Politics as Religion: The Real Reason for the Anti-Trump Rallies

My most recent post at Intellectual Takeout:

The anti-Trump demonstrations we now see in the streets are not just examples of the immaturity of many modern secular liberals, who seem to think that everyone else is somehow obligated to agree with them. They’re also a symptom of the distorted influence politics now exercises over our culture. 

But in addition to being a symptom of our culture, the dominance of politics in every aspect of life is also a consequence of liberalism itself.

Read the rest here.

You want racial politics? I'll give you racial politics

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

Get out the Doritos. Pop the top on your Bud Light. Go down to your man cave, plop down on your La-Z-Boy, invite your friends over and turn on the Packers game.

Here come the White people.

CNN commentator Van Jones, clearly upset by the results coming in last night, claimed that Democrats got “White-lashed.” In a way, he was right. But he has only himself to blame.

Read the rest here.

Tim Kaine compares the Democrat's plight to that of the defeated Confederacy

Tim Kaine compared the Democrat's political situation after Trump's win to the situation of the South after the Civil War in his introduction to Hillary Clinton's concession speech. He quoted William Faulkner's character Wash (from a short story by the same name), who tries to cheer up Thomas Sutpen, decorated by General Lee and released from the defeated Confederate army, telling him, "They kilt us, but they ain't whupped us yet." (the quote Kaine used)

Kaine repeated those words in describing the condition in which Democrats find themselves after Donald Trump's unprecedented victory, apparently unaware of its source and context. Better talk to that speechwriter.

The remark was lauded by David Gergen on CNN, apparently unaware if its source, who said it expressed the "spirit of her speech."

Pretty soon they'll be waving the Confederate flag. That'll help things.

The question is not whether Trump, will accept tomorrow's election results, but whether the rest of us will

Amid all the absurdities of this year's election, one of the more inane issues the took up hours of media time was the fear that Donald Trump would not accept the results of the election if it didn't go his way. 

Apparently Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon were under the impression that an intransigent Trump could just bring the whole election to a grinding halt and they would have to park their cameras outside Trump Force One waiting in unrelieved suspense until he relented and agreed to sign off on the vote.

I mean, we all know about that section in the Constitution that says that a presidential election cannot be certified until billionaire reality televisions stars running for president agree to it. Right?

WHO CARES IF DONALD TRUMP DOESN'T ACCEPT THE RESULTS?!!! ARE YOU PEOPLE COMPLETE IMBECILES???

The correct answer is "Yes."

In fact, it had to be rather gratifying to Trump's ego (which was rather substantial already) that leaders of the liberal media were running around like frightened chickens worrying that Donald Trump might dislike the election results. Fortunately the media—every bit as ADHD as Trump himself—flitted to some other Trump outrage and spared us another week of the ridiculous discussion.

The more important question is whether most Americans are going to accept the election results. 

I don't know how most people feel (we'll find out tomorrow), but I'm less disturbed by a Trump win than a Hillary win, since the decision tomorrow is between bufoonishness and evil. Faced with that alternative (although, as I suggest in my last post, those are not the only alternatives), I guess buffoonishness is less scary. Trump is merely silly and inept, but Hillary represents a positively malignant political force.

Trump represents America at its most trivial and fatuous. It's fitting that he is a reality TV star. If elected, he will need full time political care. Forget the warnings that a Trump presidency will result in a nuclear war. The man will be too busy insulting people on Twitter in the wee hours of the morning to even think about wars. 

Storage Wars, maybe. But not nuclear ones. 

In fact, has anyone ever asked Hillary how she cay say that Donald Trump is cozy with Putin AND that he might start a nuclear war with Russia at the same time?

We won't have to worry about government interference in much of anything under a Trump administration, since that takes a lot of thought and a lot of knowledge of how the government works. He is incapable of the former and devoid of the latter. He is more likely to spend his time watching The View than thinking of ways to bother average Americans.

