On 20th January Trump officially took over again as President. Last month he was invited to ring the opening bell at the Wall Street Stock Exchange. I watched in amazement as sober suited stockbrokers not only burst into applause but cheered him enthusiastically and then started chanting “USA… USA…. USA!” Welcome to the conservative reformation.
Another noteworthy image was Trump’s triumphant return to the world stage at the opening of Notre-Dame cathedral. All and sundry were paying obeisance to the Donald. And how fitting that it happened at the opening of the restored cathedral. The beauty of the cathedral was breathtaking, a clear symbol of the magnificence of Western heritage and culture. Maybe it is now dawning on all the sceptics that Trump’s 2016 election was not a mistake, but a turning point and that he may turn out to be one of the most consequential presidents in American history.
Trump’s return is quite astonishing, but he is an astonishing man. Few people manage to be successful in one career; he has had three successful careers in vastly different fields: property, TV and politics. The deep state, the techno-managerial complex, the liberal elite, the uni-party or whatever you want to call it has done everything possible to destroy him: two impeachments; ninety-one indictments; an organised ‘resistance’ to and in his first administration; never-ending lies and vilification in the media; using the legal system in an attempt to bankrupt him, to prevent him from standing for re-election and if possible, jail him; and even two attempts to kill him.
Yet here he is, the next president of the USA and probably already the most powerful man in the world. How interesting that he is far more powerful now than he would have been if he had won the 2020 election. Just look at the team that has gathered around him: from the impressive, straight-forward but thoughtful J.D. Vance through a charismatic, enthusiastic Vivek Ramaswami, an American of Indian descent, to Tulsi Gabbard, JFK Jnr, our own Elon Musk, the richest and most creative entrepreneurial genius in the world today, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Elise Stefanik and the new border tsar, Tom Homan.
When last, anywhere in the world, have we seen such an impressive line-up of young, thoughtful, strong, capable people. This is a tough cabinet. Even the women are tough, from Tulsi Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the army, through Elise Stefanik, best known for her ruthless exposure of the moral bankruptcy of the elite universities, to Kristi Noem, a rural woman capable of taking the tough action to personally end the life of a problematic dog. There are no bleeding-heart liberals here; this is a welcome return to the best of conservative masculinity and difficult decisions. Actions will be taken on what needs to be done rather than on a concern about how people feel. The Donald’s ‘fight, fight, fight’ response to the attempt to assassinate him was the essence of this return of masculinity.
Something different
This is Trump’s moment, but it is not Trump’s movement. It is something different – it is a broad movement which Trump currently leads. He has not created it. It has created him, and it extends far beyond the political world into a conservative re-formation in history, psychology, religion, science, society and culture. It is an overturning of corrupt western liberalism.
At the recent Democratic Party convention, where Kamala Harris was disastrously imposed as an identity-politics candidate, one of the conference themes was the problem of testosterone in society and it was reported that a medical facility was provided for men to come forward to have their cojones cut off. I don’t know whether this story is apocryphal, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if it were true. So the glorious feminist movement, (starting with Emmeline Pankhurst who bravely fought for women’s rights); having destroyed innocent lives through the hysteria of the ‘me too’ movement and having recently decried masculinity as toxic, has reached the point where it is advocating for men to be, literally, castrated.
I cannot think of a clearer indication that Western liberalism has become corrupt, toxic and no longer fit-for-purpose. In the UK the corruption prize goes to the police, legal establishment, politicians, social services and feminists who knew about, but refused to do anything about, the repeated gang-rape of thousands of young Christian, Hindu and Sikh girls.
The Western liberal establishment has corrupted every institution which it controls. This is not unusual; it is often how the world works: systems over time become ossified and corrupt. And that today is Western liberalism and the liberal world order.
In his prescient book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch detailed how the elite are ruling in their own interest with little regard to the general man-in-the-street. Bernie Sanders, a notable Democrat, has decried the recent shift of wealth from the middle and working class to the elite. In the last two years the top 1% have captured 63% of the wealth in the world. During the 2008 financial crisis, which was caused by the greed and malfeasance of the financial institutions, the ruling establishment protected its shareholding assets by bailing out the banks using tax-payers’ money. Those bank shares are now worth more than ever, so wealth was effectively moved from the man-in-the-street to the wealthy elite. The liberal elite has vigorously promoted globalisation, which again caused their stockholding value to increase dramatically but left huge swathes of the USA and Europe as a rust belt, causing a huge increase in poverty and unemployment.
Immigration
Throughout Europe and the USA, the liberal establishment has encouraged an unprecedented increase in immigration which has benefited large business and agriculture by depressing wages, seemingly with no regard or recognition of the harm that it has caused to societies and cultures. The cost to the taxpayer has been significant and it has created backlogs in social services and housing for the working class. The liberal elite has hidden the class nature of this significant shift in wealth through the promotion of identity politics. The divisions in society, according to this approach, are not between social classes but between the “oppressed”: blacks, and the whole LGBT+ alphabet; and the “oppressors”: mainly white heterosexual males.
So, no matter how wealthy and privileged you are (like the Obamas whose wealth is estimated at almost $70 million), if you are black, you are oppressed. (Michelle Obama recently claimed that she is oppressed!). And no matter how poor you are, if you are white, you are privileged. As we have seen in South Africa, identity politics does not benefit poor black people, it only further enriches the black section of the elite. That this deception is no longer working was shown in the recent USA election. Blacks and Hispanics, led by men, are recognising that their class situation is the same as that of the working class of other races and are moving to support the Republicans.
A side issue is that, hopefully, the new conservative movement will allow black people to remove the curse of victimhood from their shoulders.
