#DonLemon 's Violent Campaign Rhetoric

The liberal media spent a full two or three days this last week castigating Donald Trump for using what it maintained was violent rhetoric. CNN anchor Don Lemon was particularly outraged by Trumps comments.

No one seems to have noticed yet, least of all the liberal media, but most of the rhetoric used in political campaigns is based on violent rhetoric. In fact, the chief metaphor used in any political campaign comes straight from warfare, where the rule of the day is killing and general mayhem.

Like a lot of terms in our daily vocabulary, campaign terms are metaphors from some other area of life (and, in this case, death) whose original usage we see right through because of our common use of them. 

In fact, the term 'campaign' is itself a martial metaphor. Before there were ever democratic forms of government, armies when "on campaign," meaning they went off to kill people and break things. In fact, the earliest occurrence of the political use of the term in English dates only to the very beginning of the 19th century A.D.

And the military metaphors don't end there. 'Win', 'lose', 'victory', 'defeat', 'war room', 'battleground' states, 'fight', campaign 'foot soldiers', an election constituting a 'rout'—not only is it common in political language, it is the dominant metaphor.

So let's all panic now and run around telling everyone the political sky is falling because virtually every politician out there is using explicitly martial language, clearly indicating that they are advocating death, rape and pillage—even Hillary. I'm expecting that any second now Don Lemon will go into full apoplectic mode, warning everyone that they should head for their basements and stay there until after the election is over.

Oh, but wait. 

It is not only politicians who use these terms, but journalists who cover their "campaigns." In fact, Don Lemon uses them on a daily basis.

Don Lemon. Advocating death, rape, and pillage. So sad. Maybe he could conduct three consecutive days' worth of overheated interviews with liberal commentators on what a hypocrite he is.

Eunuchs in the Palace of Liberalism: Modern conservatism and what Ailes it

Sean Hannity, conservative ideologist.

I still, unaccountably, hear people who consider themselves conservatives talk about how much progress conservatism has made over the last ten to twenty years and how much that is attributable to media institutions like Fox News.

The first thing to say about this attitude is that it is utterly preposterous. Yes, there is a conservative media that didn't exist before the mid-90s, but what needs to be explained is why the rise of the supposedly conservative media has been accompanied by an almost complete loss of the culture.

Clearly conservatism is NOT winning. In fact, the influence of conservatism on our culture has ebbed to such an extent that if it were an animal, it would have to be put on the Endangered Species List.

So why do some conservatives like these think that conservatism is somehow thriving?

The reason is that for them (and this is perhaps the central problem with modern conservatism), conservatism is an ideology. In order to tell whether it is winning or not, one need only tally up the political offices inhabited by Republicans, compare that number to the offices held by Democrats. If the former number is bigger than the latter (or if it is growing in relation to the latter), then conservatism is in good shape.

This is malady that infects conservatism as it is represented by Fox News: The idea that the way conservatism wins is to gain political power. The more control conservatives wield over the engines of government, the better off everybody is—particularly conservatives.

This is Sean Hannity Conservatism. Roger Ailes Conservatism. It is the conservatism of the neoconservatives who have, for all practical purposes, dominated the Republican Party since the departure of Ronald Reagan from the political scene. 

Reagan himself was not of this sort. Reagan was the product of the National Review conservatism that produced him. National Review, which until the 90s was the flagship conservative voice in America, particularly when it had in its stable of writers people like Russell Kirk and Joseph Sobran, and to a certain extent its editor William F. Buckley, could be said to have had a soul, a soul that left the body some time, oh about the time that Reagan's vice president George Bush, Sr. took office.

What Reagan and the old National Review conservatism recognized was that politics was the effect in relation to which the culture was the cause.  

