Doctor Zero: A Concise Guide to Tightly-Reasoned Conservative Arguments

Doctor Zero: Year One

John Hayward, otherwise known as Doctor Zero, has published a book which is must-read for anyone who values defending an informed conservative opinion.

ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST READS FOR CONSERVATIVES

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DOCTOR ZERO: YEAR ONE

One could make the case that Doctor Zero: Year One could have easily been subtitled E Pluribus Unum.

As of December 2009, the Internet had some 234 million websites with 47 million being added each year. The number of conservative websites is considerably less; the subset of readable conservative websites, infinitely smaller still. Who knows? Maybe 200?

One of the best of those readable Conservative websites has been Doctor Zero, maintained by the digital pen of John Hayward. Hayward also crossposts his best essays at Hot Air’s Green Room, where they inevitably make it to the site’s front page.

From those many essays at Hot Air and Doctor Zero emerged Hayward’s book. See? E Pluribus Unum.

Many of the essays I had read before, as I rarely miss one; surprisingly though, there were many earlier ones I found I’d missed. But, even though I was familiar with some of the essays, the tight reasoning and logical progression of their arguments didn’t lessen the pleasure of my re-acquaintance.

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Order Doctor Zero: Year One at Amazon.

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The book sorts Hayward’s collection of essays into six sections: Capitalism, Collectivism, Family, Freedom, Culture and Politics. I can honestly state that I enjoyed all of the 100+ essays the book contains.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a few favorites.

“The Fear Machine,” first published in August 2009, is one of my favorites. It begins:

Ken Gladney, the man beaten by union thugs at a town hall meeting, is the latest victim of the Fear Machine: an old horror from the early twentieth century, still in service after many upgrades. It is crucial piece of hardware for collectivists of all stripes, because the success of their grand designs requires a frightened populace – now more than ever. It isn’t easy to persuade an Information Age society to forget all the lessons of the past century, and hand their money, freedom, and lives over to the same rancid ideology that bathed the world in blood and poverty. There aren’t enough suckers willing to believe that this time, the collectivists will manage to construct utopia. There aren’t enough people stupid enough to think the architects of the three trillion dollar deficit, stagnant economy, and runaway unemployment just need another fifteen or twenty percent of the economy under their control, and decades of miserable failure will suddenly turn into dazzling success. Ignorance is not a potent enough fuel to get socialism where it wants to go. It needs fear added to the mixture.

Brave and confident citizens are of little use to the socialist, because they have little appetite for government control of their daily lives. People who retain a measure of faith in their own abilities, and their ability to succeed in a free marketplace, are not looking for saviors. When a politician jumps in front of them and declares himself to be their messiah, they’re likely to respond with laughter. People like Barack Obama, and the leadership of the Democrat Party, do not like being laughed at. They are even less willing to tolerate questions about their wisdom or good intentions. Their predecessors left them the keys to a well-tuned machine that suppresses laughter, and questions, with apprehension and dread.

Hayward shrewdly observes that fear has handmaidens: chaos and uncertainty are also great weapons for herding a no-longer gullible people into serfdom and slavery. Thankfully, he also reveals that there is an antidote for all who will make use it.

In “The Blatant Beast” the topic is the deceit and manipulation of the Mainstream Legacy Media, it’s employment as a propaganda arm of the DNC and what conservatives can do to help tame it.

In the 16th-century epic poem The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser writes of a monster called the Blatant Beast. which had “a thousand tongues of every kind and quality”, which “poured forth abuse, not caring where or when… speaking hateful things of good and bad alike, of high and low, not even sparing kings or kaisers, but either blotting them with infamy or biting them with baneful teeth.”
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The mainstream media is the modern incarnation of the Blatant Beast, and its defeat calls for the same strategy by conservatives: tell it a story it can’t ignore, then hit it with a punchline it can’t help repeating. Like the Blatant Beast, the media does have a certain capacity for shame… because nothing bothers professional “journalists” more than amateurs besting them at the sacred ritual of reporting news.

The media beast is wounded, but still powerful. It’s hard to measure the full extent of its influence, although it seems to have diminished somewhat with the rise of alternative media, including talk radio and the Internet. The modern style of agenda journalism dates at least as far back as Walter Cronkite and the Tet Offensive, but I’ve always thought it mutated into the form we recognize today during the 1992 elections. The media may have climbed into the tank for Obama to an unprecedented degree, but in ‘92 it was driving an armored fighting vehicle for Clinton. 60 Minutes openly provided cover for his infidelity, helping to bury the Gennifer Flowers story. The press was happy to provide all sorts of assistance to the Clinton campaign, including assistance for the ridiculous “worst economy in the last 50 years” campaign slogan, and warping Bush’s polite question about a grocery store bar code scanner into a heavy-handed theme about how “out of touch” he was.

There a few other favorites that rate a mention: “The Necessary Enemy,” “Glenn Beck and the Unforgivable Curse” and “Targeting the Tea Party” come to mind. But, as I said, all are well-worth the time spent reading them.

I’ll make a little wager: any readers who regularly come in contact with Progressive/Liberals will find at least a half-dozen of Doc’s essays that will be re-read for their arguments alone. Another half-dozen will assist in ordering one’s thoughts about such abstract ideas such as the American Way of Life and exactly Why Big Government is Bad.

There will be a few that will be re-read–or, for the readers who have children, will merit a reading to the youngsters–because they make you feel good.

If readers know of any promising young thinkers in their extended family, a gift of Doctor Zero: Year One might just provide the spark for the birth of a future conservative leader.

NOTE: As previously stated, the good doctor plies his trade, not only at Hot Air, but also at his own site Doctor Zero. At the Doctor Zero site, Hayward writes not only the essay-length pieces which have become his well-known trademark–and of which his book is composed–but also an assorted variety of shorter pieces as well.

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Order Doctor Zero: Year One at Amazon.

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Here’s my final recommendation:

Imagine you were stuck on a deserted island by yourself. You’re walking along the beach and find a bottle washed up on the shore. So, you uncork the bottle and a heavy mist shoots out.

A 10-foot-tall genie coalesces from the mist and says to you: “I will grant you grant you any two wishes you desire! You may have one wish, but, before you get the second, you must convince me why conservatives are right about…” and the genie lets you pick the topic.

My recommendation?

Use the first wish for a copy of Doctor Zero: Year One. In it, you’ll find all the ammo you need to convince the genie and get the second wish.

by Mondo Frazier
image: Doctor Zero

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