Dear Friends,
Be careful what you wish for. Last week I wrote that I was tired of writing about Nazis and nationalists, so I mentally laid it all aside and turned my attention to current events. Yikes.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has been involved in a torrid three-year extramarital affair with former Trump advisor Cory Lewandowski. Republican Representative Lauren Boebert was kicked out of a theater for engaging in extremely lewd behavior with her boyfriend. A Democrat candidate in Virginia named Susanna Gibson live-streamed sex acts with her husband for money. A few weeks ago Republican Representative Nancy Mace felt entirely comfortable telling a Tim Scott prayer breakfast that she was so excited to be there that she’d declined fornicating with her boyfriend that morning.
If you’re getting the feeling that we are governed by degenerates, it is probably because we are governed by degenerates. That’s depressing enough, but what is more depressing is watching people defend the aforementioned behavior using every possible rationalization. The other side is worse! Yeah, but at least they fight! We elect politicians, not pastors! We’re in a war and it’s no time to be morality policing! On and on it goes. The Right, in particular, has become very desensitized to immorality. They will seemingly rationalize anything. I wonder if anybody predicted that would happen way back when they were falling in love with a thrice-married philanderer who cheated on his third wife with a porn star. And then paid her off to keep her mouth shut.
Oh, and that fellow, over the past few days, said that passing pro-life legislation is “terrible.” And he couldn’t say whether a man can become a woman. Odd comments coming from the Republican frontrunner. That’s not to mention that he’s getting old and tired. In a speech over the weekend he repeatedly confused Obama and Biden, and talked of a coming “World War II.” Joe Biden is not the only one losing a step or two.
Ben Crenshaw wrote four thousand-some-odd words on how condescending and irrelevant I am.
It’s a long-winded admission that Dr. Sandlin and I were correct. He admits that “the pre-political is, in a sense, swallowed up by the political.” And then he says this doesn’t mean “what Mattson thinks it must.” I never said anything about must; I said something “bothered me.” Namely, that it is a prime rationale for Statism. You retain your God-given, natural, pre-political rights only to the extent the body politic allows you to. Once the powers-that-be decide that your rights get in the way of some nebulous “common good,” so much for that—like, to choose one of a thousand examples, the city of New London, Connecticut deciding that private property rights had to be subordinated to the “common good” of building condos. Something tells me Crenshaw might have disagreed with the Kelo decision. Be that as it may, he says nothing at all to assuage my concern. He just breezily says that it means the “political must incorporate natural and divine law within its customs and civil law in order to be just in the sight of God.” Oh, okay. Statism will be just fine because the State is going to make justice “in the sight of God” their guiding light. That is a utopian fever dream and precisely why our Founders put shackles on Leviathan.
More importantly, Crenshaw admits to being a revolutionary. He doesn’t believe the United States is a constitutional republic any longer—which, if we are to take him at his word, means he doesn’t believe it a legitimate government at all. And I’d like you to read his final paragraph and ask yourself: what does this actually mean?
My call for extra-constitutional measures to restore American self-government is reasonable and prudent given the fact that we no longer effectively live under the Constitution—and the fact that the other side has been doing this a long time. We must act politically, not just constitutionally. We must not be hampered (as Movement Conservatism has for so long) by an artificial loyalty to mindless procedural norms that are impotent to preserve America, let alone renew or restore her. We are not yet at the point of appealing to the God of Heaven, but that day might soon be here. Let us throw off the shackles of the failed conservative movement and do what we can to forestall that terrible day.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what this means because these guys never actually come out and say what they mean. I surmise that the phrase “at the point of appealing to the God of Heaven” is a euphemism for a call to arms. If he really believed all his amped-up rhetoric (e.g., “America in 2023 is no longer a constitutional republic or a democracy”) that is what he ought to be issuing. And while he may think that he’s trying to “forestall” that terrible day, a really good way of hastening it is to insist on the “extra-constitutional measures” he calls reasonable and prudent. It seems to me he’s actually recklessly fomenting civil war, but thus far lacks the courage of his convictions.
I’m from Montana and I’ve seen this movie before.
But Mr. Crenshaw can rest assured that should that terrible day come, his publisher has a well-armed, multimillion dollar compound in which he can hole up. Of course, his publisher is also the guy who sold the illegitimate, tyrannical government the ammunition they’ll be using. You can’t beat the season scriptwriters for 2023.
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