(A word to the wise—verb. sap. to the saps—: turn speakers and headphones down.)
Civility and charity are virtues. Truth is an indispensable virtue. I am not giving up the latter for Lent, even for the sake of the former. I have ripped into the populist Euro-style ‘Right’—with a whole damned book
—; it’s the Left’s turn now.
And, yes, I wrote, though I did not publish, this before the strikes on the Iranian regime.
And I wrote, though I did not publish, this before Senator Sanders did precisely what I predicted he’d do in my post, ‘Congress and the War Power: Thoughts on a Constitutional Problem’.
I am, and shall ever remain, what is properly called a ‘conservative’ in American (and British, and Commonwealth) English: a Classical Liberal, devoted to free men, free minds, and free markets. And who with that believes, from principle and from experience, in the concept of ‘Chesterton’s Fence’, and in the organic growth of ordered liberty under law (the Common Law is precisely that sort of evolution in immemorial action)—and not at all in reinventing the world from ideology bombinating in a vacuum; one who gives due deference to the true and the tried, and to tradition and textualism.
What I seek to conserve, to preserve, are the Classical Liberal traditions of the Founding, and of the Founders.
At the moment, many of you, on the Left, share with me a common foe in that profoundly un-American, unconservative, aspiring authoritarian, that big-city-big-government-tiny-handed-pay-to-play-Tammany-corporatist damn-Yankee vulgarian and would-be Cæsar, Donald Trump. (Some Cæsar: a fatter, more cowardly, and more effeminate Vitellius married to a cut-rate Milonia Cæsonia, a trashier Theodora.)
But make no mistake. I oppose Donald Trump out of principle: because he is profoundly un- and anti-conservative, a threat to Liberty, inimical to the Founders’ principles and to the Constitution. You … oppose him out of interest: because he is doing a better job at shredding the Constitution and assaulting Liberty than you managed to do and wish to do in your way for your unprincipled ends … and is using the tools you fashioned for that purpose.
For make no mistake: you bear a crushing weight of responsibility for this. You invented, designed, forged, and peddled the tools he is using—and using more effectively than ever you managed—; created and distributed them in your hubristic assumption that the bureaucracy, the Courts, the Congress, and the Executive should always be in your control. And you manufactured the climate, the outrage, and the resentments which have twice caused too many even once-reasonable people to turn to Trump’s brand of corrupt statism in preference to yours. It began when mid-century ‘good-government’, ‘goo-goo’, liberals abdicated their responsibility to turf the loons and the extremists and the illiberal out of their ranks even in the hour in which, by contrast, Bill Buckley was reading the Birchers and the old Bundists and the Kluxers out of the conservative movement.
You chose to embrace the Euro-folly of ‘no enemies on the Left’: and if you wish to see the results, look about you.
I’d suggest you take responsibility for this, but we all know you shan’t and cannot bear to do: you are allergic to responsibility and to owning your mistakes.
My distant cousin Robert Conquest was pilloried by Leftist Westerners when he published The Great Terror in 1968, excoriating the Soviet Union and its tyrants and tyrannies: which terrors and Terror the Left excused or denied.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the brief opening of its archives before tyranny once more descended upon that unhappy land, Bob, vindicated, reissued the book: for which Sir Kingsley Amis, whose son Martin married a distant cousin of mine, suggested the new subtitle, I Told You So, You F—ing Fools. You’d do well today just thus to hear my words, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them—but you likely shan’t do.
We have—for now—an end in common. But make no mistake. The un-American, Continental-European, imported style of so-called ‘Rightism’—Rexist, statist, corporatist, tariff-drunk, wholly unconservative, blood-and-soil ethnonationalist—which has parasitized American redneck populism and the Elephant Party, has a long bill to pay and much to answer for. But … So. Do. Y’all. The American Left and Leftism are together the sine quâ non which enabled the rise of Trump and his electoral success. Some of you wanted him to be the Elephant nominee against the repellent Mrs Clinton in hopes that he’d be the Todd Akin of that election, realizing though not admitting that that cackling virago, America’s First Wife, could not win on her own. And you found too late that the country should rather have elected a road-kill possum than that woman. His first term was so noxious, so noisome, that the country actually replaced him with Joe Biden. Joe. BIDEN. You did not learn from that: having an empty suit in the White House utterly controlled by your own extremist loons, you thought you could run Hillary 2.0—‘Now with Added Leftism!’—against a wounded and surely unelectable Trump. Your judgement is not precisely reflecting much glory on you, is it.
