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William S. Lind (born July 9, 1947) is an American conservative author,
described as being aligned with paleoconservatism. He is the author of many
books and one of the first proponents of fourth-generation warfare (4GW) theory
and is the Director of The American Conservative Center for Public
Transportation. He used the pseudonym Thomas Hobbes in a column for The
American Conservative.
Early life Lind graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 and from Princeton
University in 1971, where he received a master's degree in history. In 1973,
having grown tired of doctoral work at Princeton, Lind wrote to Senator Robert
Taft Jr. of Ohio requesting his help in securing a job with Amtrak In response,
Taft instead offered Lind a job in his office, where he eventually began
analyzing defense policy (Taft being a member of the United States Senate
Committee on Armed Services) Views on warfare and U.S. military In 1989,
alongside several U.S. military officers, Lind helped to originate
fourth-generation war (4GW) theory. Lind served as a legislative aide for Taft
from 1973 through 1976 and held a similar position with Senator Gary Hart of
Colorado from 1977 to 1986. needed] He is the author of the Maneuver Warfare
Handbook (Westview Press, 1985) and co-author, with Hart, of America Can Win:
The Case for Military Reform. Lind has written for the Marine Corps Gazette,
Defense and the National Interest, (D-N-I.net), and The American Conservative.
According to writer Robert Coram's book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The
Art of War, during lectures on maneuver warfare, Lind was sometimes criticized
for having never served in the military, for having "never dodged a
bullet, he had never led men in combat, he had never even worn a uniform".
Coram writes that when challenged by an officer, Lind "cut him off at the
knees."
Political career and related writings Lind was the Director of the Center for
Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. He advocates a
Declaration of Cultural Independence by cultural conservatives in the United
States, in the belief that the federal government ceased to represent their
interests and began to coerce them into negative behavior and affect their
culture in a negative fashion. The foundation believes that American culture
and its institutions are headed for a collapse and that cultural conservatives
should separate themselves from that calamity. It also supports setting up
independent parallel institutions with a right to secession and a
highly-decentralized nature that would rely on individual responsibility and
discipline to remain intact but prevent the takeover of the institutions by
those hostile to cultural conservatism. Lind has authored and co-authored (with
Paul Weyrich) monographs on behalf of the Free Congress Foundation attempting
to persuade American conservatives to support government funding for mass
transit programs, especially urban rail transit. The two men have written about
Cultural Marxism as being an organized conspiracy against what he views as the
traditional Christian values of America. Lind was Associate Publisher of a
quarterly magazine called The New Electric Railway Journal from its launch in
1988 until 1996, and from January 1994, he also co-hosted a monthly program
about light rail on the National Empowerment Television network; the program
used the same name as the magazine. As a paleoconservative, Lind has often
criticized neoconservatives in his commentaries. While not a libertarian, he
has also written for LewRockwell.com. He is a self-proclaimed conservative and
monarchist. He is a staunch supporter of a non-interventionist foreign policy.
In his column of December 15, 2009, Lind announced that he was leaving the
staff of the Center unexpectedly and that his series of articles was on hiatus.
Fiction Lind also wrote Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War, in which a
group of "Christian Marines" leads an armed resistance against
cultural Marxism as the American federal government collapses. Criticism In the
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report "Reframing the Enemy"
(2003), Bill Berkowitz said that Lind was the principal promoter and
popularizer of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which claims that a
coterie of Jewish-German philosophers, the Frankfurt School, had seized control
of American popular culture, and have been systematically subverting Christian
churches and ethics within the U.S. The conspiracists’ preoccupation with
the Jewishness of most Frankfurt School intellectuals is seen as confirming
that Cultural Marxism is an antisemitic canard. The SPLC reported that in 1999
Lind wrote, "The real damage to race relations in the South came, not from
slavery, but [from] Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South
had won [the civil war]." In “The Widening Gap Between the Military
and Society” (1997), journalist Thomas E. Ricks said that Lind's rhetoric
of Marxist cultural subversion is different from the "standard right-wing
American rhetoric of the ’90s", because Lind said that the "next
real war we fight is likely to be on American soil." In The Future of
Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003) Fareed Zakaria said that
"There are those in the West who agree with bin Laden that Islam is the
reason for the Middle East's turmoil. Preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell Sr., and writers such as Paul Johnson and William Lind have made the
case that Islam is a religion of repression and backwardness." The
manifesto of Anders Breivik is built around Lind's theory on cultural Marxism
and contains 27 pages taken directly from his writings.
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