Right Wing Reading Rainbow IV: The Age of Entitlement

We shall live in peace, We shall live in peace, We shall live in peace some day.

After the Civil War, the victorious North imposed a twelve year military occupation of the defeated South. Not only were ranking Confederates forbidden from seeking public office, but most Southern Whites were disenfranchised. This was done under the premise that they had been involved in the rebellion, often simply by organizing contributions of food and clothing for relatives in the Confederate Army, or else by purchasing bonds from the Confederate government. The ensuing gangsterism is not for me to elaborate upon here.¹

After World War II, 15 million ethnic Germans across Eastern Europe were violently expelled from homes they had lived in for centuries. 2 million died on the trip. It was and remains the largest ethnic cleansing in the history of the world. Bigger than the Armenians, bigger than the Nakba, bigger than the Trail of Tears. In the west, under the command of General Eisenhower, American occupation forces deliberately starved to death nearly a million Wehrmacht POWs over two years. This attrition rate was even significantly higher than for Germans who languished in Stalin’s gulags well into the mid-1950s.

Ask the average American about all this, and they will psychotically and pathetically assert that “that’s just what happens when you lose a war.” Sometimes, they’ll even say something particularly deranged like “Should have fought harder.”

In February 2022, a clip compilation came out of all the times Joe Rogan had ever said the word “nigger”. CNN Digital Senior Writer John Blake had this to say:

Rogan breached a civic norm that has held America together since World War II. It’s an unspoken agreement that we would never return to the kind of country we used to be.

That agreement revolved around this simple rule:

A White person would never be able to publicly use the n-word again and not pay a price. […] [O]nce we allow a White public figure to repeatedly use the foulest racial epithet in the English language without experiencing any form of punishment, we become a different country.

Curious readers may wonder what war White people lost where they signed that instrument of surrender at the end of it.

Well, apparently, that’s what happens when you win a war, too. Not twenty years after Victory in Europe Day, White Americans ethnically cleansed themselves out of their own major cities (complete with an executive department dedicated to the purpose), and imposed totalitarian regime of racial terror in which the dwindling majority population could not even make jokes about minority populations without literally, exaggeratedly, and admittedly quite humorously looking over their shoulders.

The Age of Entitlement

If you don't understand the 1960s, you don't understand America. If you want to understand the 1960s, there's no substitute for Age of Entitlement, by Christopher Caldwell. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I don’t think I have the whole story on Civil Rights,” but you weren’t sure where to start, Age of Entitlement is where to start. You should have read Tom Woods’s Politically Incorrect Guide from the first article in this series already. If you want to establish yourself as a competent online take-seller, you could go far just by memorizing the arguments in this book. A great many do.²

The most important takeaway from this book is that America has two constitutions. The Constitution of 1789, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Another important takeaway from the book is that the Vietnam War itself was part of the 1960s racial and sexual revolutions imposed on the country. Yes, the anti-war movement of the day spawned future elites like John Kerry. Yes, opposition to the war was a popular (though not universal!) cause among academics, Hollywood elites, and Civil Rights Activists. But as far as the Johnson Administration was concerned, the Vietnam War was part of its Civil Rights and Great Society agendas, not in competition with it, and anyone on the left who supported the War on Poverty but opposed the War in Vietnam was sort of missing the point. Murray Rothbard called this phenomenon the “Welfare-Warfare State”.³

Follow Up Readings

If you want to begin to understand the ramifications of this period at an even level, then you might move forward to:

• The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays, by Ron Unz. American Pravda is Ron Unz’s current passion project, but before this, he was a prolific conservative commentator. This book is a collection of columns Unz had written since the early nineties on Race and Social Policy, Economics and Finance, Media and Reality, Ideology and Politics, Foreign Policy and National Security, Classical History, and one article on Theoretical Physics. The titular article is a thoroughgoing and foundational piece on the winners and losers of the Affirmative Action system. I genuinely don’t consider you qualified to discuss the topic in any capacity until you’ve read that particular essay.

• The Transgender-Industrial Complex, by Scott Howard. Scott Howard explores the Big Money behind the Big Gay Hate Machine. Comprehensively researched, Howard details the development of a very, for lack of a better term, incestuous lobbying complex. This book is extremely informative no matter how much you think you already know. Every single page of this book is like a punch in the face. By the end you feel like Charlie in It’s Always Sunny pointing at the conspiracy board on the wall, but then you start wondering why literally nobody seems to point out some of these obvious connections.⁴

• Days of Rage, by Bryan Burrough. “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” —Max Noel, FBI. You don’t understand how much the left was off the chain in the 1970s. Radical lawyers literally giving fugitive domestic terrorists—who were still bombing—money and support. In 1971, you could get in a gunfight with cops, shoot a cop, be carrying a gun stolen during a different state’s double cop murder — and get out of prison in less than a year! Bernadine Dohrn convinced her lawyer’s wife to leave her husband, take the kids, and use them to smuggle bombs for the Weather Underground. Bernardine Dohrn was a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. Another Weatherman, Eleanor Stein, was arrested on the run in 1981; she got a law degree in 1986 and became an administrative law judge. Radical attorney Michael Kennedy, who did more than any to keep Weather alive, has been special advisor to President of the UN General Assembly. Kathy Boudin, accomplice and facilitator to multiple murders, was paroled in 2003. She is now an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s school of social work.

