American Con Mag, voting for the enemy since 2008

 

Trump has attacked the Houthis, Iran, and is assembling an armada against Venezuela as we speak, but fantasy world dweller Scott Greer says the future of the GOP isn't about foreign policy

The Old Guard Is Not the Right’s Future

  ... Republicans are less likely now to back NATO and other international commitments. Republicans are not as greatly concerned with foreign affairs as think tankers are. It was ranked near the bottom of issues that 2024 voters cared about. ... Obsessing over fiscal policy, advocating for more foreign interventions, and being willing to capitulate on immigration is not a winning formula either in the GOP primaries or for a general electorate. ... [David] French, unlike other Never Trumpers, has given up on the GOP entirely. He thinks it’s Trump’s party now and for the foreseeable future.

He’s obviously right. Only an America First candidate, not a Paul Ryan type, can hold the coalition together. ...

 

The alt-right fringe is now acceptable at The American Conservative, and in the line-up at Real Clear Politics, all of which have become completely incoherent, including on the primacy of fiscal policy, which is the cause of, and the solution to, all the ills now afflicting the young people Greer would speak for.

 

Reagan authored those ills, and Trump has double-downed on them.

 

My God, The American Conservative is a joke of a magazine

The NSS Is the Strategy We Have Waited For

 ... The NSS finally says out loud what many of us have argued quietly: proximity shapes power. If the United States wants to compete with China—economically, technologically, militarily—it must simultaneously secure the space in which its own republic exists. A great power does not project strength globally while hemorrhaging authority regionally. China seems to get this instinctively. It does not confront nuclear competitors while tolerating cartel rule on its own doorstep. ...

China is the principal global source for the world's fentanyl and methamphetamine precursors which fuel the cartels in Mexico and in China's own backyard in Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand, which also supply China with its own heroin and opium.

Illegal drugs are a key weapon China deploys against the West, but Trump's new, awful, stupid National Security Strategy couldn't care less.

And Trump is about to prove it again next week when he reclassifies gateway drug marijuana as Schedule III instead of Schedule I. 

Andrew Sullivan throws the title of a recent book by Hillarycon Rod Dreher in his face, who is now at the heart of this new authoritarian Trump presidency through his friendship with J. D. Vance

Dreher has succumbed to the abuse of Trump. He lives by lies. He thinks Zelenskyy was the bad guy in the Oval Office.

Sullivan has not succumbed to our "sociopathic president":

 ... What the world saw last Friday was the same, central Trump dynamic: the leader of a smaller democracy that has withstood three years of brutal attack by a far larger dictatorship ... was still publicly humiliated, because he dared air his concern of no security guarantees against Russia. “Just say thank you,” Vance harangued him. “Have you said thank you once?” I cannot recall any visiting head of state who has ever, ever been thrown out of the White House the way Zelensky was. Why? Because he did not submit.

... The challenge for liberals of all stripes is a familiar one in dystopian democracies and rigid dictatorships: Live not by lies. Keep your grip on reality. Avoid the propaganda now washing down on you like torrential rain. Find a refuge, as I did on Wednesday — a place where eternal truths remain, or where free thinking can endure (Spinoza is a role model, which is why the Dishcast discusses him this week).

Avoid hysteria, which Trump wants and exploits. But avoid also being co-opted by a single one of his lies, to see clearly, and to speak simply. Read those you disagree with; get off most social media; choose doubt over certainty; restraint over impulse; resist this authoritarian and irrational moment by refocusing above all on the simple truth, as best as you can, and fighting all those on both extremes trying to annihilate it. ...

Here.

It's a magnificent essay which everyone should read.

Rod Dreher was a Hillarycon in 2016 because of, wait for it, The Madness of King Donald. And so was J. D. Vance.

Kamala Harris is not cutting it with Pennsylvania Catholics like Joe Biden once did

 

 Harris’ challenge isn’t limited to abortion. The region continues to inch rightward. And Harris didn’t do herself any favors in 2018, when as a senator she grilled a Catholic judicial nominee about whether he could remain impartial due to his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a respected Catholic fraternal organization with a strong presence in northeastern Pennsylvania. The questioning is fuel for a multi-million-dollar campaign in swing states, including Pennsylvania, led by CatholicVote, a conservative advocacy group. ...  in the northeastern part of the state, Trump was ahead by a comfortable margin, 50 percent to 43 percent.

... white Catholics nationally voted for Trump by a wide margin in 2020 and were on pace to vote for him again, with a spring Pew survey finding that white, non-Hispanic Catholic voters preferred the former president by a 61 percent to 38 percent margin over Biden. According to a recent EWTN/RealClear poll, that gap has narrowed, with Trump leading Harris among white Catholics, 52 percent to 42 percent. ... A Brookings analysis earlier this year by University of Pennsylvania professor John DiLulio noted that Hillary Clinton lost the overall white Catholic vote by 33 points in 2016, but four years later, Biden cut that deficit in half, losing by only 15 points. “As much as any single shift in voting patterns between those two elections, the shift in the white Catholic vote away from Trump cost him the 2020 election,” wrote DiLulio.

More. 

The story never once mentions the possible appeal of J. D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism in 2019, to America's Catholic voters.

Scott McConnell: Joe Biden has had his hair on fire for NATO enlargement since at least 1998

Anatol Lieven has pointed out that not a single hawk during the Reagan era (which today’s Democrats pretend to respect in counterpoint today’s America First Republicans) imagined bringing Crimea under NATO jurisdiction and evicting the Russian fleet from Sevastopol would be a desirable or feasible goal for the West. ...

 

One can go back to the 1998 Senate debate over NATO enlargement, won inevitably by the side promising greater profits for the military industrial complex, to see its contours. That debate was spirited, and we might take solace from the fact (unlike the present) that it took place at all. 

