The Last Crusade 04: Rip van Con
One main reason why a Last Crusade must be called is that Conservatism, while perfectly sound when facing Commies in a Cold War, Nazis in a World War, or Slavers in a Civil War, has no defense to offer when the fascistic cultural Marxism seeps peacefully into the ivory tower, the theater, the press, the halls of power.
Imagine, if you will, the current bewilderment of the conservative, the neoconservative, the libertarian, the Whig. They have won every battle and every argument since AD 1776, and always against overwhelming odds. They grew in wisdom and power to the point where putting a man on the moon was possible.
And, as AD 2017 heaves in to view, they have lost everything, including the power to put a man into space.
To visualize this bewilderment, picture the conservative as he stood in AD 1945.
Imagine you are a man who believes with a quiet and steady belief that the laws should be made by an independent parliament, not by the will of a single monarch, or, better yet, by an elected congress with only limited powers.
Why should those powers be limited? Because men are sinful, and not to be trusted with power over those things that each man should and indeed must do for himself. The private things.
What are the private things? They are the things governed by a man’s philosophy, not by his politics. They are the personal and sacred things, the intimate things. They are his worship.
You believe a man should keep the fruit of his labors, and that you should be free to swap or trade them to whom you will when you will on such terms as you and he find mutually agreeable.
You believe a man should rely on himself and, in emergency, his neighbors, and that it is shameful to take charity.
You believe it is unthinkable to compel charity, and that it is akin to castration to become the ward and dependent of a faceless bureaucrat: because this makes him a slave.
Slavery is evil precisely because a man’s life is his own, and no man is sinless enough to be trusted with total power over another man.
You think all men are created equal because it is self-evident than they are.
You think a man’s choice of by what rite he worships the creator should not be compelled, and ultimately, cannot be.
You believe in the ordinary decency that once was taught to all ordinary boys: that a man should be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave clean and reverent. Who has character reflecting these things is decent, those who do not, are not.
The private things, the sacred things, in other words, are property, charity, liberty, life, equality, fidelity and decency.
Imagine that all around you agree with these basic truths, so much so that to question them seems an act of frivolity, if not obtuse. There are overseas certain mentally warped and morally perverse creatures who preach despotism and genocide, and who reject utterly all you believe, but they are as alien to your worldview as Martians. It cannot happen here.
Next imagine that our conservative of AD 1945 sleeps like Rip van Winkle, and wakes in the modern day.
Upon waking, you find that each thing you own you no longer possess, for, in the name of regularizing the economy or protecting the environment, you retain little control or none at all over the disposition of your labor or its fruits.
Questioning why, you are told that regulation of trade and the protection of the common welfare (which includes the natural environment) are matters needed for the protection of property rights. Property right can only be protected by eliminating private property.
As a believer in property rights, you are left dumbstruck, and without an argument.
Upon waking, you see Detroit looking as bad as the burned out hulks of the European cities you just yesterday saw reduced to rubble by aerial bombing.
Questioning why, you are told that multiple generations of fatherless bastards, and fathers and grandfathers, are supported at public expense, on the dole, for to compel the bastards to work or to wed impedes their liberty, equality, and right to life. True charity consists not of giving money freely to the deserving poor, but in protecting life, equality and liberty. Charity demands the abolition of charity.
As a believer in charity, you are left flummoxed, and unable to voice a sound objection.
Upon waking, you find that laws against hate speech, and laws against discrimination, and reasonable gun safety laws, and laws against the abuse of drugs, mean that the First Amendment, the Second, and the Fifth have been abrogated.
For speaking a word or cracking a joke that offends an unspoken and unwritten set of rules called Political Correctness, you can be fired, harassed, demonized, vilified, and, as of February 2017 AD, you can be peppersprayed and beaten with rods by masked thugs, and you, not the thugs, will be applauded on television.
Their fascism will be called the traditional American way of punching Nazis, and your freedom of speech will be called fascism.
Your free speech will be denounced as violence; their violence will be protected as free speech.
Also, the police, in the name of a war on drug dealers, can seize your property without a warrant. In the name of the War on Terror, as an American citizen, you can be killed by an unmanned aerial vehicle without a trial, without a hearing, without any due process.
Questioning why, you are told that these things are needed for the preservation of law and order against internal corruption and external enemies, as well as the elimination of that bigotry which imposes on the civil rights, hence the liberty and equality, of minorities and sexual perverts, whose rights now trump yours.
