Tom Woods on right wing cancel culture regarding criticism of Israel

It's very hard to talk about this [Israel-Palestine conflict] because the names get thrown around.  The right wing, they hate cancel culture, right?  No they don't!  They love it.  And they love having their own racism.  They love antisemitism.  Everybody's an anti-Semite.  If you're three degrees north of Ben Shapiro, you're an anti-Semite.  I would assume people know what's going on there.  This is just an attempt to ruin and destroy people...

I guess it would be antisemitic to point this out, but I think it's unavoidable that if you're Isreal [with 9 million people] and they're surrounded by hundreds of millions of potential enemies, hundreds of millions of people who may not be inclined to their direction.  Now how that was supposed to work in the long run - and I know that the Zionists' side will say, "but we've been so conciliatory, look where it's gotten us" - how was this going to work without some kind of meeting of the minds here?  Was it just going to be that the U.S. was just going to keep bankrolling them forever?  Even the U.S. can't ultimately, in the long run, fix a problem in which 9 million people are surrounded my hundreds of millions who hate their guts.  Some other kind of approach had to be taken and it never was.  I don't see what's antisemitic about pointing that out.  That would seem to be the most common sense thing you have to say in this situation.

~ Tom Woods, "Ron Paul Institute Director on Best and Worst Middle East Scenarios," The Tom Woods Show, 11:30 mark, November 1, 2023

Michael Malice on the difference between conservatives and progressives

Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.

~ Michael Malice, tweet, January 22, 2019

Boyd Cathey on the pressure on Fox News to conform

The pressure on Fox pundits and reporters to accept without too much grumbling a Biden administration will only grow, and like at other supposedly conservative news outlets (e.g., The Wall Street Journal), the new Millennial hires and writers, educated at Leftist hothouses called colleges, may well finally vanquish any dissent. 

The Neocons—the slightly more demure wing of Progressivism, broadcasting their message of liberal democratic globalism and post-Christian morality—dominate Fox and have paved the way for what is coming. They have successfully squelched Old Right traditionalist conservative voices, except occasionally on the Carlson program.

~ Boyd Cathey, "The Future of Fox News and the Future of America," My Corner by Boyd Cathey, November 15, 2020

Lew Rockwell on American conservatism

The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one’s soul to heresy.  It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society.  It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor.  It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Great Conservative Hoax," Mises.org, May 4, 2006

Seraphim Hanisch on how Big Tech's attack on conservatism opened the door to competition

[T]he strategy of Big Tech appears to be to disrupt and isolate conservative activity by making it impossible for people to gather together and organize. Knowing of one another’s existence is powerful, and the Ministers of Propaganda at Castle Zuckerberg knew precisely where to strike.  However, they did not count on their actions spurring the explosive growth of a new network – one they cannot touch.

~ Seraphim Hanisch, "Social media earthquake as Parler welcomes 1,000,000 new users," The Duran, June 30, 2020

Nick Gillespie on the big spending Trump administration

Last week, The New York Times published an eye-opening tally of how much more the federal government is spending on each of us since Donald Trump was elected president.  "Total federal spending has increased by $1,441 per person since 2016,"... to a grand total of $14,652 per person per year.  They came to their numbers by looking at actual federal outlays "for the 2016 fiscal year, adjusting for inflation and population changes" and comparing them to the budgeted amounts for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

This revelation—which has generated a scant 45 comments as of this writing on five days after publication—should discomfit both Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals/progressives. And it should absolutely enrage libertarians who believe in smaller government...

~ Nick Gillespie, "How Much More Should Trump be Spending on You?," Reason.com, February 16, 2020

Lew Rockwell on Butler Shaffer's experience as a Goldwater conservative

We mourn the passing of our good friend Butler Shaffer, who died yesterday afternoon at the age of 84. Butler was a libertarian at a time when there were very few libertarians in the world. Like many supporters of the free market, he was first attracted to the Republican Party. He supported Barry Goldwater for President in 1964, but he soon came to realize that limited government was a chimera and that the State was by nature opposed to liberty.

As he put the issue in a letter to me in November 2014: “It was just a few months more than 50 years ago that I sat in the Cow Palace in San Francisco as part of my state’s delegation to the Republican National Convention (i.e., the Goldwater Convention)... Afterwards, I was enjoying a drink at the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel with one of Goldwater’s advisors. I asked: “Now that Goldwater has the nomination, let us suppose that he gets elected president. What do you think he would do to begin cutting back on federal government power?” “What do you mean?” my acquaintance answered. I reminded him of Goldwater’s book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” wherein he proposed eliminating a few government programs (federal involvement in education being one area). The other man answered: “don’t be absurd: if Goldwater gets elected president, the most we would hope to accomplish would be to slow down the rate of growth of government.”

