To all my faithful readers:
After months of preparation, my new book will be available on Amazon starting July 4.
The Kindle version is currently in pre-order, but if you buy it now, it will be yours on the 4th. The paperback should come online by the 4th as well. Here is the link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9XMMSJ2/
If you’d like to look it over, I’ve arranged with the publisher to give you access to the first third of the book—about 65 pages or so. Here is the link:
bit.ly/ScottConservativeEstimate
And feel free to share this post or email with anyone you know who might be interested.
Here is the cover blurb:
“Conservatism” is a con.
For seventy years, “conservatives” have been running a con job on America and on themselves. Because they were getting their heads bashed in by liberals, they created a bunch of phony “principles” in the early 1950s. They’ve been pushing them ever since. And they’ve convinced millions of people—even liberals—that “conservatism” is a legitimate world view.
It is not. It is a farrago of deception, illogic, unreason, and selfishness painted over to seem unthreatening and wholesome.
The principal author of this con was Russell Kirk, whose 1953 book The Conservative Mind pulled together all the historical strands of regression and wrapped them up with a bow. He “discovered” some rules of thumb that eventually became “principles” for “conservatives” to rally round. The trick? Each “principle” was actually a genial disguise for a sordid human vice that no decent person should tolerate.
Using Kirk’s “principles” as cover, “conservatives” quickly learned to hide the curmudgeonly, classist, racist, and intemperate personas that had lost them all public support starting in the 1930s. From this beginning, with the financial backing of a long line of self-interested billionaires, “conservatives” stood up a sprawling conglomerate of think tanks, institutes, universities, research foundations, and political operations to inject the venom of bad faith into American society.
This book peels back the camouflage of Kirk’s fake “principles” and shows the reality underneath. By going through each disguise, the book reveals the fathomless fear that dominates “conservatives” and compels them to ever escalating acts of hubris and antisocial hostility.
And it shows exactly what we need to do with “conservatism” to make America decent again.
If you followed my long series on the deceptive “principles” of “conservatism,” you can see that this book is based on that work. It contains a great deal of new material, however, including a helpful chart that should help people trace just about anything a “conservative” says back to the deep fears that motivate all “conservative” speech and action. When I finished it, I was surprised to discover that it runs to 235 pages!
We decent Americans all know that “conservatism” is an eternal fountain of bad faith, bad “beliefs,” and bad behavior. For decent people, listening to “conservatives” spout their endless self-justifications for their deeply immoral and amoral sentiments is continually enraging.
I hope that this book can help decent people understand why it is so enraging—and understand why the time to do something about it right now. This is the critical moment. If we do not stop them now, “conservatives” will soon capture all the levers of power and make it impossible to dislodge them or prevent their depredations. The last chapter of the book explains what we can do and how committed we have to be to getting it done now.
As I was preparing this message, I was thinking about the execrable behavior of the “conservatives” on the Supreme Court, thinking about Trump and his minions, thinking about all the despicable Republican politicians who can’t muster up the courage to buck their party—the party that now openly supports violent sedition and next-level Orwellian linguistic deformation of reality in the pursuit of unchecked power.
Republicans get on TV and rage, rage, rage about how they are the dispossessed, how they suffer discrimination, how they writhe under the boot of oppressive liberalism. And in the next moment, they glory in poking decent Americans in the eye with any filthy lie or conspiracy theory their fevered brains concoct. They cavort and dance and chortle at their perverse behavior like impish demons in some hellscape painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
This made me think of a key scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the brothers’ father, Fyodor, is wickedly flaunting his buffoonish contumely before the holiest hieromonk in the region, Father Zosima. Finally, Zosima speaks up, chiding Fyodor:
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to the passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.
My new book is all about this, all about how “conservatives” lie to themselves about themselves. They pretend to be champions of virtue while their inner fears impel them toward vice. They pretend to be courageous warriors for truth while cringing in the face of their concealed terrors. And being such inner cowards, they let their disguised fears compel them to act like vicious buffoons, disrespecting themselves by their willingness to defend the indefensible, and then disrespecting everyone else by exposing to the world their selfish passions and brutish coarseness. They have now degenerated to the point of bestiality. And “it all comes from lying continually” to others and to themselves.
Please feel free to send this post or email to everyone you know who might appreciate a complete refutation of “conservatism” and the cowardly people to whom it appeals.
Hope you all enjoy!
Thank you good sir for printing this very important work in book form