The 2024 Election Is a Fight Over America's Way of Life

Yeah. Isn't the next election always the one to save the American way of life? How's that been working out?

At WSJ, "GOP voters see a country corrupted by liberal ideals":

To win Jason Stewart’s vote, a presidential candidate should talk about stopping illegal immigration, taming inflation and keeping academic theories about race out of the classroom. But one overarching task is more important to the 51-year-old Republican than any single issue: rescuing American culture from liberals.

“Democrats and liberals have invaded every aspect of culture for the past 40 or 50 years, and we’re at a line-in-the-sand moment for conservatives,” said Stewart, a sales executive and Army veteran who lives outside Philadelphia. “What I’m looking for in a candidate is someone who can put up a fight across multiple fronts.”

The animating force in the Republican presidential primary, many voters and policy leaders say, is a feeling that American society—the government, the media, Hollywood, academia and big business—has been corrupted by liberal ideas about race, gender and other social matters. Democrats, in turn, feel that conservatives have used their political power in red states and in building a Supreme Court majority to undermine abortion rights and threaten decades of work to broaden equal rights for minority groups.

That has turned the next race for the White House into an existential election, with voters on both sides fearing not just a loss of political influence but also the destruction of their way of life.

“My biggest fear is about advancing that far-right agenda,” said Laurie Spezzano, 68, a Democrat and insurance agent in Louisville, Ky., who believes one of her own senators, Republican Mitch McConnell, subverted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by using his leadership post to block a Democratic nominee to the court and to advance GOP nominees. Abortion rights have been diminished, she said, and gay rights in employment and marriage are at risk.

“I’ve never been against all Republicans, but it’s gotten to where they’re really scary now,” she said.

Republican Julie Duggan, by contrast, sees conservative values and traditional gender roles under attack amid social change that is moving too quickly. “It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are,” said Duggan, 31, a public safety worker in Chicago. If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.” The Heritage Foundation, the conservative policy institute, has brought together 60 right-of-center organizations to compile a 900-page document of policy specifics to guide the next Republican president. But the group’s president, Kevin Roberts, says those specifics take a back seat to a broader goal. The next election, he says, “may be our last, best chance to rescue the nation from the woke, Socialist left.” “Their vision is to destroy everything that makes America America—our values, our history, our rights,” Roberts said recently at the group’s leadership summit. In an interview, he added, “We have lost our K-12 schools to radical-left activists. We’ve certainly lost our universities to the same, and other institutions,” including large businesses and even churches. “Everyday Americans,” he said, are being forced “to bend your knee to the rainbow flag.” Democrats and others say the GOP culture war is a backlash against greater acceptance of the nation’s growing diversity, which is long overdue in America, and that no one is being forced to bend a knee or otherwise get involved. Richard Blissett, 33, a Democrat and university staff member who lives in Baltimore, said that some Republican complaints are at odds with the party’s traditional faith in free markets. “There’s a big difference between government and Hollywood. If Republicans want more Republican movies, they can make them. No one is stopping them,” he said. The heightened feelings on both sides are reflected in a poll that found that about 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda, “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” About the same share of Democrats had the same fear of the Republican agenda, saying it would destroy the country, an NBC News survey found last fall. The GOP’s sense that U.S. culture has gone off-track snarled legislation in Congress this week, as House Republicans pushed through a set of contentious social-policy amendments to an annual defense bill. The measures stripped money for diversity initiatives in the military and added restrictions on abortion and transgender care for service members. GOP lawmakers said they acted because liberal ideology was weakening the military. But the amendments endanger the bill’s path in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Many Republican voters say the pace of social change has left them off-balance, with schools and businesses pushing for racial diversity and transgender Americans raising difficult questions for parents, schools and sports officials. In Wall Street Journal-NORC polling this year, three-quarters of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting transgender people. More than half said society had overstepped in accepting gay and lesbian people, and that businesses and schools had gone too far in promoting racial and ethnic diversity. Far fewer Democrats held those views.

In an Ipsos poll this March, about half of Republicans agreed with the statement, “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country.” Fewer than 30% of Democrats agreed.

