Remarks delivered to the Ron Paul Institute Student Seminar, September 3, 2021
I accepted the invitation to speak with you today only with great trepidation. This was for at least three reasons.
The first is that, both for self-protection in an increasingly unfree country and my growing sense that nothing I or anyone else can say will make much difference in averting the horrors I believe are coming our way, I had ceased my public writing and speaking life, such as it was. I reluctantly have made an exception to that less than momentous recusal but plan to resume it at the end of today.
Secondly, I was loath to contaminate the naturally ebullient optimism of youth with my crotchety Boomer pessimism. At your age you should feel that the world is, if not quite your oyster, at least pregnant with possibilities. How do I tell you that, in the layman’s terms, your lives will probably suck? At least in the near future. But there is hope. I will return to that.
Thirdly, I thought it would be derelict of me not to provide you with some sage, old graybeard advice of a practical nature. If I were in your shoes today, what would I do, specifically, to try to make a positive contribution to the world around me? How best to serve God and my neighbor? To make my country and the world a better place? And to do it in relative safety, in a modest degree of economic sustainability, perhaps even comfort? To marry, start a family, and see your offspring rise in peace and prosperity?
This last is most daunting, because the world has changed so much, in such a short time, and the pace of change is accelerating. Back in the olden days of yore, in my case the late 1970s, when I entered government service, that was an honorable thing to do. (Allow me to note that there are some who still spotlessly preserve that honor, such as The – literally – Honorable Thomas Massie, who will address us today. But such examples are rare sightings nowadays. In the institution in which he serves, you could probably count them on one hand, and you might not need your thumb.)
But I digress. When I started out, I did so consciously following in the footsteps of my father, a career Air Force officer and fighter pilot, and my father in law, a career agent in the old Immigration and Naturalization Service. After law school and a bit of flirting with the FBI and CIA, I ended up at the State Department, as a commissioned Foreign Service Officer.
My first assignment was as a Consular Officer in the border city of Tijuana, Baja California, just across from San Diego. The usual duties: jails, hospitals, stolen planes and cars, but mostly visas. With respect to immigrant visas, virtually all the applicants were already living illegally in the US and in most cases receiving various forms of public assistance. In principle, they should have been denied resident alien status under Section 212(a)(15), “likely to become a public charge,” but in practice they couldn’t be denied for receipt of any plethora of benefits – Food Stamps, WIC, Aid to Families with Democratic Children, Medicaid, SSI, etc. etc. — unless it was actually called W-E-L-F-A-R-E, and sometimes not even then. Earlier this year the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. issued a statement lauding the final dropping of the pretense (“Public Charge Rule Is Dead: Hurrah!!” – two exclamation points, seriously…). Lesson: permeable borders and a welfare state are not a good match.
My next assignment was in Washington in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs, a/k/a “the Soviet Desk.” This was at the beginning of the Reagan Administration, but, naïve young fellow that I was, I was shocked – shocked!—to find out that there were hardly any actual anti-communists in the whole Department, not just at the Desk. Not so much communist sympathizers, mind you, just blasé about ideas and ideology, generally accepting of a kind of a mushy FDR/LBJ liberalism tending toward social democracy – in short, like most of the rest of the bureaucracy. Sure, the Soviet version of those values was annoying, but what do you expect from Russians? (It was no surprise that a bureaucracy that was mildly sympathetic to Moscow when it was run by communists – just New Dealers in a hurry – became implacably hostile once the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin.) I remember once when some initiative or other was being floated past the White House, a colleague asked the Desk director, “Do you think the president will go for this?” The Director replied, only partly in jest: “He’s a political appointee. He’ll do what he’s told.” Lesson: at least in foreign policy and national security, forget elections: the permanent bureaucracy rules.
Eventually I left the State Department to work for many years in the Republican leadership of the US Senate. My job was to prepare papers on upcoming legislation (with a partisan spin) and on topics of interest to GOP Senators and staff: the conflicts in Central America, Mozambique, Angola, Grenada; sanctions on South Africa; POWs left behind in Southeast Asia (despite the sanctimonious flying of all those black flags, “You Are Not Forgotten,” they were indeed abandoned, care largely of two Senators with experience in Vietnam); the First Gulf War; the Somalia fiasco; the breakups of the USSR and Yugoslavia; Clinton’s Haiti invasion (“Operation Uphold Democracy” – really!); 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan; and – worst of all – the US military intervention in the Balkans, first in Bosnia, then in Kosovo. The lesson you know already: a lie will travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its running shoes, the first casualty of war is truth – you know the drill.
