Historic Huntington Liberty flag of 1776

Dennis Prager explains in his American Greatness article Explaining Conservatism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The next time a liberal or left-wing friend or relative asks you
what conservatives stand for, say “liberty”—especially free speech.

There are a number of reasons many young people shy away from conservatism.

The most obvious is that they have been exposed only to left-wing values—from elementary school through graduate school, in the movies, on television, on social media and now even at Disneyland.

Less obvious but equally significant is that they have never been properly exposed to conservative values. Since at least the World War II generation, most parents who held conservative values either did not think they had to teach their children those values or simply did not know how to do so. Most still don’t. If asked to define conservative values, most conservatives will be tongue-tied.

In light of this, I present here, and in subsequent columns, a list of conservatism’s defining characteristics.

We will begin with the most important conservative value—liberty.

Conservatives believe in individual liberty (there is no liberty other than individual liberty). It has been the primary value of the American experiment. While many countries include the word “liberty” in their national mottoes and national anthems, no country has so emphasized liberty as has America.

That is why:

• • The French designers of the Statue of Liberty gave the statue to America.
  • The iconic symbol of America is the Liberty Bell.
  • The one inscription on the Liberty Bell is a verse about liberty from the Book of Leviticus: “And you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.”
  • Americans sing of their country as “the land of the free” and “sweet land of liberty.”
  • Until recently, every America schoolchild knew by heart Patrick Henry’s cry, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
  • Chinese young people who protested the Communist takeover of Hong Kong waved the American flag.

And that is why America’s founders were adamant that the state—the national government—be as small, as limited, as possible. The bigger the government, the smaller the liberty. Big government and big liberty are mutually exclusive.

Moreover, liberty is not the only victim of big government. Human life is also a victim. Every genocide of the 20th century, the century of genocide, was committed by big government. Without big government, one hundred million people would not and could not have been slaughtered, and a billion more would not and could not have been enslaved. (There was one exception: the Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, which was tribal in nature. Tribal culture, like left-wing culture, emphasizes the group over the individual.)

In order to limit the size and power of the national government,
the founders delegated most governmental powers to the states.

They did so in the Constitution by specifying what powers the national government had and by asserting that all other powers be delegated to the states. In addition, they increased the power of the states by having presidential elections decided by the states—the Electoral College—rather than by the popular national vote, and by how they structured the Senate, one of the two branches of Congress. They gave every state equal representation in the Senate, no matter how small the population of the state.

The Left’s opposition to the Electoral College and to the Senate makes perfect sense. It is the power inherent in big government, not liberty, that animates the Left. The defining characteristic of every left-wing party and movement in the world has always been an ever bigger and therefore more powerful government.

Liberty is a liberal value as well as a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. Liberty cannot be a left-wing value because the more liberty individuals have, the less power the government has. Conversely, the weaker the state, the weaker the Left.

This especially holds true for the greatest of all liberties—free speech.

Free speech is a fundamental conservative value, and it has been a fundamental liberal value. But it has never been a left-wing value. For that reason, everywhere the Left is dominant—government, media, universities—it stifles dissent. The reason is simple: No left-wing movement can survive an open exchange of ideas. Leftist ideologies are emotion- and power-based, not reason- or morality-based. So, leftists cannot allow honest debate.

They do not argue with opponents; they suppress them.

For the first time in American history, freedom of speech is seriously threatened—indeed it has already been seriously curtailed. With the ascent of the Left, the inevitable suppression of free speech is taking place.

That liberals—who have always valued liberty and free speech—vote for the great suppressor of liberty, the Left, is the tragedy of our time. The reason they do so is that liberals forgot what they stand for; they only remember what they believe they stand against: conservatives.

So, the next time a liberal or left-wing friend or relative asks you what conservatives stand for, say “liberty”—especially free speech. And explain that is why you fear and oppose big government—because big government and individual liberty cannot coexist.

Black and white group photograph of immigrants posing for a photograph aboard the passenger ship Italia. Donato Sforza emigrated from Italy with his family in 1959 and are part of the group in this photograph. According to the archives at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia the Italia stopped at the following ports: New York, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax-Plymouth, Havre, Southampton, Zeebrugge, Cuxhaven and Hamburg.

