Conservative, Inc., Is Being Replaced By Us Militant Normals

Kurt Schlichter: I guess now we’re not supposed to be fighting culture wars anymore – man, it’s so hard to keep up with these ever-changing new rules! I’m old enough to remember way back to 2016, before Trump got nominated, and I could have sworn Conservative Inc., was gung-ho for the whole culture war thing. But then Trump actually fought it, taking on the big, soft target that is the spoiled, semi-literate athletes who like to rub their contempt for the flag we love in our faces in the guise of woke wokedness. Now we suddenly discover that fighting back is horribly uncouth and déclassé and “Oh, well I never!”

Gosh, I would have thought from all those cruise panels about how our crumbling culture is slouching toward Babylon and the need to resist the liberal onslaught that maybe we ought to actually resist the liberal onslaught, but see, that was my mistake. I took it seriously when Conservative, Inc., promised to fight the leftist blitzkrieg against normal Americans. It was all a scam, a lie, a pose for us rubes. The Tru Cons didn’t actually mean it.

There’s a lot of that not meaning it going on in the GOP right now. Exhibit A is John McCain, who ran ads touting how he was leading the way in opposing Obamacare only to give it aid and comfort when someone in the White House would actual sign its repeal. He’s the guy the establishment designated to lose to Barack Obama in 2008, and he was sure up to the task. But in retrospect, thank goodness, because McCain’s inevitable presidential betrayal of conservatives by breaking his word then and treating GOP voters like he treated his first wife would have done exponentially more damage to conservatism than Trump being prevented from keeping his word today ever could.

It’s so good to know that, despite his wonderful, close, awesome friend humiliating him while lying to Arizona’s voters, Lindsey Graham is still the blue falcon’s buddy. No hard feelings!

There used to be a thing called “conservatism,” and I knew it pretty well since I was part of it for about a third of a century. But conservatism changed, becoming less about principles (though the wusscons never shut up about them) and more about money-grubbing navel gazing and intellectual onanism. Actual Republican voters, actual normal Americans? Well, they became kind of beside the point in the tumbler-klinking world of the John Boehnercons, and to the corporate-friendly compassioncons who put the interests of everyone else (including the act of lovers) ahead of the GOP voters who voted the establishment in.

Conservativism forgot about the real world conservatives we expected to line up behind us. While we were talking about free trade, we were ignoring that GOP voter who fought in Fallujah, came home, got a job building air conditioners, raised a family, and then one day watched the video of the oh-so-sorry CEO – who looked remarkably like Mitt Romney, because all these guys look remarkably like Mitt Romney – sadly informing his beloved employees that their jobs were getting shipped to Oaxaca. And our response to the 58-year old Republican voter who asked us how he was going to keep paying for his mortgage and his kid in college? Pretty much, “Well, that’s how free enterprise works. Read some Milton Freidman and go learn coding.”   MORE