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Angelo Privilege by Julie Ponzi "My last long conversation with Angelo was just before the recent 9/11 anniversary, when we discussed his plans for future articles and what was happening in the world. He insisted that what was necessary at this crucial moment in American politics was leadership. He seemed confident that our crisis also announces opportunities. The greatest challenges offer the greatest possibilities to display human excellence, and thus will invite a statesman of real ambition and ability to emerge and remind Americans of what makes us unique among the peoples of the Earth: our instinct (if not always our understanding) that we are and ought to be the sovereigns of our own destiny. Our ruling-class oligarchs have supplanted that sovereignty through an administrative state that does their bidding while claiming to adorn itself in the forms and trappings of constitutionality. Yet their open contempt for our actual Constitution and its purposes proves only how difficult self-government is to achieve and maintain. Freedom under the law is not the usual way of things in this world. It is our privilege to fight to reestablish and maintain it."....... |
Author archives: Angelo Codevilla › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
Angelo Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, and was as a visiting professor at Princeton and Georgetown. He was a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and is the author of thirteen books. Codevilla’s articles have appeared in journals from Foreign Affairs and The National Interest to The Claremont Review of Books, and his op eds in the Times and Journal as well as abroad. Born and raised in Italy, Angelo Codevilla has a Ph.D from Claremont, where he studied with Leo Strauss and Harry Jaffa. He served as a naval officer and as a US Foreign Service officer. Between 1977 and 1985 he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Angelo Codevilla’s books and articles have been about the nature of regimes, as well as of war and peace. The Character of Nations shows how peoples shape their character by how they govern themselves. Advice to War Presidents explains the instruments of power. Informing Statecraft examines the role of intelligence in statecraft and defines its functions. The Ruling Class is about today’s American regime. His newest book, To Make And Keep Peace, shows how American statecraft’s loss of focus on our peace engenders dysfunction at home and abroad.
Prof. Codevilla was doing excellent work for his country and the cause of Civilization. Here’s his recent column, ironically titled:
Epitaph for the ‘War on Terror’ › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
Excerpts:
“Twenty years after the U.S. government declared war on terrorism, it consummated its own defeat in Kabul and Washington, in a manner foreseeable, foreseen, and foreshadowed in 9/11’s immediate aftermath. Fixation on itself and unseriousness about war are the twin habits of heart and mind that disposed the ruling class to defeat.
At the “War On Terror’s” end as at its beginning, the same authoritative Americans—including Republican President George W. Bush as well as leading Democrats—blamed fellow Americans at least as much as foreign powers for it.
Bush’s first post 9/11 act (other than to sequester information about Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s role in terrorism) was to declare Islam the “religion of peace” and to declare illegitimate any American who thought otherwise. Fast forward to September 11, 2021 and Bush said that these Americans, many of whom had gone to war for him, losing life or limb, are “children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Similarly, in Joe Biden’s view the American people had shown “Fear and resentment of . . . true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion.” He called them “the dark forces of human nature.”
Treating the American people, especially conservatives, as the main threat results from the growth and clarification of attitudes endemic to Progressivism and already translated into policy and lack thereof by such luminaries as Dean Acheson, William Fulbright, Robert McNamara, Jimmy Carter, Anthony Lake, (Obama’s original mentor on national security,) and even by Henry Kissinger. Many among them identified with William Appleman Williams’s thesis (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959) that America was on the wrong side of the Cold War. America’s defeat by foreigners does not threaten these progressives’ prerogatives and identities as do their domestic rivals.
Blaming domestic rivals to deflect defeat’s consequences in foreign wars is all too usual. Nevertheless, statements by Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley that “domestic extremists,” whom they functionally define as whomever opposes the ruling class, pose the greatest danger of terrorism—especially if they are white—is egregious in history. The official reorientation of the U.S. armed forces’ focus on fighting what is arguably the American people’s majority, is even more so. A grassroots progressive group called the Democratic Coalition leaves no doubt about the ruling class’s 2021 practical agenda: “we cannot rest until all of Trump’s traitorous, insurrectionist foot soldiers face justice.” Insofar as they are serious, and even if they are not, this augurs civil war.
