Pool via AP

… driving his enemies insane, says Kurt Schlichter.

We reproduce what got us laughing today – his article at Townhall:

[President Trump] has several superpowers, but his most powerful may be the ability to convince his opponents to defend the least popular possible positions just because he supports them. Not just contrary positions, not just positions that reasonable people can disagree with, but insanely unpopular positions that all normal people look at and are repelled by. There’s not a garbage hill they won’t choose to die on. It’s an incredibly useful superpower to have.

Of course, the most recent one is the 80/20 polling proposition against men pretending to be women and being allowed into women’s intimate spaces to steal their athletic achievements. What lunatic would possibly take the position that it’s OK for some dude with the whole sausage store swinging to walk into your daughter’s locker room and expect to be called Martha? Well, it’s not just one lunatic. It’s a whole party of lunatics. This is a sacred Democrat belief, maybe its most sacred belief. Just the other day, every single Democrat senator voted to continue this nonsense. But in the real world, eight out of 10 normal people understand that it’s insane, and the other 20%, probably half of them, don’t agree with the majority because they can’t wrap their minds around the fact that it’s actually happening.

Of course, Trump opposes it, and of course, he rubbed it in their faces at that glorious not-State of the Union address the other night. Naturally, the Democrats highlighted their embrace of this bizarre, creepy fringe belief system right in front of 36 million Americans. It’s no wonder that 76% of the people who watched the thing supported the president. Politically, it’s just insane to draw the battle lines about weirdos and perverts, but the Democrats do it. It kind of tells you what their main constituency is – weirdos and perverts and the SSRI [anti-depressants] ridden, Chardonnay wine Munchhausen Mommies that love them.

Embracing it makes absolutely no sense politically unless their entire focus is maintaining their psychotic leftist activist base. And, of course, their entire focus is maintaining their psychotic leftist activist base. You might think they would reach out in a systematic way to normal people, and some have tried. Gavin Newsom, the guy whose unalloyed support for kiddie castration and against penis-free female environments helped make California the sexual confusion capital of America, recently went on with Charlie Kirk and hinted that, well, you know, maybe it’s kinda unfair to let some hairy ape pretending to be a ballerina win the gold medal in a girl track meet. Don’t get the idea that he is actually going to do anything about it. California is still a gender freak state where every pervert is a king, and every normal person is liable to be leered at in the locker room – and, in his trash state, if you complain that some dude in a skirt is drooling over you while you slip on your panties, you’re a hate criminal. Other Democrats have realized that this is electoral cyanide, and they’ve tried to thread the needle by suggesting that maybe local governments should decide whether the perverts rule or not. They don’t think that about anything else, like abortion, just this, and they don’t really think it. If they get federal power back, you can be sure that the full force of law will come down in support of weirdo transvestites getting a free pass at exposing themselves to little girls.

Trump is somehow able to maneuver them into being all for such loathsome demographics as federal workers. Yeah, Americans feel sorry for the kind of person who tells them they can’t sign their VA form in blue ink. Not a lotta sympathy there. And Americans seem to like the idea of cutting government waste. Sure, the Democrats insist that we’re about to launch a Third World genocide by refusing to fully fund Ecuadorian transgender mime troupes, but normal people look at that and hear that it’s being cut, and they think it’s a good thing. This is because it is, objectively, a good thing. To support this stuff is, objectively, an insane thing.

Now, it’s not crazy in the sense that doing so does support the Democrat position that all normality and civilization must be overthrown in favor of the bizarre, creepy freak show utopia that they hope to impose upon us. It’s insane because it’s electoral poison. Look at what happened to Kamala Harris when she got up there and had to try and tap dance about subsidizing illegal alien transsexual surgeries. It’s hard to explain this sort of stuff, and it should be hard because this sort of stuff is stupid and horrific. A few Democrats understand that this stuff repels normal people. That’s their problem. And that’s Trump’s edge.

What’s the latest? Some Third World Muslim scumbag terrorist-lover who somehow got into our country and somehow got into one of our allegedly prestigious schools is using that as a base to demand the murder of Jews and everybody else. Remember – they don’t just want to stop [at] killing all the Jews. They want to kill you and me, too. They will tell you that if you listen, and thanks to the fact that we have broken the gatekeeping model of the regime media, conservative media, and social media can now tell you. You can go read what this scumbag’s positions are. He wants October 7 all over the world. That means you and your kids and your sons and your daughters are being raped and murdered on videotape for the delight of Third World semi-humans. Yeah, we’re totally morally obligated to let this creature onto our soil.