Go back and look at a copy of the old National Review (I have boxes of them in my attic). Note the prevalence of social commentary, film criticism, and book reviews—reviews of books of every kind, including poetry, fiction, literary criticism—in addition to books on policy. Then compare it to today's conservative publications (including National Review), which, if they don't actually harbor writers who suffer from it, at least appeal to readers who are poorly read and largely unfamiliar with the Western culture that magazines like NR were founded to defend.

It was the culture, stupid—the culture which has served as the battlefield on which conservatives have been completely routed—on marriage, on education, on bioethics, on sexual ethics—in addition to the size and scope of government.

Conservatism now shares the liberal impulse to achieve some sort of earthly utopia, the only difference being that for liberals this utopia consists in a thoroughly administered life through the agencies of government while for conservatives it is realized in a free market economy.

If you listen to someone like Sean Hannity, you'll hear the eschaton being immanentized (something the conservative political theorist Eric Voegelin and his cheerleader Buckley spurned) on a daily basis. The purpose of political theories, in this reading, is to write and implement the program by which heaven can be brought to earth. It is the substance of ideology, which is, as Russell Kirk, whose book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot single-handedly founded the conservative movement, pointed out is political religion.

How many times have you heard a conservative spokesperson use the expression "conservative ideology" as an expression of approval? If you were to say this in the presence of the old conservatives, they would lift their aged heads and fell you to the earth.

Not only is the expression "conservative ideology" an oxymoron, it is blasphemy to the ears of a real conservative. It is the unwitting declaration that conservatism is merely another political religion designed to give us secular salvation—through "the market," or the Republican Party. It implies that, as liberalism has always maintained, if we can just get society structured properly, we can all live in peace and contentment, free of external evil (the only kind of evil liberals believe in).

It is the denial of Original Sin, the doctrine which Chesterton maintained was the only Christian belief that could be empirically proven, and the denial of which underlies the fatal conceit of political utopianism.

Conservatives have ceded the culture to liberals, and think the way to fight it is to get their hands on the levers of power. They are sorely mistaken.

What Fox News has done is to redefine conservatism so as to hide the defeat. For example, the network did little to stand up to the judicial fiat by which the legal doctrine of traditional marriage was swept away—a judicial fiat it would have been called by its proper name in the days when Robert Bork was still alive. It holds tenuously to the prolife position only because it has to appease its more culturally conservative audience. And not only is homosexuality fully accepted on every program its runs, but it now regularly refers to the "transgender community," an expression pregnant (if one can use that word in such a context) with ideological assumptions no conservative could ever accept.

Modern conservatives are Eunuchs in the Palace of Liberalism, having been culturally emasculated and reduced to doing the bidding of their liberal overlords, and are receiving the appreciation they deserve.

Watch Don Lemon get put in his place after the ridiculous charge that Trump was encouraging people to mass insurrection

The comical imbroglio over Donald Trump's Second Amendment remark gets more comical by the hour. Trump makes one of his usual unintelligent, off-the-cuff, meaningless remarks, this time joking about what Second Amendment advocates might do if Hillary puts judges on the Court who want to do away with gun rights through judicial fiat (and barely even doing that).

Just watch CNN's Don Lemon go completely apoplectic, accusing Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who backed Ted Cruz in the primary with being a "Trump surrogate," all the time acting himself as a Hillary surrogate.

Three minutes in, Bongino: "For twelve years of my life I was a secret service agent ... while you were learning how to be a TV personality."

OUCH.

Trump's comments didn't even approach irresponsibility, and as jokes go, it was pretty poor. But folks, bad taste and inarticulateness (not to mention being ungrammatical) do not constitute a threat to the Republic.

But, as you might expect, Hillary and her surrogates in the liberal media fell all over themselves, acting like Trump had just suggested mass violence and insurrection.

C'mon.

In fact, one of the funny things about all this is that, even if Trump were encouraging people to take up arms for the right to take up arms, he would only be doing the very thing the founders intended for people to do under the Second Amendment. Even Allan Dershowitz, commenting on CNN (I think) made the point that the Second Amendment is not about the right to hunt. It was put there to ensure that if the government became tyrannical, people would have the means to preserve their freedoms.