Geoffrey Clarfield explains at American Thinker The Anti-White Lie Behind Multiculturalism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Like America, Canada is a nation comprised of people from around the world. And like America—perhaps even more than America—Canada is wearing racial blindfolds that make the government incapable of seeing that, just as “people of color” represent many different races, lands, and cultures, the same is true for “pale faced” people. This blindness erases Canada’s rich ethnic history.

As an anthropologist who spent 17 years living and working in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Black lives really matter and where everyone belongs to a tribe with which they identify, it pains me that I must explain to fellow Canadians (and Americans) that pale-faced people are not all the same. Are they just one thing — that is, one ethnic group in contrast to the myriad of “others”? No.

Canada’s government allows residents to choose from the following menu as a form of self-definition: White, South Asian, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Arab, Latin American, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Korean, Japanese, and First Nation. I found the most interesting category, “White.” No, there is no such thing as just “White.” Let us consider for a moment all those founding Canadian citizens—the “pale faces”—who were either born here or moved here from abroad.

The flag of the city of Montreal honors the founding races. It includes the French fleur de lis, the English rose, Irish shamrock and Scottish thistle. The Iroquois tree represents aboriginal people.

The first group of Canadian pale faces is the French-speaking citizens of Quebec and other parts of Canada whose ancestors came from France and settled here. They have a strong provincial government that protects and encourages their language, literature, music, poetry, film, scholarship, historical monuments, and all those other things that make a culture distinct.

The Quebecois, as they call themselves, are an ethnic group with a clear sense of who belongs and who does not belong. This week they elected a government that wants to limit immigration and protect the descendants of the founding population.

Then there are the descendants of the Protestant English and the Protestants of Northern Ireland, who founded the area of Upper Canada and conquered the Quebecois, allowing them to retain their culture and religion but insisting that England and things English be the beau ideal of the state.

They knew who was in and who was out. In Ontario, until WWII, there was little chance of a government job if you were not Protestant. British subjects hired British subjects and their children. They intermarried and kept apart from others. In slang, they are called WASPS, and their elites ran the country politically, economically, culturally, and religiously until the 1960s, with some elite Quebecois input.

Canada has many Celts: Irish Catholics, the fourth largest ethnic group in the country, who came from Catholic Ireland (the Republic), and the Catholic communities from Ulster. They are family-oriented, have a deep historic identity, and a culture of song, dance, and literature that they often justly feel may be better than the English speakers who call themselves English. Some of them still speak kinds of Gaelic.

Next come the Scots, lowland Protestants, highland Catholics, and later splinter groups like Presbyterians—but all of them feel Scottish and, similarly, there are the Welsh.

Image: People who look diverse – including those “White people,” by rawpixel.

Other pale faces have arrived since these founders. There are Central European pale faces, such as the Dutch, Belgians, Germans (who were once a majority in Kitchener, Ontario), Scandinavians and, of course, the non-conformist Protestant German-speaking Amish and Mennonite religious communities that have flourished here. The same region sent Czechs, Poles, Slovenians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats, Ukrainians, Russians, and other Slavs who have been here as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelicals for more than one hundred years.

Every one of these groups is ethnically distinct and has its own culture.

There are also the “second class” pale faces, such as Catholic Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and Orthodox Greeks, all Mediterranean peoples. Although Canada’s Anglo-Canadian-Celtic founders recognized them as some sort of second-order European, these same founders often felt that they just had too many swarthy members and, therefore, were second class. That’s why places used to have restrictive signs about Jews, Catholics, and Blacks.

And what about those Jews? Who are they? Sometimes they look German, Ukrainian, or Sicilian. Still, the constant is that other pale-faced Canadians have always treated them as second-class citizens who must “prove their loyalty.” Like the Jews, the Roma are treated as White, too, despite their Indian subcontinent origins.

Until long after WWII, most of these “pale face” groups were endogamous, and many still are, statistically speaking, meaning that they married, lived and, often, worked among each other and not members of other ethnic groups.

So why are all the pale faces, and almost pale faces,
these days lumped together as Whites on a government census?

