When I was in professional politics, it was not the liberals who truly, personally hated me.

Those who really HATED me were the Nasty Little People, the NLP.

This came up a lot when we were going out and setting up press reviews for real populist uprisings, like anti-busing marches and protests against dirty school textbooks, the Independent Truckers’ Strike and on and on.

The grassrooters loved us.

But when a protest got to a certain level of publicity, their leaders realized that this was the first and last time they would be in the limelight. They must have decided we were going to take their movement from them.

No way we could or would do that, but they, these small-time, temporary leaders, were the ones who hated us with a sincerity Goebbels would have admired.

William Buckley and his protégés really hated me, though that is the LAAAHST thing Buckley would ever have admitted, even to himself.

His partner and life-long friend, who sat in an identical office on the top floor, was William Rusher, and I was HIS protégé. It made for a really unique civil war at National Review.

Rusher’s crowd produced a review of my first book, which had a Foreword by Rusher, that was titled, “Read This One!”

Then Buckley’s crowd produced a front-page article attacking me called “To the Nashville Station,” comparing me to Lenin arriving at the Finland Station in 1917.

Then after the coalition of conservatives and “Wallace Democrats” I had advocated all that time won the 1980 landslide, it turned out the Buckley side had been for it all the time.

The Buckley crowd is now neoconservative, using the REAL definition of that word.

They are what they have always been, the opposition that those in power want.

They have found a way to make a living on the permanently losing side. They go to pieces when some Big Time Leftist says something nice about them.

I am getting some totally second-hand reports about how many AMPWs are going from looking down on us mere peasants to getting red-faced about the Mantra.

Like I said, I am getting this second-hand.

But it sure sounds very familiar.

Despite all else, the Western World still considers the final arbiter of truth to be reality.

We all take it for granted that statistical proof MATTERS. In science, no matter who said what, the final authority is evidence.

No other society was ever aware that there was such a thing as statistical proof.

Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis cut childbed fever death, which had killed a major percentage of mothers and babies in that ward, to zero, year after year, but even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, it made no difference. The University Doctors of Medicine would not stoop to washing their hands between dissections and delivering babies.

How did Newton ever convince a world that still looked to translations of Aristotle and the Old Testament for its cosmology to look to gravity instead?

How did we go from Galen and bleeding to real medicine inside the nineteenth century?

Every previous society had built its entire intellectual life on NOTHING.

To be an intellectual you QUOTED:  “It is written …”

Every intellectual stated that men have more teeth than women, because Aristotle had said so. Even if someone had counted teeth endlessly they would have convinced nobody.

What is unique is that the West has, in SOME cases, allowed evidence to actually defeat Nothing..

Oriental Wisdom and the American Indian Wisdom we hear about were Nothing.

Creation Myths were adopted because they sounded good and “It is written.”

Then Isaac Newton came along saying that the whole universe could be explained by using simple GRAVITY!

Occam’s Razor knocked the whole gigantic structure of Western Confusionism down!

In a century — AFTER the “Renaissance” — all the Ancient Authorities and all the crap about “balancing humors” was destroyed and modern medicine began.

None of these revolutions could have occurred outside the Western world, because there was no way to go gradually from the Flat Earth to Newton, from Galen to medical sanity.

You simply could not show the slightest respect for Galen’s Balance of Humors and move to Modern Medicine.

In order to introduce Occam’s Razor, you had to state flatly that a thousand years of everything that had been “intellectualism” was pure crap!

Exactly the same holds for Mantra Thinking.

There is no room for Respectful Opposition.

All present political debate is a pile of horsehockey, and there is simply no nice way to say that.