This is a liberal talking here and he's absolutely right. That's why the Second Amendment is there. And that's why Dershowitz was so outraged by what he was convinced in his conspiratorial liberal mind Trump was doing: the very thing the Second Amendment authorizes people to do (but which Dershowitz doesn't happen to like, but which doesn't matter because all a liberal has to do is ignore plain constitutional language and change the definitions of words and generally make things up).

But still the more important lesson here is that the media has now as become as trivial and unserious as the candidate they are trying to convince everyone is trivial and unserious--except when he's calling on Americans to start firing their weapons at public officials in which case he is a threat to our system of government which they don't really care about anyway which we know because they support Supreme Court justices who want to rewrite it.

Don Lemon and his liberal media colleagues are a far more serious threat the Republic than Donald Trump.

You think Trump shot himself in the foot? Check out what the Establishment is doing

Just when the air was going out of the Trump campaign for newer ever more blithering stupidity, along comes the Republican Establishment to rescue him by openly repudiating him and in the process reminding people once again how utterly worthless they are and underscoring the opposition Trump offers to them which makes people hold off on abandoning him for just a little bit longer.

Thank you, Establishment. Just keep it coming.

Even McMullin

First they launch an alternative supposedly "conservative" candidate. Now think about this. You have the Republican nominee who got where he is on the wave of disaffection among normal Americans toward Establishment conservatism, which is led by "Republican operatives" and which is associated with economic entities like Goldman Sachs, and you put up someone supported by "Republican operatives" and who worked for Goldman Sachs? 

Seriously? Will someone please issue an orange alert for political blindness? Please?

Add in the fact that Evan McMullin worked for the CIA and you have a candidate who makes Jeb Bush seem Bohemian by comparison. Ugh.

Then you have fifty national security experts come out in public opposition to Trump. Why wait for Trump's birthday to give him presents. 

Fifty national security experts? Who think Trump is a threat to national security? Are these the same people who supported the Iraq War--which, by the way, if we haven't mentioned it already (which we have) is the precise reason we have a Middle East crisis right now?

Real conservatives are not completely surrounded by imbecility. I, personally, am going to stock up on provisions and tidy up the bunker.

Transgenders: "Don't you dare disagree with us or we'll kill ourselves"

Jake over at Page One Kentucky thinks Jamie Comer's comment that "Some of the Congressmen…especially in the Obama Administration… are more concerned about transgender rights than the rights of working, middle-class people" is not only "transphobic," but is causing transgender people to kill themselves:

"As youth commit suicide all across Kentucky" he says, "The blame rests on their shoulders. The blood is on their hands. His hands."

Ooookay.

Not only is it manifestly silly to invent imaginary disease titles to assign to your political detractors (e.g. "transphobic"), but it is kind of hard to deal with a group of people who (if Jake can be believed) basically take the position that they will kill themselves if you disagree with them.

Of course we're not allowed any more to say that people who are confused about whether they're male or female need professional help (and, in fact, those who do say that are now the ones the Authorities think need it). But surely people who hold a gun to their own heads and threaten to pull the trigger if you don't acquiesce to them politically are in sore need of someone's help.

Headlines that make you want to vote for #Trump

I am not voting for Donald Trump, but there are a daily parade of news events that make me want to. The latest is the news that "Russian Rock Band Warns Americans Voting For Trump Is Like Voting For Putin."

The rock band is, of course, P***y Riot, a Russian rock band famous for the smash hit ..., um, well, there's the song ..., hmmm. Now that I think about it, they don't have any hits at all and for that matter no one has ever actually heard them play music. Which is probably a good thing.

The only reason they are famous is because the Russian government put them in jail. Not only does that not make them a rock band, it doesn't make their rantings meaningful. 