It’s been said before: The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Now, the reasonable position among Americans is that this kind of walking, talking pile of refried goat excrement shouldn’t be anywhere near our country. It’s not a matter of free speech. You don’t get to come here and start setting up your garbage revolution. Do the Democrats agree with that view? No. They’re perfectly happy to let the genocidal jihadi to do his thing. In this monster, they have finally found some “free speech” they’re concerned with protecting. They were never concerned with free speech on campus when it was conservatives trying to speak freely. They were never concerned when the federal government launched a pogrom against normal Americans who went to protest a bogus election and dared to walk through the Capitol that they own. Even now, Democrats are positively gleeful that Elon Musk’s participation in our government is being met by leftist-funded terrorists burning down Tesla stores. But this Hamas-sucking mutant who literally wants to murder you and your entire family? No, he’s got to be here. He’s got to get a free megaphone. He has every right to come here and destroy our country and kill your kids. Because of reasons and shut up, fascist.

That’s the Democrat position. But why do they hold such a manifestly politically unpopular position? Because that’s what the black, shriveled heart of the Democrat Party believes. And also because Donald Trump feels differently. One thing is for certain – Donald Trump’s superpower is in full effect, and right now, he’s laughing.

President Trump’s inaugural address, January 20, 2025. LIBERATION DAY.

This article by William Voegeli at the Claremont Review of Books is presented as a review of The Conservative Sensibility by George Will, but reads as the author’s own animadversions on contemporary conservatism. The Right Now, it is titled.

We found very little in it to agree with. But we confine ourselves to arguing against a few passages which we consider most mistaken.

Quotation:

Trump could be seen as a culmination, revealing intentions and qualities inherent in the conservative enterprise all along. [That] interpretation is one shared by some of Trump’s conservative admirers as well as nearly all of Trump and conservatism’s most vehement critics. “If Trumpism was the Right’s end point,” asks historian Timothy Shenk, co-editor of Dissent magazine, “then wasn’t it an act of naïvety—maybe even complicity—to pretend there was more to [conservatism’s] story than crude bigotry?”

What “crude bigotry”? Not a trace of it in Trump or – therefore – in Trumpism. But Voegeli does not contest the allegation.

Quotation:

The Never Trump differences with the larger part of the Republican Party and conservative movement are profound, but its objections to the progressive agenda are increasingly difficult to specify. The main problem, as Never Trumpers see it, seems to be that progressivism is bad politics rather than bad governance. As Bulwark policy editor Mona Charen recently complained, Democrats’ ineptitude and the power of their far-left wing prevents the party from discharging its “overriding obligation”, which is to keep “the Q-Anon-indulging, Putin-friendly, truth-optional, insurrectionist party from returning to power”.

Surely Voegeli should declare with indignation that the Republican Party is not “Q-Anon-indulging, Putin-friendly, truth-optional, insurrectionist”.

And what are those “profound” differences? Do they exist? Or is Never Trumpism nothing more than shallow personal antipathy?

Quotation:

[E]very Biden proposal approved by Congress and deplored by conservatives—every executive branch appointment and policy decision rendered by those officials, every judicial appointment and ruling delivered by those jurists over the next 40 years, every spending increase crammed into a reconciliation bill—could have been prevented or mitigated if Trump had displayed a modicum of responsibility, restraint, and intelligence. What are we trying to conserve? Well, significantly less now than there would have been but for Trump’s signature blend of solipsism and nihilism.

Neither solipsism nor nihilism characterize Trump. Nothing could be further from him than either of these isms, and nothing could be further from his followers than nihilism.

When was he irresponsible?

Restraint? Did he not show restraint  – especially in foreign relations, and when he might have used the military to quell the murderous violence of Leftist mobs in (for instance) Seattle, Portland and Baltimore and did not (perhaps unfortunately).

As for intelligence – was it unintelligent rulership that gave us four years of prosperity, dissuaded foreign dictators from aggression, and made an astonishing rapprochement between Israel and certain Arab powers?

Quotation:

This dereliction of a party leader’s duties is a miniature of Trump’s dereliction of a national leader’s duties. Despite Trump’s outsized personality, Trumpism started out as about something—above all, repudiating Bush-era nation-building, entitlement reform, and immigration amnesty. Some of what Trump promised got done, while most of it proved harder than he made it sound in 2016. But since Election Day 2020, “All that is left of Trumpism are Trump’s grievances and aspirations,” as Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote this year in National Review. The entirety of Trump’s agenda now is to “restore his tarnished honor and make credible his belief in his own victory”.

Trump’s “dereliction of a national leader’s duties”? No mention of the unprecedented campaign of sabotage, the sustained lies, the vicious conspiracies hindering him. And If Trump’s own “tarnished honor”, and the victory he won being snatched from him by fraud, obsess him to the exclusion of anything else, why does a massive majority of the Republican Party continue to support him, as is the case?