While past GOP primary races have turned in part on policy disputes, such as remaking Medicare or scrapping the current tax code for a flat tax, the differences among candidates this year over matters such as abortion policy and aid to Ukraine have been a more muted part of the discussion. “Very few people are talking about tax reform, and everybody is talking about the cultural issues,” said Jondavid Longo, a Republican and mayor of Slippery Rock, a borough outside of Pittsburgh. Within both parties, he said, “they see politics as almost a life-or-death situation. Many voters believe that if their candidate does not win, then doom will follow.”

Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster who recently conducted focus groups with GOP voters, said the feeling of cultural alienation among Republicans stretches well beyond issues of race and gender to include the economy. “It’s all one and the same—there’s a cultural glue that goes from taxes and inflation to transgender policy,” he said. “Our base believes that we’re losing our country, and that the left has become radicalized to a point that they no longer believe in America and want to burn it all down and remake it in their image.”

GOP voters, he said, are asking two main things of candidates: Do you understand that we’re on the verge of losing our country? And can we trust you to fight back?

ormer President Donald Trump’s defining characteristic as a politician is his eagerness to both challenge the norms of Washington and fight culture-war battles. He regularly uses heightened rhetoric to emphasize what he sees as a threat from the left, warning of “pink-haired Communists teaching our kids” and promising to “keep foreign, Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is also responding to the hunger among Republicans to take up cultural battles...

With House Majority in Play, a New Class Takes Shape

It's just a matter of getting all the ballots counted. When it's done, the GOP majority will take over in the House, possibly with some Republican outliers.

At NYT, "The Republican ranks grew more extreme and slightly more diverse, while Democrats added several young liberals to their caucus":

WASHINGTON — Whoever holds the House majority in January, the new lawmakers will include a fresh crop of Republican election deniers, including a veteran who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; a handful of G.O.P. members of color; and a diverse group of young Democratic progressives.

As vote counting continued across the country on Wednesday, with Republicans grasping to take control and Democrats outperforming expectations in key races, the contours of a new class of lawmakers began to emerge.

It featured a sizable contingent of Republicans who have questioned or denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, many of them hailing from safely red districts, adding to an already influential extreme right in the House. At least 140 of the House Republicans who won election this week are election deniers, at least 15 of them new additions.

A handful of Black and Latina Republicans also won, adding a touch more diversity to a mostly white, male conference — though far less than leaders had hoped as many candidates they had recruited for their potential to appeal to a broader set of voters in competitive districts fell short.

For Democrats, the election ushered in younger, more diverse members to fill the seats of departing incumbents. Many of those candidates had held state offices or previously sought seats in Congress and are expected to back many of the priorities of the Democratic left wing.

Here are some of the new faces:

The Republicans

Jen A. Kiggans, a Navy veteran and state senator.

As a woman with military experience, Ms. Kiggans was regarded by Republicans as a prime recruit to put up against a centrist Democrat in a conservative-leaning area. She defeated Representative Elaine Luria on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, propelled in part by state redistricting that tilted the district more decisively to the right.

She focused her campaign narrowly on inflation and public safety, and was bolstered by top Republicans, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader who is running to become speaker should his party retake the House, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin. That suggested that she would be more likely to serve as an acolyte to Republican leaders than a thorn in their sides.

But though she ran as a mainstream candidate, Ms. Kiggans declined throughout her campaign to say whether she believed Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.

Derrick Van Orden, a veteran at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A retired Navy SEAL who rallied at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Van Orden flipped a key seat for Republicans in western Wisconsin, in a largely rural district currently held by Representative Ron Kind, a 13-term centrist Democrat who did not seek re-election.

Much remains uncertain. For the second Election Day in a row, election night ended without a clear winner. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, takes a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate, and when we might know the outcome:

The House. Republicans are likelier than not to win the House, but it is no certainty. There are still several key races that remain uncalled, and in many of these contests, late mail ballots have the potential to help Democrats. It will take days to count them.

The Senate. The fight for the Senate will come down to three states: Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. Outstanding ballots in Nevada and Arizona could take days to count, but control of the chamber may ultimately hinge on Georgia, which is headed for a Dec. 6 runoff.

How we got here. The political conditions seemed ripe for Republicans to make big midterm pickups, but voters had other ideas. Read our five takeaways and analysis of why the “red wave” didn’t materialize for the G.O.P.

