The #NeverTrump Ship of Fools

It’s been five years, at the beginning of the 2012 killing season, in early 2011, that all my colleagues were either shown the door, or disinvited to hang around, all because RedState.com had decided to drop its classic conservative rock format and go to bubble-gum music. In hindsight this seems to have been based on marketing dollars rather than politics. Biznez. I joined RS in 2009 because it was a friendly format for intellectual persuasion and commentary, but by mid-2011 it had opted to pursue a groupie fellowship, not unlike the way the Left steered it’s mind-numbed robots in the preceding  generation, only using the newer, and more narcotic  technologies of the internet such as Facebook and Twitter, which even the casual observer could see had captured the Me-Me-Me Generation. I’m not sure where RedState fits on the historical time-line of this wave, a pioneer or member of the herd, that book and mini-series not yet written, but to the over-50 crowd it seemed as if RS’s parent company had purchased the Beatles’ Apple label and then begun recording Justin Bieber tunes on it. I doubt that improving readers’ minds ever came up in conversation.

And in terms of site-stats, RedState did quite well without us, since no site-meter can measure the severe drop in music IQ by dumping Leonard Cohen for Bobby Sherman. Simply by watching, and knowing where to look, we’ve learned that gaining the millennial market has come down to little more than a numbers chase for site-hits and Twitter and Facebook likes. It’s apparently better to get a thousand visits lasting less than a minute than a dozens readers for more than twenty, insuring RedState’s writing ability could keep up with the decline. I don’t think injecting a little love for America and freedom, or empathy for those denied it, or generally improving any reader’s IQ about conservatism was ever a part of their syllabus.

What we didn’t know in 2006 that we know now is that a full-blown marketed generational shift is going on inside this wing of conservatism, for what appears to be, as my friend, Lady Penguin has just laid out at Unified Patriots, a linking of this “nimnul-chase” (Mork from Ork) to a much larger globalist plan. I recently saw a Tweet that stated that “Christian conservatives” behind #NeverTrump are being manipulated by a very un-Christian globalist agenda that borders on fascism. Facts don’t lie, for there do seem to be Wall Street fingerprints on every element of this #NeverTrump movement which I’ll expand at a later date. It does seem that global corporatists have purchased shovels for the #NeverTrump wing of conservatism, as Nikita Khrushchev once alluded, to bury the ordinary citizens who persist in denying them the authority to show us the better way, and choose our leaders for us.

Yes, I know, just like the Left.

Why Adultery (per Radar O’Reilly) Matters

I’m seven months older than Donald Trump and a week older then Herman Cain. I’ve met both and we have similar education, family, church, even private sector business backgrounds. So, I’m old by modern definitions. In fact, all the people closely associated with me here share having been around the track a few times. And, as that Olympics commercial goes, we all turned pro at something other than politics.  Several professions are represented here; law, corporate business, small business, science, medicine, military, yep, even West Point. (We even have a couple of skill sets involving rolled-up newspapers we can’t speak about out loud.) Only none of us are on anyone’s payroll. Our opinions, analyses and observations are not for hire. So, we are also political mendicants. Obviously then, neither are we overly ambitious as millennials seem to be, such as wishing George Will may someday invite us to one of his Hawaiian-theme pool parties or Michelle Fields to her next book signing at the grand opening of the new Food Lion in Spartanburg, S.C. And most certainly, none of us have offered to hire ourselves out to Hillary for the greater good of conservatism and the Republican Party.

And politics is not our first language. This also we consider an asset, since true conservatism is about life and liberty and not the elegance of George Will’s table, nor the crease in Obama’s trousers

Maturity and experience;  it once was considered a valuable thing. And it plays into the tale of the GOP’s demise since 2006, for these days there are fewer and fewer of us to speak in this venue, now turned into a playground patrolled by free-range sonnenkinder. It’s growing into a vast kindergarten wasteland where, by experience, mature adults are trained to step lightly, with pewk and poopy diapers lying strewn about.

In the final analysis, then, it’s the absence of this money-for-glory condition, which once defined conservatism when it resided at 150 East 35th Street in New York, that has defined the rise of an “ambition” class of conservatism now orbiting around the DC-establishment.

In fact, knowing these simple distinctions, the hierarchy of conservative values, and that which ranks first in conservatism is not having your own Wikipedia page, you can understand the gap that seems to have crept between the political class and the “ordinary class”, who, if my math is correct, are the only ones today who still seem to want to sink, scuttle completely, this dreadnought Obama and his band of socio-fascist globalists have wrought on America.

We are the promise-keepers who know the stakes.

For Milo and Ben Shapiro millennials, who I consider, among others, save-worthy.

Alt-Right conservatism is more orthodox Bill Buckley than you’ll find at NRO these days, only there are precious few in your generation who can define why. As Mark Twain once remarked, by grabbing the bull by the horns a man comes away with twice the information as one who merely read about it in a book, almost no one in that generation has actually grabbed that bull, and until they do they will only be half a conservative, what Twain mockingly called “professional Christians” in 1900. And without that higher knowledge, some day when a day of reckoning should arise, as it always does, they may opt for their appetites and vanities, and despite their well-paying popularity today, may be just as forgotten as the Rev John Camm, President of William and Mary who mistakenly stood for the King in 1776. That day still lies ahead.

