Every now and then an acquaintance who reads what I write will ask me: “Boyd, why are you so critical of writers and commentators—Neoconservatives—like Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Brian Kilmeade, and those who appear on Fox News? Why do you seem so condemnatory of articles and essays that show up in, say, National Review or The Wall Street Journal? Aren’t there some good and worthy items there…aren’t there some good things coming from those folks and from those publications?”
My answer is short and in the form of an analogy: Suppose you had a cantaloupe. It appeared to be just fine and pleasing. But a considerable portion of it—a large interior portion you could not really see or determine—was rotten. Just as you say to yourself, “Yum, this is a tasty cantaloupe,” and continue munching away, before long and before you realize it, you are getting into parts of the fruit that maybe at first didn’t seem so bad. But, in fact, you have begun to digest decaying fruit. And then it is too late….
Certainly, this analogy is imperfect. Nevertheless, that is what happens when you embrace such personalities as Hanson and Shapiro and Guy Benson, or immerse yourself in such journals as National Review or in the courses of study in American history at Prager University. Every isolated nugget of truth is mixed in with historical and philosophical rot and falsehood…and for far too many people, the meagre “good” gotten by such involvement is more than counter-balanced by the gradual acceptance and infection of what is erroneous and not good.
Amazon.com Gift Card i...
Buy New $10.00
(as of 08:25 UTC - Details)
Just recently I heard Congressman Dan Crenshaw (Republican-Texas) tell his Fox News audience—once again— that America, its foundation, is based on the proposition of “equality for all” and “spreading the Gospel of Democracy” to all the rest of the world. Just like for his far less intelligent compatriot in Congress, Adam Kinzinger (Republican-Illinois), who never saw a war that he did not want this nation to be in, and most members of the establishment “Conservative Movement, Inc.,” Crenshaw partakes of a discernible philosophical foundation which is essentially inimical to the designs and thinking of the Framers of our Constitution and the Founders of this country. Although he and Kinzinger would undoubtedly and strongly deny it, in fact, their view owes far more to the febrile mental extrapolations and interpretations of Trotskyite publicists of the 1930s and 1940s than to the resolutely anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic vision of most of the men who cobbled together an American confederation in 1787, and who led that confederation in large part until 1861.
In effect, such enterprises as Prager U, National Review, and most of Fox (except for Tucker Carlson) are in far too many ways just a more recent, maybe less noxious branch of the Progressivist revolution which has been eating away at and infecting Western civilization for well over 100 years.
Harsh words? Yes. But let me offer just two examples to illustrate. And, as I have done in past installments in this series in essays about Hanson and Shapiro, I believe these examples are not only dispositive but highly symbolic of an ingrained—and very dangerous—mindset about our history. And it is a mindset that says much about the philosophical foundations of those who mouth such convictions.
As the old saying goes: A word to the wise is sufficient. Every “good” item you might read in a magazine like National Review, or insight that you might pick up in one of Hillsdale College’s “American heritage courses,” also contains, eventually, a slow mental infection, a “hook” which if allowed to fester will pervert and distort. (Hillsdale President Larry Arnn is a zealous follower of the late Harry Jaffa who debated Professor Mel Bradford over the disastrous role of Abraham Lincoln in American history. See my essay at Abbeville, “Mel Bradford and the Defense of Southern Conservatism,” July 17, 2014.)
