Nov. 17, 2018 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Good evening.
Good evening, one and all.
This is not James Edwards, of course.
This is Winston Smith.
James is out doing something.
He didn't tell me what, but he asked me to fill in for him this evening.
And as always, it's my pleasure to do so.
We should just dive right in.
We have a guest tonight on the second hour.
I'm going to be talking with a nutritional therapist, and we're going to discuss getting into shape and getting healthy.
But for the first hour, we're going to welcome a frequent guest to the political cesspool, Mr. Mark Weber.
Mr. Mark Weber.
I'm sorry, folks.
I have been struggling with a respiratory issue lately, and I've been taking a steroid to help deal with it.
And it kind of throws me off sometimes.
So just bear with me.
We'll muddle through tonight.
But again, we have Mark Weber with us.
He's a frequent political cesspool host.
He's a fan favorite.
He is the director for the Institute for Historical Review, a fine organization.
You can tell by the enemies it has.
And Mark is very well educated.
He's been educated in America and in Europe.
He's a gifted author and lecturer.
And it's our pleasure to have him on tonight.
Mark, how are you?
Hello. Hello.
Do we have Mark Webber?
Okay.
Folks, I've just been informed that something has happened to Mark Weber, and our producer is trying to get him back on the phone.
Again, I don't know where James is, but he contacted me and asked if I would fill in for him.
And here I am.
And now I've got to find something with which to fill the time while we try to get Mark Weber back on.
So I'm going to go to one of my favorite Facebook pages.
And we're going to learn what is racist these days.
Racism is everywhere, even where you least expect it.
Hello.
And we're going to talk about it.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello, Mark Weber.
Yeah, we got caught off.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, for some reason, I heard you, but you didn't hear me, apparently.
But I'm back on now.
Oh, excellent.
Good.
I was struggling to find what to do there.
It's part of the joys of live radio, is it not?
Yes, that's right.
All right.
Now, in the workup to tonight's broadcast, James was adamant that I asked you about a phone call between you and he, and he said it was an enthralling conversation.
He wouldn't give me any details, but he was adamant that I ask you about it for the benefit of the political Cesspool audience.
So I asked you, what was that all about?
What did you two discuss?
Well, we covered, I was speaking the other evening with James, and it was in preparation for this broadcast about what to speak about, and we were on for an hour or so, something like that.
And he thought it was a great conversation.
We covered so much that it's hard to remember everything.
I think we began by talking about the recent election.
What does this mean?
And he said that would be suitable.
I made the point that I try to look at American elections much more from the viewpoint of the forest rather than the trees.
I'm not so much interested in particular races and so forth, but what the most recent midterm elections tells us as part of a longer term trend or trajectory in American political life.
I guess the main takeaway are two things.
The recent election shows that the continuing demographic shift in America, which also means a political shift to the Democratic Party and the left, is continuing in the country.
And second, the change of the House of Representatives to the Democratic Party means that it's now very unlikely that President Trump is going to succeed, even if he pushes now to fulfill many of the most important pledges he made during the campaign.
And I'm thinking especially of his pledge about building the wall with the Mexican border.
So that means that the Trump administration is going to be less able now with the new House in place to succeed in fulfilling those pledges.
Now, we've been warned that should the Democrats succeed in taking back the House of Representatives in this election, that their main focus is going to be on impeachment.
We've also realized that the Democrats probably will not be able to impeach President Trump.
It's a very tall order because they simply have no evidence, no facts, nothing to support impeachment.
And with the Senate having to approve any sort of impeachment proceedings, that's not likely to happen.
Right.
I want to focus on what's likely not to happen, but what's likely about the administration.
It means that it's very unlikely now, I think, that any wall is going to be built.
It's very unlikely that Obamacare is going to be repealed or replaced.
It means that a large part of the agenda that Americans had expected, I think, from the Trump administration is less likely now that the Republican control of the House of Representatives has been lost.
But wasn't this to be expected?
Because historically, the party that's not of the president's party in the House of Representatives usually does flip it during the first term midterms.
