Alienated and Radicalized
Posted on October 19th, 2009
by Patrick J. Buchanan |
|
In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” Tea Party activists, and town-hall dissenters.
Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be?
Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.”
Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.
“The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.
“We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you.”
Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.
And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them “un-American,” “Nazis,” and “evil-mongers,” one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.
As with Jimmy Carter’s long range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.
Yet, the establishment’s reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.
Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.
The “dirty, immoral war in Vietnam” explains why the “finest generation we have ever produced” is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the “root causes” of social disorder.
Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:
“Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year’s turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry … Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick ‘none’ — a grim statement.”
Is all this due to Obama’s race?
Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.
With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.
Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993, and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.
They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care, and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on — then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.
They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.
They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
Filed under: Politics
“They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.”
Mr Buchanan, what does bailed out banks have to do with affirmative action and the Obamas?
And, I think ALL color Americans are feeling the pinch and the loss and the resentment right now, not just the white ones.
Exactly right. The only thing I’d add would concern endless wars, bombing, killing.
Wow.
Really jonesing for a Race War aren’t you, Pat?
Thanks for the info on the “Oath Keepers”. I will look them up. Much of your column applies to me. Vietnam combat Vet from 1968. Lived in California my first 50 years until the East-Coast liberal transplants ran me out. Now registered to vote in Arizona as “declines to state”. Voted for Bush twice, but did not approve of the way the Republicans acted with a clear majority in both houses and the White House. They got nothing done, and would have gone through with another huge amnesty program for illegals if we hadn’t shouted them down.
As soon as Mark Lloyd, the FCC Diversity Czar, gets his Net Neutrality bill in place, we won’t have to worry anymore about whether your voice counts for anything.
The Plutocratic-Socialist elite (and I include the Bushcons, the Neocons the Gingrichites and Fox News in this category, right along with the limousine-liberal Democrat establishment) has been at odds with Christianity as the American moral authority in this country for decades, despite lip service from the establishment right-wing.
The American elite decided a long time ago to forsake America and serve itself via the combination of Big Government and Corporatism, which have supplanted Christianity, the Constitution, the American family and the American working man as the heart and soul of the country. And we all know the moral and ethical code to which Corporatism and Big Government subscribe. It’s called amoralism.
It may in fact take another revolution to shake off the corrupt parasite class and return moral authority to its rightful holder.
A dead center bullseye, right on!
Let the arrests begin. Not a single person affiliated with, or working in Washington D.C. today can escape the charge of TREASON.
We used to be free to carry guns on planes, until 1978 and Teddy Kennedy’s tricky “deregulation” of the airline industry. We used to be excited to fly, but now it is a horror show at the airports. We used to be free to protest, but now it is a horror show on the streets when we do, and the media don’t report our true numbers. We used to have dreams of spaceflight, but those have been shut down and turned over to bureau-rats to thwart us. It is not fun being American right now, beset by villainy on all sides. But it is still our country, and we’re going to have a lot of fun keeping it.
The liberal media and progressives will use the race card because, until now, it’s been an effective weapon.
They obviously cannot argue with the fact that America has elected a RADICAL president, nor accept the fact that Americans would be just as alarmed and outspoken if Hillary Clinton were POTUS.
Like a parent loses patience with a belligerent child, the public is losing it’s patience with liberals’ childish antics.
Jeez. I guess there must have been something about Pat’s piece that calls for a lot of ‘moderation’ before comments can be aired, eh?.
Of course, no one could have predicted…
Oh, now I can see them.
Wow.
It’s like seeing Peak-Wingnut through a kid’s telescope.
These people are easy enough to explain. They’re the petty bougeoisie who fear being treated like the proletariat (or lumpenproletariat), subject to the ruthless national security state. Only they never really were bourgeois, they only thought they were (thanks to white skin, easy credit, and cheap goods from China). They’re like the butler who identifies with his master. Suckers.
Tony J: “Really jonesing for a Race War aren’t you, Pat?”
What a stupid comment. If anyone is stirring race wars, its the Left: affirmative action that pits the races against each other, providing the Jewish lobby and its apparatus entrée into the highest levels of influence and government to incite wars against Israel’s enemies, encouraging racial organization by pandering to the Israel lobby, La Raza and the Black Caucus…etc, etc.
