I sure hope you are alive to read this VIP column, because the idiots in the White House who work the mouth on the presidential ventriloquist dummy are leading us into conflict with Russia. This is bad; Russia has nukes. I like Ukraine – I trained their troops there and deployed with them – but I like America better. Specifically, I like an America that is not a giant desert of glass caused by a bunch of Russian hydrogen bombs going off because the Democrats are too inept to deter nuclear war.
As a lawyer, it’s hard to express just how crappy the legal takes by other lawyers are on Twitter.
Finally, is Conservative Inc. coming around to our way of thinking? Dudes, it isn’t 2005 anymore.
The Worst President At The Most Dangerous Moment
I don’t know who blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and neither does our alleged President Biden. That includes whether we did it – this demented guy would probably forget giving the order. At the riskiest time since the Cold War, probably since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are sort of being led by a guy who was stupid even before he turned senile. And he chose advisors who he could be sure did not have the intellectual wattage to outshine him.
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The big problem is hubris – our elite is unaccountably sure of its own competence and intelligence. It should not be. But this unjustified arrogance means that they think they have this well-in-hand, but they are only used to dealing with others like them.
Putin is not like them. He is a bad guy, and a serious guy. Putin is not insane. Instead, he is a Russian ultra-nationalist who believes in a lot of nonsense Russia and its destiny and where Ukraine fits into it. Now, this stuff is objectively a lot of crap, but our alleged leaders make a grave mistake when they think that just because they find it to be baloney that Putin must also.
You push this guy too hard and he might just push the button. It does not help that we have seen a subtle but critical shift going on here in terms of nuclear policy. At one time, there was no question – Russia, you use a nuke and we will retaliate with nukes. But listen to what our ridiculous government is saying now. It is not promising a nuke for a nuke, but some lesser response like conventional strike. Without discussion or debate, the clowns in charge of our country and the West too went from mutually assured destruction (MAD) to semi-assured distraction (SAD).
Part of my training was nuclear target analysis and targeting. It was super easy. You just get a nuke close to the target and it’s gone. A tactical nuke shot off in Ukraine opens a door we’ve successfully kept closed for nearly 80 years. You open it, and there’s no logical end point except a bright flash over top of your city.
I like Ukraine and would like it to win its war. But I like America better. This is getting very dangerous just as we have perhaps the worst president in American history sort of in charge. This is the time to end this war, before this war ends all of us.
Twitter Lawyers Are Terrible
Look, if there is a lawyer on Twitter you can safely presume that person is an idiot if it is not me, Ron Coleman, Harmeet Dhillon, Randy Barnett, Hugh Hewitt, or a few – very few – others. The sad thing is that for many lawyers, most of whom do not actually practice as lawyers in any meaningful sense, Twitter represents a chance to let their freak flags fly. They can say unbelievably dumb things and no one calls them on it. Instead, they get toe-sucked by hordes of lib-bots and think they are winning.
In court – usually – you need to have facts and evidence and stuff. Judges will tell you if your argument is dumb – again, typically. In political cases there is a wholly other thing going on, but in normal cases it can be brutal. This does not prevent actively stupid arguments – as opposed to merely losing arguments, of which there is one in every case – but it does provide some incentive not to be aggressively dumb.
So, when you see someone telling you how Ron DeSantis shipping illegals to Mattha’s Vineyard is kidnapping, or how Trump is totally guilty of treason, or how the Constitutional amendment saying the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed is not a right, not applicable to the people, and in no way prevents infringement of those rights, understand that the people pushing these views are either stupid, or think their followers are. Or both.
Conservative Inc. Might Be Coming Around
My pal Jim Hanson recently noted that a senior Heritage Foundation’s poobah recently showed up at the Nat Con Convention to say that the pinnacle of Establishment DC conservative think tanks was present to join the emerging populist movement and not vice versa. This is huge, and a long overdue recognition of the chain of command.
It goes like this: Us hardcore conservatives, then Conservative, Inc.
We hardcores have long had zero use for the fixtures of the DC conservative scene. Books have been written – including by me – about just how useless these organizations have become. They harken back to the bad old days of 2000s conservatism, where nothing was conserved and cruise ship conclaves fleeced the rubes. In the 80s and 90s, we build up this giant conservative infrastructure, and instead of getting out there and getting into the fight it joined up with the Establishment and devoted its efforts to telling us rubes in the base to use our inside voices.
I hope that the various forums, foundations, and functionaries have gotten the message. We are not going back to the olden days. Maybe they can limp along on the largesse of a declining number of big, unbased donors for a while, but eventually that money will dry up. Without money, theirs will be no Forums for America, Families, Forums, and Eagles or any of the zillion other Con Inc. entities.
We hardcores want to destroy the institutions, but blowing them to bits implies that we will rebuild something in their place. It might be useful to have people figuring out the details of policy to help us do that. But the key word is “help.” These entities are not and will not be our leaders. To the extent they ever were in the driver’s seat, their failure to aggressively assert the base’s interests in the past and their decision to side with the Establishment to suppress the populist threat to their sinecures permanently disqualified them from leadership roles in the modern conservative movement. They can help, they can write up their white papers and hold their seminars, but need to sit in back with a notepad copying down our orders. We hardcores are running the new conservative movement. They had their chance and blew it.
Book 7 of my Kelly Turnbull series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, Inferno (cover here), is coming out this October 13th! Catch up with all my action-packed bestsellers, including People's Republic, Indian Country, Wildfire, Collapse, Crisis, and The Split! And my most recent non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America, Plus, keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP, including an extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness video, and the Unredacted podcast!
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