That's been the same.
That's right.
That's true.
It's been in those circle patterns for decades.
Right, right.
But I put a focus on the wall because as Ann Coulter said, if that wall isn't built, the legacy of the Trump administration is going to be a pretty empty one.
And more than that, Ann Coulter even went so far as to say if the wall isn't built, it's finished for the Republican Party, for the Trump administration, and she said for America.
Now, that may be an exaggeration, of course, but that's a larger thing.
You know, the other point, too, is just how demographically the country is changing.
I'm calling we're talking here.
I'm in Orange County, California.
I remember when Orange County back in the 60s and 70s was a bastion of Republican conservatism.
At one time, there was only one congressman from Orange County, and he was a member of the John Birch Society publicly.
Orange County was this bulwark of conservative Republicanism.
Now, in this recent midterm, two Republican congressional districts here have switched from Republican to Democrat.
Congressman Rohrbacher, who's been in place for 30 years, was replaced by a Democrat.
And Mimi Walters, who's an incumbent of all things, she was replaced by a Democrat who is very leftist.
Now, if that's a trend here in Orange County, it's part of a larger trend happening across the country.
The recent election is a little bit different.
Mark, I have to interrupt you.
We're coming up on a break, so hang on.
We'll pick you up as soon as we get back from the break.
Okay, very good.
Scott Bradley here.
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It's time to jump back into the political cesspool.
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Welcome back, my friends.
Welcome back to tonight's broadcast of the Political Cesspool.
I'm Winston Smith sitting here for James Edwards, and I'm on the phone with Mark Weber, the director for the Institute for Historical Review.
And before we went to the break, we were discussing demographics and the political shift in Orange County, California, and the meaning and lessons of the recent midterm elections and what they portend for the future of America and for our people.
So, Mark, pick up where you left off, please.
Well, going beyond that, I guess a bigger point and one that James Edwards and I were talking about during the other week is how in American political life, conservatives are really losing and inevitably must lose because they're not even playing the same game as millions of other people in American political life.
Many conservatives want to still treat the country like it used to be in the 1950s or 60s or 40s demographically, but the country has really changed and political life has changed.
Conservatives often criticize what's called identity politics.
We hear a lot about identity politics, and it means politics that is driven by, motivated by activism based on race, ethnicity, and gender.
And over and over, conservatives try very hard to avoid identity politics and say, well, we're just all Americans.
We should all be looking out for what's good for all of us as Americans.
Whereas our adversaries, you could say, are playing identity politics.
They're appealing to the interests of people as blacks or Jewish or Hispanic or whatever.
But identity politics is really serious politics because the identity of a country is really crucial.
And as long as conservatives try to make their pitch and to win on the basis that the country is still what it used to be, they inevitably will lose because identity politics is really hardball politics.
And everybody, in a sense, recognizes that.
For example, probably the group in America that plays hardball politics very seriously is the Jewish community.
Jewish leaders are overwhelmingly serious, active, conscientious supporters for the interests of the Jewish community.
They don't pretend to say, well, we're just for everybody.
They push for the interests of their own community.
And conservatives even applaud that.
But they're very afraid to embrace or support identity politics when it comes to people of white or European or Christian background in the country.
And that means that inevitably then, conservatives will lose out because they're not even playing the same political game, the same hardball game that other groups are playing in American political life.
Mark, I think there's a reason for that.
It's because white people don't want to engage in identity politics because the very second we do, we are bombarded with every filthy name in the book.
We are called everything from Klansmen to white supremacists to white nationalists.
And there's no escaping the assault upon any white person who wants to lay claim to any sort of white nationalism, whereas every other ethnicity in America is encouraged to engage in identity politics.
For white people, it's not only discouraged, it's downright dangerous.
As soon as you start behaving and embracing identity politics as a white person, you are in danger of losing your job.
You're in danger of becoming a social pariah.
That's exactly right.
You're exactly right.
And that means that many people then are just simply afraid.
They're simply worried about being called names and so forth.
But that's life.