Likewise, it’s hard to work on Capitol Hill without coming to see what a bazaar it is. (Well, bizarre too, but also a bazaar, a souk, a flea market.) While the bipartisan leadership has not yet taken up the helpful suggestion from the Babylon Bee that barcodes be affixed to legislators’ foreheads so that interested persons and organizations can conveniently scan prices and self-checkout, they have provided a helpful guide to what are called “Congressional Member Organizations (CMOs),” also called coalitions, study groups, task forces, or working groups. Memberships in many but not all CMOs serve as virtual barcodes for potential (mostly legal) campaign donors, including contributions from ethnic compatriots who are US citizens, or at least are supposed to be, funneled to “friends of” this or that foreign country: like the “Argentina Caucus, Armenian Issues Caucus, Azerbaijan Caucus, Bangladesh Caucus, Bosnia Caucus, Brazil Caucus, Cambodia Caucus,…” – you get the idea, all the way to Uzbekistan and Venezuela (what, no Zimbabwe?), with at least four caucuses just for Israel. (Some might say the whole Congress is pretty much an “Israel Caucus,” but that’s a whole ‘nother topic… ) Perhaps it’s the legislative counterpart to the infamous “clientitis” at the State Department, where – as we used to say, “there is no ‘US Interests Section’” – and where diplomats come to see themselves as much or more as advocates for the countries they deal with than for the US. (We also liked to say there could never be a coup in the US overthrowing the Constitutional order because there’s no American Embassy in Washington. I guess we got that one wrong…)
Like many people, I greeted the end of communism in the USSR and the Soviet bloc with a sense of hope. No more need for an ever-growing, ever-more invasive national security surveillance state! A peace dividend! Finally, back to a sane pre-1914 international order! But of course all of the malign trends we had seen during the Cold War, far from decreasing, increased as the – what do you want to call it, the Deep State, the Borg, the Blob, the Swamp, the MICIMATT (Ray McGovern’s Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex) – saw its chance to achieve total global domination – to rule the world — “benevolent global hegemony,” in perpetuity, as neocon gurus William Kristol and Robert Kagan christened it in 1996. Lesson: folks who think night and day about nothing but achieving power, money, and influence tend to get them.
A little slow on the draw, I remember when my seven and a half watt cranial light bulb finally sputtered into illumination. In 1992, I was attending a briefing of the International Republican Institute (IRI), one of the quasi-governmental entities set up to promote – get this! – “democracy” in the 1980s, regarding the recent election in Albania. An IRI staffer who had been working on the ground in that country proudly related how they had helped secure a victory for the Democratic Party over its rival, the former communists rebranded the Socialist Party, for a paltry eight million bucks. Even better, they managed to do it even though – it was clear to everyone, and the staffer was explicit on this point – the Socialists had more public support than the Democrats did! During Q&A, simple fellow that I was, I asked: “But if the Socialists were more popular than the Democrats, wouldn’t the democratic outcome have been a win for the Socialists?” Oh, no no no, you silly boy, you! You see, the Democratic Party has democratic principles, so their win, even though fewer people support them, is the democratic result. It then struck me that we had gone through the looking glass, that words didn’t mean anymore what normal people meant by them.
Well, that was then, this is now. Let’s get something very clear. Back in my day, yes there was corruption, yes there was influence-peddling, yes there was contempt for truth and common decency. But these were debasements within what could still be argued was a structure built on a Constitution and the rule of law. That is, something existed, though as with all human affairs, it was only as good as the people operating within that something. One could still, with a straight face, contend that if the good guys win, if wise policies prevail – audit the Fed, cut taxes, stop our interventionist foreign policy, ban abortion, legalize dope, whatever you want – there was enough integrity to the something to allow for such improvements. We were still living in a normal moral universe, where virtue and vice contended for dominance. We were still living in America.
