WEIRDLAND: “European Perspectives”, JFK "Battling Wall Street", Ann Coulter's "High Crimes and Misdemeanors", JFK Jr vs Trump

Saturday, January 23, 2021

“European Perspectives”, JFK "Battling Wall Street", Ann Coulter's "High Crimes and Misdemeanors", JFK Jr vs Trump

In European Perspectives: Essays (2020), Dr. Alexander Jacob seeks to differentiate Jewish-derived Marxist socialism from the German-derived spiritual socialism. Although “a professed anti-Semite,” Marx had a “Jewish mentality” that manifested itself in a “materialistic view of life”. This is in contrast to what might be called the communitarian ethos of Werner Sombart’s German socialism and Oswald Spengler’s Prussian socialism. One useful feature of European Perspectives is its assessment of a number of important European thinkers: Werner Sombart, Oswald Spengler, Erik von Kuehnelt–Leddihn, Julius Evola, Theodor Adorno, Hans–Jürgen Syberberg, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Herzl. Sombart, one of Jacob’s favorite scholars, believed “that the modern system of commercial capitalism was due not mainly to English Protestantism as Max Weber had proclaimed but to Judaism.” Jacob is an admirer of Spengler’s Prussian socialism which does not seek to destroy capitalism. Early on, Spengler saw that “democracy, in general, is an unholy alliance of urban masses, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and finance capitalists. The masses themselves are manipulated by the latter two elements through their specific agencies: the press and the parties.” Jacob’s ideology synthesizes Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Evola’s beliefs. He accepts Evola’s criticism of Jewry and the bourgeoisie, but appears to reject his disparagement of Catholicism. Jacob concludes that Syberberg wanted to use “art as a redemptive influence on society,” while Adorno used it “as an instrument of revenge.” In the fourth essay Jacob shifts gears to examine two books, both written in 2011, that analyze the success of Western civilization: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne and The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson. Duchesne’s thesis is that the West has always been different, more creative, than other civilizations. The source of this creativity is the “aristocratic egalitarianism” of Indo-European societies. This unique aristocratic egalitarianism was made possible by a political arrangement that provided “relative freedom and autonomy from centralised authority”. For Ferguson, the West’s greatness can be found in: “competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic”. Like Duchesne, Ferguson sees a lack of centralized power as a Western asset as opposed to the centralized bureaucracy of China. He believes property rights are closely associated with “the rule of law and representative government”. Ferguson is not, however, completely sanguine regarding the future of the Occident. He warns that the greatest threat to the West is “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors,” while Duchesne expresses similar concerns about the “nihilism, cultural relativism, and weariness” of the West.

To Jacob’s thinking, what Fukuyama considers 'the end of history' is Jewish “economic utopianism which manifested itself in the twentieth century as totalitarian Communism and was transformed in the new ‘promised land’ into totalitarian liberalism of the ‘American Dream’”. Jacob concludes that Fukuyama’s neo-conservatism illustrates “the incompatibility of the American system with genuinely European systems of political thought.” Jacob traces how the English, and later the Americans, deviated from traditional European values. In essence: the rise of Puritanism led to the English Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Puritans with their individualism and industry came to see “citizens as economic units of production not unlike those of the later Communist utopia of Marx”. Plus, according to Jacob, Puritanism has always been heavily influenced by Judaism. Then, increasingly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jews in America were able to transform the remnant of Puritanism into their own political/economic system. It was “the re-entry of the Jews into England during the Puritan revolution” that began the unraveling of European culture, with the end results that we see today. There is a desperate need for a new aristocracy in Western societies. At present we are ruled by elites who are hostile to the interests of Western peoples. Before an aristocracy can develop, we need to create a revolutionary cadre from which a new elite will emerge. The historical peoples of the West are now slated to become minorities in their own homelands. We need new elites to propagate a new ideology and that is a monumental task. Nothing could be more difficult, yet nothing less will do. Alexander Jacob obtained his doctorate in Intellectual History at the Pennsylvania State University. His publications include Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the early Twentieth Century (2000), and Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity and the State (2019). Source: unz.com

As sociologist Donald Gibson explained in his fine book Battling Wall Street, President Kennedy never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; he did not join any secret societies at Harvard; he didn’t like working intelligence during World War II. He got transferred out to the South Pacific and served with a bunch of Joe Six Pack guys on what were close to suicide missions. As this author demonstrated in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, both in the Senate and in the White House, Kennedy was opposed to much of what this Power Elite was doing abroad, especially in the Third World. After his death, the progress that he did make in the White House was largely reversed. 
As Gibson comments, Kennedy’s overall business program was really pro-production and nationally oriented. Kennedy’s tax proposal was also aimed at securing for the treasury billions of dollars “in income from interest and dividends going unreported and untaxed each year.” His proposal was to use an annual withholding tax, as with middle class income. For dividends, he proposed a higher rate of tax on families with incomes over $180,000 per year—almost two million today. He also proposed tax code alterations to prevent the wealthy from concealing income garnered through advantages like investing in holding companies. Kennedy felt that wealth should be acquired and used through productive investments that benefited society as whole. He was not in favor of profits accrued through financial speculation and inheritance. As Gibson notes, "Kennedy’s overall program was trying to guarantee that the search for profit would not end up destroying rather than creating economic prosperity for the country. In this he was very clear, consistent and coherent." Kennedy wanted to shift capital from non-productive to productive investments. He was specifically interested in expanding low cost energy production. The above program, combined with Kennedy’s policies overseas made the president rather unpopular with the corporate aristocracy. Kennedy had made himself a target for big business by his stand in the U.S. Steel case in 1962. As the late John Blair wrote about that conflict, it was “the most dramatic confrontation in history between a president and a corporate management.” (Blair, Economic Concentration) Beyond that, he then went even further in his priority of the public good over corporate greed. Kennedy stated that the "American people would find it hard to accept situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives, whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility, can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185,000,000 Americans." 