Unfortunately, the fuddy-duddy Statist-Corporatist Right figures decades of these insults to melting pot Americans who subscribe to an American code instead of a racial code can all be (profitably) papered over by starting a series of wars with Muslims.
America has been ill-served by its corrupt pharisaic elite, and a well-earned populist backlash by all the races is brewing. We’re sick and tired the scheming liars who claim to be our representatives but only represent their own interests and those of their cronies.
“What a stupid comment.(“Really jonesing for a Race War aren’t you, Pat?”)”
Ah, since it’s a comment on a piece where Pat gets all excited at the thought of armed militias waging a civil-war against your government in the name of White Evangelical Conservatism, no, it’s not. The word your looking for is ‘accurate’.
“If anyone is stirring race wars, its the Left: affirmative action that pits the races against each other, providing the Jewish lobby and its apparatus entrée into the highest levels of influence and government to incite wars against Israel’s enemies, encouraging racial organization by pandering to the Israel lobby, La Raza and the Black Caucus…etc, etc.”
This is the kind of cognative dissonance that has turned the conservative movement into an unelectable fringe group. Blaming ‘the Left’ for making Israel the 51st state and waging wars on its behalf has to be the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, even here. Where the hell were you for two terms of Bush, buddy? What, is he a lefty now?
“Unfortunately, the fuddy-duddy Statist-Corporatist Right figures decades of these insults to melting pot Americans who subscribe to an American code instead of a racial code can all be (profitably) papered over by starting a series of wars with Muslims.”
You mean, the Republican Party thought the far-right base was so stupid and easily led that they could be distracted from all the things the GOP wouldn’t do for them through legislation by giving them lashings of war-porn featuring non-American but still non-white people being blown up and pushed around? Damn right they did, and it worked like a charm for eight long years.
“America has been ill-served by its corrupt pharisaic elite, and a well-earned populist backlash by all the races is brewing. We’re sick and tired the scheming liars who claim to be our representatives but only represent their own interests and those of their cronies.”
‘Pharisaic’?
Oh, I get it now, how stupid of me. It’s that old time Judeo-Bolshevik Conspiracy line again, isn’t it?
Yeah. I’m sure all the races will becoming together to finally deal with Teh Jooz any day now. Bound to happen. Done deal.
-click - wrrrrrrrrrrr
Tony J - *snap*
It seems to me that Mr. Rhodes and company are on to something here which might be labeled “good” in the horrible grand scheme of existing things.
It strikes me, however, that the Oath Keepers are already a dead letter. For if its membership were truly awake, the bullets would already be flying at the monsters who rule America. For the reasons Jim Davidson and others name above, the betrayal of the Constitution is already so far along that this ought to have begun long ago.
“They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars….”
Yet they will mindlessly back the next useless war our government starts, and the next one, and the next one…..with no thought whatsoever of either morality or public debt.
Gotta “support our troops.”
Trust a politician . . .
They serve no one but themselves. Every single one of them.
And we, like absolute blooming idiots, keep electing them.
Makes sense.
No doubt these “Oath Keepers” have plenty to feel upset about, and if they refuse to obey orders that violate the Constitution, good for them.
But I became suspicious of this outfit when someone posted about them on my Smygo newslist. Checking them out, I found out that they have some rather strange ideas about just what the Constitution permits. Their founder appeared on the G. Gordon Liddy Show — Liddy, one might recall, being a major government criminal (Watergate, break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, planning assassinations of political dissidents, planning to firebomb the Brookings Institute, etc.).
They’re also allied with “Support the Troops” orgs, which as usual turns out to mean Support the War on Iraqis. Likewise, they’re allied to Gather of Eagles, a group known to physically attack peaceful anti-war protestors.
SWPL: Multiculturalism & selling out their countrymen…
White English People, anyway. White English Labourites, that is. Mind you, the “Stuff White People Like” concept isn’t meant to describe the tastes, prejudices and beliefs of all white people, which obviously isn’t possible, but of a certain sort o…
Oathkeepers-what a joke.How can its members keep their oath to the Consitution yet participate in an unjust &
unlawful Iraq war when there was NO declaration of war
as the Constitution mandates?Just an oversight I bet.
Such a compromising contradiction ruins any & all
credibility they have & renders them a false flag operation
as far as Im concerned.HONOR YOUR OATH guys