Okay, you have every right to expect that, by now, anyone purporting to be a conservative thought leader – ugh, what a lame term – will be conservative woke, sometimes known as “based,” by now. There’s no excuse for still living in a Mitt Romney/Candy Crowley gimp cellar of crippling principles and principled failure. If you presume to lead us, you need to understand that we are in a life-or-death struggle to preserve our lives and liberty against a Marxist offensive unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before, and that we need to fight back and win or go down in defeat. We’ve lost patience with the softcons, the surrendercons, and the sissycons who demonstrate that they do not. Just ask Kristi Noem, who waffled and lost her shot forever.
This is all coming to a head again with the DeSantis-Disney war and the fight in conservatism over tactics and strategy. Let’s be clear before we proceed – we absolutely have to have a real debate about the new aggression that the vast majority of us believe is absolutely necessary to win this cultural war and preserve our liberty. What the combative mode people like me propose has potential downsides and there is a risk of abuse. We are conservatives, not libs, and we can have a debate – thanks to Elon Musk, we can have it in public on Twitter. Everyone who says “Let’s think this through” is not necessarily a simpering Jeb!-like wuss begging people who laugh at him for some claps. We have some good faith critics, and we need not fear an argument. But then, there are also a bunch of losers who never met a liberal they didn’t yearn to surrender to. The entire Bulwark staff and the other cruise ship cons are all deep in the libs’ trick bag, shaking their (former) conservative credentials on MSNBCNN and hoping credulous normies will take them home for the night.
But the good faith critics need to get on the trolley after we pick a path forward. There’s no room for perpetual nags getting in the way of the infantry as we attack. Debates are fine, but debates must end up with a decision, and we expect the guys who lose the debate to fall in and pick up their weapon rather than go AWOL and show up on a panel with noted intern and monogamy aficionado Joe Scarborough explaining how masculine conservatism “is not who we are.”
Well, fighting back hard is not who they are, that’s for sure. And we’re not having them purport to lead us anymore.
After decades of incoming fire by an aggressive left that wants to convert us into impoverished, gender-baffled serfs with no ability to participate in our own governance, we have a right to demand that the people wanting to lead the fight actually understand that we are in a fight. And we are now demanding that. You better not waver, you better not waffle, not if you want a future in this GOP.
Kristi Noem was weighed and found wanting. She sided with the Chamber of Commercecons against a law protecting girls’ sports and then lectured us that we were too dumb to understand how her total surrender was actually a massive victory. That’s when she lost her mojo – the based base was done with her. She’s toast – and if Trump or DeSantis or anyone else thinks about naming her VP (her anticipated presidential campaign is deader than CNN+), he’ll hear about it loud and clear.
You can’t betray us anymore and survive. W did. Mitt did. McCain did. The cons have one thing in common with Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit – they’ve been cheated on a zillion times, but unlike that lumpy harpy (who recently, and utterly predictably, came out foursquare in favor of censorship, as losers often do) modern conservatives are refusing to tolerate adultery, in our case of an ideological nature.
The guys at National Review – some of whom have always been pretty squared away – lost a ton of support by being soft on Trump and, more importantly, the populist Republican project that is now the mainstream of the GOP. Insiders say that the donations bottomed out as people got sick of a mostly united front on its masthead lecturing us on our moral obligation to let ourselves be runover by the leftist freight train. But look at how they, and how other formerly mellow cons, are reacting to Ron DeSantis’s glorious counter attack against woke corporations. Yes, there are still some writers on NR advocating surrender – they don’t call it that, but they are calling for us to keep doing what we’ve been doing for the last decade and we know that leads to defeat, so it is reasonable to extrapolate that they are willing to accept defeat before they dirty their dainty hands with the figurative blood of our enemies. But if you look closer, there are several writers who are not advocating rolling over. That’s good, because there’s no room in the new conservatism for perpetual critics who want to pesters us into the gulag.
We need to debate the issue of how to fight back, but then we need to make a decision. And we all need to get on board once the decision is made. Passive aggression, much less aggressive aggression, of the kind Conservative, Inc., has been practicing ever since we fired them and hired Trump, is a NO-GO at this station.
It’s time to unify and bring it in for the big win.
“Oh my gosh, Kurt is demanding conformity from conservatives!” they will cry.
Well, first of all it is not just me, and second, we are not demanding conformity. We are demanding that the folks on our side not give aid and comfort to an enemy that seeks to disarm, disenfranchise, and destroy us – and that wants to do worse to our kids. And if you can’t get with the program of fighting back against the massive cultural and political assault on us, no, you can’t be one of us.
You get one chance. Blow it, and you’re gone. Choose wisely.
Conservatives Must Stand Together and Fight. Join Townhall VIP. And Check Out Last Week's Stream of Kurtiousness, Laying Waste to Disney. And my podcast, Unredacted.
Go pre-order We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America now; it comes out July 12 but the right time to own the libs – which it does epically – is right this minute. I am also in the midst of writing Inferno, Kelly Turnbull No. 7, the next book after The Split, for release this fall. Spoiler: It is a sequel, not a prequel, in that it picks up right after Collapse with the US and the blue dictatorship still at war. It’s also going to be lit – literally.