You are wasting your time, and hampering the nation in excising the cancer on the un-American ‘Right’, by your adherence to policies, manners, and mores as repugnant to the electorate as are Trump’s vile excesses; and, unable or unwilling to admit that the country is not buying what you are determined to sell them at gunpoint and at extortionate prices, you are refusing to examine your priors and are instead trying to impose your will on the voters by insulting them at every turn. Some deserve that; most do not. And that is no way to win an election in any case. You are complaining, with some justice, that Trump and the Trumpshirts are peddling rancid food poisoned with Putinist Novichok, violating all FDA regulations, and skimming cash off the top … and your answer is to berate people for not paying through the nose for your artisanal, organic, rotted fish guts. For once in his miserable life, that orange son of a bitch is not going to be the first to go bankrupt—even morally.
You have spent six decades and more being bobby-soxers for the USSR, Communist China, Castro, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian theocracy, hippies, and the elimination of all borders, in denigrating the United States, and in using the Constitution to wipe your asses. And, having taken Fanon
for canon, and fetishizing murderous Islamists and every terrorist to come down the pike, you are far too many of you insatiate, insatiable, malignant Jew-haters. I told you so…
The spectacle of the Left’s suddenly embracing limited government once they were no longer in control of the metastasized state they sought, of rallying against Russia after years of fawning upon the Soviets, of seeking remedies against Federal overreach by embracing Federalism and States’ Rights, of your clutching your pearls over sexual immorality you defended in Bill Clinton and every Kennedy known to man, of y’all’s overnight conversion to being advocates of self-isolation, border-control, masking, and vaccination after having founded the gloopy, goofy New-Age-granola anti-vaxxer movement (I remember in the first days of Covid—February, 2020, Chinatown, San Francisco—Nancy Pelosi’s denouncing, surrounded by Asian American constituents, quarantines as racist and xenophobic, reversing herself only when she found Trump opposing containment measures from opposing premisses: you may have forgot that; I do not), of embracing free trade and no tariffs after decades of Big Labor protectionism, of turning to Taipei and against Beijing after years of romantic Maoism and Thomas Friedman sycophancy, of impotent fury that African and Latino and blue-collar Americans are daring to vote their perceived interests rather than tribally, of preaching Christian doctrines about the poor and those in adversity after generations of sneering godlessness, of posing as constitutionalists after so long railing against the Constitution, of suddenly supporting the Second Amendment, and of having in common with the illiberal soi-disant ‘Right’ only unassuageable hatred of Jews and of the State of Israel, is not merely unconvincing. Or risible. Or useless. Or flagrantly hypocritical. It is repulsive. It is beneath contempt. As. Are. You.
You called Barry Goldwater, Dick Nixon (and even he wasn’t: he was just a crook), Gerry Ford, Ronald Reagan, 41, Bob Dole, 43, John McCain, and Mitt Romney ‘fascists’; and when a real one, or as near as makes no matter, came along, some of you boomed him so as to be Clever For Hillary, the Elephants dismissed your tired insincere hysteria, and the country ignored your cries of ‘Wolf!’. Nice job breaking it, you heroes in your own echoingly vacant minds. I warned you, I told you so…
And now? Now, in the grip of your lunatic fringe, you are supporting actual Neo-Nazis—if self-described at various points as ‘progressive’ and ‘a Communist’, as if that were any better—actual Neo-Nazis with Totenkopf tattoos for the Senate, Islamists for Congress and the New York City mayoralty, and every Left-rather-than-Trumpish-Right piker on the internet. And are defending that choice vociferously. I told you…
Not to go all Gordon-Brown-to-Tony-Blair, here, but there is nothing now you can say to the nation which we can believe. Not until you admit, confess, your sins, seek absolution, do penance, try for some amendment of life, and forcibly extrude the Left and the Jew-haters from the Jackass Party.
I have remained a (Conservative, Blue Dog, Southern) Democrat all my life despite the bats in the belfry and the skunks in the kitchen; but it is past time to clean house.
I cannot do that unaided for the party as a whole. But I can do so in my private life. I have already done this with those, even former friends, who have succumbed to Trumpism. (And every other month need to do more: and so I shall.) Cousin Winston was willing to work even with Stalin towards a specific goal of destroying a common enemy, but he had no illusions about who it was with whom he—with a long spoon—was supping. I share a common foe with y’all for now, transactionally and for the duration and no longer; but my principles are and shall ever be unchanged.
I am therefore culling the herd. I do not mean to begin with good friends and good people who are redeemable. But the rest of you?
Midwestern matrons in muumuus, murmuring of 1910s and 1920s ‘municipal socialism’, smugly smirking.
Credentialed but not learnèd Alinskyites who think that loudly, incessantly, proclaimed atheism plus membership in a schoolteachers’ union makes them public intellectuals.
Scalawag Southern-fried soixante-huitards and Woodstock widows.
Crystal-chakra-gloopy-loopy practitioners of toxic empathy, mourning Khamenei and Co. and dreaming of a Judenrein planet.