The ruling class takes any and all occasions to advance its overriding objective in its own domination. Terrorism, however, is especially useful. The premise that since we cannot know who is most likely to pose threats, that hence we must refrain from focusing on (profiling) Muslims and assume that the folks next door are as capable of mayhem as anyone shouting Allahu Akbar, has done much to make America what it is today. Especially because it is an in-your-face lie. The lie serves to free the ruling class to absolve or indict for terrorism whomever it chooses.
Surprise, surprise! Turns out that not everyone is as likely a source of terrorism as anyone else. The real, congenital, terrorists are conservative white folks. U.S intelligence properly profiles them to prevent the worst of them from taking part in society. And if anyone suggests that this relates to the fact that these white folks don’t vote for the Democratic Party, the Wall Street Journal tells us that the U.S. justice system is fair and competent: “The privacy of Americans hasn’t been threatened, while the Patriot Act has provided the feds with tools to break up domestic terror cells.” You must believe that, or else!
That is why the New York Times formulated the “War on Terror’s” official epitaph: “A War on Terror Accounting Since 9/11. The fall of Kabul shouldn’t obscure the successes over 20 years. Experts say it is the success of a multilateral effort that extends to as many as 85 countries.”
Who are you to disagree, white man?”…….
Prof. Codevilla saw clearly how our Elites went from protecting Americans by defeating terrorists to defeating Americans by protecting terrorists. The Taliban are now their Trusted Partners(tm) and fellow citizens are suspects.
There is no better metaphor for the devolution of the Ruling Class than the journey from President Lincoln's Gettysburg closing in 1863 --"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,"-- to the opening of George W. Bush's 2021 9/11 speech: “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, disregard for human life. In their determination to defile national symbols they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
By "violent extremists", Bush means the Trump voters who were lured into Pelosi's spider-web of false-flag ANTIFA provocateurs, rogue Capitol Police and FBI informants. They came to the Capitol to ask for Honest Elections. So the Swamp framed them.
Bush has gone from giving purple-fingered Honest Elections to Afghanis, to defending the Right of the Ruling Class to steal Elections here. After all, if Trump voters are terrorists, they deserve it, right?
He was 78. He will be missed. ................
While attempting to smear American voters and prisoners of the American Gulag for demanding Honest Elections, W. inadvertently named his own Cabal of Occupation Government Gangsters, like a modern OBalaam’s Donkey:
“Children of the Same Foul Spirit”
Exodus 14:13:
Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again.
Praise God!
Ace of Spades: "This article from January shows his crusading, uncompromising spirit.
Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to the Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court discounted that. By refusing to interfere as America's ruling oligarchy serves itself, the court archived what remained of the American republic's system of equal justice. That much is clear.In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans' movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment.
Today's rulers don't try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.
Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class pressure than do today's Americans. And their rulers were smart enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.
In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life's rules flow from the people through their representatives. In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts' claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings' pretensions.
In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.
The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our predicament is its only virtue.
He saw this coming long before most did. From 2010, on America's Ruling Class:
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.
Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."
Codevilla had just recovered from covid. And then a drunk driver killed him.".......
Angelo M. Codevilla | Hoover Institution
Claremont Institute | Recovering the American Idea
Angelo Codevilla, R.I.P. | National Review
Q&A With Angelo Codevilla - Tablet Magazine
The Prince: Angelo Codevilla, 1943-2021 | The Pipeline (the-pipeline.org)
RIP, Angelo Codevilla, conservative thinker who took on ruling class (nypost.com)
Angelo Codevilla, RIP by Paul Kengor, The American Spectator:
"Codevilla was quite the character. Acerbic, sarcastic, cranky, ornery, prickly, and yet all of it in a strangely entertaining if not endearing way, he was the epitome of political incorrectness. In fact, he reveled in his political incorrectness. The more that an audience seemed uneasy or offended by his statements, the more Angelo seemed energized and ready to roll. ...I only saw Angelo speak maybe three times, but on two occasions, I was fortunate enough to witness him rebuking (not correcting but rebuking) a couple poor souls who mispronounced his name whilst introducing him. Angelo stepped to the mic and opened his remarks by first glaring at the unfortunate fellows who introduced him and sharply explaining that his last name is pronounced “Coda-vill-ah,” not “Coda-vee-yah.”
