One of the stranger aspects of the current ructions is the willingness of members of the professional Right to gleefully and publicly stab their colleagues in the back. Politics is an ugly business, where men squabble over trivial slights, but the custom is to avoid making it nakedly personal and to avoid being overtly craven. This last bit is especially true with the Buckleyites, as they love carrying on like Victorians. For as long as I’ve been alive, conservatives have railed against putting “politics above principle.”
Like most of what the Buckleyites preached, that was all bullshit, but they did try hard to keep up appearances. That’s not been the case during the Trumpening. National Review turned itself into MoveOn.org last fall, posting daily rants about how anyone supporting Trump is Hitler. Then we got the #nevertrump stuff, which was pretty much just people taking cash from donors to pretend to be a grassroots resistance to Trump.
A couple of weeks ago it was revealed that the lone Trumpette on Fox News, Andrea Tantaros, was dropped from the network. The official reason was a contract dispute, but the grapevine says the midget tag-team act of Greg Gutfeld and Dana Perino got her fired over Trump. The internet says both are unpleasant people in private, despite their TV act, but I have no way of knowing if that is true. I do know it looks terrible to dump the only conservative on the network.
Today brings word that the traitorous Mark Zuckerberg is recruiting some of the more deranged Trump haters to help him do a better job suppressing dissent on Faceberg.
On Wednesday, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg will hold a meeting with “leading conservatives,” embattled The Blaze head Glenn Beck, and former George W. Bush Administration official and co-host of Fox News Channel’s The Five Dana Perino, at the website’s Menlo Park headquarters to discuss Facebook’s conservative media suppression and censorship scandal.
Last week it was reported that “anonymous sources at Facebook’s news team have confirmed to Gizmodo that, in addition to suppressing conservative news sources, the company suppresses stories about itself while artificially promoting stories about the Black Lives Matter movement.”
In spite of this, Zuckerberg denies any wrongdoing, stating “we have found no evidence that this report is true.” He is instead planning to hold a session Wednesday where he will essentially “pat conservatives on the head” with a photo-op that is a direct testament to the fact that nothing has changed. It is also quite telling that he has reached out to Beck, who is struggling to remain relevant in the conservative media sphere.
Beck announced the meeting in a Facebook post on his page early Sunday morning. Beck and Perino will be joined by Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, CNN’s S.E. Cupp, and Mitt Romney’s former digital director, Zac Moffatt.
Glenn Beck is a nut and desperate for cash now so it is no shock that he would come running when Zuckerberg calls. One of the true benefits of the Trumpening has been the near destruction of Beck and his lunatic cult. The others have always struck me as being sensible enough to avoid stunts like this. S.E. Cupp is a C-list talking head, who should avoiding making enemies. Her drunken bar slut routine would make her a favorite of red pill types if she went that way.
The weird thing about this is the public nastiness of it all. Trump is not a Buckleyite, but they could easily do business with him if they were willing to play ball. There are worse things than having Trump selling your pet project. Unlike most Republicans, he could possible get some things done in Washington. Even if you hate the guy, smile and pretend and make the best of it. Smart politics says it is better to have a guy like Trump inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in.
It’s not just about Trump with these people. There’s a sneering contempt for the public in their Trump hatred. The Trumpening has been revelatory in that regard. Most of these people in the Conservative Industrial Complex are just in it for the cash. They could just as easily be peddling Marxism if it paid better. They don’t like you or your country and they don’t believe in anything but making a buck. Zuck is passing around cash so they will sell his brand of nation wrecking lunacy and say bad things about Trump.
Time will tell if this is part of some larger strategy that has yet to reveal itself. Six months from now, being #nevertrump is going to be the mark of Cain, regardless of the election outcome. If Trump loses conservatives will blame these traitors for the defeat. If Trump wins, the #nevertrump loons will be packed off to the labor camps. Well, we can dream. Still, life is not going to be fun for these people if Trump is in the White House. There’s just no obvious upside to this #nevertrump nuttiness, other than the craven cash grab.
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At least Buckley was an outsider when he began his crusade. Now after a hard day on the talking head shows trading barbs with the Progressive on the panel, the average conservative “pundit” heads back to Bethesda and maybe dinner or a round of twilight golf with their erstwhile “opponents”. Remember the old Looney Tunes sheepdog vs. coyote cartoon? Everybody is just punching their shift for lucre. As pointed out here before, Trump just fucks that whole ecosystem up. The test will be who grows a pair and decides to come over to the other side and when.
