Thirty years ago, almost to the day, I spoke at Hillsdale College, the bastion of conservative academic thought nestled in the woods and hills of southern Michigan. My speech took place one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, at what we can say with hindsight was the high noon of the conservative era in American history. As the English conservative William Wordsworth put it when he was a young and enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

I tried to remember the feeling then as we drove along a scenic route that only Siri, our computer, could compute, through wooded small farms, all of which had Trump for president signs in their front yards. Well, maybe not all of them, but whenever one of those farms declared its allegiance in the recently concluded 2020 presidential election it was for Trump. Not one Biden sign was visible. Michigan was a hotly contested state largely because of the draconian COVID lock-down which its Democratic governor had imposed on lower end entrepreneurs.

The group of students who invited me to speak were solidly in favor of Trump as well. Some wore Make America Great Again hats as an act of defiance against the oligarchic coup d’etat which was in full swing at the moment. The oligarchic mainstream press had anointed Biden as president elect, and tech giants like Google were censoring anyone who hinted that voter fraud had put Biden over the top, at least in the mind of the fourth estate.

I forgot to mention that this meeting had to be held in a secret off campus location. The students could have been mistaken for white boys, but they were all Catholic ethnics of mixed European heritage, not unlike me. The only exceptions were the students who were taking RCIA instruction to become Catholics. All of them were familiar with my YouTube videos. Some had read my books. One young catechumen whose build indicated that he could have played for the Hillsdale football team, if they still had one, told me that he listened to my “God has a Plan for Your Life” video while driving to work. The video’s message moved him to tears, so much so that he had to pull over. Shortly after that experience, he decided to become a Catholic.

If these young men had a political affiliation, it was America First, but sympathy to that point of view had been banned from Hillsdale’s campus, which is why we were meeting where we were. When I asked what the name of their club was, one young wit said, “The Charles Lindbergh Aviators Club.” These young men had invited me not to praise conservatism, but to bury it. Conservatism died four years ago with the election of Donald Trump. By the time we met together in wake of the 2020 presidential election conservatism’s cold inert corpse has been lying un-mourned in the political equivalent of the county morgue. It was now time to give conservatism a decent burial, but before we could do that we had to write its obituary and mention the role which Michigan in general and Hillsdale College in particular played in its rise and fall.

Beginning at the beginning. I waved a first edition, signed copy of The Conservative Mind by the late Russell Kirk, Michigan’s most famous philosopher and formerly a lecturer at Hillsdale College. After basing his analysis of conservatism’s roots on Edmund Burke’s hope that “Providence would not abandon mankind to Jacobinism,” Kirk went on to place that hope in “that American society which John Adams did so much to guide into conservative constitutions and ways of enduring justice.”[1]

Having defeated fascism in World War II, America was now positioned in Kirk’s eyes to become “the Providential instrument of this redemption.”[2] The first step in Kirk’s “general plan of action” was “an affirmation of the moral nature of society.” Here again Kirk appealed to John Adams, who affirmed that “true happiness” could only be found in virtue. “Family piety and public honor must be shored up. A people who are arrogant, avaricious, and crass will wither. Americans still are nearly as responsive to ethical considerations as they were in Tocqueville’s day. They can be led to a life of dignity and order,”[3] but only if they follow Adams’ understanding of the necessity of moral behavior for the success of any form of self-government. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[4] America had no constitution which functioned in the absence of a moral people, according to John Adams, and history would prove him right in ways which Russell Kirk could not imagine in 1953.

The man who gave me Russell Kirk’s book was Henry Regnery, head of the Regnery Press of Chicago and Kirk’s publisher. Henry was a German-American whose family came from the Moselle Valley during the 19th century when Germans were a powerful force in American life, especially in Chicago. When the American exposition was held there in 1893, German was the main language spoken.

German was also the main language spoken at the Chicago symphony, at least until World War I, when the director of that symphony announced that due to political considerations everyone in the symphony would have to speak English. “Is that clear?” he asked after his little speech, prompting one member of the symphony to ask from the back of the room “Was hat er gesagt?”