If you want to develop a more comprehensive descriptive understanding of how politics actually works in the modern republic, you should check out the following:

• The Populist Delusion, by Neema Parvini. A compact summary on elite theory, basically a modern update of Burnham’s The Machiavellians. Yes, the same Burnham that you should have read about in Reclaiming The American Right. The “populist delusion” is defined as the belief that “if conditions get bad enough, if the plebeians become too disgruntled with their leaders, then the people will rise up and overthrow them.” The reality, according to Parvini, is that “if people want change even at a time of popular and widespread resentment of the ruling class, they can only hope to achieve that change by becoming a tightly knit and organized minority themselves and, in effect, displacing the old ruling class.” I touched on some of these themes in my article licking the Overton Window.

• The Open Society Playbook, by Scott Howard. Another Scott Howard book. “The connections between ‘social justice,’ governmental and supra-governmental entities, big business, and high finance are not incidental. They all mutually reinforce each other and work synergistically to amplify profit and accelerate what is framed as ‘progress,’ but is really a world-wrecking endeavor.” Near the end of Age of Entitlement, Caldwell talks about the role of “Philanthropic Foundations” in funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-exempt donations (and sometimes even taxpayer money) into left-wing social causes. Here again, Howard pulls zero punches in describing how exactly this all works.

• It Could Happen Here, by Johnathan Greenblatt. The Chairman of the Anti-Defamation League has a lot of quality observations on the theory and practice of US government decision making. For those with eyes to see, he offers a one-of-a-kind look into the life and work of the leader of a prestigious NGO. He also has some interesting insights of the Iranian Revolution, too.

And Something Fun

Let Them Look West, by Marty Phillips. In previous weeks, I was recommending exciting alternate histories. This one is a little different. Let Them Look West is a slow-burn character study. It follows four main characters: Rob Coen, a journalist for The Times. James Alexander, the Based Republican governor of Wyoming. Justine, the governor’s niece. Arthur Walden, the Governor’s lawyer, confidant, and Top Guy.

Later on, we’re also introduced to Paul Alexander, the Governor’s racist uncle.

Robert flies to Wyoming to run a smear piece on Governor Alexander. The book is told from his perspective, as he refuses to believe that any of the people around him are genuinely good people, and insists on trying to find the Dark Side of this Agrarian Idyll which surely must exist. This genuine cynicism, I should note, means that Rob Coen is relatively moral for a journalist. He doesn’t seem to feel too much compelled to lie and gaslight people. As far as he seems to be concerned, everybody is just as corrupt as he feels he is, and it’s just up to him to ask the right questions to draw out the truth. Combine with the fact that he’s the POV character, the author does a good job eliciting a sort of sympathetic pity for our villain protagonist.

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This is the fourth in a series of eight articles on right-wing book recommendations.

The next article will look at how Republicans are the Real Socialists.

This series will be free for all to read, and I encourage you to share this post and all others in the series

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1. Start with the Dilorenzo article at the top of the paragraph. Tho Bishop has a good lecture on the Election of 1876 and the end of Reconstruction.

2. Hanania’s The Origins of Woke, James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, and Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution come immediately to mind.

3. Another Libertarian activist once told me that war was a “Jobs Program for Sociopaths”.

4. An example from a single excerpt, first discovered by randomly flipping through the book to make this point to someone else.

The Transgender Legal Defense Education Fund is currently helmed by Andy Marra, formerly of the Arcus Foundation. Marra previously managed public relations at GLSEN, (‘a national organization focused on LGBTQ issues in K-12 education’), was co-director at Nodutol for Korean Community Development, served as a senior media strategist at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and was on the Boards or Advisory Councils of Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Funding Exchange, the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Center for Transgender Equality. Board member Anne Tompkins was detailed to the Regime Crimes Liason Office in Baghdad, Iraq, where she “assisted the Iraqi Special Tribunal investigation into international humanitartian crimes committed by members of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” Board Co-Chair Alaina Kuped, “active fighting the proposed ban on transgender military service,” is a Senior Director at Gilead sciences and was previously with Pfizer for two decades.