Mr. Van Orden, who emphasized his military service on the campaign trail, largely ducked questions about his attendance at the Jan. 6 rally. He has said he did not go into the Capitol, and wrote in an opinion essay that he left the grounds outside the building when violence began, watching “what should have been an expression of free speech devolve into one of the most tragic incidents in the history of our nation.”

During his race, Mr. Van Orden leaned heavily into culture war messaging, accusing Democrats of “taking the nation rapidly down the path to socialism” and railing on a podcast against what he described as “woke ideology” seeping into the military.

John James, an Iraq veteran set to expand the House’s ranks of Black Republicans.

West Point graduate who commanded Apache helicopters in Iraq, Mr. James was personally lobbied for months to run by party leaders including Mr. McCarthy, who were convinced that his victory would keep this Michigan seat safely in Republican hands for years to come.

Mr. James, who unsuccessfully challenged Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, in 2020, ran a more moderate campaign than many of his colleagues in safe seats. He presented himself to voters as “an open-minded, freethinking conservative,” and focused on kitchen table issues like lowering prices and bringing back manufacturing.

His victory will nudge up the number of Black Republicans in the House to at least three from two.

Monica De La Cruz, the conservative from the Rio Grande Valley.

Ms. De La Cruz emphasized her conservative ideology in flipping a seat in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas abandoned by an incumbent who switched districts after the state legislature handed him an unfavorable gerrymander.

Ms. De La Cruz, who owns an insurance firm, had campaigned heavily on the influx of illegal migrants at the southern border, emphasizing how her family had immigrated legally to the United States from Mexico and pledging to “finish the wall” started by former President Donald J. Trump.

Republicans had enthusiastically pointed to her candidacy, as well as those of two other Latinas running in the Rio Grande Valley — Mayra Flores and Cassy Garcia — as evidence that they were finally making inroads with Latino voters. But both Ms. Flores and Ms. Garcia lost, according to The Associated Press.

Andy Ogles, a hard-right former mayor.

A former mayor, Mr. Ogles flipped a Democratic-held seat in central Tennessee thanks to a drastic redrawing of the district that all but guaranteed a Republican victory.

Outspoken, hard-right lawmakers like Mr. Ogles could cause headaches for Republican leaders as they try to keep the government funded and prevent the country from defaulting on its debt.

After triumphing in his primary election, Mr. Ogles called for the impeachment of Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as “treason” charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, over the administration’s handling of immigration at the southern border. And a video released by his Democratic opponent showed him at a G.O.P. candidate forum following the repeal of Roe v. Wade arguing that the “next thing we have to do is go after gay marriage.” ...

 

The DeSantis Dilemma

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "Is he the only politician who can save us from a second Trump term?":

“I would say my big decision will be whether I go before or after. You understand what that means?” Donald Trump told New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi this week. He likes to tease. But we know what’s coming. The deranged, delusional liar who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power is going to again. He still commands a huge lead in the GOP primary polls; he shows few signs of flagging energy; and the president who succeeded him is imploding in front of our eyes.

The preeminent question in politics right now is therefore, to my mind, a simple one: how to stop Trump — and the spiraling violent, civil conflict and constitutional chaos a second term would bring. To re-elect a man who attempted a coup is to embrace the definitive end of the American idea.

The Democrats, meanwhile, appear to have run out of fake “moderate” candidates, are doubling down on every woke mantra, presiding over levels of inflation that are devastating real incomes, launching a protracted war that may tip us into stagflation, and opening the borders to millions more illegal immigrants. They are hemorrhaging Latino support, and intensifying their identity as upper-class white woke scolds. And a Biden campaign in 2024 would be, let’s be honest, “Weekend At Bernie’s II.”

So get real: If you really believe that Trump remains a unique threat to constitutional democracy in America, you need to consider the possibility that, at this point, a Republican is probably your best bet.

One stands out, and it’s Ron DeSantis, the popular governor of Florida. And yet so many Never Trumpers, right and left, have instantly become Never DeSanters, calling him a terrifyingly competent clone of the thug with the bad hair. He’s “Trump 2.0” but even “more dangerous than Trump,” says Dean Obeidallah. “He’s dangerous because he is equally repressive, but doesn’t have the baggage of Trump,” argues a fascism scholar.

“DeSantis has decided to try to outflank Trump, to out-Trump Trump,” worries Michael Tomasky. He’s a clone of Viktor Orbán, says Vox, and on some issues, “DeSantis has actually outstripped Orbán.” Then there’s Max Boot: “Just because DeSantis is smarter than Trump doesn’t mean that he is any less dangerous. In fact, he might be an even bigger threat for that very reason.”