The American Proposition

The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, an important year in the progress of the American Empire. Where was what Hegel would have called the Weltgeist in 1953? It was in Tehran, where Kermit Roosevelt orchestrated a coup which deposed Muhammad Mossadegh and installed the American puppet Shah Reza Pahlavi in his place. The year 1953 marked the emergence of the CIA as a player on the world stage. Stalin died in the same year.

Shortly after Stalin’s death, a man by the name of C.D. Jackson said that by losing Stalin, America had lost the best salesman for the American Proposition. C.D. Jackson was simultaneously an employee of the CIA and TIME magazine, where he functioned as Harry Luce’s right-hand man. TIME magazine at this point in time was the propaganda ministry for the United States of America, and one of the main vehicles for the anti-Communist crusade, which would find its culmination in 1991, which is where I came in. During my first visit, I was taken on a short tour of the campus by Lissa Roche Jackson, an attractive lady who introduced herself as “the wife of George IV, the mother of George V, and the daughter-in-law of George III, the man who put Hillsdale on the conservative map when he became president of the college in 1971.

Two years before the annus mirabilis of 1953, Henry Regnery published God and Man at Yale, another seminal conservative document, whose author was William F. Buckley. In the annus mirabilis of 1953, the CIA also got into the magazine business. One of the magazines they created as a front was Encounter, which was edited by the English poet Stephen Spender and the then unknown Irving Kristol, who went on to become the father of neoconservatism.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two seminal decisions ratifying social engineering as the deep grammar of American life. Berman v. Parker established urban renewal as a form of ethnic cleansing, and Brown v. School Board, turned public schools into vehicles of social engineering based on race. Following Brown v. School Board, race, not religion, became the source of ethnic identity in America. The oligarchs chose race because they believed in the Roman motto “divide et impera.”

Two years after the annus mirabilis of 1953, William F. Buckley launched National Review, most probably with the same CIA backing that launched Encounter. As we all probably know, William F. Buckley was a CIA agent. When I asked Joe Sobran if National Review were a CIA front, he told me he didn’t know. He had signed on as a young writer at National Review to fight Communism and didn’t care where the funds to do it came from. Murray Rothbard, another member of the conservative pantheon of the 1950s and 1960s, wasn’t so hesitant. Rothbard was “convinced that the whole National Review is a CIA operation.”[5] That quote was taken from John Judis’s article “William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative,” which appeared in the September 1981 issue of The Progressive. In that article, Judis explains how “after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as ‘Conservatism.’” According to Charles Burris:

It was “former” deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Willmore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony “conservative movement.” Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trostykist communist WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such “conservatives” for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of the Buckley described him as the “Pied Piper for the Establishment.”[6]

Burnham’s concept of managerial elites usurping representative government made a big impression on a Southern boy by the name of Sam Francis, who took the concept and explained how the elites had created in reaction a group he called “Middle American Radicals,” whom he defined as “essentially middle-income, white, often ethnic voters who see themselves as an exploited and dispossessed group: excluded from meaningful political participation: threatened by the tax and trade policies of the government: victimized by the tolerance of crime, immigration, and social deviance, and ignored, ridiculed, or demonized by the major cultural institutions of the media and education.”[7]

Both Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran contributed to the book, Shots Fired, which was the source of that quote. Aside from that fact, these three men had something else in common: they were all betrayed by William F. Buckley as part of that man’s campaign to purge anyone who disagreed with the CIA’s version of conservatism from the conservative movement. In a piece which took up an entire issue of National Review, Buckley accused both Buchanan and Sobran of anti-Semitism. Buckley also traveled in person to Washington to the offices of The Washington Times and demanded that Sam Francis be fired. In spite of what Russell Kirk said in 1953, conservatism was never about principle, and certainly not about maintaining moral principle. It was always a CIA black op run by commissars like Buckley according to the whims of the oligarchs, who turned out to be increasingly Jewish as time went on.