Hillary, on the other hand, is the Nanny from Hell who will make sure you eat according to government dietary guidelines, get the proper government-approved amount of daily exercise, and make sure no one ever questions what gender you decide to be when you get up in the morning. She's against the government in your bedroom, but will have government bureaucrats stationed in every other room in your house.

She's the quintessential representative of modern secular liberalism who wakes up every morning thinking of new ways in which she can bring about a society efficiently administered by secular elites. She thinks in talking points and talks in jargon. She's got a 4-point plan for putting on her pants suits in the morning and wants to require you to have one too (It will be dresses for men).

Hillary is not incompetent. She knows what she wants and how to bring it about. It would be far better if she were incompetent. Trump doesn't have the competence or the inclination to do bad things. He will only do bad things by accident--because he doesn't know any better. Hillary will have the bad things planned out months in advance, and will speak about why they are good for us in speeches paid for by questionable foreign governments who donated to her foundation.

The choice in this election is between stupidity and corruption. I don't think Americans will accept either of these. Our culture will continue to come apart no matter who wins.

If the founders could only see what we've made of their noble republic.

When Conservatives Could Talk Intelligently: Where is William F. Buckley when you need him?

Compound Sentences. Subordinate clauses. Conclusions with supporting premises. Eloquence. They were all once a part of conservative rhetoric, a rhetoric now become imbecile and associated with the nominee of this nation's nominally conservative party, the extent of whose wit is embodied in insults and thoughts that (perhaps fortunately) do not extend beyond 140 characters.

Instead of advocacy and criticism informed by a knowledge and understanding of the long tradition of American and European political philosophy, we get lengthy disquisitions on the optimal tonnage of beauty contestants. Comments once strewn with quotations from Edmund Burke, Alexis de Toqueville, Lord Acton, and Russell Kirk are now more likely to make reference to the words and actions of people whose chief public exposure is in People magazine. 

There are a few relics left. Charles Krauthammer, Brett Stephens, and, to some extent, Jonah Goldberg and Russ Douthat at least speak grammatically and prosecute a good argument, but they have proven themselves (to use the British term) wets when the going gets tough on social issues like marriage.

Today's conservatives breath with only one lung. They are all economics and no culture. Yes, you can find frequent and justified ridicule of the latest PC outrage on Fox News, but once the liberal tide rises, they just position themselves higher on the beach. And as the waters rise, the retreats pile up and the conservative territory diminishes. And no one wants to do the hard work of dealing with the more enduring problem of the rising sea of ideology.

Where once we had spokesmen who were Burkeans because they had read and agreed with Burke, we now have Machiavellians who not only have not read Machiavelli, but don't even know who he was.

If you want to understand better the low estate into which the conservative mind has fallen, you need to see PBS' new documentary, "Best of Enemies." It is about the public confrontations between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal, the two intellectual leaders, respectively, of the conservatism and liberalism of the 60s and 70s. They spoke at a level which would be incomprehensible to today's generation of voters, educated as they were in public schools where the traditional content of history and literature have been set aside in order to make space for test preparation, fun projects, environmentalism, and political indoctrination.

But in their time, Buckley and Vidal were a huge television draw. They were rock stars before rock stars were, well, rock stars.

"Best of Enemies" focuses on the television debates on ABC during the Republican and Democratic national conventions of 1968. It was a time when CBS and NBC ruled the ratings, with ABC a distant third. While the two more popular networks focused exclusively on the 1968 convention, ABC decided to throw the dice, and put Buckley and Vidal on the same set to see what would happen.

It was a tremendous hit filled with tremendous hits.

Buckley, editor of National Review, the magazine that put conservatism on the American political map and the host of PBS' weekly "Firing Line," and Vidal, the brilliant writer of lurid but popular novels like Myra Breckenridge, squared off in a series of televised flame wars that put to shame the sallow political discourse of today. They didn't like each other, but, with the exception of one now famous incident (which the documentary spends most of its time building up to), Buckley and Vidal engaged in informed political argument only peppered with insults, not, as today, insults peppered with ill-informed political argument. 