Yep. I used to see this in the 80’s when the shout show format started. You’d see bitter enemies getting hammered at the local watering holes every night. In the 90’s, many of these shows started by two “enemies” pitching their idea to CNN or a local radio. I think it was ABC radio that started having these five minute debates that they would package to local affiliates.
Now they are all pals.
Andrew Brietbart said it right, “Culture is upstream of politics”.
The Faceberg Six are essentially cultural marxists 5th Column operatives working from the top down inside out of the party of the dirt people and bitter clingers. They are systematically trying to destroy the vestiges of what remains of the public appearance of legitimacy of the voice and will of we of the dirt people. They sound great on first appearances, but the fundamentals of true liberty and self determination of and by the dirt people are completely absent in all their agitprop. And brother, are they a crafty cunning lot. That is how these bastards operate, they do it with everything, it is what they are, infiltrate, and undermine, all under the guise of deciding what all of us are supposed to do, how we are to think, and what we are supposed to believe in.
There is quite simply in no uncertain terms any difference between the Faceberg Six and the red diaper regime on the other end of the cultural marxist spectrum. It is only the facade of the con job that provides a fig leaf of an alternative.
It is why Donald Trump sticks out like he does. It is why he is able to not just survive, but thrive and grow in strength, because of the awful contrast between these cultural marxists and those who are unquestionably not.
It was inevitable something or somebody of a revolutionary and resistant nature got by these gate keepers. The elites don’t have enough fingers for the leaks in the dike. Trump is in the most important way a small part in the equation of defiance. Not saying that because Donald Trump is small potatoes or insignificant, the guy is larger than life, a very good thing, it is what was needed, but Donald Trump would not be possible if the dirt people hadn’t chosen to withdraw consent and revolt. A perfect confluence of events that couldn’t happen any other way. Yet at the same time, makes you think, now what are the chances of that happening?
Andrew was right, Culture, is upstream of politics, like liberty is upstream of tyranny.
Makes you think.
Are you familiar with alexa.com? It’s an Amazon site and shows website traffic. Someone over on Conservative Treehouse uses it and that’s where I learned about it. You can find some interesting stuff. Just checked Facebook and views are down since April. It doesn’t have historical data on everything (like this site), but it can be interesting to see how the #NeverTrumpers are faring.
Sam Johnson’s ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ has echoed down through the ages. I suspect that “politics above principle.” is going to resonate through future ages.
Another branch of the human extinction movement.
Me, I think they despise the dirt people. And the rise of the dirt people in the form of “The Great Fuck You”, (Trump), terrifies them. Being in the media is not any different than being in Congress, the only way to not be ousted or worse is to be a part of the absence of morality and itinerant corruption. Appearances no longer matter, Trumps small unit infantry tactics has outflanked them all and exposed their true nature, and those appearances where everything, because lets face it, illusion of legitimacy is all the media and congress had.
I get the feeling that Hillary, after a rally, goes back to her hotel and says “God, I can’t wait to get away from these hillbillies”. I never get that vibe from Trump. And he always notices the closed factories and shops (which makes sense from someone that deals in real estate). Hillary doesn’t notice anything but herself. It’s surprising to me that Trump seems to pay attention to the dirt people around him, but it seems to be the case.
Pah, I believe very few politicians can even see what is to them ‘the little guy’. Trump is most probably not an exception, especially considering the lifestyle he can (justly) afford. But at least he isn’t beholden to Islam, doesn’t call for everyone to “celebrate Islam” (lol) and is willing to eschew political correctness.
Real estate development is a very hands on business…and you do not survive unless you notice and pay attention to details. And other than a few suits at the top, you interact with a lot of “dirt people” every day. Development companies are very flat organizations. Grew up with a developer parent in Florida, experienced it first hand including all summer jobs, high school through college doing hard labor on construction sites. I don’t particularly like Trump personally, but he is a true “WYSIWYG”.
