old and Alternative Rights as the last major national political figure, narrowly defined, that shared many of our principles. Evidence of the Senator's popularity can be seen in the existence of The Robert A. Taft Club and the fact that The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft by Russell Kirk, first published in 1967, has been re-released in 2010. Going back and reading the work, however, makes me wonder whether we're not seeing Taft and the Old Right through nostalgia colored glasses.

Robert A. Taft didn't enter national politics until his 50s. His father, former president William Howard Taft, implied on more than one occasion that he wished his son had more ambition. It wasn't until 1938 that Taft the son, motivated by the desire to make sure Roosevelt's New Deal didn't destroy the American way of life, left the politics of his native Ohio and joined the U.S. Senate. He would remain there until his death in 1953. Principles was Russell Kirk's interpretation of the Senator's political philosophy based on the latter's public statements, articles and one book, the A Foreign Policy for Americans (1951).

Perhaps you've been following the latest diversity madness at the University of California San Diego (49 percent Asian, 27 percent white, 2 percent black).  Last month a fraternity had a "Compton Cookout" to celebrate Black History Month.  That week, a student on the campus TV station called those protesting the party "ungrateful n-----s" and the next day "the Black Student Union issued a list of demands, including mandatory diversity sensitivity classes, increased African American enrollment in students and faculty and the creation of space in central campus considered 'safe for African-American students.'" Then last week, a noose was conveniently found in the library.  Black students stormed the chancellor's office before it was revealed that the perpetrator of the crime wasn't white.  In the latest news , "a white pillowcase crudely fashioned into a Ku Klux Klan- style hood" was found on a statue last Monday.  The AP also reports "This week, officials at UC Santa Cruz found an image of a noose scribbled on the inside of a bathroom door."

Imagine you're a UCSD student.  You lock yourself in the bathroom stall one morning and suddenly recall reading an AP report that said that at your school a drawing of a noose was found on the bathroom wall.  Knowing that if you cover the wall with swastikas it'll be a national story and nobody will ever find out, how do you resist?

Meanwhile, two students from the University of Missouri have been arrested and charged with "second degree tampering" for leaving cotton balls outside a black culture center.  Think about it for a minute...

Making his point (allegedly) with shoelaces, cotton balls, pillow cases and drawings on bathroom walls.  After the centuries of colonization and slavery, my how far the white oppressor has fallen.

It’s fitting that chutzpah is a Hebrew word.  Newsweek reports 

How do you sell the American public on the idea that Israel has the right to maintain or even expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank? Be positive. Turn the issue away from settlements and toward peace. Invoke ethnic cleansing.

Those are three of the recommendations made by Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, in an internal study he wrote for the Washington-based group The Israel Project (TIP) on effective ways to talk to Americans about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The 117-page study, titled The Israel Project's 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was commissioned by the nonprofit group, which aims to promote Israel's side of the story, and leaked to NEWSWEEK. It includes chapters with such titles as "How to Talk About Palestinian Self Government and Prosperity" and "The Language of Tackling a Nuclear Iran."

The report is strewn with bolded examples of "Words That Work" and "Words That Don't Work," alongside rhetorical tips such as "Don't talk about religion" and "No matter what you're asked, bridge to a productive pro-Israel message." Taken together, the 18 chapters offer a fascinating look at the way Israel and its supporters try to shape the public debate in their favor...

In the report, Luntz describes the "best settlement argument" as one that draws a parallel between the Arab communities in Israel and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank—and refers to the idea of evacuating Jews as racist. "The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can't be any Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea," he suggests saying. "We don't say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews. We don't accept it. Cleansing by either side against either side is unacceptable."

One line of argument that Luntz says actually harms the cause is Israel's policy of restricting Arab housing construction in East Jerusalem: "The arguments about demolishing Palestinian homes because they are not within the Jerusalem building code tested SO badly that we are not even going to dignify them with a Word's That Don't Work box. Americans hate their own local planning boards for telling them where they can and can't put swimming pools or build fences. You don't need to import that animosity into your own credibility issues. Worse yet, talking about 'violations of building codes' when a TV station is showing the removal of a house that looks older than the modern state of Israel is simply catastrophic."

Luntz gets paid for this?  On one hand, it seems obvious.  If you want to win an argument in America, call your opponent racist.  I bet the best way to put out a pro-life message is to say that blacks tend to have more abortions.  If you’re pro-choice, go around saying abortion bans would disproportionately restrict the freedom of women from “communities of color.”  But the “r card” being used by the only racialist state in the world this side of North Korea to justify its expansion?  That’s chutzpah. 