This is public television, of course, and so they can't keep their ideological fingers off the facts. Between the mostly accurate historical narrative, we are treated to a litany of disinformation on Buckley's conservatism.

We have Andrew Sullivan, for example, remarking on how elitist and anti-democratic Buckley was. Mind you, this was the Buckley famous for saying that he would rather be ruled by the last three hundred names in the Boston phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard University, and Sullivan and his fellow liberals the ones who applaud every time unelected elite liberal judges take issues out of the democratic process and decide them for the rest of us. 

And then there is the customary civil rights rhetoric, where conservatives in general and Republicans in particular are cast as the ones in favor of discrimination and segregation despite the fact that it was the Democratic Party who supported segregation in the South, that housed Lester Maddox, George Wallace and (to this day) Lyndon LaRouche, and that offered the greatest opposition to the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, voting against them in much higher numbers--and percentages--than Republicans.

Then we have Sullivan speculating that Buckley's opposition to homosexuality was the results of Buckley's fear of his own homosexuality. Thoughts like this are, of course, a great comfort to gays like Sullivan, whose insecurity not only demands that everyone else agree with him (by force if necessary), but that everyone else must be like him deep down. And so we say unsubstantiated and--let's face it--stupid things like this.

And we are also given the impression that Buckley lived in the shadow of his emotional outburst when, after Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," Buckley called him a "queer" and threatened to punch him in the face. In fact the whole program works up to this moment. And when it comes, it cuts to 5-second shots of the liberal commentators, silent, thinking apparently, how terribly, terribly sad it was.

Tsk, tsk. Such a shame.

That Buckley would regret losing his temper and calling Vidal a homosexual (he was, although he consistently refused the "gay" label) using a term that gays themselves use (check out the "Queer Studies" discipline at your local state university) was something Buckley regretted doing. Conservatives have, not only standards, but consciences. But Vidal's charge that Buckley was a "crypto-Nazi," a term no conservative uses of himself, goes unlamented on the show.

No five-second camera pauses focused on the pained faces of moralistic liberals pondering the tragedy of it all. No moralistic lectures from Andrew Sullivan. No grim voice narrating how Terribly. Unfortunate. It was (queue the footage of the face of the perpetrator, in slow motion).

Maybe that was because Vidal, apparently lacking an operative conscience, never regretted hurling his own epithets, and had no journalists to feel guilty for him.

But despite all of the obligatory liberal finger-wagging and head shaking, the glory that was Buckley comes through. In fact, maybe it was good that Buckley called Vidal what he in fact was on live national television and created such a legendary moment. If he hadn't, PBS might never have done such a show, and we couldn't have seen these great old clips of Buckley practicing the art of polemic, an art increasingly falling into disuse, and one which, if conservatives fail to revive it, will be their undoing.

Liberals Living in Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones

The next time you hear the liberal media waxing high and mighty about Donald Trump's truly objectionable remarks on a recently released videotape, you need to remember a few important things.

First, you need to remember that you are hearing all this self-righteousness from a group of people, now fully a part of the entertainment industry, who consistently look the other way when their own industry make millions of dollars every year by selling rap and hip hop music the glorifies sexual violence, who defend the right of the porn industry to produce blatantly misogynist and objectifying pictures and films, and who, when it had the chance to condemn Bill Clinton's abusive behavior toward women instead gave him a pass.

And the next time you hear the Democrats preening about their high ethical standards, you need to compare two things:

1. How the Democrats dealt with Bill Clinton when it came to light that he had engaging in sexually abusive behavior with, among others, people over whom he was in a position of authority, which consisted of dismissing it as unimportant and making excuses for him; and

2. How the Republicans are dealing with Donald Trump now.

The fact that Trump's words have been condemned and that many Republicans have disowned him because of it, and that the much worse behavior of Bill Clinton was excused and caused no serious defections of Democratic support at the time is about the best evidence you can have about that the relative standards of the two parties are.