Expelled from the synagogue of conservatism, Sam Francis became a white guy because nature abhors a vacuum and, having been raised in the South, that is how he saw his identity. A white guy, in case you don’t know, is a Protestant who no longer goes to church. Tom Fleming, editor of Chronicles, tried to keep this fact from the public by censoring Sam Francis’s articles, but eventually the truth came out to the embarrassment of all concerned.

Shortly before he died, Sam sponsored a talk in Washington by John Tyndall, founder of the British National Party. During his talk, Tyndall tried to explain how we should all be proud of being white guys and gave Elizabethan England as an example of their achievement. My friend and associate Gerry Bruen looked at me when Tyndall made this claim, because the same thought occurred to both of us. Wasn’t Elizabethan England the place where Catholic priests could be and were hanged until not quite dead and then drawn and quartered for saying the Mass? Were Catholics white? When Gerry asked Tyndall if the Irish were white, Tyndall replied with obvious distaste that of course they were. “My mother is Irish,” he said hoping to end this train of thought. At that point Sam Francis turned to him and asked, “Are Jews white?” To which Mr. Tyndall had no answer.

I mentioned that incident and tried to answer that question at the memorial which was held in Sam’s honor at the National Press Club. I was in the middle of writing the book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and I thought the time was opportune to broach the question. But I was wrong. It was as if I had just lobbed a hand grenade into the room. Taki said we were all going to be arrested. Peter Brimelow rebuked me by saying that he liked Elizabethan England, doubtless because he would have enjoyed seeing me being drawn and quartered. No one was willing to admit that race had replaced conservatism because conservatism had already collapsed. Nature abhors a vacuum. Sam Francis’s intellectual odyssey was proof of that. Sam would spawn intellectual offspring as well. Richard Spenser, by way of his mentor Paul Gottfried, who was also at the Sam Francis memorial, floated the new idea of the white race as the latest manifestation of Middle-American Radical spirit in Charlottesville in 2017, where he handed out spears and told the white boys to charge the machine gun nest. The white boys then got mowed down by a “chubby Lesbian kike” by the name of Roberta Kaplan, who is still pursing lawsuits against them to this day.

Lindbergh's Speech

William F. Buckley didn’t just purge individuals. He worked avidly to expel groups like the John Burch Society from the synagogue of conservatism as well. The main group which got purged from the Right and declared anathema was America First. On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh, the American aviator who flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic Ocean, gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa in which he claimed that “the three most important groups which have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration.”[8]

Phyllis Schlafly had just graduated from City House, the now defunct Catholic high school in St. Louis, when Lindbergh gave his speech. It’s hard to imagine that the brightest girl at City House was unaware of America First, since Lindbergh had already given the same speech to 15,000 people attending an America First rally at the St. Louis arena.

Phyllis Schlafly was a tragic figure. She was the abused wife of the Republican Party, an organization which treated her with contempt until it was time to get out the vote. Then like the husband who had beaten her in a drunken rage the night before, the Republicans would apologize and sweet talk her into supporting them once more. Schlafly was a tragic figure because she was cut off from her natural constituency, which was Midwest, America First Catholics, in Alton, Illinois and St. Louis, most of whom were blue collar union members.

Phyllis was the victim of identity theft, perpetrated on her by the conservative movement by people like William F. Buckley, whose job was policing the conservative movement and expelling anyone who showed genuine, i.e., America First, conservative inclinations.

Three months after Lindbergh gave his speech, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, and America entered the war. One day later the FBI showed up at the door of Henry Regnery’s father, the man who was the treasurer of America First, and confiscated their mailing list, thus putting an end to the only genuinely conservative movement in America during the 20th century. Henry told me that story some 50 years after it happened, an indication that the event had made a big impression on him at the time. I never asked him what conclusions he drew from it, but with hindsight the answer to that question was obvious. Henry abandoned America First and created conservatism in its stead. Whether he did it with the CIA in mind is something I can’t say, but I can say that conservatism never lost its ethnic flavor. Russel Kirk’s book was based on Whig history. Henry Regnery’s family may have been Catholic when they arrived in this country, but Henry became a Quaker, largely because of the Quakerspeise, their effort to feed the Germans Winston Churchill was starving to death with his naval blockade. Henry married a Quaker princess from Philadelphia, and he published books which supported the ethnic cleansing of Catholics from their neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago because he was a Quaker and because Quaker was his ethnic identity.

