They are at it again, the Con Inc. crowd that never met a conservative they didn’t dislike. The latest specimen of this lame species is some total rando who The Bulwark – of course – decided to highlight. He was a GOP consultant-class flunky and you don’t know his name – I don’t know his name, either – who has decided to announce to a waiting world that he is leaving the Republican Party because … wait for it … of the Dobbs decision. Yeah, the guy is mad because, under Donald Trump, the Republican Party achieved its goal of about half a century of overturning Roe v. Wade. Leave it to these invertebrate losers to take a tough moral stand against winning.
The loser marquee used to feature bigger names. Once, Jonah Goldberg mattered. He wrote some books that did not suck. Once, people read David French. He was mediocre, but some people liked his brand of generic Republipap with a side of the tedious moralizing of John Lithgow in Footloose. And there was once a time when Bill Kristol – whose characterization of my conservative action novels as “appalling” is such a great advertisement that I use it as a blurb – edited what was then considered a conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard. But it’s gone now, the cruise ship conservatives’ Love Boat having sunk beneath the waves of new media without so much as some bobbing flotsam or jetsam to mark its passage into oblivion.
These goobers left us, and good riddance. It was so easy for them to depart from what they had allegedly believed and what they had, in their own feminine way, tried to fight for, that it’s reasonable to assume they never actually believed in anything. Five seconds don’t go by without one of these geebos tweeting about Muh Principles, but, as a rule of thumb, if you can turn on a dime, it was never much of a principle to begin with.
Now, they will tell you that what made them depart from the Republican side of the map was Donald Trump, plain and simple. He was so morally and politically flawed that any True Conservative was obliged to loudly, publicly quit the party and sit out the elections, if not actively support, Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, President Eggplant, and Willie Brown’s chardonnay-curious side piece. But that’s not the real reason they abandoned what they claimed to believe. They may have found Trump’s candor disturbing and his ability to get with hot women alarming, but his real crime was not respecting them. Their pride got hurt, and they have spent the last decade pouting.
See, in the old GOP, these doofuses had prestige. They were names. They mattered – not greatly, in the grand scheme of things, but they all had comfortable niches and lucrative grifts going on in the world of Con Inc. They blamed Trump for queering that deal. But this was unfair. While they tend to focus their ire on Trump personally – so much so that a synonym for these cheesy weasels is “Never Trumpers” – Trump was not to blame for their fall. Trump never cared about them; it’s unclear if the president knows they even exist. He certainly doesn’t consider them worthy of a mean Truth; that must crush what remains of their souls, that the man they hate most in the world is utterly indifferent to them.
No, their real beef is with normal Republican voters who noticed that these conservatives, as has been observed before, did not conserve much of anything. From George W. Bush to Mitt Romney to the aborted Jeb! campaign, they were always ready to try to stuff some zero down our throats. But we are conservatives who are actually conservative; it’s not a gig or a grift. In the Beltway, they wear their affiliation like a name tag. It’s an identity, not a passion. They were happy to be the house cons, fed a little better, granted softer beds, and made to do less toiling in the hot sun. In return, they shucked and jived for their real master, the Establishment. But real people were conservative because it mattered to them, because what happened in politics made a difference in their lives. Their sons were being killed in stupid wars. Their daughters were being pushed toward perversions and abortion. Their future was in doubt as the “free market” gang at Con Inc. cheer-led the shipping of good jobs overseas. Everywhere, we were losing ground in ways that made a real difference in our lives, but the gentlemanly managers of decline were doing fine.
We saw this and we rejected these bums. Their fall is not because of Trump; it’s because we realized these goofs were frauds and quit buying their books, magazines, and cruises. They went and found other funders, libs who think it’s useful to crank the organ grinder and have their allegedly conservative monkeys dance. But the sting of their repudiation, the hurt at losing their prestige and authority, cannot be assuaged by scribbling for a subsidized website no one reads or appearing on panels as the “conservative” on cable networks no one watches. They’re schnooks. Let’s see one of them sell a book. Where’s the latest Jonah Goldberg tome – perhaps "Conservative Fascism"? Or David French’s "I’m Very Disappointed With You People: The Conservative Case for Sucking Up to Murderous Communist Mutants"? I sell tons of books, but I’m a conservative, not a cynical turncoat; exactly who would spend money on one of their tomes today?
Nobody. And that makes them nobodies. In this game, you’re only as important as your audience thinks you are, and who thinks about these weenies? Where’s their influence? Where’s the power they once had? Gone. They squandered their goodwill by sucking, and now they have to make do with some money. Guys like Jonah still collect enough dough to remain doughy, but the prestige that came with it, the ability to fill a room with an audience eager to oooh and aww at their dog n’ pony show, was important to them too. And now it’s gone. A couple of minutes on stage at a "No Kings" rally between Angela Davis and some trans weirdo named Lady Prudence DeVulva speaking to a crowd of baffled mutants and seniors with ear horns just won’t cut it ego-wise.
This latest unknown announcing his departure from the GOP to a world whose reaction is “Who?” is likely among the last of these traitors to publicly defect. Sure, in the Beltway, there remain GOP politicians, staffers, and assorted Con Inc. functionaries who hate Trump and the base in equal measures, but most will keep their traps shut. They saw what happens to the defectors; who really wants to be Father-of-the-Year George Conway?
Trump and the Republican base now demand loyalty as well as aggressiveness, and we are positively ruthless about it. As for the clowns who jumped cruise ship, their lefty zillionaire paymasters hold them in utter contempt. These investors in GOP disunity will note that the return on investment for buying off these former Republicans is too low. The Never Trumpers are a depreciating asset, and soon their new friends will divest themselves of these bitter has-beens.
Ahoy, karma!
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