I, personally, am in favor of putting them back in jail. Maybe they could figure out how to play some instruments and actually play music, which is what rock bands are supposed to do, after all.

We should be more afraid of Hillary Clinton than Vladimir Putin

I could make more sense of  the criticisms of Donald Trump for calling on the Russians to release more hacked emails if it weren't for the fact that Hillary Clinton were not to the political left of Putin.

While Hillary is pushing left-wing postmodernist gender ideology, radical feminism, divisive multiculturalism, and undermining religious freedom, Putin at least gives lip-service to traditional values.

While Hillary and her minions oppose the least whiff of Christianity in the nation's public schools, Christianity is now taught freely in Russian schools

While Putin's Russia has largely abandoned Marxist economic policies, Hillary (if not in name, in fact) embraces them. In fact Putin's public positions on most issues are closer to what anyone could legitimately call "American values" than the average Democratic politician.

Hillary is a far greater threat to American than Vladimir Putin.

Trump rains on Hillary's parade

The dude's a maniac. Trump has now invited the Russians to release more hacked emails. And, of course, the liberals are fit to be tied.

And they ought to be. Why? Because Trump has sucked all the attention away from them once again and attracted all the attention to himself. Now instead of everyone talking about Bill's speech last night, they're talking about Hillary's emails again.

In an effortless, off-the-cuff remark, Trump has rained all over the Democrat's parade.

Again, I'm not voting for him, but you've got to give him credit: He's willing to go where no Republican candidate has gone before. No timidity, no reticence. He just comes right out with it. He does what Lincoln said Grant did, when Lincoln was asked about the competence of his new general: "He fights."

This has been the Republican's problem. They don't fight. They're haven't been willing to take the gloves off and get serious. The trouble with Trump, of course, is that you can never be certain exactly what he's fighting for, other than himself.

His ego is so big that it's irresistible centripetal pull forces all things into the vortex of its influence. He's a crazy man. I'm just glad it's at Hillary's expense.

Hillbilly Lament: Why are today's poor more desperate than yesterday's despite the fact that yesterday's poor were poorer than today's

Are good country people not as good as they used to be?

Rod Dreher writes today about Terry Teachout writing about J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy:

My own late grandparents were more or less the same generation as Terry’s Gracie and Albert, and equally humbled by circumstance. But they had dignity and self-discipline and character. The only thing they lacked was money, and opportunity.

How is it that when America had far less in the way of material wealth, and families of the poor — black and white both — had far more pressures on them, they did not succumb to self-degradation as so many of the poor do today?

Why are today's poor more desperate than yesterday's despite the fact that yesterday's poor were poorer than today's? The first answer is dependence. If you look at Eastern Kentucky, for example, what you see is a culture that, having once been ravaged by poverty is now ravaged by a dependency mentality that has robbed people of their dignity and made them vulnerable to all the secondary social pathologies that go along with the destruction of dignity, chief among them, drugs.

People in the Appalachia have served only to enrich the liberal government bureaucracies that feed off of their plight and the private industries--especially the health industry--that feed off of the government bureaucracies that feed off the plight of the poor. The very welfare programs that were designed to help these people have enslaved them. 

The second answer is provided by Charles Murray, who has pointed out again and again that the wages of the permissivist values of the upper class are paid by the lower class. The limousine liberals who spout their lax views of sexual promiscuity and drug use can easily afford single motherhood (or abortion) and have no trouble paying for the drug rehab program. 

 

But the members of the underclass are not so lucky. Single motherhood throws them into poverty and if they get hooked on meth, they're on their own.

Children of broken marriages and those born out of wedlock altogether in a wealthy family have a support system that the poor do not have. If you doubt it, go down to your local family court and see what life is like now among the underclass.

Peter Burger said that we are "a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes." The trouble is that there are things Swedes can do that Indians can't--at least without serious repercussions.

#TimKaine signed the same religious freedom bill as Pence. So where's the outrage?