In 1955, four years after Henry published God and Man at Yale, in the same year WFB launched National Review, Will Herberg, who would become religion editor at that magazine, became famous as the author of Protestant, Catholic, Jew, a book which resurrected the 1930s sociological theory known as the triple melting pot. According to that theory, ethnicity did not cease to exist after migration to America. After three generations language was replaced by religion as the source of ethnic identity. America was like Yugoslavia; it was a country which had three ethnic groups based on three religions.

Missing from Herberg’s account was the fact that these three religious-based ethnic groups were, as in Yugoslavia, in a constant state of cultural conflict. In the 1920s and the 1930s, the Protestants joined forces with the Catholics in opposing the Jews who ran Hollywood and were using their monopoly on cinema production to corrupt the morals of the American people. Beginning in the late 1940s, with the publication of Paul Blanshard’s book American Freedom and Catholic Power, the WASP ruling class switched sides in the culture wars and joined forces with the Jews in opposing the Catholics.

The complicated interface between religion, morality, ideology, and ethnicity gave rise to similar conflicts on the campus of Hillsdale College, where Catholic students started arriving in significant numbers after the sellout of Catholic education which Rev. Theodore Hesburgh inaugurated after issuing the Land O’ Lakes statement in 1967. As one of his first acts, when he became president of Hillsdale College in 1971, George Roche III invited Russell Kirk to join the faculty. Kirk’s appointment put the world on notice that Hillsdale was serious about being conservative. If Roche had been as serious about thinking as he was about fund-raising and public relations, he might have noticed that Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, had some significant things to say about the need for religion to restrain appetite, lessons that would have increasing relevance to Hillsdale College under George III’s increasingly autocratic leadership. “Men’s appetites,” Kirk wrote describing Burke’s point of view, “are voracious and sanguinary . . . reason alone can never chain them to duty.”

Both Burke and Adams were referring to religion as the antidote to “reason alone,” but it is the recurring tragedy of the Anglo-American philosophy that its traditionalist thinkers could all agree on the necessity of religion, but could never get down to specifying which religion was necessary, so suffused were they with the baleful effects of the Reformation.

Burke, according to Kirk, was dedicated to private property and tradition, but both pillars were to prove fragile mixtures of iron and clay. When Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist Jacobin, asked the tradition-loving Burke if he believed strongly enough in tradition to want to go back to the days when Englishmen worshipped bread, there was no answer forthcoming. When Burke said he followed tradition, he meant going back to the political arrangements of 1688 and no further. When Burke defended private property, he did not enquire too closely into the question of where the richest English families got their property, because if he had, he would have had to admit that they got it by looting the Catholic monasteries of the Middle Ages. Once again tradition and property had distinct if dishonest boundaries.

There is no statue of Edmund Burke on the Hillsdale College campus, but there is a statue of Ronald Reagan and one of Margaret Thatcher as well, the two representatives of the triumph of modern conservatism over Communism, the main 20th century representative of the Jewish revolutionary spirit. On October 12, 1990, right around the time I gave my speech on the fall of Communism at Hillsdale, Margaret Thatcher said:

The new world of freedom into which the dazzled socialists have stumbled is not new to us. What to them is uncharted territory is to us familiar and well-loved ground. For Britain has returned to those basic truths and principles which made her great—personal liberty, private property, and the rule of law on which democratic freedoms everywhere are based. Ours is a creed which travels and endures. Its truths are written in the human heart.