This conversation helped to confirm the sentiments to which I was already becoming more firmly attracted. I went back home; walked away from any delusional thinking about ‘cleaning up the whorehouse’; and never looked back.

With this view of the state, Butler was naturally attracted to the anarchism of Murray Rothbard and Robert LeFevre, and he wrote from this perspective for the rest of his long life.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Butler Shaffer, R.I.P.," LewRockwell.com, December 31, 2019

Butler Shaffer and Lew Rockwell

George Orwell on the real political spectrum

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

~ George Orwell

Milo Yiannopoulos on restrictive speech in America

As a Brit, I came to America thinking this was going to be the land of freedom - free expression.  It's the land of the 1st amendment after all.  And I discovered actually the social pressures on speech - what you can and cannot say in society, if you're in dating, in the workplace - are some of the most restrictive speech codes I've encountered anywhere in the world.  I don't have any particular love for the Republican party - I happen to be a conservative on most social issues - but it's very clear that the trajectory of speech codes and language policing and the oppression of different points of view is working very obviously in one direction.  And that is the progressive left, which has a stranglehold on the media, on the academy and on Hollywood, constantly characterizing conservative points of view as hateful and bigoted, sexist, racist and all the rest of it.  And constricting not just the language that conservatives can use, but the ideas they're allowed to express, and the subjects they're allowed to bring up...  It's a really weird set of affairs for America, of all places, to be a country where speech is so heavily restricted, and it's normally the speech of conservatives.

~ Milo Yiannopoulos, "'Dangerous' Milo Yiannopoulos tells all," (5:53-7:09 mark), YouTube, July 12, 2017

Michael Malice on the Left vs. the Right

Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.

~ Michael Malice

National Review defends central planning... in the name of defending capitalism

The tensions that arise among the demands of these different institutions [family, religion, schools, civic associations, political bodies, and more] and the commitments that constitute our social order can often be addressed by individuals setting priorities in their own lives. But there are also instances when dealing with such tensions requires politics. This means that sometimes our economic policy has to be determined by more than purely economic considerations — by our sense of the kind of society we want to be and the kinds of goals we want to pursue together. Overall economic growth is one such vital goal, as surely everyone agrees. But there are other goals that matter, including equity, cultural vitality, social order, family formation, piety and religious liberty, individual and national self-sufficiency, personal liberty and communal self-determination, and moral traditionalism and moral pluralism, among many others. Ordering these frequently competing or contradictory ends in hard cases is part of what our politics is for, and the argument for capitalism cannot be an argument for putting economics above all else.

To suggest that our commitments to market ideals must be moderated in this way, and also that they should be allowed to moderate some of our other commitments, is not to attack capitalism, but to defend it... [C]apitalism needs conservative defenders, and deserves to have them.

~ Yuval Levin, "The Free-Market Tradition," National Review, May 2, 2019

Lew Rockwell on conservatism

What does conservatism today stand for?  It stands for war.  It stands for power.  It stands for spying, jailing without trial, torture, counterfeiting without limit, and lying from morning to night. …  There comes a time in the life of every believer in freedom when he must declare, without any hesitation, to have no attachment to the idea of conservatism.

~ Lew Rockwell

Kevin Duffy on Townhall.com's boast that "A Republican wave is building -- let's be ready to ride it to victory!"

You can’t be serious. Under Bush II you spent like drunken sailors, doubled the public debt, bailed out reckless speculators with undue government influence (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, BofA, et al.), and invaded and bombed a country who never invaded us (or had anything to do with 911) into oblivion, tarnishing the American brand of liberty and neutrality. Further, you paved the way for Obama and his radical socialist and authoritarian agenda. This is the vaunted Republican platform of limited government and free enterprise??? On top of that, the only true limited government, freedom loving Republican – Ron Paul – you treated like a pariah. Quite frankly, you and your party disgust me.

