PRINCIPLES

 This is going to be a long thread on the subject of the PRINCIPLES! Crowd and their insistence that DeSantis shouldn’t lead a charge against Disney, ‘Don’t call them groomers! That’s naughty!’ etc

because PRINCIPLES!

And I’m going to use Dien Bien Phu as an example.

At Dien Bien Phu, the French Foreign Legion was slowly surrounded by the Viet Min. The Communists slowly took high ground position after high ground position. 

At first the French tried occasionally to push them out and occasionally succeeded.

But eventually the Viet had all the high ground with artillery sited on the base.

At first the shelling was a nuisance. Then it got heavier. More and more guns, more anti-aircraft. 

Eventually, the French were pounded into surrender.

The Left has been ‘boiling the frog’ for a long time, and it has mostly been by weaponizing empathy around ‘cultural issues.’

And as Breitbart pointed out, 'Politics is downstream from culture.' 

READ THE WHOLE THING ...

The Rick Moran problem.

The country has a Rick Moran problem.

Rick Moran has a column in PJ Media, generally considered a right-leaning source. He recently wrote about Stephen Miller’s appearance with Chris Wallace. Moran called the interview “contentious” and accused Miller of seeking to “alter the media narrative” about the call President Trump made to Ukrainian President Zelenski. 

There is no question that Moran is right. Because the media narrative is a lie.  And making a desire to correct the media narrative an accusation is to make the implicit assumption that the media narrative is the correct one.  That's the Rick Moran problem. 

Here's the essential Moran problem, pre-emptive surrender. Putting up a white flag before a shot is fired; classic Cuckdom.  It is emblematic of the losing Republican position.  The media sets the narrative and Republicans bleat "I'm not .... whatever the Democrats accuse me of."  The classic loser posture of cowering in the face of the people who hate you and want you slinking away in fear.

Moran writes: To my mind, it isn't a question whether Trump was putting pressure on Ukraine to get dirt on Joe Biden and his son. He was.

In the Wallace interview Miller directly refutes Moran’s point. “Digging up dirt” implies a nefarious motive. Is it uncovering the facts or a quest for the truth? Is a detective investigating a murder suspect “digging up dirt?” Is trying to find out why the son of the Vice President got paid several million dollars for a no-show job a not-so-subtle bribe of a high government official?

Here's more of the Rick Moran problem.  From Moran's perspective, Trump is presumed guilty of whatever crime his enemies accuse him.  From Moran's perspective, he's not trying to drain the swamp.  He's not the chief law enforcement officer seeking to root out corruption at the highest level; he's a sleazy politician "digging up dirt" on a political opponent.   In Moran's mind it's not even a question; it's his default position and I doubt if there are any facts that will shake that position.

This is why Washington DC is a hot mess of corruption.  Why politicians of modest means arrive in this cesspool of corruption  and leave wealthy.  It's why Hillary knew she could get away with soliciting bribes to her foundation and erasing the evidence on her computer.  It's why the Bidens were able to get Ukrainians to pay millions and the Chinese to make billion-dollar deals with barely a fig leaf to cover up their play-for-pay scam.  Republicans and their few "friends" in the media are really not interested in changing things.  They want to get in on the action.  Offer Rick Moran a column in the NY Times or the Washington Post and he will write column after column denouncing Trump and the people who voted him into office.  If you doubt this you have only to read the "conservative" columnists like Max Boot or Jennifer Rubin in either paper.

Let’s say that instead of Hunter and Joe Biden, we have Jimmy and James Smith. Jimmy gets a no-show job working for a Ukrainian company while James Smith is a Senator who can steer a lot of aid to Ukraine. Does that sound like there is a huge conflict of interest and that the Smith family is being bribed in a pay-to-play scheme? Other than the Biden name what did Burisma receive for the millions it paid Hunter Biden?  What US Government policy was affected?

And keep in mind that the Biden corruption issue was not the first thing that President Trump talked about when he asked for a favor: it was Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election that held Trump's primary interest.  That’s an issue that the Left wants no one to investigate.