And, of course, it's a measure of the kind of hypocrisy liberals--inside and outside the media--are willing to engage in to promote their cause.

My Five-Step Method for Determining Who Wins Presidential Debates and How to Apply It to Last Night's Debate

I have a five-step method for determining who wins presidential debates. Here it is:

1. I switch to Fox News to see how Sean Hannity is feeling;2. I then switch to CNN to see how Jake Tapper (or Anderson Cooper) is feeling;3. If Sean Hannity looks grim and Tapper (or Cooper) looks chipper, then Hillary won;4. If Sean Hannity is chipper and Tapper (or Cooper) grim, then Trump won.5. If they book look about the same, then it was a draw

Applying this method last night, I determine that Trump won.

Tapper looked like his dog had just died. He had circles under his eyes and looked like he badly needed a long vacation. Of course, he wouldn't admit that Trump won, and he had to settle for saying that the debate wouldn't help him to win, which, of course, has nothing to do with the question, and which, if Trump had engaged in any similar confusion would have prompted Anderson Cooper to interrupt him and pointed it out and if Hillary had done it would have prompted neither moderator to do anything, since she can do no wrong.

Hannity, on the other hand, was positively ecstatic. The Donald had perpetrated the most decisive victory in the history of debate, beating out Demosthenes, Pericles, Cicero, and every other -es and -o who ever rose to a podium. He made Clarence Darrow look like a Sunday School teacher. He had destroyed Hillary so utterly and decisively that it was a wonder she wasn't taken off the stage on a gurney.

The first debate was, of course exactly the opposite.

What always gets me is the utter bias with with both networks deal with issues, although I will have to say that in the days leading up to the debate at least Fox extensively covered Trump's video scandal in addition to its coverage of Hillary's emails, while CNN hardly mentioned the emails.

And this morning on NPR, Mara Liasson's report on the debate included a discussion of everything but the emails. This is just unethical journalism, and it is why public broadcasting has so little credibility any more. And it isn't even necessary: Trump tends to hang himself. He doesn't need liberal journalists grinding an ax and pretending to be objective to do it for him.

The chickens come home to roost for Trump supporters

You know it's bad when Trump fanboy Hannity is reduced to the argument that his candidate is no worse than Bill Clinton.

On the one hand today's release of a videotape containing Trump's lurid remarks about a soap star right before meeting her is nothing new. Is anybody really surprised at this? The only thing new about these remarks is their explicitness. But they are no different in character than other things he has said.

Remember when Republicans said that character mattered? Those were the good old days. That was when the people with bad character were Democrats. Now that the people with bad character are Republicans, all of a sudden character doesn't seem to matter much anymore.

Funny how that works.

I have been telling my conservative friends who are so fearful of Hillary that they are supporting Trump that they'd better watch out. He is the political poster boy from Hell.

Well, welcome to my nightmare.

As much as I like many of the people who have supported Trump, I don't feel sorry for them. They should have known better. Will a Hillary Clinton presidency be bad? Yes it will. But if we're going to have a screwed up Presidency, which I don't see any way out of, I'd rather the party of which I am a member not be responsible for it. 

This is not the last time something like this will come out. In fact, it's a fair bet that there will be several more revelations like this before the election. And, if he becomes president, he's sure to add new outrages. He's the gift that will keep on giving.

No worse than Bill Clinton? There's got to be a campaign slogan better than that. 

Evan McMullin is NOT a Conservative

Evan McMullin

Caleb Howe at Redstate wanted us to watch Evan McMullin's event in Utah tonight. McMullin, the man the Republican establishment put up to compete with Trump (How's that going?), Howe calls "the only conservative running for President."

Huh?

We now go to Maggie Gallagher, who, unlike Howe, still inhabits this dimension:

“As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I believe in traditional marriage between a man and a woman, but I respect the decision of the Court, and I think it’s time to move on,” McMullin said, according to Lifesite News.

When [Mark] Halperin asked if a President McMullin would at least appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn the Obergefell decision, he replied, “I wouldn’t.”