Preachy ‘Progressive’ Christians who list the Evangelists as Matthew, Marx, Luke, and John and whose objects of charity are color-coded for their convenience.
‘Woke’ wankers, the ‘anti-racist’ and ‘anti-colonialist’, who pardon, palliate, and protect, who celebrate, coddle, and demand coexistence with, every murderous, statue-wrecking, FGM-demanding savage and barbarian alive, on the grounds that such is their tradition and we mustn’t judge … but who denounce Middle America as ‘bitter clingers’, trad and orthodox Christians as ‘fundamentalists’, Jews simply for daring to exist, and the less than perfectly pallid as being ‘primitive’ if they dare hew to non-trendy religion (the sheer volume of undisguised racism directed towards GAFCON and the Southern Cone is matched only by Trump’s infamous depiction of the Obamas as apes).
Those, incapable of winning arguments against even the most superficial and specious of Trumpshirts, who celebrate their assassinations and assert that a difference in political opinion is a capital offence to be … executed … by private and self-selected murderers.
Californians who openly rejoice in the deaths of children or in their being orphaned so long as they are not Californians and their parents are of another party…
The whole scum and rabble of Lefty social media shall I cull from my circle. You contribute nothing to the struggle but ‘own goals’ … and protecting Trump from consequences: when you—rarely—oppose him effectively, I shall welcome that, but I have long since ceased to be interested in your memes, your recycled opinions, your received ideas, your shibboleths, your follies, your baseness, your lack of character, your ineffectiveness, your dead-eyed ‘Squad’, your soulless Jew-haters, your handing Trump a new rhetorical defense and advantage with every word you utter and every stupidity you embrace. The first cull shall I trust suffice; if not, I shall in the end reluctantly extend it even to very dear friends and relations. I told you so, you…
There is no excuse for the Trumpian domestic agenda or nine parts in ten of the Trumpian foreign policy agenda—or for supporting that same. None. There is equally no excuse for your having provoked it and inspired it. And you did. It is from you they learnt lawfare. It is from you they learnt lawlessness, and the cheap tactic of calling every duly convicted extremist, domestic terrorist, and insurrectionist a ‘political prisoner’: you, the idolators of Angela Davis and the Black Panthers and the SLA and the Chesimard woman; you, the supporters of Hamas and the mullahs. It is you, babbling of ‘black spaces’ and ‘women’s spaces’ and ‘queer spaces’, who shattered the bulwarks of Fair Housing and Civil Rights Acts and the decisions affirming these from Brown v. Board of Education to Piggy Park to Bostock, you asserting that public accommodation rights and race-blindness and equal protection somehow can be used to exclude non-minorities and that the Kantian universals of equality and civil rights are not universal but flow in but one direction.
It is thus you who gave cover to those who seek to reverse generations of civil rights law, tarring it with the brush of your hypocrisy, making it all look a mere scam. It is you who, berating the nation over Title IX, Me Too, Yes-All-Men, ‘reparative justice’ feminism, and ‘safe spaces’, then insisted that any common rapist who suddenly declared himself a woman must be housed with those he likes to rape and must be granted privileges as reparations for the historic disregard of women’s rights, and that any failed male athlete must be allowed to call himself female and benefit from Title IX accommodations in sport no matter that this expressly reverses the purpose of women’s equal participation: as if chromosomes were as mutable by declaration as the Dolezal grifter thought race and color to be. It is thus you who drag your own principles and achievements, such as they are, into disrepute. It is you who declaimed upon due process and civility and bail reform (and mainstreaming the mad and being gentle with the murderous) … who now shriek for the summary imprisonment of or the murder or sectioning of your political opponents, and attack even the center in the language of war: and you are shocked that this is contagious? It is you who created an ungovernable bureaucracy unanswerable to Congress or the people, an imperial presidency, a gelded Congress, a diminished and circumscribed judicial power, and a concentration of unitary Federal power and unitary Executive authority: because you thought you alone should always control it, that no one else should ever play your unconstitutional and un-American game better than did you, that no one should ever turn these things to ends contrary to your own. I told you…
You have taken my party—the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Truman, all of whom you have excised from its memory—and made it first a center-Left and now an openly Leftist one: thereby at once creating the atmosphere of existential threat which created Trump and handing him victory. There is no excuse for the Trumpian domestic agenda or nine parts in ten of the Trumpian foreign policy agenda—or for supporting that same. None. If you can call it an ‘agenda’, and not merely a blind, instinctive function of greed, spite, and pathological egotism, it is you who enabled it. Almost the only thing he’s got right is the one thing you hate most: and you hate it, not because ‘Orange Man Bad’, but because you fear it benefits the State of Israel as well as US interests: and if you hate the United States—and you do—, you loathe Israel the more by several orders of magnitude. Not because of the lies—your lies—about ‘settler colonialism’ or ‘genocide’ on the part of an Israel wholly innocent of those charges, but because you hate Jews. I have no use for the statement that ‘antisemitism is the socialism of fools’: socialism is the socialism of fools. To pretend otherwise is to elide the fact that antisemitism has been baked into socialism from the start: another unanswerable indictment of the Left and its unremedied and unredeemed, its irredeemable and irremediable, inherent, immemorial Jew-hatred.