“I’m Italian,” he explained sternly, without a hint of amusement. “Not Mexican.”
He was indeed, born in Voghera, Italy in May 1943. He came to the United States and attended Rutgers [now a full-Fauci Fascist institution--ed.] as an undergraduate before going on to grad school at Notre Dame (master’s degree) and then at Claremont, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1973. He served in the Navy, was a Foreign Service officer, and was very influential in the 1980s in a key position as a staff member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence and an aide to Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyoming). The Reagan administration found him to be a rock of reliability in supporting its foreign policy initiatives and defense programs, particularly the Strategic Defense Initiative. Beyond his time on Capitol Hill, Angelo taught at several places, from Grove City College to Georgetown to Stanford to Boston University, where he became an emeritus professor.
Among his many pieces for The American Spectator, none had the impact quite like Angelo’s piece for the July/August 2010 issue. Billed on the cover of the magazine that month as “America’s Regime Class,” the piece was titled inside, “America’s Ruling Class.”
“The progressives found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people’s backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America,” wrote Codevilla ...“By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty.”
In retrospect, the article seemed prophetic of the Trump years and into the 2020s when corporations and Big Tech and educated elites all went woke-left and as the rural-populist-working class went Trump and Republican. But at the time, it was directed at Barack Obama and the progressive elite and their “ruling class” that was dutifully filling up and expanding the Left’s Beltway powerbase.".......
It still IS directed at Barack Obama, Mr. Kengor. Obama was the Shadow President of the Permanent Government trying to overthrow President Trump for four years and now serves as Shadow President, Biden's Brain Edition.
In 2008, we effectively elected Barack Obama as President-for-Life, only nobody told us.
Our Indispensable Man by Ben Boychuk:
"His novel diagnosis in 2010 has become conventional wisdom on the Right today. The divide between the ruling class and the country class is at the heart of every political conflict of the past 25 years. It is the reason Republican and Democratic elected officials say one thing to their constituents and do another when it comes time to vote. It is the reason for the rise of both the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street. It is the reason for the unlikely electoral success of Donald Trump (of whom Codevilla could be quite critical when he needed to be).
The piece caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who still commanded a radio audience approaching 20 million nationwide. Limbaugh not only read the entire contents of “America’s Ruling Class” on the air over the course of his three-hour program, he spent the next four days discussing its implications. Codevilla expanded the essay into a book, to which Limbaugh contributed an introduction.
Codevilla came to believe that the ruling class had morphed into an out-and-out oligarchy—a transformation that accelerated during Trump’s time in office.
What’s striking, however, is that as glum as Codevilla’s analysis could be—and it often was—he never lost faith in America and Americans. More than anything, the immigrant-turned-patriot wanted his countrymen to recognize that they had the power to reject the oligarchy and its demands of obedience. As he often liked to say, “Who the hell do they think they are?”
“Stop pretending,” he wrote earlier this year. “Realize that you enjoy the rights God gave you only to the extent that your fellow ex-citizens recognize them, and that your only hope of continuing enjoyment lies in leaguing with them, on turning your back on the oligarchy and on effectively living republican lives with similarly minded people.”.......
Angelo Codevilla: How Our Oligarchy Crushes Terrorism:
Killed by a drunk driver? After a COVID infection failed to kill him? After the FBI spied on him and tried to entrap him ?
Huh. What are the odds?
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“Mr. Bond, they have a saying in 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'." |
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