Hillsdale advocated those “basic truths” for the following decade, and they did nothing to impede the slide into sexual degradation on the Hillsdale College Campus. Both Roche and the conservatism he rode to wealth and power shared this ambivalence about religion. Russell Kirk, after spending most of his life as an Anglophile Bohemian, finally converted to Catholicism when he married in his mid-50s. George Roche followed the exact opposite trajectory. Raised a Catholic in Denver, Roche abandoned the Catholic faith and became an Episcopalian as an adult. When Roche decided that even the decidedly Erastian brand of Christianity that the Episcopal Church had always been was too rigid for his liking, he founded his own Episcopalian Church. It was a move reminiscent of Henry VIII and completely consistent with someone who referred to himself as George III. George Roche was, to use the phrase of St. Augustine, someone who loved money and made use of God. He was not someone who loved God and made use of money.

The crisis came in 1978. Pressured by the growing Catholic presence on campus, Roche put Harry Vereyser in charge of creating a Christian Studies program, and then did everything he could to undermine Vereyser’s efforts. In October of 1978, Rev. Eugene Sweeney, the Catholic chaplain, resigned in protest against Roche’s animus against any religion which held fast to the moral law in its entirety. Shortly thereafter, Harry Vereyser resigned, and shortly after that Russell Kirk handed in his resignation as well.

After he left Hillsdale, Kirk would eventually get expelled from the movement he founded. When Kirk opined at a meeting of the Heritage Foundation, “Not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States,”[9] he was excommunicated from the conservative movement he had founded, because that movement had been taken over by a Jewish Trotskyite sect known as neoconservatism, led by Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Dector, who called Kirk’s remark “a bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives.”[10]

With all of their faults, both Russell Kirk and John Adams were onto something, but they would remain for their respective generations, voices crying in the wilderness, as their contemporaries plunged toward the gratification of passions which would ultimately destroy them.

Purged of the moral restraint which Catholicism offered, the campus became a hotbed of sexual degradation whose best expression was the Porky’s movies which Hillsdale alumnus Bob Clark directed in the 1980s. “The passions,” John Adams warned, “are all unlimited.” If the citizens of this republic “surrender the guidance for any course or tie to any one passion, they may depend upon finding it, in the end, a usurping, domineering cruel tyrant.” Anyone who indulges in and continually gratifies passion will be driven mad by it. Man has a congenital weakness to confound liberty and license, which is why according to Kirk, “Adams preferred the concept of virtue to the concept of freedom.” Kirk shared the same preference, and seeing how things were going, left Hillsdale to its own devices.

“Democracy in some form,” Kirk concluded at the end of The Conservative Mind, “will endure. Whether it is to be a democracy of degradation, or a democracy of elevation, lies with the conservatives.”[11] Hillsdale chose the former path in the year Russell Kirk resigned in 1978. It was in 1978 that George III began his affair with his daughter-in-law Lissa. That affair reached its tragic conclusion when Lissa Jackson Roche committed suicide. Purged of morality, conservatism became nothing more than rationalized appetite, and Lissa had to kill herself to draw everyone’s attention to that fact.

Then everything includes itself in power
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat himself up.

We witnessed the fulfillment of that line from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida over the summer of 2020. Deprived of the morality based conservatism that Russell Kirk proposed as the only way to unite the people of this country, the United States descended into moral anarchy, identity politics and race war, as articulated by the Jewish revolutionary spirit, and Michigan led the way. Governor Gretchen Whitmer turned the COVID pandemic into a lockdown which was nothing less than an undeclared war on the lower end of the state’s entrepreneurial class, epitomized by Karl Manke, the barber from Owosso, who defied Whitmer’s lockdown regulations and was later vindicated by the Michigan Supreme Court.[12]

The plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer surfaced two weeks before the election. At a press conference which she called on October 8, 2020, Michigan attorney general Dana Nessell said that she could not have thwarted the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer without the help of the FBI.13 Five days later, the attorney representing the alleged kidnappers agreed, contending:

that there was no probable cause to arrest and charge the suspect, arguing, among other things, that the suspects had no operational plan to do anything, were engaged in all legal activities – including talking in encrypted group chats and practicing military exercises with lawfully owned guns – and that it was the informants and undercover agents who “pushed” others to do illegal things. “One of the most active leaders was your informant,” the defendants’ attorney Scott Graham said.[14]

Graham went on to claim that the FBI informant who infiltrated the militia group “was one of the most active leaders of the group pushing the rest of them to follow through with their criminal plans.”