As Donald Gibson notes, one of the things that many of his critics were disturbed about was Kennedy’s willingness to loan what they called “easy money” for credit purposes. Which, of course, is what the Alliance for Progress was about: low interest or no interest loans for infrastructure and capital improvement. By 1962, Dillon seemed to have gone over to the side of Kennedy’s critics on this and other issues. For example, he was pressing for less government spending, except for defense expenditures. The Wall Street Journal, another consistent critic of Kennedy, wrote in 1963 that the activists in the administration, like Heller, had gained the upper hand over the conservatives like Dillon. (Wall Street Journal, 10/3/63, article by Philip Geyelin) The article said that Kennedy did not want to rely on monetary policy to cure a balance of payments problem. And, in fact, the president had come to think that such problems were too important to be left to bankers. He also did not agree with another of their notions, namely letting interest rates rise. (Hobart Rowen, The Free Enterprisers: Kennedy, Johnson and the Business Establishment
By 1963, there was a split within the administration over general economic policy. There was on one side the activist Kennedy group which included JFK, Heller, and Franklin Roosevelt Jr. of the Commerce Department. On the other side was Dillon, the Federal Reserve, and their outside backer David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan. As Gibson points out, and as I have tried to indicate here, the economic powers in America had been pushing for a globalist agenda even during Kennedy’s presidency. They wanted European colonialism to be replaced by American imperialism, which would allow American business entities to be shipped abroad. They also wanted old-fashioned tight-money monetarist rules in banking. Kennedy opposed both. Source: kennedysandking.com

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion; everyone is not entitled to his own facts. If a president’s “cutting corners or hoarding dirty little secrets” is enough to impeach him, as Nixon’s attorney general, Elliot Richardson, said, because “honesty is the best politics,” then Clinton’s bald-faced lies under oath in a citizen’s constitutional case against him would have to be enough. There are pretty clear rules and standards for what constitutes a “high Crime and Misdemeanor,” or an impeachable act. To paraphrase the current “just about sex” line, Watergate was about a two-bit breaking and entering. And unlike with Monica Lewinsky, it wasn’t committed by the president, but by people who worked for his campaign committee. The Philadelphia convention in 1787 adopted the impeachment remedy in the process of creating the first government in the history of the world that would have separated powers, checks and balances, and sharply limited powers. And, of course, no king. The reach and purposes of impeachment would be different in a constitutional republic. Personal misconduct took on a larger role in impeachments, for example, and policy disputes became irrelevant to impeachable conduct. Impeachments in Great Britain had been used as a weapon in the ongoing and turbulent power struggle between Parliament and the king. The only impeachment convictions ever rendered by the United States Senate were for the high crimes and misdemeanors of: Drunkenness and Senility; Incitement to Revolt and Rebellion Against the Nation; Bribery; Kickbacks and Tax Evasion; Tax Evasion; Conspiracy to Solicit a Bribe; and False Statements to a Grand Jury. But the American variations on impeachable crimes flow directly from the Constitution itself.  

In brief, Richard Nixon’s subversion consisted of: One invocation of presidential privilege, and zero criminal offenses. The worst that could be said of Nixon’s alleged “obstruction of justice” was that he thought the president had a right to fight a legal case, just like a private citizen might. If Nixon telling one lie, not under oath, constituted the creation of an “Imperial Presidency” demanding the president’s impeachment, what did Clinton create by telling repeated lies, not only to the public, but under oath? As Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey casually remarked of the president, “Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?” Nixon wanted one man investigated, and he wanted FBI information on that one man: Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official who was leaking national security secrets to the New York Times. If that was “unrelated to national security,” what are the implications for an FBI investigation of a public servant whose job Clinton’s friends wanted? In any event, like the IRS, J. Edgar Hoover also ignored him, which is why Nixon brought in the Plumbers to plug national security leaks, some of whom were later caught at the Watergate Hotel. Indeed, the famous “smoking gun” tape was the direct result of the fact that the FBI would not accede to the Nixon administration’s demands—as is discussed on the tape. Twenty-five years later the Clinton administration uses the IRS and the FBI—and this time these agencies are responsive—to persecute an innocuous public servant whose job Clinton’s people wanted. Nixon acted from defensiveness; Clinton acted from cupidity. 