Jon Chait frames the case: “Just imagine what a Trumpified party no longer led by an erratic, deeply unpopular cable-news binge-watcher would be capable of.” Chait’s critique focuses at first on the fact that DeSantis is an anti-redistributionist conservative, and believes that pure democracy is something the Founders wanted to curtail. Sorry — but, whatever your view on that, it’s light years away from Trump’s belief in one-man rule.

On this, in fact, Chait acknowledges that DeSantis once wrote that the Founders “worried about the emergence of popular leaders who utilized demagoguery to obtain public support in service of their personal ambitions.” He meant Obama — not Trump. Unfair to Obama, of course. But the same worldview as Trump’s? Nah.

Chait then argues that DeSantis is an anti-vaxxer, or has at least toyed with anti-vaxxers, and out-Trumped Trump on Covid denialism. But like many criticisms of DeSantis, this is overblown. Dexter Filkins reports that DeSantis, after his lockdowns during the panic of April 2020, studied the science himself, became a skeptic of lingering lockdowns and mask mandates, and, for a while, risked looking like a crazy outlier.

But from the vantage point of today, not so much: Florida’s kids have not been shut out of schools for two whole years; the state’s economy beat out the other big ones except Texas; Covid infection and death rates were not much higher than the national average; and compared with California, which instituted a draconian approach, it’s a viral wash.

As David Frum put it in a typically perceptive piece:

The DeSantis message for 2024: I kept adults at work and kids at school without the catastrophic effects predicted by my critics. Because I didn’t panic, Florida emerged from the pandemic in stronger economic shape than many other states — and a generation of Florida schoolchildren continued their education because of me. Pretty powerful, no?

Very powerful in retrospect. And again: not Trump.

And this is a pattern: DeSantis says or does something that arouses the Trumpian erogenous zones, is assailed by the media/left, and then the details turn out to be underwhelming. His voter suppression law provoked howls; but in reality, as Ramesh Ponnuru notes,

the law includes new restrictions, such as requiring that county employees oversee ballot drop-boxes. But it’s also true that the law leaves Floridians with greater ballot access, in key respects, than a lot of states run by Democrats. Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, unlike Delaware and New York.

DeSantis wins both ways: he gets cred from the base by riling up the media, but isn’t so extreme as to alienate normie voters.

Ditto his allegedly anti-gay bigotry. Vox’s Beauchamp says DeSantis is another Orbán. But Orbán’s policies are a ban on all teaching about gays in high schools, a ban on anything on television before 10 pm that could positively show gay or trans people, and a constitutional ban on marriage rights. DeSantis’ policy is to stop instruction in critical gender and queer theory in public schools for kids under 8, and keep it neutral and age-appropriate thereafter. In other words: what we used to have ten minutes ago before the woke takeover.

And who but a few fanatics and TQIA++ nutters really oppose this? I know plenty of gay people who agree with DeSantis — and a majority of Floridians support the law as it is written. The fact that his opponents had to lie about it — with the “Don’t Say Gay” gimmick — and then resorted to emotional blackmail — “This will kill kids” — tells you how unpopular their actual position is.

Some more contrasts: Trump famously wanted to torture captured prisoners, steal the oil in occupied Iraq, and desecrate Islam to break down Muslim detainees. DeSantis, on the other hand,

was responsible for helping ensure that the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets [in parts of Iraq] … were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated. “He did a phenomenal job,” Navy Capt. Dane Thorleifson, 55, said of DeSantis … [describing him] as “one of my very close counsels that as we developed a mission concept of operations, he made sure it was legal. I respected him a lot as a JAG. He was super smart, articulate, resourceful and a positive part of the staff.”

Imagine Trump taking care to make sure anything is legal!

Trump ripped children from illegal immigrant parents. DeSantis opposed the policy. Trump launched his real estate empire with a “small loan of a million dollars” from his mega-wealthy dad. DeSantis grew up in a working-class neighborhood, scored in the 99th percentile on his SAT, and worked several jobs to help pay his tuition at Yale.