It’s one of the bonuses of Trump–finding out all those people that truly despise you. I was reading the comments on Ace during the Idaho primary. He said that the place was full of white racists and would go for Trump. I was pretty shocked because Idaho really isn’t like that any more. Of course, when Cruz won, he shut up about it. It is disgusting, the way these “elites” look down their noses at regular people
You learn a lot about people from who they hate. Buckleyites hate everyone to their Right.
Great article, and the comments are on the high road, thank goodness. Please pardon my not knowing, but who or what are Buckleyites? I think it is in reference to William Buckley who did a lot for conservatism, no?
I’ve taken to calling the National Review types the Buckley Conservatives. We have so much splintering I think I’ll do a post on the labels I like to use.
Ace is sounding more conciliatory now, but I can’t go back there again. That was not just a quick flare-up of frustration, it was a full-on psychotic rage episode. Trump supporters were called white supremacists, racists, Nazis in disguise, deluded imbeciles, pig-headed ignoramuses… you name it. Oh, and racing toward electoral suicide. And Trump was just as bad. Now that the polls show Trump holding his own against Hillary, he claims that he’d be happy to be proved wrong, but shouldn’t he be feeling even worse? If he really believed all those things he said about Trump and his supporters, he should be horrified at the thought that they actually might win. And if he didn’t believe it, then what a rat, screaming reputation-destroying insults like that at innocent people!
The traitors have been flushed out. The bad thing is there are a lot of them. The good thing is their followers are all leftists, in the enemy camp anyway.
“Most of these people in the Conservative Industrial Complex are just in it for the cash.” I’m not sure I agree. I think they’re more like (your take on) Kevin Williamson. Their creed is NOCD: “Not Our Class, Dear.” They’re Bobos, and want to be taken seriously by other Bobos… but since all the Leftie talking head jobs were taken, they had to recalibrate their act. Functionally it’s the same thing — so, yeah, they’d prefer to be spewing Marxism — but it’s not just for the cash. If Trump really wanted to build a Party (and honestly, I’m still not sure he even wants to be President), he’d harness some of this wannabe-elitism. Create a think-tank thingie where these people can sneer down their noses at the rest of us while pretending to influence policy – the Trump Institute for the Study of Popular Culture or something. Basically reviving the Buckley act, but flipped — elitists pretending to be wonks, instead of wonks pretending to be elitists.
I was thinking yesterday what a win-win it would have been to have had Trump running as a Democrat.
After all, as Conrad Black pointed out recently, Trump is actually a centrist.
Had Trump run as a Democrat, he could have truly changed America, because regardless of whether he’d win or lose the elections, the left would be injured. His being a Democrat would mean that Americans would have a choice between voting for the center or for the right.
When Britain’s Cameron won the elections, the Labour party shifted to the far-left, though it might still change and try to move to the center. If Trump wins, will the Democrats shift to the center or move even further than they were to the left?
I”m kind of hoping the Republican Party splits by the next election cycle. Trump and his supporters can be a centerish party – about where the Democrats were in the 80’s. The Mitch McConnell’s and Paul Ryan’s can stop pretending to be conservative and move to the middle too.
Actual conservatives such as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and many of the Governors, can run a new Conservative Party.
Meanwhile, the Democrats can drift further left into irrelevance in national politics. The cities and states they continue to run (and slowly destroy) can serve as warnings against the temptations of big government.
The question would be whether the Democrats really would drift leftwards *into irrelevance*.
Perhaps so. Perhaps not. However, if Trump would have run as a Democrat, then there’s a real chance that the hard-left would have become irrelevant.
Trump is a center-Democrat in the Bill Clinton model with a populist flair and religion on a couple of conservative issues such as immigration that like 90% of the public secretly agrees with him on. The left has gone further to the left and the right has gone further to the right leaving the center wide open. Somebody just needs to run in there and we are going to throw them the ball. That’s what Trump is doing. The country is more unified than we let on. It’s just that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so all we ever hear are the loudest voices, pundits and activists, squeaking away from the far reaches of left and right. Pols pay too much attention to the media and internet and as a result they misread the silent majority.
I think they showed polls saying 40% of Democrat voters agree with Trump’s position on Muslim immigration if it isn’t presented as Trump’s policy!! 🙂 So this ‘hard-far-right’ position is actually a hawkish but centrist position.