What else has he proved he cares about? Chiefly: making America great again and saved from global socialism; upholding the rule of law and equality of all before the law; sealing the southern border; encouraging American manufacture; lowering taxes, ending inflation, achieving full employment; making America energy independent; augmenting America’s military strength; handling foreign enemies with personal tact while keeping an iron fist in the kid glove; ending racist indoctrination in the public schools and the universities; opposing abortion on demand; preventing the sexualization and prurient corruption of children; and, above all, protecting individual liberty.

If liberty is the highest value – and doesn’t American conservatism hold that it is? – all forms of collectivism are abominable, and the Never Trumpers are politically blind.

Britain’s great conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said: “Britain was created by history, America was created by philosophy.”

What were the principles of America’s foundational philosophy?

• Freedom: freedom of the individual, and so, logically, freedom of conscience, speech, publication,  assembly; property ownership and a free market.
• The rule of law under which all are equal.
• Government by the people themselves to protect their freedom with the rule of law, and with military strength against foreign enemies.

All those principles are now being abandoned by usurping powers, to be replaced with contrary ideals.

The systems and institutions that proceeded from them are being corrupted and turned from their intended purposes to serve opposite ends.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Townhall:

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.

Freedom is much diminished, especially with the forced quarantine and masking of the healthy in an epidemic of Covid flu, and threatened penalties for those who refuse vaccination.

The rule of law is scoffed at by those who should enforce it.

As Victor Davis Hanson says:

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives. Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and big-city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order. They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again, not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis – have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Government by the people has been corrupted by electoral fraud. And the military cannot be relied on to protect the nation:

Mention the military to conservative Americans these days, and they unfortunately associate its leadership with the disastrous flight from Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility – much less resigned – for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the top generals traded charges that the other was responsible for the calamity. Or both insisted the abject flight was a logistical masterpiece.

Never in U.S. history have so many retired four-star admirals and generals disparaged their president with charges of being either a traitor, a liar, a fascist, or a virtual Nazi, as occurred during the last administration.

Never has the proper advisory role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly usurped and contorted.

Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged “white supremacists” without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.

Worse, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff informed the hostile Communists who govern China that he would warn them if President Trump decided to attack their country with nuclear weapons.

Victor Davis Hanson concludes:

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

Does it mean that the experiment of creating a nation from a benign philosophy has failed?

… delivered and not delivered.

We cannot find this message from President Trump to the nation anywhere but on Twitter.

So as a tweet we post it.  (As usual we overlook the “God” parts.)

He says what a president of the United States ought to say to and about the soldiers who fought for their country.

The goof of a “president” in the White House wouldn’t think of saying anything of the sort. His handlers, however, should think of it for him, if only for the “optics” of it, about which they are always most concerned, even now at this time of national abasement and global tragedy caused by their “president”.

President Trump's message for a grieving nation. pic.twitter.com/2o7kgLKdaR

— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) August 27, 2021

… needs more desperately than ever, speaks in fury.

Stay there and see the next video too. It is about Trump deserving a Nobel Peace Prize. (We think he deserves it more than anyone who has ever received it.)

Suddenly the FBI has changed its institutional mind. The January 6 protest at the Capitol was not an insurrection after all, it now declares. According to Reuters, the FBI now says there was no conspiracy behind the event.

Has the shock of America’s calamitous fall in the world’s esteem with its defeat in Afghanistan woken the agency up? Will it wake up  all the  “woke” half of America to the extreme danger this country is now in?

Steven Hayward of PowerLine quotes part of the Reuters report, including these paragraphs:

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

“The violence?” The only violence recorded on the videos we have seen was on the part of the Capitol police – one of whom shot an unarmed protestor dead.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme … to storm the Capitol and take hostages.” 

FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said. 

‘Far-right?” What Reuters – and Leftists in general – mean by “far-right” are Americans who like their country and want its Constitution to remain unchanged and in full force.

One source said there has been little, if any, recent discussion by senior Justice Department officials of filing charges such as “seditious conspiracy” to accuse defendants of trying to overthrow the government. They have also opted not to bring racketeering charges, often used against organized criminal gangs.

Senior officials had discussed filing such charges in the weeks after the attack, the sources said.

Hayward comments:

But we’ve been told that the events of January 6 were an “insurrection,” and the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War. And this narrative is the pretext for the Biden Administration to claim “domestic terrorism” is the single greatest security threat facing the country. And also the pretext for banning Trump from social media platforms because he incited the mess.

As with the Muller report on the 2016 election, don’t expect the left, and the media, to give up on their “insurrection” narrative easily.

Right! With that pretext, that claim, that lie, the “Biden” administration hopes to destroy the Constitution and entrench the America-hating Democrats in power.

(From 23 minutes) President Trump on the defeat of America by primitive fanatical Muslims in Afghanistan because of “President” Biden’s ineptitude: “Our country has never been so humiliated.”

