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Either you have been drinking too much coffee or have been taking too many diet pills, or you are deliberately trying to get a rise out of people. The essential idea of "paleoconservatism" is "back to the founders." But how are we to understand the founders? One way is through a libertarian or paleo-liberal framework, based on very limited government and the individual. Another way is through a more particularist approach. That is to say, one that is skeptical of the universalist claims that have been put forward for America, and argues that we are the specific nation of a specific people. Still another way would be to look towards those government institutions that the founders established. These are three different foci: the individual, the people or nation or region, and the government or regime. You can find paleos who lean more towards one focus or another. Sometimes the combinations, for example of Southern nationalism and individualist libertarians are pretty unstable and questionable things, though they do attract a following. You will find very few paleos who harken back to a European "throne and altar" perspective, though you will find many who wish that religion had a larger place in American life.

Dragging in Ayn Rand and Franco simply muddles things. To say one is more individualist than the mainstream doesn't make one a Randian. To say one is more traditionalist than the mainstream doesn't make one a fascist or even an authoritarian. Those are the terms the majority uses to stigmatize, isolate and punish dissenters, and if you are really asking your question in good faith you wouldn't use them.

As to why some paleos are critical of Zionism, one obvious place to start is that they feel that the conservative establishment has distorted the situation to lead the following around by the nose. Another is that they don't feel that that area is any business of ours.

Another way is through a more particularist approach. That is to say, one that is skeptical of the universalist claims that have been put forward for America, and argues that we are the specific nation of a specific people.

Once again, this clashes with the constant "liberty, liberty, liberty" cry of palaeoright libertarians, as you yourself recognize. As to being a specific nation of a specific people, I have no objection. The only things are that this kind of got knocked in the head in the 17th Century when the first Africans were brought here, and that we ourselves are recent arrivals. This does not make our place here illigitimate, as everyone comes from somewhere else (even the Irish had to come to Ireland and the Japanese displaced the Ainu), but even Francis Parker Yockey in his national socialist "classic" Imperium noted that North America is not the natural home of Europeans, and that by coming here they cut themselves off from their roots.

As you well know, this is not the true reason, otherwise the palaeos would be opposed to intervention anywhere or alliances with anyone. Only Israel is deemed by them as contrary to American interests and "none of our business." (Where is your Biblical sentimentalism, btw? Did you trade it for a sentimentalism for medieval Europe or early federal America?)

And this brings us again to an interesting contradiction. Often the very palaeos who oppose universalism and egalitarianism, and who scream their lungs out for particularity and hierarchy, are the very ones who scream about "Jewish supremacy" and "apartheid" in Israel. Now I wonder where all that partucularity and hiearchialism goes to when Jews come into the picture? Whence comes this dedication to Jacobinism when Jewish nationalism is the object in view? I don't get it. Unless . . . there are some paleaos who are actually so screwed up in their thinking that they believe Jewish supremacy and egalitarianism among everyone else is actually linked. Garm! That would make the destruction of Jewish supremacy and nationalism (such as by supporting egalitarian Arab and Jewish leftists in Israel) a paramount measure to restore hiearchy and particularity to the rest of the world.

Anyone out there honest enough to admit he believes that?

Hmmm. One G-d creates all people from one original man and woman. This G-d then sovereignly chooses one particular people from this family.

That would never happen . . . would it??? [/Sarcasm]