The American Conservative

“Red Tory” Philip Blond is giving a talk this evening at Georgetown University, hosted by the invaluable Tocqueville Forum. Well worth attending if you’re in the D.C. area. And tomorrow Tocqueville is hosting two panel discussions on Blond’s ideas, the first featuring Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat, and yours truly, the second with John Millbank, Andrew Abela, and Charles Mathewes. Details are here.

Blond’s Red Toryism is not welfare statism — he’s for breaking up and devolving much of the British welfare system, and he prefers a morality-infused market to further government regulation. But how would that work? His talk will give some ideas. (As does his upcoming book, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it.)

There are a few noteworthy old-right events at this year’s CPAC gathering, which begins tomorrow and runs through Saturday. Our friends at the Campaign for Liberty are hosting three functions in particular which TAC readers will enjoy, starting with a talk at 1 pm tomorrow by Thomas DiLorenzo on the topic “Friend or Foe? Abraham Lincoln on Liberty,” followed at 2 pm by TAC contributing editor Thomas Woods on “When All Else Fails: Nullification and State Resistance to Federal Tyranny.” Then at 2 pm Saturday, there’s a panel with Jacob Hornberger, Karen Kwiatkowski, and TAC‘s own Phil Giraldi, “You’ve Been Lied To: Why Real Conservatives Are Against the War on Terror.” All of these events are being held in the Delaware Ballroom of the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.

A few weeks back I asked readers to donate to help us distribute copies of TAC at the Campaign for Liberty regional conference that took place this past weekend at Valley Forge. C4L had a larger-than-expected turnout, but thanks to you, we had magazines for the welcome packets of all 650 registered attendees. C4L’s conference included talks by TAC contributing editors Philip Giraldi and Tom Woods — it was a great gathering and an excellent place to make the magazine available.

The American Conservative needs your help. In September, we’d like to distribute the magazine to attendees at the Campaign for Liberty’s Valley Forge conference. This will get the magazine into the hands of several hundred people highly sympathetic to the magazine’s positions on peace, sound money, civil liberties, and constitutional conservatism. It’ll cost us $200 to get copies to the event and distribute them; a tiny sum, but something we haven’t budgeted for. So we’d like to ask you to donate — obviously, just 10 donors for $20 apiece gets the job done, or four $50 donors. Include “Valley Forge” in the comment box, and any additional money raised will also go toward distribution at this or future events.

I think there’s an excellent chance that recipients of the magazine will become subscribers, so this is a great way to help the The American Conservative grow. (Naturally, another helpful way to expand TAC‘s reach is by giving gift subscriptions.)

Neoconservatives and talk-radio types have been on this beat for a while, but next Saturday in McLean, Virginia the American Cause is hosting a conference on paleo perspectives for “building a new majority.” Pat Buchanan, Bay Buchanan, Ward Connerly, Phyllis Schlafly, former Rep. John Hostettler, and Terence Jeffrey are among the speakers. You can register here.

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference begins on Thursday. TAC has reported critically on the show in years past. But in 2009 CPAC may be livelier than usual, with no Republican establishment in Washington to defend and with a strong Ron Paul presence (including at talk by the good doctor at 4 pm on Friday and a Campaign for Liberty event that night at 7 pm) to shake things up. So this year TAC will have an exhibitor’s table on Friday and Saturday — stop by to pick up a copy of the magazine and say hello to a staffer or two. I’ll be at the table for a time on Friday, and on Saturday morning I’ll be part of ISI’s “God and Man at CPAC” panel from 10:30 to noon, which should provide a counterpoint of sorts to the usual Coulter and Hannity festivities.

(Also, if you’re a CPAC-goer under 40, be sure to visit our friends at the Young Americans for Liberty table and come to the 9 pm Friday launch party for their new ‘zine, the Young American Revolution, which I’ve had a hand in putting together.)

We just got a much anticipated phone call from our daughter, who is on a junior year abroad program in a city near Mumbai. She’s fine. But, she told us, she had been at one of those bars hit by the terrorists a few weeks ago. Deeprak Chopra is on the TV. Among other things, he says that the Al-Qaeda and like minded terrorists are really worried by Obama, and his capacity to transform the whole moral-intellectual landscape between the West and Islam, and are striking out to try to prevent that. Sounds about right to me.

Happened to surf by Oliver Stone’s “JFK” last night and stuck with it. I had seen the movie when it came out, even wrote a NY Post column about it — have no idea what I said. But in 1991 I was a good deal less inclined to credit the possibility of malign US government conspiracies. Now, after the (second) Iraq War, we’re probably all a little more cynical.

I know there’s a ton of books out there on both sides, (I remember my stepfather was very excited by getting to know Mark Lane in the early sixties). I know there was a fairly authoritative “Case Closed” book published in 1993. What do others think of this? As portrayed in Stone’s movie, the second “magic bullet” theory does seem pretty unlikely.

Yes, Jesse Venture, former Reform Party governor of Minnesota, said he might run for president in 2012, at Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic today.  I doubt he actually will make the effort — although in his talk he called for leveling the playing field for third parties, he knows full well that any third-party effort will be a failure, and he doesn’t have any shot at either major party’s nomination. But he got a rapturous reception from the Ron Paul audience, and if he did run, he’d certainly enliven the race.

Highlight of the day for me so far has been Bill Kauffman’s talk, which was also a big hit with the audience. He lamented the near extinction of antiwar conservatism–”locating the antiwar wing of today’s Republican Party is like looking for the Juice Newton wing in the rock and roll hall of fame”–but Kauffman is optimistic. “Liberal, conservative, left, right–the old labels are more like prison cells,” he said, suggesting that an “alternative America is reasserting itself: in farmer’s markets, in home schools, in book clubs, in the buy local and eat local and homebrew movements [this received huge applause], even in the polling places where over one million Americans voted for Ron Paul for president of these United States.” This is genuine post-partisanship: a stemwinder populist antiwar conservative speech that ended by recalling George McGovern’s 1972 slogan: “Come Home, America.”

What could be more helpful in the midst of a hurricane than a politician? If there is flooding in New Orleans, I’m sure the victims will say, “Don’t send food, water, money, medical supplies–send us candidates!”

While Bush and other great samaritan-statesmen are skipping out on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, so they can be ready for the photo op in case of natural disaster, Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic in Minneapolis is still on and picking up momentum. The big event at the Target Center tomorrow will have over 10,000 people, dwarfing the gathering in St. Paul. Turnout was impressive at an intense, nine-hour political technology training session the Paul people held yesterday, with about 600 activists. NBC camera crews got some footage at the beginning and, from what I hear, they were “amazed.” They’ll be astonished tomorrow.