At least Nixon tried to bend these agencies to his will to stop leaks of national security information; at least he tried to manipulate the agencies to protect his people rather than to attack his enemies; at least he was rebuffed; and at least President Kennedy had his sexual trysts in a consensual way with grown women. One realizes how low President Clinton brought our country when you start thinking 'Bring back the Watergate Plumbers!' Clinton's flacks have frequently made the preposterous claim that this whole mess was the Supreme Court’s fault for allowing the Paula Jones suit to proceed. It is as if somehow the Supreme Court had been holding back all this time, and by mere historical accident it all caught up with Clinton. When in fact, private civil lawsuits against presidents have always been allowed. But other presidents weren’t vulnerable to those lawsuits because other presidents weren’t such pigs. The case is that Nixon did not invoke his privilege in an investigation “about sex” he personally engaged or pressed upon an unwilling female. Nixon simply raised his privilege in an investigation about a third-rate burglary he hadn't committed. Clinton's whole presidency was a complete mockery of the American people. For the Clintons, it was all just a game. 29th President Warren Harding (whose extramarital affair with his secretary Nan Britton eroded his popularity) must be turning flips of delight in his grave to know that at least he wasn’t such a pervert like Clinton. No one has ever been caught like Clinton, in this tawdry combination of sexual perversion, witness tampering, and public perjury. Even the most frothing-at-the-mouth Nixon haters never really thought Nixon had himself committed perjury. There was a dignity about Nixon's conduct that is unimaginable for Clinton. As far as I am concerned, Clinton's degrading behaviour is the most complete ignominy in the American presidential history. —"High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton" (2002) by Ann Coulter 

“We finally got the authoritarian liberals have been talking about,” Ann Coulter told The Daily Beast about ex-president Donald Trump. “And I want to point out what a gigantic pussy he is. Who are these people still supporting Trump? I don’t understand why. Why are you doing this for Trump when he doesn’t give a crap about you? These poor, working-class Americans, hanging on by their fingernails! No, he didn’t have time for them. He held a rally and he encouraged them to march on the Capitol while he goes back to the White House to have a nice lunch because he’s a gigantic pussy. He always has other people doing his dirty work. He was this tough guy on The Apprentice. He couldn’t even fire his own attorney general. He sent Corey Lewandowski to do it." Coulter sputtered with rage as she vented about the ex-president. “I hate him,” she seethed. “Trump betrayed his own supporters at every turn,” Coulter added. “He turned over his presidency to Idiot Boy Jared. I hate him. He’s a betrayer. Yes, I knew he was a coarse vulgarian. Yes, I knew he was a huckster. I think we all did. But one thing there was no warning of was Jared and Ivanka. They ran this presidency and all they cared about was impressing Kim Kardashian and sucking up to Wall Street. After he was elected, we got the most gigantic bait-and-switch in history. That was a shocker.” Source: thedailybeast.com

John Kennedy Jr. (Speech to the American Society of Magazine editors, April 27, 1999): "I thought if I could parachute behind the enemy lines and join the journalistic profession, which has often attacked my family, then I could begin to let my perspective about journalism seep in  George magazine and maybe influence the presentation of politics." 

Carolyn Bessette photographed by Robert Curran in Miami, on March 21, 1998, at the wedding of Betsy Reisinger (pictured with Carolyn) with Kenan Siegel, John Kennedy Jr's good friends and Rugby teammate at Brown University. Carolyn and Betsy bonded over a passion for fashion and Carolyn helped Betsy shop for her wedding in Bal Harbour the night before. Betsy Reisinger: "Carolyn made me feel so special as she was so inclined to help me. Carolyn kept our photograph in a beautiful silver frame in her apartment with John at Tribeca. This framed picture was mailed to us in Miami after their fatal plane crash. I am so grateful to have this photo to remind me of Carolyn's kindness." In 2007, Donald Trump, interviewed by David Heymann, recalled his encounter with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy: "I didn’t find Carolyn Bessette as beautiful as everyone else did. She had a great style and a good body, but she wasn’t my type. To John, she was beautiful. Many people considered her a great beauty. I constantly heard these rumors about them—they were having extramarital affairs or they were on the verge of divorce. Michael Bergin was an absolute sleazebag. I know other girls who dated him and said he was a fucking loser!" Kenan Siegel remembered the occasion (February 1997) when Donald Trump hit on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy at Mar-a-Lago, the resort in Palm Beach County that was acquired in 1985 by Trump for $10 million. "Carolyn looked really embarrassed and said to John: 'that thug tried to flirt with me, can you imagine that?' John turned white as paper and threw a vitriolic glare in Trump's direction. John and Donald Trump were complete opposites, like water and oil. If they made a movie, they would be mortal enemies, the handsome guy with principles against the nasty bully. It would be like the old good guy versus the bad guy. Carolyn was so classy and Trump just looked like white trash with money. I think Trump actually was jealous of John's ability to attract classy women and of course of his historical and political legacy." —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen

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