In other words, he's a conservative, but he doesn't want to conserve things like the viability of the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the legitimacy of the judicial system, and the institution of marriage, the institution without which we are all hosed.

Good luck with that.

Why Trump Should Win Tonight's Debate

There are several reasons that, barring some major gaffe on Trump's part, he should win the debate tonight with Hillary Clinton.

First, all you have to do to win this kind of debate is exceed expectations. As it stands now, the expectations for Trump's performance are lower than Hillary's, giving him a much lower bar to clear.

Second, Hillary faces a dilemma that Trump does not: She either plays it conservative, in which case she appears too boring and Establishment, or she plays it aggressive and tries to trash-talk Trump, in which case she will get the short end of the stick because no one can out trash-talk Trump.

Given these realities, Trump's strategy should be purely reactive: If Hillary remains docile, just stand there, make a few policy statements and look presidential, in which case he will have exceeded the expectations. If Hillary goes on the attack, then deploy the email scandal, the Bengazi scandal, the Goldman Sachs connection, and her husband's Bimbo scandal, in which case he will at least neutralized her attacks and possibly draw blood.

Thirdly, Each candidate comes with a constructive and destructive narrative and both will be trying to play to one and downplay the other. Hillary's positive narrative is that she is competent and tested; her negative one is the mirror image: she is an establishment figure who skirts ethical rules and gets away with legal transgressions that mere mortals would do time for. Trump's positive narrative is that he is an anti-establishment figure bent on shaking things up; his negative narrative is that he is impulsive and reckless with his words and a lightweight when it comes to the serious policy work it takes to be the leader of the Free World.

That's pretty much a draw. However, Hillary has one more narrative working against her, and it has to do with her health. Up until about a week ago, I thought her health really was a tempest in a teapot that no one really cared about. But I think that I thought that because I didn't care about it. As has become evident, a lot of people do care about it. The video of her collapsing as she got into a car made it an issue.

This debate is supposed to be 90 minutes without commercials. Do they even get a potty break? If not, Hillary has another dilemma: If she drinks water before the debate, then she's going to need one (remember the several times in the primary debates when she disappeared from the set?); if she does not drink water, she faces the problem of dehydration, in which case she faces the problem of passing out again (this was the reason given for collapsing in the now famous video).

Again, Trump doesn't face the same dilemma. If we can go by past experience, he can hold it--and he is more likely to make other people pass out than to do so himself. In fact this is the one thing that could completely change this election: If Hillary collapses or shows any significant evidence of fatigue or physical weakness, this election could well be over. 

Finally, even if there is a gaffe, there is going to be an automatic double standards for the candidates that, once again, favors Trump; namely, that Trump can get away with gaffes that Hillary cannot. In fact, gaffes are such a regular part of Trump's rhetorical repertoire that the gaffe is going to have to be a big one in order to be news at all, whereas Hillary will be hurt by even a moderately serious gaffe, since her strength is stability and experience.

And of course this plays back into the expectations game.

Trump has more to gain and less to lose than Hillary, making him the favorite to win.

It's the End of the Conservative World as We Know It

Paul Gottfried

There is one conservative blog (other than, of course, Vital Remnants) that will put the current election in excellent perspective. It is a conservative oasis in the sea of nonsense. It is the Imaginative Conservative. Today's article is a great example of why this online magazine is a light in the conservative darkness. Paul Gottfried, one of the great modern conservative writers reflects on the state of modern conservatism, so-called:

[E]very time I hear the term used to describe a GOP position on just about anything, I have to wonder what makes that position “conservative.” Why for example is nation-building abroad, which involves imposing the latest model of American democracy on populations that are culturally quite different from the present American ruling class, a “conservative” position? And why is letting American working communities languish while our jobs are outsourced a “conservative” policy? The obvious answer is such stands are talking points deployed by the Republican Party as it works to hold on to certain constituents. These stands also happen to be those of the GOP donor base.