That's what it's come down to in America.
And as long as people keep silent about issues and are willing to play with one hand tied behind their back, so to speak, they inevitably will lose.
But that's why speaking forthrightly and openly about these issues is absolutely crucial.
Fortunately, the system is falling apart.
I mean, I think it's a fair thing to say, and it's shown by public opinion polls, that the vast majority of Americans have lost faith and trust in the major institutions and especially in the media in America.
But that should make it more possible, or at least encourage people then, to first and foremost say what's truthful and to embrace reality.
Because as long as the reality that race and ethnicity do matter and they are important, as long as people refuse to embrace that reality, then there's no real hope or future at all.
I think that once most or more white people accept the fact that no matter what we say or do or think or write, we're going to be called those names that I mentioned earlier.
As far as the left is concerned, as far as the left's identity politics are concerned, white people don't even have a legitimate right to participate in the discussion because we're inherently racist or we benefit from white privilege and all these crazy notions,
which are really just psychological coping devices that racists of color use to deal with the acute feelings of inferiority that they feel when they're in the presence of their superiors.
Well, I think throughout history, it's right and proper for every ethnic and racial and cultural group to defend itself and its own integrity.
That's not necessarily at all motivated by feelings of inferiority.
It's a very natural thing.
Just as every family puts the interests of its family first and doesn't try to placate the feelings of every family, I mean, race or ethnicity or nation is just in a sense an extended family.
And promoting the interests and the future of one's own group is entirely natural.
It's not a bad thing.
It's an entirely natural and good thing.
In fact, a necessary thing.
In the years before the United States broke away from Britain, the question of identity was crucial in the decades before the Declaration of Independence.
And the question for most Americans at that time was, well, are we first and foremost Americans or are we British subjects?
Are we loyal to the monarch or are we loyal to a separate country called the United States called the United States of America?
And identity politics is really serious politics.
There's nothing shameful or wrong about that.
The proof of that is that leftists applaud identity politics or national promotion of national interests for every other group except, of course, white European Americans.
I tend to think of identity politics as nothing more than tribal warfare in better clothes.
See, it doesn't have to be warfare.
Just as one doesn't declare war on other families by having a love for and a firm loyalty to the interests of one's own family, promoting the interests of one's own nation does not at all necessarily mean, of course, that one is declaring war on other groups or other families.
That's a fundamentally wrong idea.
The world is very diverse.
We live in a world of many different cultures and ethnicities and nations, and that's entirely proper and the way it should be.
What you just said, I think, is true of white people.
That's the way we think.
However, I think that the non-white ethnicities in America have been so indoctrinated by paranoid liberalism that they really do think of whites as enemies, and they're at war with us.
They don't think like us.
They think like tribes.
And we'll have to get back to this when we come back from the break.
Stay with us, folks.
Winston Smith on a political cesspool with Mark Weber.
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dine at 1-866-986-6397.
Welcome back, my friends.
Welcome back to this evening's broadcast of the Political Cess Pool.
I'm Lincoln Smith, filling in for the Out and About James Edwards.
My pleasure to be here, especially since I'm having a conversation with Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, an organization that has all the right enemies.
And it's a pleasure to be with Mark.
And before we went to the break, I was making the point that white people, we have the ability to love our own without hating the non-white races that are in our midst.
In contrast, the non-white races are incapable of seeing white people as anything other than the oppressors, the enemies to be conquered and displaced, because their socialist leaders feed them such ideas constantly.
Socialism thrives when people are at each other's throats, when people are mad at each other, and people are filled with hate for each other.
Mark, your response?
What other people do should be less of a concern than what we do.
Every individual and every nation should try to do what is right and try to act in a way responsible and as charitable and as righteous as possible.
If other people respond with hatred, that's their fault.
That's bad.
But what's more important, I think, is what we do.
And we shouldn't be intimidated by the hostility or the name-calling or the smears that inevitably come when we act in a way that's in the interests of our own people and our own nation.
That's just obviously, to me, it should be so obvious.