Trump is a teetotaler, and while in office “his administration made a number of hostile anti-marijuana actions — rescinding Obama-era guidance on cannabis prosecutions to implementing policies making immigrants ineligible for citizenship if they consume marijuana.” DeSantis ensured that Florida’s overwhelming vote in favor of legal medical marijuana was passed into law, and he even suggested that the drug be decriminalized — despite his distaste for the smell of weed in public.

Trump wings everything, and almost never delivers. He couldn’t even build a fraction of his wall. DeSantis is disciplined, studies issues closely, and follows through. On a good day, Trump is fun. DeSantis, to be kind, isn’t. He has a Nixonian edge.

Trump believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, and, given the chance, would cover our national parks with condos and oil rigs. DeSantis is a governor in a state where rising sea levels and floods are real, so Trumpian insanity is a non-starter. “I will fulfill promises from the campaign trail,” DeSantis said shortly after taking office:

“That means prioritizing environmental issues, like water quality and cleaning the environmental mess that has resulted in toxic blue-green algae and exacerbated red tide around the state. We will put Everglades restoration into high gear and make it the reality that Floridians have been promised for three decades.”

This year he followed through — with more than $400 million in funds for containing rising sea levels. And last year, Filkins noted,

DeSantis signed into law a remarkable piece of environmental legislation that could become a model for the rest of the country. The project will establish the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a blueprint for the state to connect all of its large national and state parks with tracts of open land.

The corridor, once complete, would create an unbroken swath of preserved land from the Alabama state line all the way to the Florida Keys, nearly eight hundred miles away. It would insure that a population of wildlife — whether it be black bears or panthers or gopher tortoises — would not be cut off from other groups of its species, which is one of the main drivers of extinction.

So far, DeSantis is not that far from the “Teddy Roosevelt conservationist” he claimed to be. Yes, he’s mainly focused on responding to, rather than preventing, climate change — “Resilient Florida” is the slogan. And he’s allergic to green uplift or catastrophism. But another Trump? Nope.

His authoritarianism? He certainly gives off vibes. He picked a fight with Disney, for example, over their belated opposition to his parental rights bill — and punished them even after the law had passed. Using executive power to target companies for their free expression is not conservatism. (It’s worth noting, however, that in this case, the “punishment” was ending very special state treatment for the company.)

There is also disturbingly vague wording and vigilante enforcement in his parental rights bill — which is why I opposed it. He has tried to curtail free speech in colleges in ways that will almost certainly be struck down by the courts. Three state university professors were prevented from testifying against state policies (DeSantis denies any involvement). His comments on tenure are chilling. He said something dangerous about the role of child protective services in punishing parents for taking their kids to raunchy drag shows. Parental rights for conservatives, but not for liberals?

His spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, is Trumpian in her provocations, reviving the ugly trope that gays are pedophilic “groomers” until proven otherwise. DeSantis wages the power of government in the culture war — and with alacrity. There’s a pugilism to his style that comes off as bullying at times, so he can, quite clearly, be a charm-free prick. He’s been a coward over January 6 and Trump’s Big Lie. And as Tim Miller notes, he hasn’t exactly declared he would not be another Trump in his contempt for constitutional democracy (although such a stance now would effectively sink his bid to replace Trump). He’s said nary a word on abortion; and has ducked real questions about guns in the wake of Uvalde. Who knows what his position on Ukraine is?

I’m deeply uncomfortable with much of this...

 

The Sword Drops: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade; Clarence Thomas Says Contraceptives, Gay Rights, and Homosexual Marriage on the Chopping Block (VIDEO)

The day has come. The Sword of Damocles has crashed down on the constitutional right to an abortion. The Court's decision is the most consequential in generations, and will make the abortion issue even more contentious and controversial than it's been already.

But contra the Democrats, especially President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it's doubtful that "abortion will be on the ballot" this fall. Bread and butter issues, kitchen table issues, will be on the ballot, and what better way for the radical Democrat Party to try to change the subject, try to turn the page on the misery the great majority of Americans are feeling amid the worst economy since the 1980s. 

It's a big day. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "In historic reversal, Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade, frees states to outlaw abortion: The ruling marks the most significant curtailing of an established constitutional right in the Supreme Court’s history":

WASHINGTON — In a historic reversal, the Supreme Court on Friday overturned the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision and ruled states may again outlaw abortion.

