Book Review- The Great Campaign: Against the Great Reset

Observations concerning Jason Jones' diagnostic analysis of modern political and social realities and prescription for a better future

Laura Sextro, my colleague and leader of The Unity Project, recently provided me with an advance copy of Jason Jones’ soon to be published book “The Great Campaign: Against the Great Reset”, asking that I provide a promotional book blurb. Intrigued by the title, and remembering prior conversations with Jason a few years back, I gladly agreed.

I had first met Jason while participating in Hawaiian protests against the deeply destructive COVID lockdown, masking, “vaccine” mandates, and other “public health” measures which devastated the economic and social well being of residents of that island state. Among many other deeply moral actions and activities which he has engaged in during his lifetime, Jason has the honor of being one of the first arrested for resisting irrational Hawaiian governmental COVID policies while working to help feed destitute unemployed Hawaiian citizens suddenly thrown into poverty due to the state-imposed collapse of the tourism industry.

Why should you or anyone else care what Jason Jones has to say regarding “The Great Reset”? The answer lies in the life history, contributions, commitment and fundamental ethics of this remarkable (and yet remarkably modest) American leader.

As summarized in Wikipedia, Jason Jones is an American film producer and human rights activist. He is the president and founder of HERO, Inc., known for its two primary projects, Movie to Movement and The Vulnerable People Project. Jones began his career in film and media with Movie to Movement, becoming known for producing projects dedicated to "social causes related to children and families."Jones' work in the anti-abortion movement had its beginnings in his time attending the University of Hawaiʻi. There he formed the anti-abortion Student Union and also served as State Chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a national group of conservative student activists. He later became Chairman of the Hawaii Young Republicans, and worked as Chief-of-Staff for State Representative Mark Moses. Jones' other credentials include: Director of Hawaii Right to Life, National Youth Director of American Life League, grassroots Director of Brownback for President, and Public Relations Director for the world's largest international anti-abortion organization, Human Life International.

The 150 page “The Great Campaign: Against the Great Reset” is a deeply principled defense of humanity and monotheism at a time when nihilism, Malthusianism, “wokeism” and the profoundly anti-human logic of transhumanism are ascendent and seemingly inevitable.

In this pioneering volume, Mr. Jones integrates two of the most intriguing philosophical trends I have encountered over the last four years of the COVIDcrisis; traditional catholicism (trad-cath) and the anarcho-capitalism (an-cap) of Murray Rothbard, although Jones favors more of a micro-cap approach.

Corporate media and the Federal Administrative State treats both of these philosophical positions as radical “far right” enemies of the modern state, when in fact they represent (respectively) a full throated defense of traditional Catholic church ethics and teaching, and pure capitalism. Like many, when I see corporate media labeling and propagandizing something or someone as “far right”, I have a reflexive urge to want to learn more about whatever is being attacked.

The trad-cath movement can be seen as a counter-reaction to the marxist-socialism of Pope Francis, and the most famous modern an-cap global leader is President Javier Milei of Argentina who recently set the world on fire with his speech at the World Economic Forum. The reality is that both the trad-cath and an-cap movements are at the cutting edge of pushing back against the “Great Reset” agenda, and without pretentious posturing Jason Jones has managed to integrate both to provide a philosophical roadmap for those looking for a way forward towards a future which respects human life, dignity, integrity, and community.

For over three years now I have been searching for a modern vision which provides an alternative to the dark techno-totalitarianism of the “Great Reset” and globalist fascination with transhumanism as the inevitable existential “boundary event” for the human species. And now, unexpectedly, from this deeply moral, Catholic, pragmatic, and unpretentious Hawaiian intellectual, we have all been given a glimpse into a pathway for integrating the morality, spirituality, and traditional theological wisdom of our ancestors with a sophisticated but practical understanding of cutting edge “Austrian School” economics theory.