It's something that every healthy people and every healthy nation understands around the world.
It's only in America, which millions of people say is supposed to be a country for everyone, in which the only thing that holds it together is an embrace of a liberal democratic ideology, that That's the odd thing in this country that the country is defined in that sort of way.
Anyway, I don't believe that inevitably other races or other groups or other nations are necessarily hostile any more than, oh, China and Korea should be able to get along, and they have to get along because they're neighbors, even if they're very distinctly different nations and cultures.
And that's true in Europe and so forth.
But just as families try to do what's best for their family without being enemies or hostile to other families, that should also be true of nations.
Earlier in our conversation, you alluded to the shift in American politics, American ideology.
And I'd like to discuss that with you if we could.
And you have mentioned in speeches that over the past century, conservatism has changed to the point that it's nigh indistinguishable from liberalism of just a few decades ago.
Now, I read you right on that.
I put it a little differently.
Conservatives end up supporting positions that liberals had 10 years earlier.
On issue after issue, conservatives have a long record of retreat and giving up on issues.
You know, I mean, I remember in the 60s, conservatives were adamantly opposed to Medicare.
Medicare, they said, is socialized medicine.
At one time, conservatives opposed Social Security.
Now there's not a single conservative, a politician that I know of, who is in favor of dismantling Social Security or Medicare.
Now, in fact, conservatives say they want to protect Social Security and Medicare.
By the same token, conservatives a few years ago opposed very strongly the Affordable Health Care Act, the Obamacare, but the interest in overturning or repealing that has diminished tremendously in the last few years, and very likely that conservatives are going to end up sanctioning or approving that just as they have every other program.
At one time, conservatives were opposed to Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday.
When Ronald Reagan was campaigning for president, he said he did not support, would not support Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday.
But then when he became president, he actually signed the bill into law to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday.
My point is that over the years, conservatives have retreated and abandoned one position after another because their principles are really pretty flabby.
They want small government.
They say they are in favor of individual liberty.
But over the span of time, they retreat and retreat because they cannot and do not even try now to lay out a very compelling or certainly inspiring vision of the kind of America that they do want.
This is because in the discussion, conservatives really, a conservative country is less important than a country of one's own kind and one's own people.
What would conservatives prefer living in a liberal, big government country like Denmark or a small government country like Haiti?
Well, it's obvious because the most important thing is not whether the government is big or small or whether the tariffs are high or low or whether the income tax is high or low.
It's whether it's one's own people and one's own community that's really more important.
Your idea of conservatism being nothing more than a lagging liberalism is something that is not new.
Back in the 1880s, I believe it was, the great Southern Presbyterian theologian, Robert Lewis Dabney, had this to say.
It's a little bit of a long quote, but if you can bear with me, Mark, I think you'll have something to say about it.
And this is what Robert Lewis Dabney says.
It may be inferred again that the present movement for women's rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only proponent, Northern conservatism.
This is a party which never conserves anything.
Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the Progressive Party and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.
What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism.
It is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
Got a message on my computer here.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.
Any comment on that?
Right.
Well, that's well put, and it's certainly not a new idea.
But my point, and I think the lesson from that, is therefore it's important to not put hopes in just simply tapping on the brakes of the engine that's going ahead.
It's not enough to be the caboose in the train that's going in this direction.
And if conservatives do nothing more than just try to put on the brakes in these trends, the outcome is inevitable.
It's not going to, it's obvious where this is going.
And many people have seen this in American history and American life, like the person you just quoted.
But that means then there needs to be a fundamentally different outlook by people who call themselves conservative and merely, I mean, the question ought to be for conservatives, what is it you want to conserve?
What are you trying to conserve, really?
And what's more important, what is ultimately important is the identity and the definition of a society and a nation, not whether the taxes are high or low or whether the government is a big one or a smaller one.
It's the identity and the character of a country and a people that's fundamentally much more important than those issues that conservatives often emphasize.
Now, when you ask the question, what is it that conservatives want to conserve, how do they usually answer that?
I find that they'll say two things.