I prefaced my remarks by referring to the Rick Moran problem. The problem is the fence-sitters. The problem is those who want to cut the baby in half. The problem is that there are too many people who are comfortable enough with the Deep State that they will echo their talking points. In every period in history the majority will always try their best to get on with their lives. They want no trouble.  These are often referred to as the "good Germans." It’s almost always safer to stay out of the line of fire, especially if you don’t know who’s going to win. And keep in mind the forces arrayed against Trump have a long, long record of winning.

It’s also the reason that there are so many Rick Morans.

The Silence of "The Right:" Why Do We Have to Turn to Leftwingers to Hear Challenges to Leftist Mob Rule

Ace of Spades:

That was Andrew Breitbart's philosophy -- "I take the heat so that others won't have to."

And that's why people loved him, and why people are disgusted with our current go-along-to-get-along cucks and cowards, the grifters and the opportunists, the check-cashers and clock-watchers which currently dominate, and I do mean dominate, the top positions of "conservative" media.

Obviously I don't mean warriors like Michelle Malkin or Colonel Kurt Schlichter. I mean the people you're already thinking of, the people who take the position that "this culture war is so beneath me" and "Let the Garbage People be savaged by antifa until they've learned enough manners to mix with the Civilized People of the nominal right."

He's looking at you: National Review!

David French, a General of the losing army.

David French is known by some of his opponents as “nice,” even as they point out that the battle he’s been fighting is one long retreat.  But nice is not my appellation.   He's a Christian and he never lets you forget it.  But he's a special kind of Christian.  He reminds you that Jesus commanded you to love your enemies.  And David French does.  It's his friends that he hates.

  

Christians once believed in the existence of sin and the possibility of redemption.  That was long, long ago.  The church has “grown” and sin is now just another lifestyle choice.   But not for David French who is very happy to judge your soul, examine your life and pass judgment.  And right now, his judgment is that Donald J. Trump is a bad, bad man, unfit in every way to lead America.

  

French – as a symbol - was the subject of a recent critical article by Sohrab Ahmari who finds French the embodiment of the “… conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016.” He calls it French-ism.    

   

What is David French-ism? As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, French-ism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets. …

It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.” …

I added, “The only way is through”—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.

French prefers a different Christian strategy, and his guileless public mien and strategic preferences bespeak a particular political theology (though he would never use that term), one with which I take issue. Thus, my complaint about his politeness wasn’t a wanton attack; it implicated deeper matters.

French rose in his own defense.  He calls the depiction of himself by Ahmari as fictional and describes himself as a fighter.  He cites his courtroom victories defending religious freedom and says:

I’ve also written, spoken, and advocated for significant federal reforms designed to deter and punish university illiberalism, and while Ahmari says I have an “airy above-it-all mentality,” I didn’t feel “above” anything on that night at Tufts University when I literally placed my body between a small group of Christian students and a collection of roughly 100 protesters who were trying to intimidate them in a darkened hallway.

He rejects being naïve, having gone to the belly of the beast and experiencing being shouted down at Harvard.  He believes that radical Leftist professors are in as much danger in academia as Christians and, by gosh, he’s willing to go to court for either one.  He believes that dissident Google employees like James Damore (fired) and kneeling football players (Kaepernick and dozens of others) are equally embattled.   

I’m neither a lawyer, nor do I write for a living, but I am submerged in the culture and am aware of the tide of the times. The tide is not coming in for Conservatism or Christians. In fact, Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world. 

So for all the skirmishes David French claims to have won, Christianity - which he claims animates his philosophy - is going down.  But he doesn't think it's critical or an emergency.

I’m old enough to remember when speakers at Harvard were not shouted down.  Some were even conservative.

There was a time within my lifetime when Christian students were not mobbed at Tufts and instructors at Yale were not mobbed for defending the right to wear the Halloween costume of your choice.

It was not that many years ago that bakers could bake cakes and wedding photographers could pick and choose the jobs that reflected their values without being fined. 
 
French has no problem living cheek by jowl with pagans, atheists, LGBT activists and those radical Leftist professors who are transforming impressionable kids and turning them into those mobs that roam academia.  The may hate him, his skin color, his sexual orientation and the fact that he's part of the male patriarchal oppressor class.  Live and let live and turn the other cheek.  But he draws the line at Trump who has done more to protect religious freedom than his recent predecessors.  The President preceding Trump was busy suing the Little Sisters of the Poor.   Trump signed an executive order protecting religious liberty.