This is very bad anthropology. It is not science-based. It is not empirical, and—God forbid! —it’s not evidence-based either. Also, remember that some pale-faced groups hate and persecute other pale-faced groups, a key aspect of many “ethnic boundaries.” Consider the war in Ukraine! This is just one example.

The madness of this census and its broken categories comes down to one thing: political correctness and Critical Race Theory, which, when taken together, must invent a category of “White” so proponents can blame everyone else’s suffering on this social construct. This ignores the fact that pale-faced ethnic groups are as diverse as people of color. If we were to take the CRT acronym of DIE (“diversity, inclusion and equity”) seriously, then these groups and the individuals who comprise them should be allowed to self-define.

Since we now live in a society that allows us to choose our pronouns, why can’t we choose our ethnicity as our fundamental defining feature, for it realistically includes things like neighborhoods, religious affiliation, and a way of looking at the world (not to mention good food)?

Should not, according to this twisted logic, the next government census reflect this multicultural truth? Can I again quote singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (deceased member of one of Canada’s transnational minorities) because the truth is, “Everybody knows.”

These Canadian census categories are very bad anthropology. They are unbalanced, and they are used to reduce hiring in the private sector and the government by those who are naïve enough to check off their category as “White.” The newspapers here are full of examples, and the policies are not hidden. Affirmative action based upon these bogus anthropological categories is totally out of control in this once fine country.

Canada and Canadians are at their best when they reject the politicization of personal identity; when they abide by the shared traditions of Anglo-American law and the Judeo-Christian tradition; and above all, when they are judged by the quality of their character, not by the color of their skin or ethnic identity.

Canadians, like Americans, must reject the politicization of ethnic labels. Give the study of ethnicity back to the anthropologists, for that is where it came from. Let us once again become individuals, equal under the law.

Lyrics:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that its now or never
Everybody knows that its me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you’ve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what you’ve been through
From the bloody cross on top of calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows its coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Footnote:

I doubt Leonard Cohen had climate or social justice in mind when he wrote this masterpiece.  But he did have a pertinent poetic insight; namely, that social proof is an unreliable guide to the truth.

Mark C. Ross writes at American Thinker Thoughts on the new civil war.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The true divide in our ongoing civil war is not geographical but political. It is between those who covet the power to control others and those who want to be left alone. Within this context, the geography comes into view: it is a conflict between metropolitan Washington, D.C. and the whole rest of the country. And it had already been started some years ago during the Obama presidency.

The battles are being fought in the media, the courts, and legislative chambers and occasionally boiling over into the streets.

Agents of the state are becoming increasingly more obvious in their efforts to suppress dissent. Political crimes have emerged as an ostensible new class of offense…where nothing is stolen and no one is actually harmed, but resistance to authoritarian control threatens the well-being of those who covet power.

How can such a small area dominate so vast a continent? They have the power, or at least they think so. When the eleven Confederate states seceded, 70% of the officers of the U.S. Army joined them. For a while then, the tail managed to wag the dog. Then the larger picture began to take shape.

It was into today’s milieu that emerged one Donald J. Trump as a perceived reckless iconoclast — smashing the idols of authority regardless of the consequences. After all, apple carts were meant to be upset. And while the authoritarians have used every weapon in their arsenal, Trump’s stature has grown. Thus, the shoddy tactics being used against him have morphed into clichés, losing much of their effectiveness. Even fear, the most reliable tool in the box, is no longer getting the job done.

First, we were endlessly harangued about how we’re to blame for subtle trends in the weather. Then a strange virus of possible man-made origin is portrayed as an emergency requiring significantly more authority on the part of obviously fallible officials. Statistical deception was employed to the point of reductio ad absurdum.

Add to this the attrition of key members of the media. Bari Weiss, formerly of the N.Y. Times; Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone; and Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, are three of the more notable defectors away from the Orwellian nightmare of modern journalism. There are pro-state authoritarians scattered throughout the nation — just as the Confederacy had supporters in the Union, though they were mostly along the border regions. The difference is that today’s statists have typically been trained by a corrupt education establishment. Over time, some will realize how they’ve been misled.

This conflict is hardly contained within the United States. But socially stratified Europe and Asia were especially more vulnerable to the dogma of Marxist class struggle than the bourgeois paradise we call America. And thus, Americans are more familiar with freedom and are hence more hostile to tyranny. The complaint and the alarm are that the forces of authoritarianism have succeeded as much as they have in the last few decades. Systematic indoctrination in the class rooms accounts for much of this; and from there, it has spilled out through the media.