First of all, they say, well, we want individual freedom.
Well, that's fine.
But if that's true, then conservatives ought to be happy about the direction America is going in because in many ways, Americans have many more freedoms than we had in the 1920s or 30s or 40s.
Now we have the freedom.
Men can marry men.
Women can marry women.
That didn't used to be the case.
It used to be illegal for people of different races to marry people of other races.
Those freedoms are, those are freedoms, quote unquote, that we have today that we didn't used to have.
Abortion used to be illegal in the United States.
Homosexual behavior in America wasn't a right.
It was a crime.
It was treated, it was punished.
Jobs were segregated by both gender and by race in American life for much of the history.
So, in some ways, there's more freedom than there used to be.
Hey, Mark, we're coming up on a break.
You sticking around for the next segment?
Okay, that's fine.
Yep, excellent.
Stay with us, folks.
We'll be right back with Mark Weber and Winston Smith on tonight's broadcast of The Political Cesspool.
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
Welcome back, my friends.
Welcome back to this evening's broadcast of the Political Cesspool.
I'm Winston Smith.
Filling in, if that's ever even possible, for the ever popular James Edwards.
And I'm having a fascinating conversation with Mark Edwards, the director of the Institute for Historical Review.
You can find out more about the Institute for Historical Review at their website, www.ihr.org.
That's www.ihr.org.
You can find a ton of fascinating reading material.
And it's worth your time.
As I've said before this evening, it's an organization that has all the right enemies, so you should check them out.
Beg your pardon for that cough there.
Before we went to the break, Mark was telling us about one of the two things that conservatives answer with when they are asked about what they are trying to conserve.
And Mark had made the point that the first thing they say is freedom.
And he pointed out that we have more freedom today than we had back, than Americans had back in the 30s.
And some of the examples that he gave were abortion and gay rights, among other things.
And yes, these are freedoms.
They are very bad freedoms, but freedoms nonetheless.
So Mark, would you like to pick up where you left off?
Yeah, I mean, if we go back to, I mean, when I was a boy, and for much of American history, you couldn't buy a pair of clothes, a pair of pants or a hammer on a Sunday afternoon in the United States.
Because in America, up until the 50s or 60s, stores were all closed on Sundays.
You couldn't go to a Walmart on a Sunday.
You didn't have Walmart.
But because there was still a residual respect for the traditions of Christianity.
So stores were all closed on Sunday.
Now we have the freedom to buy things on Sunday and every day of the week.
Gambling is now far more widespread than it used to be.
That's more of a freedom.
Now, I'm not saying this is good or bad, but if individual freedom is the most important thing, marijuana is legal now.
It didn't used to be.
I mean, there's many more quote-unquote freedoms, but that's not the most important thing in a society.
A healthy society isn't a society characterized just by more individual freedom.
It's characterized by what serves the long-term well-being and health of the people who make that society, who make up that society.
The second answer that I often get from when I ask people, well, what are you trying to conserve?
They'll say the Constitution.
Well, the Constitution, even from a conservative point of view, has been twisted out of any all recognizable from right away it was when it was originally set up by the Constitutional Convention.
In fact, it's hard to believe today that any conservative would be in favor of the kind of society of the founding fathers.
You know, the Constitution itself was made by a small, 55 men meeting in secret.
They worked this out by pledging first that there would be no revelation of their discussions to the public before it took place.
But originally, the Constitution was set up in such a way that the presidency, the Senate, were not even to be elected by the people in any direct way.
It was only over a period of time that that changed in American life.
But one of the very first tests of the scope of the Constitution came in the very first administration of George Washington when George Washington and Alexander Hamilton approved a central bank for the United States, the Bank of the United States.
And Thomas Jefferson opposed it, saying, well, it's not laid.
That authority is not laid out in the Constitution.
But ever since then, the Constitution has been stretched out of all from stretched immensely from what it was when it was originally made.
Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad, but a Constitution is not the most important thing for a society.
Many countries, well, Britain, for example, doesn't even have a written constitution.
Haiti has a great constitution.
