I started my political journey on what I thought to be the Left. Books like Klein’s The Shock Doctrine resonated with me, as did films like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. My favorite childhood films were Atlantis and The Iron Giant. All of these works are part of a long line of salient critiques of the deracinated culture of consumption promulgated by our military-industrial corporatocracy, the oligarchy cloaked in the egalitarian garb of meritocratic democracy. I subscribed to the visually stunning anti-capitalist journal Adbusters, and immersed myself in works attacking the American imperial project. I still hold some of these positions; yet I was misled, duped into believing the lies that I had been force-fed. Wherein, though, is the lie? The lie is not in the problem, but rather in the identity of the Enemy.

The institutions that create our popular culture have gone to great lengths to put faces to these forces of darkness that I had always opposed, including Big Business, Big Pharma, Wall Street, neoliberal economists and neoconservative think tank operatives like the monsters at AIPAC and the now-defunct Project for the New American Century. These are all heads of the Hydra, but what fashionable Leftism excludes from this projection is Big Tech, Big Journalism, the Academy, and Hollywood. The heads of the Hydra that we are permitted to see are represented as right-wing, whereas in reality they are all Leftists. The corporatocracy is Leftist; both the bastardized “capitalism” that provided for their ascension to power and the bureaucratized administrative state that perpetuates their stranglehold are firmly rooted in the Left.

The self-appointed counterculture, stocked by rudderless upper-middle-class youths adorned in designer clothing, is nothing but the handmaiden to power. Antifa brownshirts, whether or not they are aware (and they are aware), are doing the bidding of academics and corporate boards. They want us to be intoxicated, to dismantle “the patriarchy” and the family, to cease having troublesome children, to refrain even from going outside. Instead of founding families, praying and rearing our children in the faith, we consume processed foods, opioids, and plastic trash. Childbirth, according to figures like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, is a stumbling block in the path of suicidal success (our suicide, their power aggregation). In the name of equality, invidious individualism is doing nothing but entrenching the hostile power that occupies and rules our nation. The primary difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, between the Sanders base and the Trump base, is their respective identification of the Enemy; the symptoms are manifest to both. For what it’s worth, I maintain my belief that had his campaign not been torpedoed by the Democrat Party, the forty-fifth President would have been Sanders.

The rapacious vulture “capitalism” that has destroyed the United States of America is not of the Right, nor is the same vultures’ concomitant project to rebuild the Tower of Babel through imperial warmongering. Nowhere is this false consciousness more on display than on the question of our physical environment. The counterfeit “environmental” organizations that now pretend to care for God’s creation are nothing but Leftist fronts; when was the last time a board member of the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, or World Wildlife Fund actually visited a National Park? William de Vere has chronicled the subversion of Earth First! into a Leftist organization. The wall-to-wall screeching on the Left about “climate change” is merely a vehicle through which to bestow upon totalitarian bureaucrats the power to completely control every aspect of our lives (see Michaels’ Lukewarming and Scientocracy, as well as the work of Marc Morano).

Environmental conservation is inherently and necessarily Rightist. We are called to be able and benevolent stewards of God’s creation; to use, but never to abuse the physical environment and its creatures. We truly care for the real environment, not the academic abstraction that our reptilian They Live rulers cry crocodile tears for. The Southern tradition is rooted in the land; see Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows for a most beautiful depiction. Our forefathers were agrarians, not capitalists; Yankee capital pillaged our virgin land and put it under an iron yoke, decimating our fathers’ fields and pristine forests, sold to the lowest bidder. America was a nation of independent farmholds, trading with one another absent government oversight. This, the land of rolling hills, piney woods, and twinkling streams,is the Right; the irradiated alien landscape of gouged mountaintops and strip-mined scars is the Left.

Soulless mammon-lust, the alienated and individualized quest for cancerous perpetual growth, is Leftist unreality, unmoored castles in the sky; the Right values community, faith, and family, fixed in the reality of natural cycles. The earth is nothing to our rulers but a mass of biological matter to exploit, just as humans are nothing but biological abstractions, Darwinian masses of swirling atoms; they are totally disconnected from reality. Perhaps a perfect illustration is given in the case of the Soviet Union’s whaling program, decimating hundreds of thousands of whales for no reason other than to fill quotas, utilizing little to none of the mammals, their bloated corpses so thick that the sea couldn’t even be seen. The gruesome and depraved international traffic in endangered animals is fed by the insatiably virulent appetite of China, the country that the American Left worships. In a situation akin to Crichton’s State of Fear, arsonists from California to Brazil and Australia have claimed millions of animals’ lives. Self-described environmentalists are masters of propaganda, disseminating images of dead and dying animals like polar bears, which in reality are enjoying a population boom (see Crockford’s The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened).

We have to reclaim the mantle of conservation, and expose the faux environmentalists for what they are. This would greatly improve our prospects with youth. We must integrate environmental protection into our platform; this does not mean nebulous and capriciously overburdensome regulation, such as banning plastic straws, bags, and fluorescent lightbulbs, or instituting carbon neutral building codes and fuel standards, or stunting our energy independence (all of which are simply anarcho-tyrannical exercises in soft totalitarianism). No, this means a national tree-planting campaign, strengthening the penalties for animal abuse and littering, properly funding and staffing the National Park Service (our national treasure) and game agencies, and refocusing the Environmental Protection Agency on the basic enforcement of clean air and water acts. We should eliminate ethanol subsidies and federal funding for both apocalyptic climate propaganda and quixotic alternative energy sources.

We can use our environmental program as a springboard from which to carry out other items on our agenda. We should use the poaching issue to further deepen the divide between our nation and China, utilizing it to impose sanctions on the hostile power flooding our communities with fentanyl. We can further utilize the pollution issue to promote a stateside manufacturing renaissance; if we truly care about pollution, wouldn’t we cut economic ties with China immediately? And perhaps the strongest tangible argument against immigration is the Malthusian overcrowding of our country and the proliferation of trash blanketing our cities and the Southwestern desert. Those who have thrown open our borders have not done so thoughtlessly; nay, they have done so in a calculated manner. Our wide, open, and wild spaces are decried as wastes of space. The unspoiled wilderness is seen as a barren waste, unproductive land that must be plundered and put to use. By crowing that our nation “has plenty of room”, the rulers of the darkness of this world betray their true motivation. They want to turn Yellowstone and Arcadia into a ghetto, a sprawling strip mall, dotted with gas stations, methadone clinics, and payday loan operators. There is also a veritable litany of cases of illegal aliens raping and abusing our farm and pet animals (see the work of Ann Coulter and Dave Gibson). Horrific practices like dogfighting are prevalent in these certain subsets of the population. The grotesqueries of factory farming, wholly antithetical to our agrarian roots, are directed from on high by corporate Leftists and perpetrated by the illegal serfs in their employ; the recent video exposé of one of the dairy farms supplying Fairlife Milk is but the tip of an iceberg.

Once we embrace our mission, the possibilities are truly endless. We can and must reclaim the mantle of environmental stewardship from the predators who coopted it. Animal rights groups and true conservationists will be welcome additions to our coalition to restore the Republic that we proved ourselves incapable of keeping.