The plot to kidnap Gretchen wasn’t the first time that the FBI tried to incite terrorism in Michigan. In late March 2010, nine members of a group known as the Hutaree were charged with a conspiracy to overthrow the government. As we have come to suspect, the “undercover FBI agent” provocateur was the most active member of the group. Two years later, on March 27, 2012, a federal judge acquitted seven of the nine defendants. Two of the alleged conspirators were sentenced to “time served on weapons-related charges, to which they pleaded guilty, and placed under supervision for two years.”[15]

Unlike the alleged kidnappers, Nessell and Whitmer were actually involved in a plot to prevent Donald Trump from winning Michigan’s electoral votes in an election that was less than two weeks away. Evidence of cheating started showing up within a week of the election. On November 5, Kellye Sorelle, an attorney on the Trump legal team who was sent to Michigan to watch the count amidst concern about voter fraud, tweeted a report that she was told to leave for the night because Trump was winning. She got suspicious and hung back with her camera and waited. Later the same night cars started pulling up with luggage and ice chests full of illegal ballots. She is now a witness for the Michigan and U.S. Supreme Courts.

The FBI could not have played their part in this conspiracy without the collaboration of Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel, a Jewish Lesbian who got elected with the help of George Soros money.

When former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tried to explain the bad effect that Soros prosecutors were having in cities across America, he was told by the info babe at Fox News, the conservative network, that he was not allowed to mention Soros’s name. The look on Gingrich’s face spoke volumes. Apparently, Newt hadn’t gotten the memo. Merely saying the name George Soros constituted a prima facie case of anti-Semitism.

During the time leading up to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, George Soros gave Black Lives Matter $33 million dollars. During the summer of 2020, Jews like George Soros and Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation league tried to ignite a race war in the United States as part of their campaign to deny Donald Trump re-election.

The ADL was not the only Jewish organization supporting Black Lives Matter. According to a report in the Jewish Telegraph Agency, “More than 400 Jewish organizations and synagogues in the United States have signed on to a letter that asserts ‘unequivocally: Black Lives Matter.’”[16] Those groups represented a broad spectrum “of religious, political, gender, and racial identities. The list of signatories – from small congregations to major Jewish organizations – represents millions of Jewish people in the United States . . . .”

What name do we give to this involvement? In America it was called the Black-Jewish alliance. For the 70 years following the lynching of Leo Frank, Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamantion League or ADL and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, tried to foment race war in the United States. The culmination of this campaign came in the 1960s with the creation of the Civil Rights Movement.

Religious Riots in St. Louis

But the Jewish revolutionary spirit goes back farther than that. It goes back to the foot of the Cross. By rejecting Christ as their Messiah, the Jews rejected the Logos incarnate, and when they rejected the Logos they rejected the order God created for this universe, and when they rejected that, they became revolutionaries, which is what they are today in places like St. Louis, where Umar Lee demanded the removal of the statue of the eponymous King of France.

As in Minneapolis where the race wars of 2020 began, appearances are deceptive. Lee claimed to be a Muslim, but he also claimed to be a descendent of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. He claimed to have the support of Black Lives Matter, but why should they hold a grudge against a French king from the 13th century? Did Louis IX own black slaves? Did he have secret cotton plantations in Paris? No, Louis IX’s crime was that he burned the Talmud.

Do the Blacks care about the Talmud? Do they know what it is? Do they know about the blasphemies it contains, which was the real reason it was burned? Probably not. As in Minneapolis, the group behind the protest was invisible. The Jewish revolutionary spirit was behind the protests in both cities. In spite of appearances to the contrary, the brouhaha over the statue in St. Louis was a battle between Catholics and Jews. Umar Lee, as front man for the Jews, had to disguise that fact, and turn the conflict into a battle between blacks and whites. Catholics became victims of identity theft when Umar Lee turned a group of Catholics who had assembled to pray the Rosary in defense of the statue into “white supremacists.” After Lee did this, Black Lives Matter showed up and beat up a 60-year-old Catholic who was trying to pray the Rosary, because, as we learned from the failed attempt to preserve the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, white people have no rights.