We really can’t say that anymore. It’s not just that laws and the Constitution are violated – when were they not? – but that they now have almost no relevance to the nation, or perhaps former nation, we have become. When I say nation, I mean the core, founding American ethnos characterized by European ancestry, by the English language, and by the Christian religion, mostly Protestant. The constitutional order established by the Founding Fathers – you know, those racist, gun-toting transphobes in knee britches and powdered wigs – for themselves and their posterity is a secondary epiphenomenon, the ethos of the founding ethnos, their folkways and values. You know, all that quaint Anglo-Saxon due process, habeas corpus, presumption of innocence, limited powers stuff. The primary phenomenon, without which the erstwhile constitutional order would not have existed in the first place, from which it derived its values, principles, and structure, is the ethnos. That is what is under attack, even more than the order itself, which in my opinion is effectively gone.
And it’s come with astonishing speed.
It is difficult to look back on the events of the annus horribilis of 2020—and to anticipate worse to come—without a foreboding that the world is nearing some sort of crescendo. The Gnostic tendency described by Eric Voegelin, in his landmark 1952 book The New Science of Politics – hey, don’t immanentize the eschaton, bro’! — and fitfully growing year by year, decade by decade, century by century, seems to have achieved an unprecedented and decisive degree of domination in a few short months, and not just in America. It is increasingly difficult to see any signpost of restraint, much less of restoration.
Perhaps this crescendo will be similar to earlier ones: collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Islamic conquest of the Eastern Empire, the East-West Great Schism and the Crusades, the neopagan humanism of the Renaissance, the religious strife of the Reformation, the misnamed Enlightenment with its malign offspring Revolution and “Progress,” the world wars and totalitarianisms of the modern era. Yet with each seeming turn of the wheel, with each ebb and flow between disorder and partial re-stabilization, the net linear advance of Gnosticism is undeniable.
Even a cursory search of the internet yields multiple references to the congealing omnipresence of powerful actors in every sphere of life to implement a program called the “Great Reset.” Released in May 2020 by Prince Charles of the United Kingdom and Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (commonly known as Davos, after its meeting place in Switzerland), the Great Reset takes its cue from the “Covid-19 crisis, and the political, economic and social disruptions it has caused” as—no, not as a misfortune, not a calamity—but as “a unique window of opportunity [emphasis added] to shape the recovery,” informed by the insights of “global stakeholders” in “determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies [really, what doesn’t come under the heading of “the priorities of societies”?], the nature of business models and the management of a global commons” in order to “build a new social contract that honors the dignity of every human being,” summed up in the ubiquitous slogan “Build Back Better.” The initiative’s list of Partners (“global stakeholders”) reads like a Who’s Who of the most powerful international corporations.
While the provenance, natural or artificial, of the viral disease that served as the justification—or pretext—for this “unique opportunity” may remain forever in the shadows (except perhaps to the small group of cognoscenti who feel they are guiding the process) the primary manifestation of the crisis is all too public: a relentless incitement of paralyzing and irrational fear—of a malady that has an almost universal survival rate for anyone not in a handful of comorbidity categories. The very success of this terror campaign is a testament to the extent to which post-modern and (mostly) post-Christian society has reached the point of deeming physical death, though inevitable, as the worst possible fate, to be avoided at all costs. Imposed via diktat by the very government and corporate entities force-feeding the scare propaganda, the costs—in the form of lockdowns (heretofore a term relevant exclusively to prisons), travel bans, compulsory masking, denial of opportunity to earn a living, “distance learning” in place of education, “virtual” social interactions, mass transfer of assets from the middle class and small enterprises to a rentier elite, and the prospect of an unavoidable, and perhaps a mandatory, biometric “passport” as proof of vaccination—continue to rise.
No less dismaying is the propensity of many people, perhaps most, to go along with all this, running the gamut from sullen submission to loving embrace of their shackles and enthusiastic willingness to force others’ compliance. What explains this? Fear of reprisal, fear of being thought of as a crank or “conspiracy theorist,” terminal law-abidingness, a misplaced virtue of charity regarding others’ intentions, naïve trust in “authority,” “experts,” “science” and claims of necessity to keep us and others “safe”? Or even worse, a sense of joining the worthy elites in their domination of lesser, insufficiently obedient and “caring” mortals? A totalitarian mindset is not solely an elite phenomenon.