The Twitter files, released by Musk when he bought Twitter, showed the extent to which the media has become corrupted by its collusion with the liberal establishment; no longer journalists who pursue the truth so that the people have the information to make rational decisions in elections; instead they now promote a specific narrative based on a false premise of morality. The refusal to address issues which concern the poor and working class; the lies and misinformation pushed by the media during the Covid epidemic, the lies about the Hunter Biden laptop; the lies about President Biden’s mental abilities; the lies about Trump, have made many Americans aware of the corruption of the legacy media. Surveys show that less than 25% of the general population in the USA trust the media. Even among Democratic Party supporters, trust is less than 50%.
Conservatives
Starting under Obama, the USA legal system and administrative state was corrupted by being weaponised against conservatives and political opponents. The attack has not only been against Trump, but also against a range of individual conservatives and conservative organisations including Christian churches. Over 4,000 people were arrested during the BLM riots, yet not one person was charged or jailed. Compare that to the thousands of people charged and jailed for the January 6th riots at the US Capitol. Some people who were not even at the riots were charged with sedition and received prison sentences of up to 20 years. In the UK, the Prime Minister is known as two-tier Keir, resulting from the different approach taken by his government against conservative protesters whom he describes as ‘far-right thugs’ as opposed to those supporting Hamas.
Using the epidemic as an excuse, the electoral system in the USA was corrupted by the Democratic party in the 2020 election. Using a donation of over $500 million from Mark Zuckerberg, left-wing NGOs greatly influenced the electoral process in many states. The Democrats removed the need to show identification before voting, claiming that it was racist and a form of ‘voter suppression’; the use of ‘ballot harvesting’ allowed Democratic operatives to selectively collect ballots and deliver them anonymously to drop-boxes; a highly organised legal campaign to change electoral rules in many states resulted in advantages to the Democratic party. The result was a highly inflated number of votes cast for the Democrats. According to Wikipedia: “Despite taking place during an epidemic, the election saw the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900. Biden received more than 81 million votes; the most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate in US history.” So a pathetic non-entity president received more votes than iconic figures like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama? During a major epidemic?
The corruption of academia at elite universities has long been a discussion topic among conservatives, but it was on full display in the response to the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. Academic corruption is more than this. It is the silencing of any dissenting voices, even prestigious ones like Jay Bhattacharya, especially during the pandemic; it is preventing conservatives from speaking at campuses; it is the refusal of university administrations to fund conservative student organisations; it is the refusal of funding for any research which questions the elite liberal narrative; it is the perversion of the scientific method in the pursuit of that narrative, especially the approach to the issue of transition among young transgender people; it is the removal of conservative academics and it is the imposition of the deceitfully named Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
The liberal penchant for regulation has made it very difficult to get anything done. In her book Ten Years to Save the West, Liz Truss speaks of her time in government and how regulations and a self-perpetuating uncooperative bureaucracy make it impossible to get anything major done. Elon Musk has pointed out that it took SpaceX longer to get approval than it did to develop their rocket. The regulations required the submission of fifteen thousand pages and each one had to be stamped with the company stamp and provided in hard copy rather than electronically.
Liberal corruption
This liberal corruption has called forth a conservative revival. The new conservative movement which includes many old-style liberals extends far beyond the political. For decades, while the left disappeared down the rabbit hole of identity politics, a conservative ferment has been bubbling in the background, mainly in the podcast world. There has been a re-evaluation of conservative values; what we mean by conservative; of the role of religion and of the importance of the nation state and a rediscovery of Classic and Enlightenment thought. Movements have developed like the National Conservative movement which calls for a greater emphasis on the family, community and the nation as opposed to individual rights, and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) which brings together diverse conservative voices.
For years the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has been attracting audiences of thousands to hour-long intellectual discussions. His media presence and books have changed the lives of thousands of young men. The historian, now Sir, Niall Ferguson is a hugely important critical analyst and observer. The thoughts and input of black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury have added shape to the debate. Elon Musk is an example of the power of American entrepreneurship and a defender of free speech; Bill Ackman has had an impact in the business sphere. Douglas Murray in his book The Strange Death of Europe explores how Europe is committing cultural suicide by allowing in millions of immigrants who have a different culture and values incompatible with traditional Western values. Matt Goodwin, David Starkey, Roger Scruton, and Americans like Vivek Ramaswami, Victor Davis Hanson, the Weinstein brothers and Joe Rogan have all made a significant contribution to the movement.
The opening of Notre-Dame was also fitting, considering the current ferment and renewed interest in Christianity. We are not talking here of the liberal theology of the current Pope who recently degraded his Christmas message by including a political attack on Israel, or the Anglican church which David Starkey described as the only church in Western history whose leaders do not believe in God.
Rather it is a return to the basics of Jewish and Christian religious thought. Jordan Peterson is one of the leading lights in this movement. His recent series of podcast workshops with notable intellects deciphering the Book of Exodus and the Gospels is strangely interesting and compelling. These workshops show the inherent wisdom in both the Old and the New Testament. There is an increasing recognition of the extent to which Western culture is infused with Judeo-Christian thinking.
Baptised
The historian and podcaster Tom Holland has been instrumental in showing how the basis of Western thought and morality has its seminal grounding in Judeo-Christian thinking. There is an increasing revival of Christianity in the USA and Europe. Prominent people like Jordan Peterson and Niall Ferguson have declared themselves to be Christian, and Ferguson’s wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has converted from Islam and speaks convincingly about the importance of Western thought and culture. The actor, Denzel Washington, was recently baptised at the age of 70.
It is an interesting time of change, and it is likely that Trump’s victory will reverberate throughout the Western world and will give impetus to the conservative revival, which is already under way politically in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Austria, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. So get your popcorn and sit back to watch the return of the best of Western and, ironically, liberal values, and let us see how it impacts on South Africa.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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