Rule: If your conservatism is your least valuable possession, it is the first you will jettison when required to dump excess baggage. Just ask any 1950s Manhattan Episcopalian when asked to make room for liberalism. God was the first to go.

I know, I seem to drone on about adultery having just written a preface to this theme on generational self-worship only a couple of weeks ago. But how we got from the 1960s to this point, in 2-3 generations, is instructive. It began with My Generation, the Baby Boomers, who first declared ourselves the best and brightest, and then, when we came to our great crossroads, far too many of our brightest took the other fork for reasons never clearly explored. I bear a responsibility…and a penance to perform.

Today, many of our children (Gen-X) and grandchildren (Millennials) have developed into some really talented “conservatives” who, while ages ahead of the Left, still haven’t really grasped the 4th of July’s deeper significance. I’ve told the story many times of the room full of Soviet professors in Ukraine in 1991 who cried when they heard (me read) Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident” lines for the first time. I don’t think any of this newer generation have had their knees go wobbly in witnessing such a thing, or would recognize such an event for its true meaning. About this yearning for freedom because of its absence, their souls seem to be a blank slate.

And there’s the rub.

Millennials and many Gen X’ers see conservatism’s principles as an abstraction, a set of factoids that stand opposite another set of factoids held by people they haven’t liked since 10th grade, so want to be separate intellectually, not unlike the “Boomer liberals” of the 1960s I was intimate with. Millennial conservatism consists of little more than fine snark aimed at their opposites, for which they can count coup. Raised to expect recognition and applause, thanks to left-designed public school education, me-me-me modern conservatives want to receive the appropriate celebrity, financial recompense and whatever sort of scalps Twitter attaboys are counted, as a way to measure how much smarter they are than those they disdain. This is still tenderfoot, middle school competition, carried into one’s thirtieth year.

It’s true, not one in a hundred liberals can match a conservative intellectually or factually. But what they both agree on, culturally, are those other 80%, the “ordinaries” only conservatives are supposed to be defending them, (i.e., speaking up for, you know, as Jefferson once did when he wrote those lines of the Declaration that was able to make grown academicians cry).

As long as that remains their nourishment, understanding and protecting liberty isn’t.

I can’t know any person’s heart, let alone millennials, but none of that makes a person any better a conservative, unless he knows the nativism of Alt-Right conservatism completes the rest of the story about William F Buckley at 150 East 35th Street, who, alongside his intimate relationship with Aquinas, Aristotle, de Rochefoucauld, not to mention Soviet nuclear deterrence, would still rather have been governed by the first two hundred names in the Boston Telephone Directory than the faculty at Harvard. WFB didn’t gain that knowledge from a book, but rather grabbed it by the horns, requiring a personal journey, not a school field trip, as I described with my Soviet professors in 1991. They showed me the true meaning of Jefferson’s words, not the other way around. It’s sort of like being saved in the religion sense. The film falls from one’s eyes, the depth of awareness is instant, and all things appear differently thereafter.

As I’m sure Jonah Goldberg or Kevin Williamson would prefer not to turn their government over to those same first 200 names (they’ve said so, in fact)…the essence of conservatism is found in the transcendence of the American theology which can only be found in a personal grabbing of that bull as I did that night in the USSR, while reading from a Cato-copy of the Declaration of Independence. I can thank Bill Buckley, among others, for knowing what it was I witnessed when I witnessed it.

Moot court case in point: Had Milo, Ben Shapiro and Mike Cernovich been a part of the Millennials of 1860, would they have been willing, even eager, to rush out and risk their lives to rescue a peoples they had never seen? Half a million of over two million, died doing just that, many of whom were barely able to read. It was just not one of America’s periodic “bloodings” of the Tree of Liberty. The best of their generation, though not necessarily the brightest, they defined American exceptionalism, another key element of the American theology. Just asking.

Just know, the true value of America lies in Americans who will offer up their lives for the freedom of strangers more than their better-read betters who only read about it in a book.

(I have another purpose, beginning here, but not yet revealed, for Mssrs Yiannopoulos, Shapiro and Cernovich, as those three have certain abilities to put a real dent in political correctness across the country very quickly, without ever having to step out of character and giving up their true identity as Don Diego de la Vega (Zorro). I can even see a TV-min-series in it. It’s all here to consider. More later.)

If figuring evil out were rocket science, “ordinary people” would never have figured it out. It’s that they have figured it out that explains this distance the #NeverTrump crowd has put between themselves and the people, and sadly the core precepts of conservatism. The people are sometimes wrong, but if they are not allowed to be wrong, they are no longer free, and the American experiment is finished. If you #NeverTrumpsters believe you have a better way, you are not just not-conservatives, you are liars.