(But don’t worry – Hannity is praying to “God” to save the thousands of Americans stranded there, and as “God” is omnipotent and good he will do as he is asked, just as he always does.)

https://youtu.be/yNRbQNzz4xs

Donald Trump was a great president. He is a great man. But too good, too kind, too tolerant. His excessive restraint was a weakness. He was overcome by the bad, the cruel, the bigoted Left.

Kurt Schlichter wants and expects a Strong Man next, to restore America to its political senses; the Man who will wield the power of No.

He writes at Townhall:

Get ready for Strong Man Populism. The bad guys – the soft elite who think it can hold onto the societal power it inherited, but did not earn, through petty oppressions – will call it “authoritarianism”. Of course, they like authoritarianism when they are the authority – that’s why they feel no compunction about remaking our country and culture without bothering with obtaining our buy-in. But history teaches – not that they would know it, because they have never been taught it – that a backlash is inevitable.

We’re going to turn to someone who won’t be deterred by cultural caterwauling, who will not be satisfied with a status quo ante that is deeply anti-American, who will ruthlessly use his power to reclaim our society for us, and who will wreak vengeance on our enemies.

That last one is important. They must learn never to do this again.

We’re going to elect a Strong Man Populist because the current crisis is intolerable …

Drug-addled hobos, junkies, and degenerates infest our cities and, increasingly our suburbs. The elite answer is, of course, to destroy the suburbs.

Our teachers, in the rare cases they teach, teach our kids to hate our country.

Our warriors, in the all too common cases they war, lose, and also teach our kids to hate our country.

Our voices are silenced, we have no institutional advocates; the institutions designed to vindicate our rights won’t. …

But when the ordinary ways to have our voices heard are closed off to us, we’ll find extraordinary ones.

Trump was one. He was a warning. But he was, despite the mass-micturition of the elite – no radical. He had no desire to lay waste; he wanted to rule, but as a member of what he did not understand was a terminally ill ruling caste. Remember how he was caught up in institutional prestige – this college was great, that company was respected? This, as well as the fact that he showed up without a Rolodex and needed to rely on a bunch of establishment acolyte-kissers, made him too weak to truly use his power. Yet even with his limitations, he did many amazing and consequential things.

The Strong Man Populist coming soon will not have that weakness. He will not hesitate to use his power to clean house, to prosecute the criminals, to defeat our enemies, both foreign and domestic.

He will unleash the power of No.

No, hobos, you can’t live on our streets.

No, criminals, you don’t get to commit crimes.

No, Pentagon, you are going to focus on winning wars.

No, academia, you do not get to take our money and use it to turn our kids into little commie saps.

No, tech jerks, you do not get to decide what we can read and say.

No, climate cultists, we are not going to live in caves because of your bizarre, quasi-religious weather obsession.

No, media, you do not get to be partisan advocates and also treated like neutral truth tellers.

No, Democrats, you don’t get to steal elections.

No.

No is the weapon of the Strong Man Populist; it is our weapon. It is a rejection of elite hegemony, and the ruthless use of power to enforce it. And it is coming.

The establishment should have heeded the warning that was Donald Trump. But if it was smart enough to do that, it never would have botched its cultural curation so spectacularly that it made him necessary.

The best part of the coming Strong Man Populism will be watching them cry.

Yes, there are times when Schadenfreude is fully justified – and in any case irresistible. May such a time come soon!

But can such a Strong Man be found?

Can he already be seen on the political horizon?

Would you vote for him?

President Trump encourages and heartens us to believe America can and will recover from the killing sickness inflicted on it by the “Biden” junta.

But Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

The Biden Administration  has destroyed the idea of a border, with an anticipated 2 million entering the country illegally over a 12 month period. It demolished the idea of the police and prosecutorial deterrence curbing crime. It is ending the trajectory of America’s natural gas and oil renaissance that enriched the country, and freed it from Middle East entanglements. And it killed off the notion that government should seek to ensure that race is not how we collectively define the content of our individual characters.

Meanwhile, our enemies and rivals—China, Iran, and Russia especially—are giddy at what America has become. The American Left, they believe, has done a much better job of denying Chinese culpability for a Chinese-engineered virus than had the Chinese communist media.

America’s richest are placing their bets on a Chinese-Communist controlled 21st century, and will adjust accordingly.

Our adversaries can’t quite believe their good fortune. Had they thought up ways to divide and impoverish America, to see its cities burned, and looted, to weaken its economy and currency, to erode the unity of its once feared military, and to entrench the most effective critics of America in America—not in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, or Tehran, but in corporate boardrooms, campuses, newsrooms, Hollywood, Wall Street and the Pentagon—they could not have improved on what has happened in 2020-21, the era of our collective meltdown.

To read the whole persuasive argument leading to these conclusions, go here.

Is Hanson exaggerating?

Is he wrong?

Should we believe more in Hanson’s analysis or Trump’s vision?