In the report itself , Luntz reccomends saying 

"As a matter of principle, we believe that it is a basic right of children to be raised without hate. We ask the Palestinian leadership to end the culture of hate in Palestinian schools, 300 of which are named for suicide bombers. Palestinian leaders should take textbooks out of classrooms that show maps of the Middle East without Israel and that glorify terrorism."

Muslim terrorists deliberately target innocent people.  "Democracies" like America and Israel target their enemies knowing that in the process innocent people will be killed.  There's supposed to be a moral difference here?

Notice that the word “hate.”  In selling an idea to Saudi Arabians you’d probably need to frame it in a way that made it clear that it was compatible with or, better, required by Islam.  It’s a sign that multiculturalism is our religion that everything moral has to be framed as against “racism” or “hate.” 

Luntz’s report is also filled with Machiavellian tips like

A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick—that is just about the time the public will wake up and say “Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!” 

and

K.I.S.S. and tell and tell again and again. A key rule of successful communications is“Keep It Simple, Stupid”. Successful communications is not about being able to recite every fact from the long history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is about pointing out a few core principles of shared values—such as democracy and freedom—and repeating them over and over again.

In other words, the masses are stupid.  Get them on your side the way you'd educate a slow kid: say what you'd like him to learn again and again in the simplest terms possible.  This is great advice to anybody and why a "Jews good, Arab bad" message consistently repeated has beat out a more nuanced view of the situation in the Middle East.  

A couple of people have asked about my comment “high IQ people are by and large easier to brainwash.”  Is it really true?  I think so, and will explain why.

Let’s take feminism, which along with Marxism and racial egalitarianism is one of the “big three” evils that have cursed the modern world.  How might a smart person be easier to brainwash in a women’s studies course?  We can look at some feminist material to see.

Google, Yahoo! and YouTube have no prompt for “Epic Beard Man.” Nothing for “Tom Bruso” either.  Google does prompt “Epic Beard Guy,” but “Epic Beard Man” is more commonly used.  Yahoo and YouTube have neither.  It looks as if Google also allows “Epic Beard Man interview.”

If you put “epi” into Bing “Epic Beard Man” is the first thing that comes up.

They really don’t like implicit whiteness, huh?  Buchanan could’ve been depersonized at any time, while this shows that the search engines have censors looking for new developments to quash.

23 percent of the US federal budget goes towards defense, 20 percent towards social security and 19 percent towards medicare.  The programs providing support for the elderly are to a large extent people getting the money they paid into the system back.  Military spending, on the other hand, is wasted on machinery that either kills innocent people or rots in a warehouse.  The biggest government waste program is defense and the biggest welfare cases in America are the US army and its contractors.

A true conservative movement should take on the military industrial complex before it worries about unwed mothers or ending social security.

I’ve been thinking about the psychological differences between Ron Paul supporters and mainstream conservatives.  Since the main issue of disagreement seems to be foreign policy, we can apply the lessons we learn to how each group sees this issue.

Mainstream conservatives are more numerous because TV tells people that Republicanism is one of two acceptable options.  When they realize that they’re not masochistic enough to be liberals, the Republican takes conservatism as a package.  When I first accepted free market economics I didn’t care about abortion or a hawkish foreign policy but supported both because I knew that those who wanted to redistribute wealth were on the other side.

Time magazine writes on America’s falling crime rate.

Health care, climate change, terrorism — is it even possible to solve big problems? The mood in Washington is not very hopeful these days. But take a look at what has happened to one of the biggest, toughest problems facing the country 20 years ago: violent crime. For years, Americans ranked crime at or near the top of their list of urgent issues. Every politician, from alderman to President, was expected to have a crime-fighting agenda, yet many experts despaired of solutions. By 1991, the murder rate in the U.S. reached a near record 9.8 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, criminologists began to theorize that a looming generation of so-called superpredators would soon make things even worse.

(See the top 10 crime stories of 2009.)

Then, a breakthrough. Crime rates started falling. Apart from a few bumps and plateaus, they continued to drop through boom times and recessions, through peace and war, under Democrats and Republicans. Last year’s murder rate may be the lowest since the mid-1960s, according to preliminary statistics released by the Department of Justice. The human dimension of this turnaround is extraordinary: had the rate remained unchanged, an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered in the years since 1992. That’s more U.S. lives than were lost in combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq — combined. In a single year, 2008, lower crime rates meant 40,000 fewer rapes, 380,000 fewer robberies, half a million fewer aggravated assaults and 1.6 million fewer burglaries than we would have seen if rates had remained at peak levels.