Teat-Fittery and the #NeverTrump Ship of Fools

The Ship of Fools is a 15th Century allegory that has continuing relevance in our modern world, for that seems to be where the disgruntled seem to take their ball and glove and go when they don’t get their way, turning over the battlefield to our enemies. It also seems to be the home of the snide, the condescending and the mocking.

As I mentioned earlier, teat-fittery seems to be a sine qua non (essential condition) of millennial self-admiration. But it is not exclusive to that generation. Bill Kristol and George Will have been on a teat fit tirade lasting months, revealing more about themselves than I think either wanted the public to know. A friend told me last week that Will is a narcissist, and I replied that so was Thomas Jefferson. I recall JFK’s remarks to a group of Nobel laureates in which he said he’d never imagined such a congregation of fine minds in a single room…”except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone”.

What separates Jefferson and Will is not narcissism but elitism. Jefferson cut and paste an old Bible into his own preferred version, the Jefferson Bible, as a personal guide (he never offered it for sale) inasmuch as he did not believe in the supernatural events of the New Testament. He was a “deist”, I think we call them, holding to no specific religion’s definition of God, probably balancing the moral teachings of Christ with his love of Greek philosophy. Jefferson had the pride, arrogance, even hubris of narcissism, yet because he was a deist, he saw that same possibilities in all men. George Will, a proud atheist, clearly cannot look upon “ordinary people” as anything other than less than himself, and that no man is endowed by his Creator with anything, for no such Creators exists. It’s just luck, and he hit the jackpot. It sucks to be the other guy. From that one simple thing, we can see fundamental conservativism on two different planes, as I said before, as an Eagle Scout and a First Class Scout; a Jefferson and a Will.

In conservative-speak, the theology of America requires seekers to obtain the knowledge, empathy, and gratitude to be a true conservative. As with all the Founders, Jefferson found great wisdom down at the public ale house, and believed all men could sire children to become just like himself if allowed to forge their own destinies, as happened somewhere in George Will’s line as well. Only George has forgotten those shoulders he stands on.

I’ll bet you thought #NeverTrump is a new idea. It was concocted out there on the Ship of Fools at least as early as 2011. Interesting, five years ago I had to say almost these same things about some of  the same people as today concerning Herman Cain.

In the 2011-2012 election cycle, Michelle Malkin tried to destroy Rick Perry, a man I still admire and would like to see serve some day. I never understood the nature of this decimation. On who’s behalf did this political assassination occur, I can’t say, except to say that it was so vitriolic as to assume Michelle was for hire. At the same time, over at RedState, I was shown the door because it was clear I would support Herman Cain, and could have been very persuasive among RedState’s adult readers. While RedState would support Rick Perry. As a guest writer there I simply disappeared and said nothing for eight months until Erick Erickson (age 36-37) wrote Herman Cain (age 66) off in this fashion:

Herman Cain is done.

In all honesty, I think if I did not like Herman as much as I do and did not feel some measure of gratitude for him allowing me to take his radio show, I would have objectively cut him off this list before now.

This was Erickson’s kiss-off to the man who had taken him under his wing, and actually launched his gig as a radio talk-show host. EE wrote this in such a condescending superiorist manner, the same haughty demeanor George Will likes to assume, I was infuriated. By any measure, experience, maturity, manhood, even spiritually, Erick Erickson couldn’t shine Herman Cain’s shoes. Or mine.

This sort of infantile hubris defines the general character of the Ship of Fools waiting out in the harbor.

What we know now that we didn’t know then is that had someone paid EE a million bucks to come up with a #NeverCain campaign in 2011, he likely would have obliged. He was likely always for hire. And his toads at RedState would have dutifully obliged with a choral “amen”.

So there is a 5-year precedent that undercuts the false-sanctimony of the entire #NeverTrump movement.

What we know now that we didn’t know in 201o, which gave us Herman Cain, was there were useful idiots out there, all young and ambitious, who had no compunction to destroy many a fine man and woman if the candidate weren’t their fine man and woman. This notion of killing off a full slate of conservatives every four years, hoping to find a new group four years later, hasn’t worked very well, has it? But it has enhanced the profit and profile of those from that period who now want to appear to have beards to stroke, and believe they can sell their “seniority” to the highest bidders, an act that everyone from Erick Erickson to Michelle Fields have tried to cash in on.

Donald Trump represents and end to that, hopefully forever, for which he is reviled from bottom feeders like Leon H Wolf  (affectionately known as Capt Kneepants in these circles) to Bill Kristol, Karl Rove and George Will riding higher on the surf.

That ship of fools has sailed…

That ship of fools has sailed.

…all because these new voters, citizens who had never involved themselves with politics before, and who, despite being lied to in 2010, 2012 and 2014, bloodied twice, with callouses and blisters, and much wiser, have hung around instead of packing it in. Herman Cain had a lot to do with bringing, and keeping them on board these several years, not so Donald Trump could find them, but so they could find Donald Trump.

Again, the ordinary voter is no longer ordinary.