It's, in fact, largely copied after the U.S. Constitution.
A country is not healthy or good or bad depending on its constitution.
It's the character and quality of its people that's really essential.
After all, the Constitution of the United States that we have today isn't even the first Constitution.
There was one before that, the Articles of Confederation.
Countries live and prosper or do well or do badly, not according to their Constitution, but according to the mores and the attitudes and the character of the people of that society, because no Constitution can keep a country from being ignorant or being corrupt or being crime-ridden.
Constitution is just an instrument of government.
It can be a good one, it can be a bad one, but the health of a society is far more than just what the government does or how it operates.
Earlier, you made some references to Ronald Reagan.
And to this day, many conservatives, even those who would call themselves paleoconservatives, point to Ronald Reagan as the example of what American conservatism should be.
But the older I get and the more I learn about Reagan, I find that he is not what we are told he was or what we thought he was.
I mean, admittedly, he was a very attractive politician.
He was upbeat and he made Americans feel good about themselves after the calamitous Carter administration.
But he actually did several very bad things.
Could you enlarge on that?
Well, when you ask conservatives, well, what political leaders of the last 50, 80 years do you admire?
And invariably, the one that conservatives point to is Ronald Reagan.
And he was called the great communicator for a good reason.
He had been an actor.
He gave great speeches.
He made people feel good about themselves and about the country.
But the actual record of his administration is very different than what many conservatives, especially today, would like.
Reagan could not, a man running on the platform of Reagan's actual policies as president wouldn't even get nominated today.
I mean, the most obvious example was over the issue of immigration.
It was Ronald Reagan that signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which legalized about 3 million illegal aliens in the United States.
And this is not surprising.
It's not a mistake.
This is consistent with Ronald Reagan's view that America is a colorblind country that should be open to everybody in the world who loves, as he put it, who loves freedom.
Well, if loving freedom is the litmus test or the criteria by which Americans should be welcomed to this country, well, there's hundreds of millions of people that are ready to come in then.
But that's not, that again underscores this notion that Reagan embraced of America as a universal country.
A universal country is a country, therefore, that cannot have a real cultural or racial or ethnic or religious identity of its own.
And that's inherent in the kind of policies that Reagan actually carried out.
I mean, most of all, Reagan campaigned for a small government.
He wanted to reduce the size of government.
He specifically promised to eliminate the Department of Education.
But in fact, he greatly increased the federal government during his administrations, his two terms.
Both the military spending was greatly increased and non-military spending was increased during the Reagan administration.
And he enormously increased the federal deficit during his terms.
But he made people feel good, and they more or less ignored a lot of that.
And that, again, underscores the point earlier about how shabby and really empty the actual record of American conservatism actually is.
Can we point to something that has guided American thinking, American sentiment on this notion of America as a country for everyone?
Well, this is really crucial because it goes to the core of the heart of the question of identity.
What does it mean to be American?
And today there's a tremendous debate taking place in this country.
It's prompted, for example, over the big discussion about this caravan coming up to the border of the United States.
If loving America or loving freedom is the criteria for letting people in, well, I guess we should let the caravan in.
Actually, Jimmy Carter welcomed the people who were released from jails and mental hospitals in Cuba to the United States because he's trying to be very warm-hearted and open.
But Americans have been, so this question of identity is really crucial.
If we return to what Americans used to believe up until the 1940s or 30s, there was a understanding and a broad consensus that America is a country of people from Europe and that the identity of America is a Western European identity.
But even conservatives, beginning especially in the 40s and 50s, began supporting this idea of America as a universal country.
It's a microcosm of humanity.
Well, again, if that's the definition of America, then maintaining any kind of specific racial, cultural, religious identity becomes impossible.
In one speech that you've given, you referenced the Statue of Liberty and how the famous poem that's inscribed thereon has become something of a burden to America.
Could you talk about that?
Well, Mark, I'm sorry.
It looks like we've come to the end of the hour.
Okay.
I'm sorry about that.
Thanks very much for joining us, and I look forward to it.