I’ve often thought along similar lines. If the old Reagan Democrats went back to being Democrat, that party would become a lot less Progressive. The result would be a re-centering of politics. But, that’s an idea that works well in the lab, but not in field trials. Progressivism is a religion. The billionaires bitten by the bug will put their resources into clawing back any gains the moderates would make in dragging the Democrats to the center. Look what happened with the Democrat Leadership Council.
You may be right.
Having said which, I think only the left can de-radicalise the left. Someone like Trump needs to step into their lair together with his followers and get the Democrats to acknowledge there are extremists in the movement. Once the Democrats would turn that into official policy (if ever) then many soft-core university lecturers would feel they have ‘permission’ to eschew the extremists. Right now, the hard-core lead by default.
Emily Monroe Norton Kane: Really Charles, people will think-…
Charles Foster Kane (played by Roger Ailes): -what I tell them to think.
WE KNOW WHO THE LOSER TRAITOR FAKE PATRIOTS ARE.. AND, ITS OBVIOUS ZUCKERFKER WILL USE THEM TO BRING THE REAL PATRIOTS DOWN!!! NICE TRY MORONS, IT WILL BE THE DEMISE OF ALL OF YOU. YOU SHOWED YOUR HAND, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT TRAITOROUS BUSINESS MODEL. LETS SEE IF BACKSTABBERS CAN KEEP EACH OTHER AFLOAT. DELUSIONAL. LOSERS BAND TOGETHER… ALL FALL DOWN.
Trump, quite unintentionally, has awakened tens of millions of joe public conservatives to the true state of their Republican leadership and commentariat. He is a blessing if for no other reason, and it will not surprise me to find that after all is said and done that there are no other reasons. Deportations, a wall, and no more Muslims would be a very pleasant surprise.
Love the term joe public conservatives. Are there enough of us? We’ll see.
James, I suspect there are enough of us, and we are witnessing the penultimate event of our age. It is a preference cascade thing. Ripping the chainsaw from the grasp of the political class as they hack away at the dirt peoples self determination and liberty will be difficult at first but once they start folding (a quality they all share thankfully) it will come fast. A plurality of people who are legitimate in their freedoms is the most powerful political weapon ever devised when they are determined to live free or die.
You and I wouldn’t be here today on ZMan’s blog if it was not the truth.
Well said.
The old maxim “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t” does not apply in this election. We know Hillary. Trump may be more of an unknown, for reasons we are aware of, but in this case, better to give him the benefit of the doubt than to let a shrill failure like Hillary take the main seat. After so much time no one can name any significant accomplishment throughout her political life.
So in the battle for the country, the constant attacks on Trump by the Right to keep him from Office, and hence the willingness to give it to Hillary, speaks of treachery of the highest degree to which I would say they do not even deserve to be called Republicans. Their only allegiance is to their net worth and themselves. Self interest is good. Unrestrained greed is a fatal character flaw and mental illness which can be described as the “god-complex.”
But of course, character is something that belongs in the past and no longer matters to a significant portion of the public. Today, I imagine that a concept like character would imply general expectations from society which would be deemed hate speech because that squelches someone’s perceived freedoms to be a lying, murdering, incompetent boob who seeks titles and produces no results of value.
Trump may be the most open, what-you-see-is-what-you-get person who ever ran for president. That alone would rock the psyches of those pretenders who live their lives behind curtains. Like the current crop of Buckleyites. They don’t know what to do with a guy whose life has been so public, warts and all, that there’s no new dirt to dig up. But God knows, they keep digging. (“There HAS to be SOMETHING!!!”)
PS. The entry of Moneybag$ Zuckerberg into the #NeverTrump scene is no small issue We know Beck has to be financially terminal. But money also has to be a very big deal with the Lowrys, the Williamsons, and all the other little trolls nibbling at Donald Trump’s ankles like miniature lumbermen trying to fell a Giant Sequoia. My guess is that they are all deep in personal debt while trying to look like Big Operators.
Everyone could see where “Official Conservatism” was going if they’re paying attention, for me it was clear by the late ’90s and 9/11 to Iraq invasion shenanigans made it obvious, the Trotskyits made their home with the GOP, I think they realized that the American Empire is their Progressive Empire that they wanted the Soviet Union to be before Stalin kicked them out.
I’ve been looking for the words to describe this site. It’s one word – wisdom. Common sense everyday wisdom. Thank you.