In fact, they don’t even exist, except in the minds of their enemies. In order to have rights, you first have to have existence. Identity flows from existence because as an essential aspect of being, existence presupposes essence. Essence is the basis of identity, and identity is the basis of unity.

To have unity you have to assert your identity. And this is precisely where the Catholics of St. Louis ran into problems. They were willing to come to the statue and pray the Rosary, but they were unwilling to go any farther than that. Most importantly, they were unwilling to identify their enemy. This was a crucial mistake because, as Sun Tzu once said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”[17]

The crisis came on June 12, when Umar Lee announced that a group of “white supremacists” were planning to go to the St. Louis statue and beat up a group of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish women. This was a complete fabrication on Lee’s part, and his supporters probably knew he was lying because virtually none of the St. Louis iconoclasts showed up to support him. The Catholics, however, showed up en masse led by a black nun ringing a bell, a gesture which did severe damage to the race-based identity theft which Lee attempted to impose on the Catholics. That gesture was an implicit rebuke to Lee’s racial narrative, but it was not explicit, nor did that gesture alone explain the identity of the Catholics’ enemy.

At this point, I became part of the story by releasing my account of the battle of the statue as a Catholic-Jewish conflict. I say that I became part of the story because within hours after the Culture Wars article appeared on the Internet, Umar Lee challenged me to a debate.

Up to this point, Umar Lee didn’t know me from Adam. The fact that he challenged me meant that my article did significant damage to his racial narrative because only people on the losing side of the battle challenge their opponents to debate. Up to this point, Lee was riding high and confident not only that the statue was coming down, but also that the city named after the same saint was going to be renamed Confluence.

Catholic reaction to Umar Lee’s challenge was instructive. Almost to a man, the Catholics told me not to debate Lee because, they claimed, if I did they would be called anti-Semites. That statue is still standing, not so much because I accepted Lee’s challenge, but because I identified the enemy. If you want to succeed in the culture wars, you must identify the enemy, as Sun Tzu pointed out a long time ago. That means avoiding meaningless labels like “liberal” and “conservative” or “black” and “white,” and getting to the heart of the matter in America, which is invariably ethnic, involving a conflict between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Any other strategy is based on a naïve acceptance of the terms of identity politics, which invariably involves, as it did in St. Louis, identity theft.

Hillsdale College is now witnessing what Sigmund Freud would have called “the return of the repressed.” Censored by the administration, which had banned America First clubs on campus, Hillsdale’s Catholic ethnics protested against the form of identity theft known as conservatism by inviting me to the local version of the catacombs to speak.

The death of conservatism in 2016 meant the resurrection of America First in 2020. Just look at the map of election results, and you will see the same configuration that Charles Lindbergh addressed in 1941. Both then and now, the center of the country supported isolationism, high wage manufacturing, and limited representative government, and the coasts supported globalization, low wages, identity politics, gender ideology, and Jewish usury. The triple melting pot of religious identity re-asserted itself over race-based identity politics. Religious-based ethnicity trumped race, because in America religious-based ethnicity is a category of reality, whereas race is a category of the mind which invariably gets deployed for political purposes which have nothing to do with race.

The most striking sign of the return of the repressed at Hillsdale was architectural. Brooding over the quadrangle which it created, Christ Chapel is large enough to become the foil balancing Central Hall, the iconic American Gothic administration building which is one of America’s most prominent symbols of conservatism. Christ Chapel is an Italianate masterpiece in beige brick and limestone, worthy of Alberti, at least on the outside. Entering the building through the porch of Doric columns during the era of COVID lockdown in Gretchen Whitmer’s Michigan proved impossible until, that is, a young female student took pity on my wife and I and buzzed us in through a side door. This young lady had clearly never darkened a church door during her 20 years of existence, and was apologetic about the chapel’s price tag. “This money,” she said, “should have been spent on the poor,” apparently unaware that one of Jesus’ disciples had said the same thing, and that that disciple was Judas Iscariot. “Be sure to check out the day chapel,” she said leaving us to our own devices.