He raises the specter of "Christian statism"  (what is that?) and believes that Kamala Harris will be dissuaded by Christian niceness from implementing her plans which include:

·        Supports public funding for abortion services.

·        Opposes parental notification for abortions by minors.

·        Keep federal funding for family planning clinics.

·        Supports restrictions on right to bear arms.

For reasons which I can’t fathom, French actually believes that being nice to Kamala Harris – or any of the other radicals, socialist or Marxists currently vying for the Democrat party’s nomination – will persuade them to leave us alone.  By the sheer power of his Christian witness and nice personality, he will convince President Harris that she should not proceed to make fourth-trimester abortions the law of the land.  And keep in mind that French’s stated goal is (in his own words):

It’s the formulation that renders the government primarily responsible for safeguarding liberty, and the people primarily responsible for exercising that liberty for virtuous purposes. … I firmly believe that the defense of these political and cultural values must be conducted in accordance with scriptural admonitions to love your enemies, to bless those who persecute you, with full knowledge that the “Lord’s servant” must be “kind to everyone, able to teach, and patiently endure evil.”

How's that working out for you?

During my lifetime I have seen this country evolve.  My home town had a rifle club in the high school basement and a creche in the public park at Christmas time.   Where men and women got married and had children, in that order, more often than not.  Where women did not celebrate their abortions.  Where babies were given to their mothers instead of made comfortable while doctor and mother debate whether it should be killed.  Where high school valedictorians were actually allowed to proclaim their love of Christ.  Where racial integration and color blindness was the goal to which good people strived.  Today 75 American colleges offer Black-only graduation ceremonies and 43% offer segregated residence halls.

It was a time when America was hailed as a beacon of freedom rather than condemned as the focus of evil in this world.

What French-ism means is the “nice” decision to lose the culture war, encapsulated in the 1992 speech by Patrick Buchanan.  The Right’s intellectual and political leaders set the agenda, rallied the troops, asked for our support and our dollars.  Most of them talked a good fight, but they were not the ones losing their jobs as their mines, mills, and factories closed.   It took a brash, guy with balls of steel to virtually single-handed show how it’s possible to actually win, in contrast to French and scores of people like him were losing the culture and the country they claimed to love.  But what they really loved was pretending to be in charge, bathing in self-esteem, seeing their names in print.  Today, they are simply ankle biters who have been made irrelevant by someone who fights and knows how to win.

The thing that makes Trump “seem” so spectacular is that he has balls in an environment that has been nutless for decades.

The thing that makes Trump “seem” so spectacular is that he has balls in an environment that has been nutless for decades. When a normal grown man with AC-DC sized big balls pops on the scene amongst an ocean of cucks and wusses there is an automatic and continuous tsunami-earthquake-typhoon of emotions everywhere simultaneously. Nervous reactions.

Out here in Realville men have been acting like men all along so we have been stymied as to why DC males act like they do. Until Trump, we had nothing in that realm to compare the cucks to. Now we do, and we feel embarrassment for them.

And we want them to know severe punishment. If you are born a male you are a man all of your life but if you choose to behave like a child or a woman then you need to be corrected, violently if necessary, or preferably, eliminated, permanently so as to not infect others.

Out here in Realville Trump would blend right in and seem like everyone else.

Corrected for grammar.

Kurt Schlichter: "They Are Not Never Trump – They Are Never You"

The recent utterly unsurprising utter capitulation by the Fredocons to the SJW/tech/media campaign to deplatform and silence any right-wing voice who is not trying to sell you a cruise cabin is a symptom of a bigger problem. It’s not a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, though Trump has utterly deranged these pointy-headed geeks. It is a symptom of Conservative, Inc.’s contempt for you.

The dethroned conservagimps are angry with you. Donald Trump is not really the issue. He’s just a convenient target for those these establishment sissies. They truly despise you.

You.

They hate you because you refuse to honor and respect them, to validate their cheesy status within the Beltway hierarchy, and to acknowledge them as your betters. Your pig-headed uppityness has disrupted their scam. The old paradigm, the model of go-along/get-along and feed the crackers out there in America articles about lib outrages to keep them writing checks, no longer cuts it. You’ve stripped them of their status by holding them accountable for their failure to fight for conservatism, and for us.