In any case, these measures and their justifications, though constantly changing and often contradictory, are all the more obligatory. Taken together they have all the appearance of a controlled demolition of all established human interactions in anticipation of their replacement by something we are assured by our betters will be an improvement. The contours of the “new normal” in the post-American America hurtling in our direction have already become so familiar as to need little elaboration:
In sum, what could not be implemented over decades solely by fear of climate change and “rising oceans” is now being swiftly achieved via fear of a submicroscopic infectious agent. No one should doubt that the old, pre-2020 world is forever gone.
This brave new world, my young friends, is your world. This is not something that is going to get fixed by the next election, or any election, by a new political party or movement, or by a convention of the states to write new Constitutional language for our Executive, Legislative, and Judicial authorities to ignore or pervert like they do the current language.
(Let me also mention in passing one of my pet peeves: while government at all levels bears a YUGE responsibility for all this, most of it is being carried out by private corporations. This leads some free market advocates to shrug their shoulders: “weeeell, they’re private businesses, they’re within their rights.” I say: bunk. To start with, corporations are inherently creatures of the state. They wouldn’t even exist were it not for legislation making them under the law “persons” – though they have neither body to be kicked nor soul to be damned. Given the incestuous “partnership” between government and the corporatocracy, the distinction is increasingly academic.)
Much of what I have described centers on the United States. To note that is not to be unduly parochial any more than would have been noting Russia’s centrality to an earlier Gnostic outbreak a century ago. Given our country’s global dominance in virtually every field of human endeavor—politics, military, finance, economy, science, medicine, media, popular culture, etc.—in the wake of the collapse of the earlier communist eruption (and before that, of national socialism), it is to be expected that this global crisis would begin, and perhaps will end, in the United States.
There is a remarkable congruence, though not an exact identity, between the divisions in American society pitting those who accept the therapeutic narrative on the virus and supposed countermeasures against those who reject them, and between those who accept and reject the violent “social justice” campaign championed by groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa (themselves sponsored by the government and corporate establishment), culminating in a contested presidential election that half the electorate believes was the result of fraud. The conclusion that the US Constitution and the rule of law, which have been declining for many years, may have in fact reached a terminal point is reluctantly dawning on tens of millions of ordinary, generally apolitical Americans. Not only are we more divided than at any time since 1861-1865, we are even more aliens, indeed enemies, to one another than were Northerners and Southerners back then in terms of fundamental questions of who we are, what man is, Who God is, and how we should order our lives and our country. In 1861 they worshipped the same God, read the same Bible, honored the same Founding Fathers, claimed fidelity to the same Constitution. In today’s America, like in the rest of the Woke Woke West, we can’t even agree on our pronouns.
The term “cold” civil war, a war that might possibly turn “hot,” has become a commonplace in American discourse. That should not come as a surprise when we remember how the Red Gnostic seizure of power in Russia, to which many draw parallels to America today, didn’t triumph without bloodily overcoming ferocious popular resistance. The rising tide of Rainbow Gnosticism in America now, whether it succeeds or fails, may turn out to be just as destructive. Let’s remember too that, if you credit the William Strauss and Neil Howe “Fourth Turning” cycle, we are only about halfway through a crisis that will totally transform this country, assuming there’s a country left at all by the end of it.
Finally, “wars and rumors of war” may not be confined to the United States. As the dysgenic impacts of the virus scare affect other countries to a greater or lesser degree, so America’s growing instability must have its international reverberations. Afghanistan is a bellwether. Suggestions have been made that overextension abroad and internal crises may force the United States, willy-nilly, to withdraw from the program of global hegemony launched after the demise of the USSR, with a multipolar world finally emerging. That could happen, but it’s not likely, at least not smoothly. Despite the Kabul kick in the teeth, realism is still a scarce commodity among Washington’s nomenklatura, where the penalties for strategic failure are few but rewards for aggression are great. As we will see, the Afghan humiliation will have little consequence for those culpable. While American “humanitarian intervention,” “democracy promotion,” and “regime change” have been to little advantage but much harm to the supposed beneficiaries (Haiti, Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc.) the tangible benefits are clearly visible in the form of the “McMansions” around the Washington Beltway, which still sprout like mushrooms after heavy rains. As America continues down the road of confrontation with Russia, and increasingly with China, the prospect of the first major global conflict, now well overdue, since the Long War of 1914-1945 grows. A self-interested, arrogant, ignorant, and spiritually and intellectually stunted leadership class caught in a Thucydides Trap (a declining power confronted by a rising opponent or opponents) may well be tempted to launch a war to eliminate the “threat” if it feels victory may be in reach today but might not be tomorrow. To call such a prospect apocalyptic is not hyperbole.