(See pictures of crime in Middle America.)

There’s a catch, though. No one can convincingly explain exactly how the crime problem was solved. Police chiefs around the country credit improved police work. Demographers cite changing demographics of an aging population. Some theorists point to the evolution of the drug trade at both the wholesale and retail levels, while for veterans of the Clinton Administration, the preferred explanation is their initiative to hire more cops. Renegade economist Steven Levitt has speculated that legalized abortion caused the drop in crime. (Fewer unwanted babies in the 1970s and ’80s grew up to be thugs in the 1990s and beyond.)

(Comment on this story.)

The truth probably lies in a mix of these factors, plus one more: the steep rise in the number of Americans in prison. As local, state and federal governments face an era of diminished resources, they will need a better understanding of how and why crime rates tumbled. A sour economy need not mean a return to lawless streets, but continued success in fighting crime will require more brains, especially in those neighborhoods where violence is still rampant and public safety is a tattered dream.

The Lockup Factor
In his book Why Crime Rates Fell, Tufts University sociologist John Conklin concluded that up to half of the improvement was due to a single factor: more people in prison. The U.S. prison population grew by more than half a million during the 1990s and continued to grow, although more slowly, in the next decade. Go back half a century: as sentencing became more lenient in the 1960s and ’70s, the crime rate started to rise. When lawmakers responded to the crime wave by building prisons and mandating tough sentences, the number of prisoners increased and the number of crimes fell.

Common sense, you might think. But this is not a popular conclusion among criminologists, according to Conklin. “There is a tendency, perhaps for ideological reasons, not to want to see the connection,” he says…

Criminologist Conklin believes that two statistics in particular — median age and the unemployment rate — help explain the ebb and flow of crime. Violence is typically a young man’s vice; it has been said that the most effective crime-fighting tool is a 30th birthday. The arrival of teenage baby boomers in the 1960s coincided with a rise in crime, and rates have declined as America has grown older. The median age in 1990, near the peak of the crime wave, was 32, according to Conklin. A decade later, it was over 35. Today, it is 36-plus. (It is also true that today’s young men are less prone to crime. The juvenile crime rate in 2007, the most recent available, was the lowest in at least a generation.)

“The effect of unemployment,” Conklin adds, “is problematic.” Indeed it is. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute dissected this issue in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008,” she wrote, “criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the ‘root causes’ theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over 7 million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s.” To Mac Donald, this is proof that data-driven police work and tougher sentencing are the answer to crime — not social-welfare programs. Conklin thinks it may be too soon to tell. “The unemployment rate began to spike less than a year ago. We may yet see the pressure show up in crime rates,” he says. It’s fair to say, though, that the belief in a simple cause-and-effect relationship between income and crime has worn pretty thin.

Quite an admission for a magazine of the establishment.  This and the Unz article make it look like there’s not going to be a day when things get so bad that the traditional American population is forced to wake up and realize what it’s lost.

Jailing should also be applauded for having eugenic benefits, as some of the worst men are locked up during many of their fertile years.

A friend who was at CPAC writes me the following:

I was at CPAC for three days and people affiliated with Campaign for Liberty are everywhere. Paul is extremely polarizing. Everyone who hasn’t become part of his cult of personality hates him. That’s how he was able to win 31% of the straw poll votes but get booed when the announcement was made that he’d won! It’s really unfortunate, because on domestic policy all his views are extremely popular. When Ann Coulter was asked if she favored ending the federal reserve, she replied that if Ron Paul is for it and it doesn’t involve foreign policy she supports it! The crowd cheered.

You should really check out Glenn Beck’s speech. He came out against building democracy. He talked about Woodrow Wilson establishing the federal reserve and asked “How’s that working out for ya?” He lifted these ideas straight from Paul, but in Beck’s mouth everyone cheered for them.

I watched Beck’s speech, and what strikes me is his complete rejection of egalitarian premises. Usually Republicans will say things like “Sure, everybody should have health care and education, but the free market is the best way to make that happen.” Beck doesn’t pretend that in a free society everybody will be able to have everything. You may not get everything you want or even deserve, but asking the government to provide it for you is theft. All claims to the property or labor of others should be rejected on those grounds.