Twenty years ago, people would’ve thought you were crazy if you told them that Karl Rove would be welcomed onto the pages of the regime media to announce that his powerful principles require him to vote for a Democrat who believes you should carve up little boys and girls to conform to the trendy gender delusions of their Munchausen mommies. But in 2026, when he did that, nobody was surprised. Nobody was shocked. After all, betrayal is the old Republican establishment’s brand.
Rove and his ilk claim that taking sides against us is mandated by their principles. What principles? We understand what the principles of our alleged betters in the conservative (sic) movement really are. They’re not a set of rigid standards that must be adhered to at all costs and hazards; they’re a joke, a ploy to manipulate the rubes, moral Calvinball for people who demand our respect and obedience yet hold us in utter contempt.
But of course, Karl Rove isn’t alone. The doddering has-been is just emblematic of a particularly pernicious political type that those of us who actually believe in something beyond our own prosperity, prestige, and power have been trying to exile from the GOP for decades. All this stuff about the gentlemen of the Republican Party, the compassionate conservatives, the sensible adults in the room, has been revealed to be a lie, but it was always a lie. It was always a scam. When they speak of principles, they’re talking about arbitrary and amorphous guidelines that they impose from on high to control you. But those principles never apply to them. Why, the idea that they should be bound by any guardrails is profoundly insulting to them. They are beyond such common limitations. You, however, are absolutely bound to them, like a serf to his master’s fields.
And here’s the not-so-surprising part. Those principles they always talk about? Somehow, those principles always end up reinforcing the power of the failed GOP establishment at the expense of the GOP base. And those principles always require that we give up our interests, our rights, and our prosperity. Pretty convenient, huh? Tell me one establishment GOP principle that helps us in the base at the expense of those at the peak of the pyramid, and I’ll show you a unicorn.
There’s no such thing as a unicorn.
Why are they taking this opportunity to ostentatiously demonstrate to the people who hate them that they are dissociating themselves from us at the same time the Republican Party faces a very tough midterm? After all, all that’s on the line are the myriad conservative achievements of the Trump administration. It’s no biggie. And what was the catastrophic outrage of outrages that forced them, almost against their will, to take sides against their own party in this time of crisis? Well, an obscure Republican candidate for an obscure Texas political office sent an inartful tweet referencing the anxiety of many Americans about the demographic change in the country that they were never consulted about. That earth-shaking political tsunami of a tweet, according to their principles, requires them to help the Democrats destroy everything we’ve done to save this country. You know, because of Muh Principles.
Uh, no. This was just a convenient excuse for them to do what they wanted to do anyway, which is to slap back at the people who dared not to genuflect to them anymore. Do you think Karl Rove would be doing this if anyone at the White House took his calls? Their phony outrage is a convenient excuse. The issue isn’t whether it was a nice tweet or not; the issue is that they didn’t have to trash their own party, but they chose to do it anyway. You can choose what you’re outraged about. And moreover, this is an opportunity for them to tell you you’re not allowed to talk about the issue of demographic change. They think they should define what is acceptable discourse. One of the big reasons they hate Trump is that Trump started talking about immigration, and they didn’t like that. They had decreed you’re not allowed to talk about it, and then this guy did. How dare he! But Trump spoke for us when no one else in the GOP would. They didn’t want our input because our input wasn’t going to be what they wanted. Guys like Karl Rove and his boss, George Religion of Peace Bush, decided that what America needed to do was change, and what they didn’t need to do was ask us about it. They just did it without asking, just like they sent our jobs overseas, because they knew better. Because they were smarter. More moral. Our betters.
The Tea Party and Donald Trump were largely a reaction to these guys, and we’ve been fighting and largely winning that war ever since. We were once an insurgency; now we are in power. There are far fewer of these throwbacks than there used to be. But the fight continues. They are still out there, popping their little weasel heads up out of their holes to bitterly nip at our ankles.