Ideas and information are the true weapons in this struggle. This explains why the other side is so hell-bent on manipulating the language. Yeah, and we’re wise to that, too. They are so superficial that they actually believe that such nonsense as banning gendered pronouns will be taken seriously.

D. Parker chimes in also at American Thinker It’s time to get rid of the ‘liberal-conservative’ spectrum

One question destroys the liberal/conservative narrative fiction:

Were Stalin, Mao, and Hitler “ultra-liberal”?

Because if this is supposed to be the political spectrum model for the world — and logic presupposes that must be the case — then having it range from ultra-liberal to ultra-conservative poses a big problem: where do the “baddies” belong?

Consider all of this in the context of the political spectrum as the logical arrangement of ideologies based on their level of governmental control, with maximum and minimum levels at each end. It stands to reason that since socialism is the standard leftist ideology, with forced wealth redistribution and a centrally controlled economy, these would require the government to be at a maximum level; thus, this would be the left side of the spectrum. Also consider that it’s going to take the maximum government to take “from each according to his ability.”

Does the authoritarianism of the anti-liberty left along with the negation of property rights and the economic slavery of socialism seem amenable to liberalism?

Contrast that with the fact that the precepts of the pro-freedom right with an emphasis on liberty and limited government would mean minimal control. In fact, with the term “liberal” closely associated with liberty and minimal government, the logical conclusion is that all of these terms belong on the pro-freedom right.

A left-right political spectrum with maximum governmental control on the left and minimal governmental control on the right, easily accommodates these questions. That is not the case with the liberal/conservative canard, since maximum government would not seem to be amenable to an ideology closely associated with liberty.

Finally, consider this from author and engineer Robert A. Heinlein, encapsulating the whole issue with one test:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

It does seem as though most people fall into one of two distinct groups. The first are control-obsessed collectivists who demand that we place the public good ahead of the good of the individual. Then there are those individualists who just want to be left alone.

Footnote: Jordan Peterson has some advice for the elites pushing this mad dash for Net Zero.

Transcript of Peterson’s concluding comments:

A better way forward would be to prioritize the problems that beset all of us on this still green, functional and increasingly abundant planet. With the requisite focus and attention demanded of a true political class elected by the people, capable of and willing to look at everything: Trying to fix where necessary; trying to maintain as much freedom and autonomy as possible. And stop simply capitalizing narcissistically on the mere appearance of action, knowledge and virtue.

We should obtain true cooperative consent from those affected: farmers, truckers, working-class people who have turned an irritated desperation to figures such as Trump. And work with them rather than forbidding them with your power or improving them so they will be finally worthy of your time and attention.

Help replace dirty energy with clean, if you must. But do it on your own dime and make sure that the results are cheap and plentiful, if you want to help the poor and the planet.

The warning bells are ringing. Listen to them before they turn into sirens. We will not advance without resistance through the straits of your enforced privation. We will not allow you to steal and destroy the energy that makes our lives bearable, and that produces our food and shelter and housing and the sporadic delights of modern life, just to address your existential terror. Particularly when it will fail to do so in any case.

We will not allow our children to be criticized, first for having the temerity to merely exist, and then to be deprived of the prosperous and opportunity-rich future we strived so hard to prepare for them.

We remain unconvinced by your frightened and self-congratulatory moralizing and intellectual pretension, ignorance of the limits of statistics and misuse of arithmetic. We do not believe finally and most absolutely that your declared emergency, and the panic you sow because of it, means that you should now be ceded all necessary authority.

So leave us alone: you centralizers of power, you worshipers of Gaia, you sacrificers of the wealth and property of others. You would be planetary saviors, you machiavellian pretenders and virtue signalers, objecting to power all the while you gather it around you madly.

Leave us alone, to prosper or not as a result of our own choices, as a result of our own actions, in the exercise of our own requisite and irreducible responsibility. Leave us alone or reap the whirlwind, and watch in consequence the terrible destruction of what you purport to save. 

See also Washington Capital Overthrowing the United States