Opposing NATO expansion, Senator Daniel Moynihan, the last intellectual in American politics, warned “We’re walking into ethnic historical enmities. We have no idea what we’re getting into.” Taking Moynihan’s side, Republican senator John Warner of Virginia warned of antagonizing Russia by building an “iron ring” around it. And from whom came the most strident objection to Warner and Moynihan? According to the New York Times, Joseph Biden, “took the floor and erupted…stalking the Senate floor, flailing his arms….” 

More.

Non-binary queer man who threatened to blow up his mother's house last year shoots up gay nightclub in Colorado, liberals blame conservatives

Story.

The biggest cuck of the moment is Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, prophet of coming soft totalitarianism to The West

Rod Dreher retweets a whiny guy with kids who thinks boomers are dogshit, a Canadian who is intimidated by a Russian circus act training with a bear, and a Russian propaganda map of Ukraine showing "the advance of our troops".

All in the last 24 hours.

He's in Spain and Hungary enjoying the cafe life for Lent.

 

LOL, Rod Dreher finally is ready for government by a Strong Man to protect the white man

  

Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist :

I don’t ever want to see Donald Trump again. He had these people’s number, in a way, but he did little or nothing effective to stop them. I want to vote for a presidential candidate who will move against these dirtbags and their institutions without mercy. Enough is enough. I’m not sure what can be done, but if we keep tolerating this, there is going to be violence, one way or another.  I am not willing to sit here and listen to these aristocrats like Dr. Khilanani, and malignant institutions like Yale, turn people against me, my children, and my neighbors, because we are white.

Scott McConnell of The American Conservative voted for the enemy in 2008 and votes for him now too

Dreher advocates for peace and for praying for the Muslim victims.

In 1776 the American preachers advocated for war and actually killed Christian Redcoats.

Two different religions but you're only here thanks to one of them.

James Pinkerton for The American Conservative completely falls for Hillary's "new" immigration views

Hillary Clinton: Conservatives Were Right on Mass Migration:

[H]ere in the U.S., conservatives—as distinct, of course, from libertarians—are now able to say, “Even Hillary Clinton and John Kerry agree on the need for border enforcement.” And in political terms, that’s not a small victory.

 Commenter Blitzkrieg spoke for many when he opined that Pinkerton "missed the point entirely".

Paul Gottfried has read Antifa's wunderkind Mark Bray and finds that there's no there there, just slogans

Proving once again that PhD's aren't what they used to be. Maybe it's time to draft them. 

The Myth Making of Antifa Intellectuals:

Despite its obvious incompatibility with the dominant political culture, the alt-right seems to have rallied philosophically deeper thinkers than the slogan-chanting adolescents who swarm around [Mark] Bray. ...

Bray’s Left has nothing in common with the Left that existed in interwar Europe. His field and passion are gender studies and “fighting racism.” These were hardly the major interests of anarchists and Marxists in the 1930s. Back then the Left was serious about a socio-economic revolution and showed no noticeable interest in identity politics or LGBT self-expression. It may even be a bit of a stretch to relate antifa activism to the protests in the 1960s that I personally witnessed. The demonstrators at that time opposed a prolonged war in Vietnam into which they might be personally dragged; others protested segregation, which really existed in some parts of the country. What similarly deep cause is driving Bray and his allies? I can’t seem to find one other than seizing power or simply letting off steam.

Conservatism upside-down: Russell Kirk chair in history at Hillsdale held by professed libertarian

Bradley J. Birzer, here:

"I have never considered myself a classical liberal, but I have always considered myself libertarian."

Russell Kirk, of course, was neither, but especially not libertarian.

And at public universities also it is common for atheists to chair religion departments.

A grandmother of Bolshevism over at The American Conservative is upset with her children

Hey, we are the chosen immanentizers of the eschaton, not you!

Kelly Marcum, here:

The left, which continues to decry the social faux pas of cultural appropriation with ever-increasing vehemence, is itself guilty of the very same crime. They, the proponents of a predominantly liberal post-Christian culture, have undertaken a great project of appropriating and reinventing orthodox Christian values. ...

The left has made it its mission to culturally appropriate Christianity and use it for its own ends; in too many cases, it has been allowed to do so and even aided in its efforts by Christians themselves. ...

If orthodox Christianity is to survive in an evermore hostile culture, its practitioners and leaders will need not only to withstand the pressure to accommodate and self-censor, but to repossess their own language and tenets that have been exploited by the left.

And at the so-called American Conservative the lead is about sex, not antifa

Sex is Cheap and It’s a Buyer’s Market—If You’re a Man

And surprise! it's not by Rod Dreher.

Laugh of the Day: Leave it to Rod Dreher to crank out 2,000 to 3,000 words about so much bologna

Here, in the comments section.

For some unknown reason The American Conservative decided to remind us today about the crack-up of Bruce Bartlett

They reran his 2012 piece detailing his several intellectual crises, in which the libertarian finally gave up and became the liberal, although he denies it.

Nostalgia on the editors part, no doubt, for wound-licking in defeat.

Rod Dreher is a boob, calls Homer's Odyssey "a novel"

Here.

Let's hope no one puts him in charge of someone's classical Christian education somewhere.

A conservative makes an appearance at The American Conservative

Not in the articles line-up, but in the comments section, here:

"Every able-bodied Christian man should learn to shoot a rifle, because it will come to that if we live uncompromising lives."

Laugh of the Day: The top one percent in brains tend to become our senators

Gotta be a typo.

Seen here:

Reflecting on the latest findings of longitudinal studies on gifted students, Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program, concluded that children with early cognitive ability “control our society…The kids who test in the top one percent tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires.”