William S. Lind

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. 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 his Senator Robert Taft Jr. 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 US military

In 1989, alongside several U.S. officers, Lind helped to originate fourth-generation war (4GW) theory.

Lind served as a legislative aide for Senator Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio from 1973 through 1976 and held a similar position with Senator Gary Hart of Colorado from 1977 to 1986. He is the author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Westview Press, 1985) and co-author, with Gary Hart, of America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform.

With Bruce Gudmundsson, Lind hosted the program Modern War on the now-defunct satellite television network NET.

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 and clearly spending way too much time playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare." Coram writes that when challenged by an officer, Lind "cut him off at the knees."

William S. Lind is a believer in the idea that "The Great Replacement" is an aspect of "4th Generation Warfare".

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) a number of 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 pair also write about Cultural Marxism as being an organized conspiracy against 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 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.

Other views

Lind has advocated for police to have rocket-propelled grenades as standard issue and for a return to death by hanging as a common sentence for crime in "urban areas."

Lind is a key proponent of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory and asserts that Marxists control much of modern popular media and that political correctness can be directly attributed to Karl Marx.

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 an article for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bill Berkowitz describes Lind as a key proponent and popularizer of the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory—a theory which alleges that a cabal of Jewish-German philosophers have seized control over American culture and have been using that control to systematically subvert American values. Because the supposed architects of the putative Frankfurt School plot are Jewish, and because many proponents of the theory emphasize the supposed conspirators' Judaism or even blame Judaism for the conspiracy, Berkowitz and the SPLC characterize the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory as anti-Semitic. According to the SPLC, in 1999 Lind wrote, "The real damage to race relations in the South came, not from slavery, but Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won."

Journalist Thomas E. Ricks in The Atlantic Monthly asserts that Lind's rhetoric differs from what Ricks calls "standard right-wing American rhetoric of the '90s", because Lind suggests that the "next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil."

Journalist Fareed Zakaria criticizes Lind in his book, The Future of Freedom. On page 123, Zakaria states, "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 and writers such as Paul Johnson and William Lind have made the case that Islam is a religion of repression and backwardness."