In the end, my young friends, the impact any one of us can expect to have in the face of world-historic trends before which the fates of nations and empires fly like leaves in the autumn winds is vanishingly small. Already baked into the cake will be, I believe, hardships for you that we’ve become accustomed to think only happen to “other people” in “other countries” far away, not seen here since the Revolution and the Civil War, or maybe in isolated instances during the Great Depression: financial and economic disruption and, in some places, especially in urban areas, collapse; supply chains, utilities, and other aspects of basic infrastructure ceasing to function (what happens in major cities when food deliveries stop for a week?), even widespread hunger; rising levels of violence, both criminality and civil strife. These will be combined, paradoxically, with the remaining organs of authority, however discredited, desperately cracking down on the enemy within – no, not on murderers, robbers, and rapists, but on “science deniers,” “religious fanatics,” “haters,” “conspiracy theorists,” “insurrectionists,” “gun nuts,” “American Taliban,” “purveyors of “medical misinformation,” and, of course, “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes,” and so forth. It’s the late Samuel Francis’ “anarcho-tyranny” nightmare come to life with a vengeance.
As I say, I think your ability to impact the “big picture” regarding any of this is slim to none. Even our ability to discern the signs of the times in an era of pervasive Gnostic deceit abetted by technologies unimaginable just a few years ago is limited.
Nevertheless, for what it is worth, I put before you three practical tasks for your consideration.
Firstly, be vigilant against deception, in a day when assuredly evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived. Admittedly, this is a tough one, given the ever-present lying that surrounds us and the suppression of dissent. Try to sift truth from falsehood but don’t become obsessed because, in many cases, you won’t be able to be sure anyway. Focus most on what’s proximate to you and on the people most important to you. It sounds terrible, I know, because everyone who’s denoted as an “expert” or an “authority” isn’t necessarily unreliable, but that’s a good starting assumption. Be skeptical – about everyone. In communist countries, this was the norm: listen to what the establishment media say, to foreign sources if you can access them, and to anti-establishment dissidents (then it was samizdat, now it’s internet “conspiracy theorists” – but don’t get sucked in by Trojan Horses like the infamous Q.): then triangulate and take your best guess. There may be a cost. As Solzhenitsyn said, “He who chooses the lie as his principle inevitably chooses violence as his method.”
Secondly, as stewards of every worldly charge placed on us by God and by other people—as fathers and mothers, as husbands and wives, as sons and daughters, as neighbors, as students, as workers, as citizens, as patriots—we must prudently care for those to whom we have a duty within the limited power and wisdom allotted to us. Start with yourselves. Be as self-sufficient as possible. Get involved in your community; that leftist slogan is actually a good one: think globally, act locally. Befriend your neighbors. Learn a real skill – electricity, plumbing, carpentry. Farm! DON’T go to law school, for goodness’ sake. Get in shape. Eat and sleep right. Have plenty of the essentials: food, fuel, gold, ammunition. Learn to shoot. Limit computer and phone time. Cultivate healthy personal relationships – real ones, not virtual ones. Marry young, have kids – especially women, don’t get seduced by all that “career” nonsense. Read old books. Cultivate virtue. Go to church.
Simply being what used to be considered normal and leading a productive life is becoming the most revolutionary act one can perform. With that in mind, find the strength to be revolutionaries indeed!
You’ve seen the meme: Hard times create strong men; Strong men create good times; Good times create weak men; Weak men create hard times. Well, take it from the weakling generation that brought them to you: the hard times, they is a-coming. But they won’t last forever. If you live through them – and some of you will not – we’ll see what possibilities, as of now literally unimaginable, might then exist. But you will need to be personally fit to take advantage of them. You will also need to be part of some kind of sustainable community of likeminded people.
Third, for those of you who are believers, particularly Christians, we must pray without ceasing, firm in faith that, through whatever hardships may lie ahead, even the very hairs of our head are all numbered, and the final triumph of Truth is never in doubt.
Thank you, and good luck. You’re going to need it.