... I am convinced that the designation “conservative” is losing any substantive meaning, except for attachment to Republican operatives and donors and the label that particular media personalities choose to give themselves. 

In going back and reading Russell Kirk, as I have had the occasion recently of doing, I am reminded once again of how far gone modern so-called conservatism is. Real conservatives are trapped between a presidential candidate and his followers who hold many positions consistent with conservatism but who, when asked to defend them blindly repeat that the want to "Make America Great Again," and establishment Republicans who hold many positions at complete odds with conservatism.

And, worse, both factions have abandoned the long tradition of social conservatism. On Trump's end you get an immigration plan that would only let in people who support the agenda of radical gay rights groups (maybe that's the reason he opposes letting so many Syrian Christians into the country):

Recently he discussed how he would make Muslims entering the United States undergo “extreme vetting,” which would include making sure they had favorable attitudes toward gays and affirmed full gender equality. I’ve no idea why this test is something associated with the Right. It looks like something that came from editorial board of the New York Times or from some other publication that is now attacking Mr. Trump as a fascist.

On the other side you have the New Conservative Establishment, who were waving the white flag on marriage even before the ink on Obergefell had dried:

Popular “conservative” journalists Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz are high on gay marriage, which they argue promotes family values. National Review‘s rising star Jillian Kay Melchior wishes to see the United States become more fully engaged in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin, lest transgendered Ukrainians come under reactionary Russian sway. Other conservative journalists have berated the Russian president for not allowing gay pride parades in Russian cities.

As Kirk pointed out, conservatives in any time are almost necessarily relegated to the status of a Remnant, and we probably need to embrace that role, which means keeping our powder dry in elections like this one.

Ann Coulter Finds Out that You Can't Trust Trump

There is some kind of poetic justice in Ann Coulter having to admit you can't trust Trump on the very day of the release of her book In Trump We Trust. 

The invasion of the body-snatchers thing that has been going on with many so-called conservatives infected Coulter fairly early on. Why? Almost exclusively because of the immigration issue. He was the only one addressing it, she thought. 

Okay so far. I get that. I don't agree with the immigration panic, but I can understand why Coulter thought that. Trump is right on the immigration issue: I can understand why someone would think that. But where, precisely, did she get the idea that you could trust Trump?

I'm sorry, but that doesn't make any sense at all.

Trump is exactly the kind of candidate that you can never trust: One who has no moral or political center. One whose attitudes are determined by what will either get him attention or help him win. That's what demagogues do.

And that's all they are: attitudes. They are not positions. Positions are come to by a process of application of some underlying principle or philosophy. Trump is incapable of even having a principle. 

Attitudes change with the political wind. So now he's calculated that this new position, now different from Coulter's, will help him win. That is literally the only factor in his decision to make the change.

Coulter is no fool. But she now looks foolish. Why? Because she should have known better. Now let's just wait for the evangelicals who have backed Trump to get their comeuppance. He'll turn on them too in time.

As someone who does not suffer fools gladly, I wonder what Coulter thinks about herself.

My comments in the Washington Post today on the Paul/Gray KY Senate Race

Lexington, KY Mayor Jim Gray

I was quoted in the Washington Post today about the Rand Paul/Jim Gray Senate race. The story centers on the fact that Gray is a gay candidate, one of a record number of gay candidates running for state and local offices.

The narrative is basically that the number of gay candidates running for office is an indication of greater acceptance of gays in our society. That's true as far as it goes, but my point was that Gray is not a "gay candidate" in the sense that he runs on the issue:

“He’s never run as a gay candidate,” said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation of Kentucky, a socially conservative group. “It’s not something he’s ever worn on his sleeve … For that reason, he’s not identified with gay issues.”

I also pointed out to the reporter that what social conservatives care about is where the candidate stands on the issues, not what their sexual preference is. That being said, I also pointed out that wearing the gay label on your sleeve probably wouldn't help a statewide candidate in Kentucky, largely because they would take that as an indication of where they stood on the issues.

Read more here.

#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.

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.

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.

#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.