Andrew Jackson was Old Hickory. Reagan was Teflon. Wellington was the Iron Duke; Margaret Thatcher, like Golda Meir before her, was the Iron Lady. Trump is not even Irn Bru: he’s a semi-sentient can of Fanta, or Orange Crush. Granted. Reince Priebus was a spineless coward in waiving Trump into the Elephant primaries despite that man’s refusal to pledge he’d not mount a third-party spoiler’s challenge if he lost fair and square (and of course he’d have done, even had he sworn not to: look at January 6); the Elephants in the Senate who failed to impeach him the first time ’round for fear of their own constituents were abject cowards. Granted. But eight years of Mr Obama and the prospect of his being succeeded by his former Secretary of State, the ghastly Mrs Clinton, created in them all a valid sense of existential dread, not for their party but rather for the nation.
‘Valid’? Absolutely. Because you made it so: you. Spineless in Syria; supine before the ayatollahs … and this prior to the Jew-haters’ achieving effective veto-control over the Jackass Party. The ‘reset’. The ‘New Beginning’. ‘New START’. The meaningless ‘red line’ in Syria. Putin’s invasion of Crimea and crickets from Washington. Open disdain for Israel. Open contempt for the Forces. A series of betrayals of our allies and interests, punctuated by spasms of drone strikes. Weakness combined with petulant lashings-out; truckling up and kicking downwards. That is the legacy you imposed on the Obama / Mrs Clinton foreign policy years; and those chickens have returned to roost … accompanied by vultures.
You have no moral high ground, and, unforgivably, you are dragging my party to your level. Since as long ago as the cases of Walter Polovchak, whom you wanted sent back to the USSR, and Elián González, whom Janet Reno and her INS seized in defiance of a stay issued three days prior by the Eleventh Circuit, you have forfeited the right to condemn ICE. Having gleefully applauded the assassinations of Young Master Kirk—a political grifter I never had any use for, but who at least forcefully denounced Jew-hatred—and of Brian Thompson (the accused in whose murder, Luigi Mangione, you fetishize), you cannot convincingly decry political violence—so long your patent stock-in-trade—or oppose Markwayne Mudsill’s nomination. Beholden to your … young Turks … and your objectively Hamasnik, Hezbollah-supporting, pro-Islamist ‘progressives’, you endorse Rottenführer Platner, with his Totenkopf and his podcast appearances with neo-Nazi conspiracists, to take on Senator Collins up in Maine; you rally for Mamdani and his vicious wife; you jam out to Cenk; you gather in mobs to shout, ‘Great is Piker of the Ephesians’ … and you piss away any claim to be taken seriously as opponents of racism, bigotry, or fascism, real or imagined. You are estopped. You have reduced yourself to the moral level of, you are morally indistinguishable from, the crazed Owens creature, the crabbed and contemptible Carlson, and that foul and openly fascist fraud Fuentes.
Your talking points and memes and hive mind—you are none of you bright enough to have evolved what you say and post, out of your own interior consciousness—come, laundered through the Singham networks, from those who, whether you know it or not, are your paymasters in Beijing, just as those of the un-American ‘Right’ come from the Kremlin (the removal of the Iranian tyrants may put a kink in both those pipelines, by the way): you and the Trumpshirts are alike catspaws in a proxy war against our common country. No wonder you believe decent human beings—in this context, anyone who supports Israel—to be as venal and as mercenary as yourselves. We, however, are on a different playing field: it’s you and the Cro-MAGAs who are the ones playing a fixed game, a split-squad scrimmage if you but knew, on astroturfed ground. As Shoeless Joe admitted of the fixed, thrown Series, It’s so, kid. And you have not merely barred yourselves forever from the Hall by this: you and your mirror images in the sewers of the alt-Right have lost every and any right to condemn one another, let alone to speak against the normal and decent of us: who regard all y’all equally with burning contempt and utter revulsion.
You have rendered yourselves despicable.
You spent decades dismantling the checks and balances installed by the Founders, whom you openly despise, all the while thinking you should not, that nothing ever should, awake the revulsion and dissent of your fellow citizens: whom you also despise. You normalized playing fast and loose with the Constitution and tore down, as an impediment to your dreams of a dystopian utopia, the barricades of a limited government. And now you bleat of guardrails? I warned you, I told you so…
You utter f—ing fools.
Set your own Goddamned house in order. You made this mess.
❦
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 