I would have preferred a tour with her as guide, but the building spoke for itself. The massive Doric columns we had seen at the entrance porch now reappeared and marched in stately file up to what should have been the church’s sanctuary, but was in this instance an empty space with a pathetic little altar added at its back almost as an afterthought. I have had similar experiences of architectural disappointment before. Walking up to the Taj Mahal was one of the greatest aesthetic experiences of my life, but when I walked inside the empty tomb which is that building’s raison d’etre, I experienced on of the greatest aesthetic disappointments in my life as well. The mosque of the wife of the fourth Imam in Qom is gorgeously adorned with cobalt blue tiles, mirrored ceilings, and a solid silver shrine which inspire weeping and devotion on the part of the Muslims worshipping at its walls, but the interior of the mosque was, in spite of the worshippers conversing with imams seated on gorgeous Persian carpets, disorganized and strangely empty. I had a similar experience at the historic Quaker meeting house at 2nd and Arch in Philadelphia, where one sits on horsehair benches and contemplates others sitting on horsehair benches as well. The chapel at Hillsdale was both magnificent and disappointing because what should be the culmination of the aesthetic experience, which the building offers, is missing. Instead of the Real Presence, we have a significant absence, a vacuum which is of necessity abhorrent.

But then we went to the Day Chapel, just to the right of the empty sanctuary, and there, to our surprise, we found stained glass windows. It was as if we had been touring one of England’s stately country estates and had discovered a priest hole. Popery had shown the hidden feature which became the symbolic explicator of the building. Later that day, I learned that the architect who had designed Christ Chapel was the Notre Dame professor Duncan Stroik. As some indication that Stroik knows how to create a full-blooded expression of the Real Presence which balances off the most magnificent interior, one need only visit his masterpiece in the California style at Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, California. There leafy ethereal Corinthian pillars proceed to a baldachino with swirling pillars that were copied from St. Peter’s in Rome. That symbolic canopy provides a worthy shrine for the Real Presence. After walking the length of the nave, the pilgrim feels that he has arrived at his cosmic destination in the same way you feel that you have arrived safely home after the last note of a magnificent symphony. Did Duncan Stroik wreck his own building when he left the sanctuary of Christ Chapel bare? He used Anglophilic models like Christ Church in Philadelphia as his model, but they don’t seem unbalanced in the way that the chapel at Hillsdale did, probably because those architects didn’t know any better. Christ Chapel has the feel of the great Italian architect of the Middle Ages Leon Battisti Alberti on the outside and the American Revolution on its inside. Christ Church in Philadelphia is where our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. Is this bifurcation of purpose going to work? Is it possible to worship God and Mammon? Larry Arnn, who is George Roche’s successor at Hillsdale, talked about always needing a place to pray on campus. Lissa’s demise at the trysting place known as the Gazebo made that point in a bloody and dramatic way. Christ Chapel totally dominates the quad behind Central Hall. The verdict is still out on how that chapel aligns with the statues of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Jefferson which surround it. Conservatism failed to make that connection under George III. If anyone can make it now, it is the students who attended my talk.

We seem a long way from Edmund Burke’s hope that “Providence would not abandon mankind to Jacobinism,” and even farther from Russell Kirk’s vision of America as “the Providential instrument of this redemption.”[18] The color revolution continues to unfold before our eyes, but Logos is rising because the prism of conservatism is no longer distorting what we see. Hegel called it “the cunning of reason,” but we call it Divine Providence. We now have a chance to win, but only if we can identify the enemy. If we don’t know who we are and we can’t identify the enemy, we will lose every battle as Sun Tsu predicted many years ago.