And guns are being taken away for the same reason you yourself would take away power from tyrants: no man can be trusted with the power. Liberty demands an abrogation of all your liberties.
As a believer in liberty, you are left flabbergasted, and unable to concoct a coherent counterargument.
Upon waking, you find that your life now belongs, as a property, to your group identity.
This identity does not follow the Law of Identity, that is, A is not equal to A in your case, because, for example, a White Male is not a White Male if he is Muslim, a Mexican, or a foreigner, or a homosexual, or if he has some other claim on some other group. A Hispanic who shoots a Negro attacker in self-defense is suddenly a member of the ‘White Male’ group, and a conservative speaker who is a woman is no longer in the ‘Female’ group, and so on.
Rights, including such things as college admissions and government contract bids, who may speak which words in jest, and whose opinion are counted and whose are not, and whose votes are counted and whose are not, all this and more is now controlled by these group loyalties.
Questioning why, you are told that since bigotry and oppression, and indeed, any ability of a citizen to live his own life, are hindered by the enmity between these group identities, the only way for the individual to protect himself from bigotry, and to hence be free to live his own life, is by allowing his individual identity to be subsumed in his group identity.
Hence, to live his life freely, he must have his freedom to live his life as he wills be abolished.
As a believer in a man’s ownership over his own life, you are left nauseous, and can say nothing.
Upon waking, you find that the Boy Scouts, an institution designed to teach boys good characters and moral uprightness, wish to admit into their ranks a sexual perverted creature called a ‘transsexual’ who is a girl that dresses as a boy, and apparently suffers from a mental defect, encouraged by her own parents, rendering the child unable to distinguish the sexes.
The newspapers all refer to this girl as “he” and “him”, and you are upbraided, and may indeed by subject to lawsuit or legal penalty, if you do not play along.
The plan is to have girls from between age eight to eighteen, the years when girls ripen into women, sharing a pup tent and showering facilities when out camping with boys of that age, going through the same unsteady wildness of adult hormones.
No chaperone is required, because, by law, the boys all have to lie to themselves and each other and pretend the girl is a boy. (These official lies will require the boys to be taught to avoid, rather than embrace, trustworthiness.) However, due to the rights of homosexuals to enter into the target rich environment of the boy scouts, and an epidemic of child molestation, a chaperone is required each time any adult is alone with a boy.
(By some odd nuance of the rules of Political Correctness, when an adult homosexual commits statutory rape with a underage member of his own sex, he is suddenly no longer a homosexual, and to identify him as one is condemned as homophobia, bigotry and badthink. Whereas a Heterosexual committing statutory rape is not only considered a heterosexual, but is taken as proof that heterosexual males promulgate a rape culture. At the same time, Political Correctness demands lowering the age of consent to Muslim levels, making child molestation legal.)
Questioning why, you are told that without the ability to decree oneself a member of the opposite sex at will, the right of the girl to control her own life is abridged, and if boys can be boys but girls cannot be, this offends the right to equality.
It is for this same reason that men must be forced by the government to pay for medical insurance covering their maternity needs, and that homosexuals can not only wed, but can compel Christians to desecrate the sacrament of marriage and be forced into gestures and expressions of public support and celebration of the unsightly sexual disorder.
The crazy people and the perverts have rights to compel the sane and decent people. The rights of the sane and descent do not exist. Equality is abolished in the name of equality.
As a believer in equality, you are left dazed and staggered.
Likewise, when you wake and find that the protection of the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion means that only Muslims are free to build schools that teach and promote the violent overthrow of the American government and the genocide of the Jews and the slaughter of the Christians, whereas Christian institutions must support contraception, abortion, and homosex. The Antichristian religions trump the Christian. Fidelity is abrogated in the name of fidelity.
Likewise, you are told it is indecent to hold that marriage is between man and woman, sex is between male and female, and sex outside of marriage is wrong.
You are told that fertility is bad, and that babies must be prevented from life by contraception, or expunged from life by abortion. Because a baby is not a baby, but a fetus; because life is not life, but a clump of cells; because chastity is a word no one has ever heard; and abstinence cannot work, but prenatal baby-killing is effective and efficient as a birth control.
You are told that boyfriends forcing their pregnant lovers into abortion clinics is an act of free choice on the part of the mother.
You are told that mothers killing her own child in the womb is sacred, wholesome and good, an act to be proud of, whereas any objection to that act is prompted solely by bigotry and evil motives, and therefore no argument, no debate, no reflection, no logic, and no thought will ever be brought to bear on this question.