All I can say is a sincere “thank you” to Jason Jones for his commitment to humanity and this gift to all who still believe in the potential of the human species and community to advance “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

“Since the Sexual Revolution and its angry stepsister, feminism, overturned our assumptions about what sex means and what it’s for, we have almost forgotten how to form families, or what they are. Divorce laws have made the contract of marriage tragically easy to escape from, even as we have tightened up bankruptcy laws and canonized student loans as sacramental covenants. Judges and voters alike have redefined marriage in many states to include homosexual unions. Single people can adopt children, and couples can cook them up in petri dishes, discarding the “surplus” embryos or sending them up to Harvard to be cannibalized for parts.

What agenda is served by all these bizarre acts of rebellion against the plain nature of things and the immemorial structure of human society? Nothing so elevated or insane as Marxist-Leninism. Nothing so cool and mathematical as capitalism. The philosophy underpinning our current crisis, which explains our Keynesian politics and addiction to credit card debt, Europe’s falling and our own flat birth rates, our willingness to tax our children (via deficits) instead of ourselves, is a simple creed known to every teenager: “We want the world and we want it now,” in the words of Dionysian rock-god Jim Morrison, who died a bloated shell of a man at age 28, leaving behind no acknowledged children, but at least 20 paternity suits filed by women he had abandoned.

Repulsed by the gray “organizational men” who toiled without credit or creativity inside massive corporations, the young (who are now middle-aged) took as their creed a vulgar hedonism, papered over for some by New Left politics. Even when hippies cut their hair and got “real” jobs, the creeds they had popularized changed our economy and politics, all across the Western world. Gone was the stern frugality of the Depression generation, the optimistic fecundity of those who birthed the Baby Boom. In its place came a cleverly calculating Epicureanism, a breed of men who lived for pleasure but knew how to avoid overdoses and V.D., who relied on now-legal abortion to clean up the unintended consequences of pleasure, who looked to vacant New Age spirituality, or endless acquisition for its own sake, with endorphin rushes from risk buffered by the certainty that their banks were “too big to fail.” When the focus of life becomes not pursuing the Good, or even transmitting life so someone else has the chance to, and descends instead to the accumulation of diverse, amusing experiences, man as an organism ceases to function as he was built to. His machines, lazily tended, break down and fall apart. His governments, overburdened and underfunded, welsh on their debts. His countries are either depopulated or colonized by fertile foreigners. He looks around, and he shrugs. If he majored in English, he might remember Eliot’s line from “Ash Wednesday” “This the way the world ends/Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

If we are to restore effective government and prosperous economies throughout the West, the first step will have to be averting our gaze from the funhouse mirror into which most of us have been staring for much of our lives. We must start to think as members of families first, and individuals second. We need to see our fertility not as a toxic waste that sometimes spills, but a primary purpose of life—perpetuating the human family. Our parents made real sacrifices to put us on this earth. Are we too weak or feeble to pay it forward, and replace ourselves? ”

I am once again reminded of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”.

“Solidarity imposes limits on our attempts to pare back government.  While we can and should resist the imposition of unjust or burdensome laws and crippling taxes, we know that there is a line beyond which libertarian, anti-government rhetoric ceases to be reasonable.  Certainly as Americans convinced of the truth of subsidiarity, we want the government’s powers to be as limited and localized as possible—without sacrificing justice or denying the common good.  But when shrinking the state endangers those core values, it undermines the order that makes real liberty possible, creating the chaos that historically has always yielded to tyranny.  Sometimes these evils co-exist.  So today there is chaos in the womb, as the laws refuse to protect the rights of preborn children—and tyranny in the lab, as hundreds of thousands of embryonic human beings languish in the freezers of fertility clinics. There is chaos on the Internet, as pornography of the vilest kind is pumped onto the tablets and phones of America’s youth—and tyranny in the dens of the sex industry, where women who are often the victims of human trafficking are exploited in the most dehumanizing ways.  No one who accepts the core principles we advocate here can be an outright anarchist, precisely because in the absence of government there can be no reliable way of ensuring that solidarity is taken seriously.  The human person deserves better—it deserves ordered liberty. “

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If you believe, as I do, that the best is yet to come for humanity, buy this book when it comes out and take the time to read and re-read the wisdom and insights within. With leadership and contributions from thought leaders like Jason Jones, we can defeat the resurgent devil and once again avoid being devoured by the current embodiment of that rough beast.

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