Remember the public meltdown among the Tolerance and Diversity crowd over Mike Pence signing an Indiana law that simply underscored the traditional protections religious people have enjoyed under the First Amendment's religious exercise clause?

Well, it turns out that Tim Kaine signed virtually the same law on Virginia in March of 2007.

The media has repeatedly brought the Indiana law up as justification for criticizing Pence as the Republican's vice presidential candidate. So why isn't Kaine criticizable for the same reason--particularly since he is the running mate for the liberal candidate for president ("liberal" being defined as the political faction which stands for progressivist values, but only when the political winds are blowing the right way).

As far as I can tell there has been no national coverage of this fact, which means either that the media doesn't know it yet, or that they know it and are giving Kaine a pass.

The new pro-gay Republican Party

So now Trump is "reaching out"--not just to the "LGBT community"--but the "LGBTQ community." No wonder they seem to be gaining influence: They keep adding letters, so fecund is the new gender ideology. Pretty soon they'll have appropriated all the rest of the letters of the alphabet and there will be no stopping them.

LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ. It's coming. Mark my word.

How great, said the pundits--on Fox News no less--is this "new Republican Party." Trump even put up Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, to proudly declare his sexual identity (or orientation, depending on which is more politically beneficial at the time) to talk about how we need to "put culture wars behind us"--complete with cheers from the new Republicans in this "new Republican Party."

That's just what the victors in a culture war would say--victors preening before the camera at the convention for the party that used to represent the other side in those culture wars. It does not bode well for those now seeking Constitutional protections from the increasingly aggressive and punitive Gender Police.

They talk a good game on religious freedom, but when you have to regularly genuflect to the very group of people who are its greatest enemy, it's kind of hard to maintain your credibility on the issue.

And the same day that the new Trump-drunk Republicans finish their convention in which this "new Republican Party" was loving up the people who are the worst threat to religious freedom in this country, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, endorsed their nominee.

Maybe, like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Perkins could take a picture with Trump in his office with the framed cover of Playboy Magazine with Trump on the cover in the background.

Conservatism was nice while it lasted.

The lyin' guy whose father helped assassinate JFK and whose wife is a bimbo didn't endorse #Trump. Go figure.

That the Trumpites who are all up in arms about Ted Cruz not explicitly endorsing Trump last night did not expect Cruz say exactly what he said (and didn't say) is a measure of just how fatuous is Trump's support.

The Morning Jolt captured it perfectly:

But why is everyone so surprised? Trump nicknames him “Lyin’ Ted,” argues he’s a Canadian ineligible for the presidency, retweets an image mocking his wife’s appearance and suggests his dad had a role in killing JFK, and never apologizes for any of it… and the Trump team is surprised Cruz didn’t endorse him?

Why were they and the RNC so surprised by a text they saw beforehand? Trump’s chief strategist, Jason Johnson, contends they weren’t.  “Since it’s obvious the shock is contrived, let me ask: What the H**l did they expect from the son of the man who killed JFK? Lighten up.”

Either the people booing were naive (a tendency common among many of Trump's supporters) or it was disingenuous.

And the only thing worse than the common run of naive or insincere Trump supporters is those current Trump supporters who were formerly Cruz supporters who now profess to be ashamed of him.

After all, if I have give up my principles so that my party can "win," why doesn't Cruz do it?

Wednesday night is going to be one of those nights that political junkies talk about for a long time. Ted Cruz’s decision was bold, reckless, politically stupid, brave, principled, divisive, gutsy and vindictive, all the same time. If you’ve spent the last couple years complaining that all politicians are spineless hacks who only follow the weather-vane and refuse to stand on principles, you’ve got no reason to complain this morning.

I agree with all of that except the part about political junkies talking about this for a long time. Political junkies don't talk about anything for a long time. They have very short attention spans. They're a bunch of Dories who can hardly remember what happened last week, let alone a year ago.

This will be virtually forgotten after next Sunday. Two weeks tops.