If you dare ask a question on the point, the mavens will shriek like harpies, clutch their pearls, and pretend to faint. Decency is abolished in the name of what is socially acceptable, that is, in the name of decency.
Now, as a conservative, you point out that all these things are simply illogical, paradoxes even a schoolboy could see cannot possibly be true. A thing cannot be itself and be the opposite of itself at the same time. A sentence that contradicts the same idea it affirms is a self-refuting sentence. Reality cannot be unreal.
You are answered that modern progress has proven that truth is untrue, for all things are matters of mere opinion that each man decides for himself. To say truth is truth offends the liberty of each man to invent his own truth.
You are answered that modern progress has proven that logic is merely a social adaptation mechanism formed by evolution, and has no authority to compel men to obey it. To say that logic is logical offends the liberty of each man to enjoy whichever of the personal and invented truths he sees fit.
You are answered that modern progress has proven that morality consists of the single rule that all must toleration any abridgement of morality anyone sees fit, aside, of course, from hate speech and badthink. Avoiding badthink is an absolute moral prohibition applied to all rightwing angloamerican white male heterosexual Christians. To say that morals cannot be defined as immorality is badthink. It offends the liberty of men to be evil, condone evil, promote evil, and worship evil.
You are answered with a fullthroated defense of unreality so complete that even Buddha would be shamed. The Progressive thinks that all life is an illusion, but that the illusion can be peaceful and pleasing, or the opposite, depending on the discipline and disposition of the subjective observer. You make your own reality.
This reality is called “a Narrative.” It is not based on fact, nor meant to be. It is based on emotion, whim, psychological defense mechanism.
Unlike the Buddhist, the Progressive seeks not to escape the illusion. There is nothing outside the illusion, no reality, no nirvana, to which to escape. There is no red pill to take.
The Narrative is an all encompassing world of illusion. It is an empire of lies.
And the first lie in the empire of lies is the lie that the Narrative does not exist. Only truths, as told by conservatives and anyone else looking at reality, are called Narratives.
Now, at the end of these answers, Rip van Conservative realizes that debate is impossible with a creature who cannot and will not speak in a coherent sentence, cannot and will not think a logical thought, and whose sole verbal reply to any criticism, no matter how true and trenchant, is merely to accuse his accuser of the flaws he himself possesses.
The stupid calls his smarter critic stupid. The fool calls his wiser critic foolish. The bigot calls his open-minded critic bigoted. The fascist called his freedom loving critic a fascist. And on and on ad nauseam.
And so the conservative loses every battle. Why?
When conservativism is not only obvious, but self-evident, why does it falter?
When conservatism is not only a self-evident position, but the sole position seen not to contradict itself, why does it lose the field?
If all positions other than the conservative one are not merely incorrect, but immoral, illogical and insane, how is it that conservatism is soundly swept from the field, and no one polite society dares utter a word in its defense?
Conservatism falters, fails, and finds itself utterly effaced because and only because it fights the wrong battle on the wrong battlefield.
Note that the same pattern repeats again and again in each passage at arms with the Progressive. The Conservative upholds some obvious and self-evident good thing, like equality or property rights. The Progressive, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, promotes an idea that it the diametric opposite of the first idea, such as elitism or communal rights, and then merely calls the first idea by the opposite of its true name.
The argument at that point becomes an argument of metaphysical philosophy, or an argument of worldview. But the worldview of the conservative is the Christian worldview, which is why they believe in things like the equality of man, the rule of reason, and the law of identity. But the prime ideal of the conservative worldview is never to press one’s religion’s ideas onto another. The wars of the Reformation and Counterreformation have made conservatives neurotically and uncontrollably unwilling and even unable to promote or defend any religious idea.
On the other hand, all the Progressives do is take their religion, Social Justice Marxism, or whatever name it is going by these days, and PRETEND it is not a religion at all, and they press their worldview as if it were the default worldview promoted by the Constitution and by the consensus of academia, and declare the burden of proof to be on the conservative to proof otherwise. And when the conservative does prove otherwise, the Progressive decrees from the bench that the proof is inadmissible, on the grounds that no religious arguments can be brought into the public sphere to argue against the Progressive religion. Because it is said to be not a religion, you see.
My own bewildering experience with this is when I discovered, as an atheist, argument against abortion, homosexual, and contraception to which I could find no coherent counterarguments. Very much against my will and my inclination, I was dragged into believing a position I did not want or like, because and only because logic said so.