...

... we are in the midst of a cultural upheaval where our shoddy elite is desperately trying to cling to power and prestige it did not earn, has not wielded competently, and does not deserve. The recent shameful collaboration with the SJW left by those who once fancied themselves our leaders in conservatism just proves, again, how right we were to discard these losers.

Trump, and his success at invigorating the economy, the military and the lives of ordinary Americans despite the best efforts of the scum on the Left and the Right, has revealed the foolishness of the old Ruling Class. 

Ace of Spades on the firing of Kevin Williamson

Ace of Spades

People are waking up to the fact that our "leaders," both political and those in media, who we have put into positions of leadership to serve as our advocates and our champions, who maybe might speak up for us with one one-hundredth of the vigor with which they champion their pal Kevin Williamson in his bid to become a respectable writer at an prestigious left-wing magazine, seem to be an insular group of class-conscious, careerist mercenaries primarily interested in advancing their own interests and quite willing to sacrifice those of their fellow conservatives if it gets them just a bit of goodwill from the dominant leftist class.

...

You know how you got Trump, fellas?

You made it too obvious that you were pursuing the interests only of your own small insular class and had decided that the Little People and Filthy Commoners existed primarily to provide you with perks and power.

How many times do we have to hear about the plight of the very well paid Bari Weiss and the well-enough paid and somewhat famous Kevin Williamson while the "leaders" of the right continue to shrug at much-less justifiable acts of corporations to punish their workers for wrongthink?

If you're only going to use the media power which average citizens, who do not have any means of mass communication themselves, have trusted to you with the assumption that you would advocate for their interests once in a while and not exclusively for your own -- why should they let you keep that media power?

Why not turn you all out into the streets and elect a better class of advocates?

I could not agree more.

The Atlantic Fires Kevin Williamson

Ace of Spades:

Social Justice Warriors have been trying to get Kevin Williamson fired from his just-started job at the meaningless dribble publication The Atlantic -- a magazine much admired by the cucks -- because he has previously tweeted that women who get abortions should maybe be hanged.

The Atlantic just fired him. They said they'd found a podcast appearance where Williamson repeated that tweet, and that they now believed this wasn't just a provocative joke but his "carefully considered" opinion.

It seems it was just yesterday that The Weekly Standard, which you should totally obey because they're smart guys who really "get" the current political environment, were blowing air-kisses to the liberal print media and claiming charges that it was without integrity were "deeply unserious."...

What will they say now? If they now denounce the leftist print media as totalitarian, that would establish two things:

1, They're wrong about everything all the time.

Which we already knew. Worse, it would establish:

2, They don't care about the left's totalitarian attacks on speech and belief until it gets someone in their own class.

I despise these cucks for this reason: Many of these people scoff at the notion that the leftwing is out for scalps. They are out to get people fired. They are out to ruin lives. They stand for the proposition that You shall repeat our cult dogmas or we will work as hard as possible to deny you the ability to even earn a living plying your trade in Current Year America.

Yet these cucks continue to engage in apologism for the left, claiming that only "paranoids" believe this about their Very Good Leftist Cocktail Party Friends.

They themselves are immune from the Recite Our Dogmas or Lose Your Job threat, because they are actually paid to write (nominally) conservative twaddle by (nominally) conservative magazines funded by (nominally) conservative billionaires.

Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn on "cuckservatives"

Mark comes up with as good a definition of the Modern Concervative as I have seen, but then he is a master wordsmith:

As the purveyor of a family-friendly website, I have been reluctant to join in the popularization of the epithet "cuck" - as in "cuckold", as in "cuckservatives", etc. Yes, yes, as a practical matter, most mainstream conservatives are hopeless squishes who haven't conserved a single thing and for whom, as I complained to John Oakley in Toronto the other day, no hill is ever the hill to die on.

What Today's Cuckservatives Had to Say About Obama in 2009

On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. They were Reaganites all, yet some had paid tribute to Obama during the campaign. Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama “the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be “a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin,” who would “bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, “I look forward to Obama’s inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer.”