WHITE ORCS AND BABY FORMULA

     Back in the days of my youth, a family friend told me of a visit to Germany, circa 1946. We were discussing his adventures during WW2, and he went back on some errand related to the War Crimes Trials. Of the German people he stated that he learned two things: none of them had ever been Nazis, and none of them knew about any of the atrocities that the Third Reich was involved in. He mentioned a conversation he had with a German businessman:

   German: "I don't know, you see I was never...

   Adventurer: "...Yes, I know: you were never a Nazi."

   German: "You don't believe me?"

   Adventurer: "Oh I believe you. If I sound surprised, it's because I'm amazed at how much damage Adolf was able to do all by himself."

   This conversation keeps coming back to mind reading both articles and comments on Republican/Conservative websites. It's truly astounding how so few on the Right knew that our schools, media, military, and healthcare system had been co-opted by Leftist special interests until just last year. Before 2021, we weren't seeing increasing monopolization, or an Opioid crisis, or legal abortion, or the break down of the family, or the need for immigration reform, or an expanding police state... I seem to recall that in 2016, Trump ran on a platform of Making America Great Again: a slogan that would seem to imply that we were in a state of decline and needed reformation. But we don't seem to remember any of that.

  One of things that is really destroying the Conservative Movement is their continued refusal---like the Postwar Germans---to acknowledge that the vast majority of our national problems are entirely of our own making. The Right's continual refusal to address electoral corruption, or remove Neocons from key Party positions, or lack of any Platform or relevant issues except to proclaim that they aren't Democrats is proof that they've learned nothing since from the cultural and economic debacles of the last 30 years.

   The real crisis that the Right faces is a spiritual one. It's becoming increasingly obvious that they don't give a hoot about about any of the issues that effect all of us as Americans: the majority on the Right are perfectly happy with the status quo and their only real complaint is that the Left is grabbing too big a share of the pie. Blogger InsanityBytes addressed this in a good article yesterday. She was speaking about a recent scandal in a church, and how focused the critics were on how the scandal effected themselves: their reputations, their profit margins, their place in the narrative, etc.

   "That is what lurks at the heart of our cultural divide, a tone deaf church that just doesn't care. It's really not about abortion or skin color or wokeness, or whether we should believe all women. It's about not even existing, not being seen, being rendered completely invisible. It's really just about how all animals are equal except that some are clearly more equal than others. The thing is, if you genuinely want life to matter in this country, then the suffering of others has to matter, and it has to matter more than your hurt feelings, or your status, or your alleged reputation."

   This was brought once again today by a flurry of bowtie clutching and outrage in the Controlled Opposition Conservative Press. It's seems there's supposedly a shortage of baby formula in the United States right now. I have doubts that the story is even true, considering that just a few months again, the Corporate Oligarchy got caught red-handed withholding shipments of imported goods to drive up inflationary costs, and to create artificial shortages. The stories have since fallen from the Corporate Media, and everybody is blaming the conflict in Eastern Europe---despite the fact that we import practically nothing from Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine. 

    Instead of explaining to the few stay-at-home mothers left in the United States that they can get around the 'shortage' by simply doing what our grandmothers did: heat some milk on the stove and put it in a baby-bottle, the punditocracy is squawking because some RINO discovered that Immigration Detention Centers were stocked with baby formula.

   Now, aside from the fact that these centers usually stockpile such goods a year or so in advance, and that infants probably don't have much say as to whether they enter the country illegally or not; the compassionate Conservatives are infuriated by all of this. Some are even suggesting that we seize these stockpiles and distribute them to American citizens---the fact there probably isn't enough there to feed all of the babies in America for two days at most to the contrary notwithstanding. Nobody also seems to wonder what these babies are supposed to eat once their stockpiles of formula are seized, but none of this is important so long as "I got mine!" and the little ones presumably can crawl back to Mexico and get their feedings there for all that anybody cares.

   Of course, the Government could choose to force the Agribusiness Cartels to release their stockpiles of baby formula and punish them for creating an economic crisis: but no, that would be government overreach and interfering with the free market. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ted Turner and all of the other WEF kingpins buying up American farmland wouldn't like that; neither would all of the Conservatives who have money tied up in Agribusiness stocks.

    

   We can't have a functional Democracy based on the idea of every man for himself. Enlightened Self-Interest is one thing; blind greed and Narcissism is another. Enlightened Self-Interest underpins both Democracy and the Free Enterprise System, but it is at its core, an honor system. It cannot realistically function unless it has a generally agreed upon code based in accountability both to God and to one's neighbor. Conservatism has failed in the West because it largely abandoned accountability to all but the official Conservative narrative: which ultimately has made our movement no better than the Left. 

   Conservatism (the real kind) is an ideology and a way of life---not a product to be packaged and marketed; nor a 'narrative' to be controlled. It's completely laughable watching the Right celebrate people like Elon Musk and Bruce Jenner while they criticize Jeff Bezos and Rachel Levine for doing the same things. Or when they applaud applying Cancel Culture to Disneyland Florida but object when the Left boycotts Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A. Then they wonder why nobody takes them seriously. 

   Some actually have objected to the kinds of arguments made here: saying that idealism is different from reality, and that ideals are for a few chumps, but the realistic political approach is to do what works. Fine. Feel free to explain what good the 1994 and 2010 GOP Congressional takeovers or either Bush Administration did to advance the Conservative cause. From 1992 to 2016, every national GOP campaign has been centered on a win-at-all-costs Realpolitik strategy; and for all the good they've done we may as well have elected Democrats. The secret to Trump's successes was that he reached to Americans and cared about solving problems for everyone---not just a select few. That was real Conservatism. But Orange Man Bad and the Right jumped on the anti-Trump bandwagon just as fast when they saw their own special interests threatened. The bottom line though is, that we are going keep losing the Culture War as long as we keep using the means of the enemy.