The O’Leary Review Podcast
Guest: James Newcomb
December 10, 2022
We welcomed James Newcomb to the show. James is an internet marketer, podcaster, and keen trumpeter.
Check out James:
“Always be serious. Never take yourself too seriously.”
James referenced General Douglas MacArthur’s speech to the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy from May 12, 1962.
Tom Woods School of Life
James and I are both members. Go to https://tomschooloflife.com/ to get on the waiting list. I recommend joining the school.
John Birch Society
James once worked for the perennially and unduly maligned John Birch Society.
William F. Buckley, Jr., seen by a good many Americans over the last several decades as the paragon of American conservatism, was anything but that. Buckley and his magazine, National Review, were “purgers.” Over the course of National Review’s history, the Buckleyites purged portions of the conservative movement for not falling in lock-step with the magazine’s ideology.
Ideology is an interesting topic when it comes to politics or political discourse. It is harmful. We could get into a long discussion on why ideology is so antithetical to moral order, but I shall just point you toward Brad Birzer’s quick article “Russell Kirk on the Errors of Ideology.”
Birzer wrote an extensive biography on Kirk, ironically one of the founders of National Review and who wrote for the magazine for years, but was then…purged. Kirk’s reputation has been somewhat resuscitated by some over at NR in the nearly 3 decades since his passing, but his idea of conservatism is definitely at odds with the bunch who run the show over there at this stage.
Here’s a video of Birzer talking about his book, Russell Kirk: American Conservative. https://youtu.be/8kn9RdM6gks
This is a long way of getting to the point that the John Birch Society was not on the “3 x 5 card of approved opinion” set forth by our cultural betters at the National Review, a magazine that has also purged other heroes of mine—namely Patrick J. Buchanan and Dr. Paul E. Gottfried—from their silly “movement” that has ceased to be “conservative.”
Tom Woods 100
Tom Woods—as far as I’m aware—coined the aforementioned “3x5 card of approved opinion” phrase. It is beautiful and explains so much about our world today.
Tom is also a mentor to both James and me.
Perhaps not so coincidentally, one of the goals of this program is to get at least 100 people within the Tom Woods orbit on the podcast. “Tom’s orbit” is loosely defined, but in our case, James is number 10. Ninety to go!
Ron Paul presidential campaigns
We talk a little about the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of Dr. Ron Paul.
I did not mention the essay I contributed to a book called
