At this year’s NatCon 3 conference in Miami, I chose to focus on the most formidable domestic aspect of the China challenge: ourselves.
More specifically, it is our ruling class—those seated atop the commanding heights of our most influential institutions from Harvard to Hollywood; Seattle to Silicon Valley; and Wall Street to Washington, D.C.
As I argued during my speech — a modified transcript of which you can find over at The American Mind — I chose to focus on the problem posed by our elites because as a practical matter, it will be near-impossible to implement and execute the comprehensive plan necessary to combat the Chinese Communist Party if every power center in our country is averse to it because their occupants have conflated China’s self-interest with their own.
My speech on the jihad against Joe Rogan as a microcosm for the War on Wrongthink corporate media’s executing in cahoots with our Ruling Class
Last month I had the privilege of speaking before the Leadership Program of the Rockies’ annual retreat during a heterodox panel on media hypocrisy moderated by Kennedy, and featuring Mary Katharine Ham and Hannah Cox.
My speech highlighted not just the corporate media’s rampant hypocrisy, but the fact that that hypocrisy poses a danger: That the greatest beneficiaries of the First Amendment and our free speech tradition are its most zealous proponents, and that the purported adversaries of the powerful have become the powerful’s greatest accomplice as they seek to monopolize Narrative to monopolize power.
With America’s eyes fixed on Ukraine, the Biden administration just gave Communist China its greatest gift yet.
In so doing, it caved—by its own admission—to the demands of American progressives, who serve as the Chinese Communist Party’s most useful of idiots.
In a little-noticed February 23 university speech, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division announced the department would be terminating its preeminent counter-espionage program, the China Initiative.
On March 30 I had the privilege of guest-hosting “Hold the Line with Buck Sexton,” with guests Ned Ryun, Kyle Shideler, and Julie Kelly.
The running theme of the program—which you can watch in full below—and my opening monologue in particular honed in on one of the great challenges of our time: A Ruling Class that seeks to monopolize the narrative to cement a monopoly on power.
Amid congressional Democrats‘ push—via the dishonestly named “For the People Act”—to make universal and permanent the extraordinary election integrity-threatening measures of the 2020 election, while hypocritically unseating Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-2) after her duly certified November victory, their Big Tech adjuncts continue censoring speech that runs afoul of that election’s Official Narrative.
My colleagues at the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind publication found this out when they tried to publish a podcast on YouTube that my company helped script and produce—only for the Google-owned video platform to remove it outright.
Ironically, or perhaps not, the mini-audio documentary, titled “The Ruling Class Strikes Back,” chronicled the myriad ways in which our political establishment—and its sundry allies in Big Tech, woke capital, the corporate media and across the other commanding heights of society—worked relentlessly during the 2020 election to marginalize, silence and rout dissenters from their progressive orthodoxy.
…What was so wrong about the American Mind podcast?
One portion of it scrutinized the dubious aspects of the 2020 election—that is, the podcast touched on what is now a quintessential third rail.
We violated a sacrosanct, Official Narrative, engaging in the very political speech regarding elections that is at the core of the First Amendment. Therefore, we had to be punished.
As I conclude the piece by noting:
The Ruling Class seeks to set the terms of the increasingly limited debates we are allowed to have; it controls the platforms through which the narrow array of its approved arguments are promulgated; it determines who gets canceled and who is spared.
Our Ruling Class cannot tolerate dissent because it cannot tolerate challenges to its power and privilege.
That is why it hated President Donald Trump, and that is why it must relentlessly target the tens of millions of Americans who symbolically rejected the Ruling Class’s reign by supporting him.
Ironically, the Ruling Class’s claim to power would be stronger if it ceased its hostility toward the roughly half of the country it deems Deplorable and at least gave the appearance of caring about and responding to its concerns.
That it does not, and instead lashes out in angst, indicates its inherent weakness and short-sightedness.
Why would our Ruling Class want to raise its own children in the kind of joyless, volatile, sclerotic country it now seems intent on crafting?
On top of the release of our new Federalist media criticism show, “BAD NEWS“–which Ezra Levant graciously had me on The Rebel to discuss–last week we also recorded the first episode of a new show “The NatCon Squad,” a production of the Edmund Burke Foundation.
In the inaugural episode of the weekly program, out today, Conservative Partnership Institute‘s Rachel Bovard, Newsweek‘s Josh Hammer, “BAD NEWS” co-host Emily Jashinsky, and I discuss:
I am thrilled to report that today The Federalist published the pilot episode of a new media criticism show hosted by myself and Federalist Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky that we are calling “BAD NEWS.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (@RepGallagher) (R-WI) is a leading China hawk in Congress, where he serves on the Armed Services Committee, with a background in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence and as a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (@RepBradWenstrup)(R-OH) is a doctor, Army Reserve officer, and Iraq War veteran who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