~ Kevin Duffy, Bearing Asset Management, May 28, 2009

Sheldon Richman on conservatives and nationalism

Worship of the nation and its government is in fact inconsistent with America’s founding ideals. Thomas Jefferson said the appropriate attitude of a free people toward the government is “jealousy” not “confidence,” much less adoration. He spoke of the need to keep it caged. He was right, but if he were around today, conservatives might accuse him of not loving his country. Stripped of its incidental characteristics, government is nothing but physical force. So government, even under the best of circumstances, must always be eyed with suspicion. No Jeffersonian can be comfortable with government activism in foreign affairs. Appeals to security are to be met with high skepticism, for it’s too easy a cover for political intrigue.

That conservatives relish almost any foreign activism shows how un-Jeffersonian they are. They are nationalists and state-worshipers. For them, to love America is to love the government (at least if it is run by one of their own) because it is the government that embodies the nation and the nation is great and deserving of reverence.

~ Sheldon Richman, "How Can You Love a Country?," Freedom Daily, December 3, 2008

Friedrich A. Hayek on liberalism and conservatism

There is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here (in Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom) the term "liberal" in the original, 19th-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been a part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensible term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of approbrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.

It is true, of course, that in the struggle of the believers in the all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the conservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of working for his ideals. But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused. Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its tradionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disallusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desireable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

~ Friedrich A. Hayek, 1974 Co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, in the Forward to The Road to Serfdom, Page ix

Stan Evans on conservatives

Conservatives come to Washington knowing it's a sewer. Trouble is, most of them wind up treating it like a hot tub.

~ Stan Evans, American journalist, writing about Reagan Republicans who came to Washington in the 1980s

Justin Raimondo on Murray Rothbard's concerns about "conservative" foreign policy

Rothbard realized that, irrespective of the rhetoric about the "free market" and "individual liberty" that came out of the mouths of conservatives, objectively the result of their policies – specifically, their foreign policy of relentless aggression and confrontation with the Soviet Union – would lead to the exact opposite of their stated intentions. He saw that, as long as we were leading a global crusade, and pouring billions down the "anti-Communist" rat-hole, building up a huge military apparatus and national security bureaucracy – complete with an arsenal of nuclear weapons that could destroy the world several times over – our liberties, indeed our very lives, would be threatened with extinction.

~ Justin Raimondo, "The Year of the Insurgents," Anti-war.com, February 22, 2008

G. K. Chesterton on politics

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

~ G. K. Chesterton

Any Rand on conservatives poorly defending capitalism

The liberals are constantly asserting that they represent the future – that they are new, progressive, forward-looking, etc. And they denounce the conservatives as old-fashioned representatives of a dead past. The conservatives conceded and thus helped the liberals to propagate one of today’s most grotesque contradictions. Collectivism and dictatorship – the frozen status society – is offered to us in the name of progress, while capitalism – the only free, dynamic, creative society ever devised – is defended in the name of passivity and stagnation.

The plea to preserve tradition as such appeals to the worst elements in men and rejects the best. It appeals to fear, cowardice, conformity, self doubt, and rejects creativeness, originality, independence, self-reliance. It is an outrageous plea to address to human beings anywhere, but the more outrageous here, in America – the country based on the principle that man must stand on his own feet, lead by his own judgment, and move constantly forward as a productive, creative innovator.

Ayn Rand, "Ayn Rand on the GOP," (video) 1961

Glenn Greenwald on conservatives and external enemies

When Communists were the Enemy du Jour -- Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" -- they were the root of all Evil, the Soul-less, God-less Machiavellian Warriors with designs on World Domination who posed a grave, imminent and existential threat to our nation, to everything we held dear. Back then, in the Era of The Communist Enemy, even to suggest that there was anything restrained or unthreatening or at least rational about the Evil Communists would subject one to all sorts of invective -- involving allegations of anti-Americanism and treason and moral relativism and the like -- from the National Reviews of the worlds.

But no longer. Now that the Communist super-villains of yesteryear have been replaced by Islamic Terrorists as today's Prime Enemy, Communists have undergone a radical, retroactive make-over. According to National Review, back then we could afford laws like FISA and we could expect our Government to abide by annoying constitutional guarantees (such as the Fourth Amendment) because those Communist simpletons were rational, sensible, even honorable enemies -- and not very sophisticated.

Identically, and hilariously (in the most perverse way imaginable), some "conservatives" are even arguing that we treated Nazi detainees well during World War II only because -- unlike the primitive (though simultaneously cunning and sophisticated) Islamic mongrels we battle today -- Nazis were honorable Western gentlemen who posed a far less formidible threat and thus could be treated in accordance with civilized norms.

~ Glenn Greenwald, "The conservative vision of America, by National Review," salon.com, October 16, 2007