Oh, it’s not just Karl Rove. Senator John Cornyn (“R”-Nowhere) is part of this imbroglio too. He is big mad that Texas voters rejected him. He must be pretty humiliated right now, which is good, because he deserves it. He wouldn’t be in this situation if he didn’t have such profound contempt for his own voters. For five years of his Senate terms, he would be back in Washington, DC, clinking glasses at the Palm and helping Democrats with things like gun control and amnesty. And in the sixth year, he would come back to Texas, throw on a cowboy hat for the benefit of the yokels, and pretend he was a conservative interested in conserving something other than his own sinecure. But Ken Paxton, whom the allies of Cornyn, Rove, and Bush tried to frame in a bogus impeachment, ran on a platform of actually doing what the people of Texas wanted. And the Texas GOP drop-kicked Cornyn through the goalposts of failure.
It’s not surprising that the tofu crew is now actively pushing Democrats. They haven’t come right out and endorsed that blasphemous communist imp, James Talarico, but everyone knows they want Pete Buttigieg’s Mini-Me to win. We must be punished for our uppity defiance. The old establishment doesn’t care about the Republicans or this country. It cares about itself. The last few weeks have proven that so conclusively that a Lindsay Clancy juror would vote guilty.
These guys are exactly who we thought they were. Hell, they’re actually worse. At least the snobs and stiffs of a century ago had some sort of sense of noblesse oblige. George H.W. Bush may have been so remote from real people that he didn’t understand a supermarket scanner, but at 19 years old, he jumped in a plane in the Pacific to fight for his country. You don’t see that anymore among our GOP ruling class. His loser son’s Air National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam required us to come to his defense when Dan Rather presented that infamous fake memo. We had his back even when he wouldn’t defend himself because he was too much of a gentleman to respond to them calling him Chimpy McBu$hitlerburton. And he returned the favor by sticking a knife in our collective back when we chose Donald Trump over his fat brother. We were told to please clap as he palled around with his new buddies, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton; standing up for the icky GOP voters who stood up for him would’ve made for uncomfortable conversations at the country club.
And we were equally stunned the other day when news broke that George Will was likewise promoting the Democrat candidate in South Carolina. Of course, what stunned us the most was that George Will still exists. His decline to bitter establishmentarianism started long ago, which is when we stopped listening. It’s hard to understand how influential he was decades ago, although George Will was always like Peggy Noonan without the testosterone. People used to actually think of him as the touchstone of conservatism, but time has made clear that the performative Republicanism of these guys was just that – a performance. It was an act, a mask, a brand.
So it’s not surprising that their principles were, ironically, totally bereft of any principles. Consistency, patriotism, loyalty – oh, they evoked these concepts endlessly, but only when they’re haranguing us to obey. We were told we had to vote for the incumbent Republican no matter what, swallow whatever they gave us, take whatever they chose to give. Vote for someone who actually wants to do the things we wanted to do? No, that was too dangerous. We might lose in the general if we run a candidate who actually believes in something! No, we had to have the back of Senator Stickuphisrear even though the guy, given the chance, was going to vote with the Democrats to import the entire Third World, disarm us, and give a free hand to their crony capitalist corporate donors. Principles require us to compromise. But principles never required them to do anything.
After decades of dealing with these losers, it’s clear that it was never about us. We poor slobs in the Republican base were all just a means to an end. And the end was them being able to be called “Senator.” It was never about the conservative policies they promised us at election time. They knew it was a lie, and when we figured out it was a lie and picked people who actually do what we wanted done, well, we had to be punished.
Do you think Karl Rove or John Cornyn gives a damn what some rando GOP candidate in the Lone Star State thinks about the demographic composition of the UT-Austin Longhorns cheering section? It’s a pretty safe bet that both of them live in neighborhoods that make a Romney family reunion look like the United Nations General Assembly. Their newfound diversity principles are as fake as everything else about them. They’re not supporting the Democrats because of some moral imperative. They’re doing it to hurt us because we rejected them, because we withheld the respect they believe is their due from their lessers. This latest old GOP establishment treachery isn’t about principles. This is about being pissed off at the people who told them to talk to the hand. And now, as far as we’re concerned, they can talk to the finger.
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