I found immediately that the only arguments leveled against me were ad hominem arguments: the Progressives asserted that only bigoted religious arguments made in bad faith existed against abortion, homosexuality, and contraception, and that therefore, ergo, QED, my arguments could, without the courtesy of being examined, be dismissed as the arguments of a bigoted religious zealot arguing in bad faith. It was merely asserted that I believed abortion to be wrong, not because of the legal arguments against it, but because I was believing what I wanted to believe because I wanted to believe it.
Now, since I was an atheist who came to these conclusions in good faith and against my own inclinations, the mere assertion that I was the opposite of what I was had no power to persuade. And even if it were true, it is an ad hominem argument. That is an argument which addresses the man, not the argument.
So I searched and searched. No Progressive had any other argument to give. Whenever crossed or contradicted, all any of them did was scream and scream and scream that the motives of the questioner were bad, ergo no questions could be entertained.
Confronted by a complete and utter void of rational argument, how was it that the Progressives were triumphant in every debate in the public mind?
They were triumphant because they were and are a religion, not a political movement. In a religion, dogma is accepted on faith, by bowing to the authority of the prophets or the Church who speak God’s word. To question the faith is an act of immorality, of disloyalty, of subversion. Hence the Progressive has no need and no ability to defend his dogma: he merely condemns the questioner as a heretic, a man with bad motives.
And since the conservative has assented to the proposition that religion should not be debated in public, nor used as a basis for law and custom, he is left with no argument against the antichristian religion promoted by the Progressives.
He is fighting a political battle. A political battle concerns the prudent compromises needed to obtain law and order, to promote peace and public virtue.
The Progressive is fighting a holy war. A holy war concerns not one policy or one thing, but everything. It is a war to impose a worldview on the world. It cannot compromise.
Politics is merely one branch springing from the trunk of one’s worldview, and one’s worldview grows out of the roots of one’s religious background. Even atheists with a Christian background have their worldview so informed.
Facing holy warrior with prudential political arguments about policies and politics is bringing a knife to a gunfight. Conservatism is insufficient, since it only addresses the political side of life. The Christian roots of conservativism alone have the strength to resist the attempt to undermine and uproot civilization.
Only a crusader can face a jihadist.
The truce of the Enlightenment, for better or worse, is over. The First Amendment is a tolerable compromise between competing denominations that share common Christian ideals. The compromise promises no denomination will use secular power to dictate the faith or forms of worship of competing denominations.
The First Amendment has been turned into a weapon against Christianity in the hands of the Progressive Left. There is no compromise between life and abortion, between chastity and fornication, between decency and perversion, between sacred and satanic.
No Christian denomination can compromise with Antichrist. The simple reason is that Antichrist accepts the compromise as a victory, makes no compromise whatsoever in return, and then doubles his demands. Compromise occurs when both parties foreswear some small partisan advantage for the sake of the mutual advantage of the common good. But between Christ and Antichrist, there is no common ground, no common good. Any loss no matter how small for the one is gain to the other.
So if we are to survive, and civilization escape destruction, and our souls escape damnation, the Antichrist religion of the Progressives, and all their works and all their ways, must be defeated, routed, silence, expunged. Since we have already been defeated and routed and silenced in every public forum that matters, and since we are on death row waiting to be expunged, there is no virtue in hesitation, no benefit to underestimated the danger, no wisdom in urging caution.
Look at the terror. Look at Orlando, San Bernardino, Fort Hood. Look at the Twin Towers. Look at the whole history of the Middle East from the Battle of Lepanto to the Battle of Manzikert.
Look at the riots. Look the 150 Million slain by Communism since AD 1918. Look at all the lies they tell, the Orwellian lies, from that day to this.
The rioters and the terrorist have combined against us. Both use the same language of victimology, the same tactics of crybaby-bullies, who bludgeon girls from behind while weeping like brats that they are the wounded party. Both are utterly evil, and utterly blinded by their own self-righteousness. One is an open religion, the heresy of Mohammedanism. The other is a an agnostic and materialistic variant on the old, old heresy called Gnosticism, the belief that each man is his own god, and that God is a devil who must be reviled and overthrown.
Look at the utter abandonment of any attempt of the Antichrist’s party to reason, or to settle differences of opinion peacefully.
Look at the war. Conservativism is too short a blade to reach the foe. A crusade, based on Christian faith, Christian metaphysics, and a sound and rational philosophy is needed. Sheathe your knives. Let the cannons roar.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
