Many of my fellow America First conservatives need to take a chill pill and calm the hell down. I get the frustration. I get the irritation. We’ve waited decades for justice. We’ve waited decades to use the power granted to us by the American people to reshape this country back into something like it was rather than the gross, formless blob of neo-commie failure it has become. But this Gramscian Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we’re not going to burn it down overnight, no matter how hard we fiddle. Start taking “Yes” for an answer, conservatives.
Let’s take some of the more common gripes, starting with the complaint that our Congress hasn’t passed anything. But, of course, Congress has passed several things. It passed the Laken Riley Act to keep Third World savages who are illegally here locked up. It just overturned the ridiculous California “no gas engines” law. So, the objection is not that the Republicans haven’t passed anything. It’s that the Republicans haven’t passed enough.
But there’s a structural fact that frustrated conservatives refuse to admit exists. This is why most of our actions must be taken via executive orders. Because of the Senate filibuster, we have to get 60 votes, but we have only 53 Senators. All the Democrats hang together, breaking the neck of our legislation.
What is so amazingly difficult to understand about this? Do people not know what the filibuster is? Do they not care? Look, I get the anger. I’ve been a conservative longer than many of you people have been alive. I was a conservative in the 80s, faithfully reading America’s only right-wing outlet, National Review, before it became the Teen Vogue of conservatism. All the stuff we are trying to do today is stuff that we’ve been dreaming about for decades. But we’ve been lied to, spat upon, disregarded, persecuted, and generally treated like crap not only by the Democrats but our own Republican Party for as long as I can remember. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – the Republican base is the abused spouse of American politics. We are naturally suspicious and looking for any reason to validate our gut instinct that we are about to get screwed over yet again.
Recommended
That’s why we act like we do, but let’s not pretend it’s always rational. The fact of the filibuster is not an excuse for inaction; it’s the reason for it. Gravity is not an excuse why you can’t jump 50 feet high. The filibuster is a structural reality that we have to work around – unless we make the major decision to get rid of it. If you want to do that, make that argument. But don’t whine because Congress is not doing something it literally cannot do.
Yes, I know a lot of this is just emotional catharsis. I know it makes some of us feel better to complain incessantly about the failures of our Republican Party, and it doesn’t help that the Republican Party has given us sufficient material to complain incessantly for days without repeating ourselves. But that doesn’t change reality.
We should celebrate the Big Beautiful Bill, which can pass because of arcane Senate rules that get around the filibuster. But no. Cue the handwringing. Yes, it spends too much. Yes, it fails to cut many things that richly deserve cutting. No, it doesn’t include a bunch of things we want. Yes, it includes many things we don’t want, like the SALT increase. But you know what? It’s a compromise bill. With only a four- or five-vote majority in the House, all those blue-state Republicans have outsized leverage. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to recognize reality. They’ve got the power, and they’re using it to do what they think is best for their district and their reelection chances. This is called politics. That’s how it works. The idea that every politician must be a disinterested, economically rational person who happens to agree with every policy choice we prefer is silly. We can’t create a majority out of a minority. It’s better to have this bill passed than not to pass it, so we should pass it through the Senate if those chuckleheads can get their egos in check and get it done.
And then there’s the court. Liberal court judges are breaking the rules to keep Trump from governing. What are we doing about it? We are going through the appellate system and getting them overturned. Almost all of them will be. Is it frustrating? Yes. Shouldn’t we just ignore the court? Not if we want to avoid an entirely different fight that we might not win. We’re going to win doing what we’re doing. We should keep doing that.
And here’s another gripe. What did we want from the investigations of some of the key scandals of the last decade? We wanted to know the truth about Epstein, for example. We got good people to look at the evidence from the inside. I don’t know Kash Patel (people who say he’s squared away), but I do know Dan Bongino and trust him implicitly. These guys had a lot of credibility with our movement. Well, they looked at the facts about Epstein, and they’ve determined that he did kill himself, but some of us apparently didn’t get the answer we wanted.
I was under the impression that we wanted the truth. The whole thing about Epstein was exceedingly sketchy. Obviously, the Deep State has no default to our trust. But, when a guy like Dan Bongino takes a look at the relevant materials and tells us that there was no murder – it’s not unreasonable that a guy like him might not want to spend the rest of his miserable existence in an 8’ x 10’ concrete box – it’s weird to see people disappointed. We were looking for the truth, correct? What if the truth is this perv killed himself, aided by the entirely routine incompetence of government employees who failed to do their job, just like millions of other government employees fail to do their job every single day?
So, now Dan Bongino is “compromised?” Now, he’s a tool of the Deep State? Dan Bongino? Come on. There are only three real options. You could believe that somehow, he allowed himself to be corrupted. That’s ridiculous. You could believe the Deep State fooled him, but he is no amateur. The guy was a federal law enforcement officer and presumably knows what to look for. The final option is that he examined the relevant evidence and came to the conclusion that Epstein did kill himself. But the reaction of some people is disappointment, as if they wanted that perverted degenerate to have been killed within the web of some giant conspiracy. Of course, being familiar with and distinctly unimpressed by the kind of unaccomplished people who tend to control institutions, I tend not to believe in conspiracies because the alleged conspirators aren’t smart enough to pull them off.
In any case, it’s baffling that we would send one of our most trusted surrogates to wade into the swamp to find the truth and then get mad at him when the truth isn’t what we thought it was. I thought we wanted the truth, but some people want validation of what they already decided is true. Now, I think everything should be released, including any video of that creep offing himself. We also need to see the non-perverted videos the FBI seized, as well as a full and complete list of his grody associates. But Dan Bongino has earned the benefit of the doubt through years of loyal service to the movement. It’s pretty crappy to start making accusations about him because the answers he has found are not the answers some people want.
Finally, there are complaints about prosecutions. I was a lawyer for 30 years. This stuff takes time. You want to do it once, and you want to do it right. Many people require accountability. In reality, we’re not going to be able to hold all of them to account. We don’t have the resources or the bandwidth; that’s another unpleasant reality we must accept. But for those we are going to hold to account, it takes time.
Trump’s been president for about four months. He’s got four years. I think Donald Trump has earned our trust over the last decade. I think we can give him the benefit of the doubt that what needs to get done is going to get done, even if it’s not right away.
That’s the bottom line. Do we trust Trump and our movement? Are we ready to accept that we’re not going to get everything we necessarily want? Are we prepared for answers that don’t fit our preconceived notions?
Johnny Rotten Lydon observed that anger is an energy, but we can’t only run on anger. We must be ruthless. We must be cold. And for heaven’s sake, we must calm down.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Pre-order Kurt Schlichter and Irina Moises’s action-packed new noir fantasy novel, Lost Angeles: Silver Bullets On The Sunset Strip! Also, check out Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels.
Join the fight for America by enlisting in Townhall VIP right now. You get access to a bunch of great stuff, not the least of which is my extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness videos every Friday, and my Unredacted podcast every Monday! Plus, some stuff from Larry O’Connor – and more!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member