The court’s conservative majority said the Constitution does not protect the rights of women to choose abortion and instead leaves these decisions in the hands of state lawmakers.

The 5-4 ruling marks the most significant curtailing of an established constitutional right in the court’s history.

The opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. closely tracks a draft that was leaked by Politico in May.

“We hold that Roe and [the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs.] Casey must be overruled,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.”

The opinion was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. concurred but did not join the majority opinion in overturning Roe, saying he would have upheld only a Mississippi 15-week ban on abortion. That made the decision to uphold Mississippi’s law a 6-3 opinion.

“The court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system,” Roberts wrote.

The court’s three liberal justices — Justice Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — dissented.

“Today, the court ... says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of,” their dissent read. “A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

The dissenting justices concluded, “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”

The ruling figures to set off a fierce political fight nationwide and state by state as politicians and voters weigh in on whether abortion should be restricted or prohibited entirely.

Opinion polls show most Americans support access to abortion, at least in the early months of a pregnancy. Nevertheless, half the states are expected to seek to quickly enforce laws that make most abortions illegal.

The decision is the high court’s most far-reaching reversal on a matter of constitutional rights since 1954, when the justices reversed six decades of precedent and struck down laws authorizing racial segregation.

But that unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education expanded the rights of individuals and rejected conservative state laws, while today’s does the opposite. It empowers states and reverses what had been the most significant women’s rights ruling in the court’s history.

For the U.S. Catholic bishops as well as evangelical Christians who believe abortion ends a human life and is immoral, the ruling is a triumph decades in the making. They had refused to accept the idea the Constitution protected abortion as a fundamental right...

Keep reading.

 

Marine Le Pen Upends French Presidential Election

Sunday is France's first round of the presidential election. 

Marine Le Pen, daughter to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front, is posing a serious threat to incumbent Emmanuel Macron. She lost badly in the second round in 2017, but who knows this year. Anything could happen.

At UnHerd, "The resurrection of Marine Le Pen: Macron has enabled her remarkable comeback":

Three months ago, Marine Le Pen’s political future seemed smashed into irrelevance by the rise of Eric Zemmour. She was past it, a tired war horse with no project and a quasi-bankrupt party, watching her closest National Rally associates being shaved off one by one by Zemmour’s seemingly irresistible promise of rebuilding the French Right in his image, a mix of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and De Gaulle’s 1950s RPF.

The Rally, the wisdom went, still operated like a family clan, even though Marine had fired her own father, the Front National’s founder, after he made one anti-Semitic joke too many. It looked to the past while Zemmour looked to the future, bringing together Marine’s own niece Marion Maréchal and former Sarkozystas from the hard fringes of Les Républicains, the Centre-Right party descended from the Gaullist movement. Le Pen was a spent name in French politics.

Fast forward to this week, however, the last before the first round of the Presidential election on Sunday, and Marine Le Pen is polling at 23% against Emmanuel Macron’s 26%. She is up two points and he’s down four in ten days — and, incredibly, the same poll credits her with 48.5% against Macron’s 51.5% for the 24 April run-off.

“This is well within the margin of error. There are configurations in which she could win,” says the political analyst Stéphane Rozès, who has advised every French President since Mitterrand. Bruno Jeanbart, the vice president of Opinionway, another pollster, concurs. “It’s harder to predict the run-off, mostly because voters don’t yet know how they will decide in reaction to the first-round results. But it’s no longer impossible.”

What explains Marine Le Pen’s extraordinary comeback from the political graveyard? Her platform hasn’t essentially changed: she still wants to reduce all immigration into France by 75%, and to create a legal discrimination between French nationals and foreign residents in their access to public jobs, benefits, and even private sector jobs. But she has softened it. Not only does she no longer advocate France’s exit from the EU, she has given up on leaving the Euro.

She wants to abolish Jus Solis, birthright citizenship, to deny naturalisation to the children of foreign parents born in France, but has given up on banning double nationality. She no longer wants a return to the death penalty, which she advocated as late as 2012. As for gay marriage, voted through during the François Hollande presidency, she prudently suggests “a three-year moratorium”, which means in effect it’s no longer in question. (In all fairness, Marine Le Pen has always been a social liberal; old Front hands used to bemoan her “gay Mafia” of advisers a decade ago.) And while she recommended leaving Nato before the Ukraine-Russian war, she has since rowed this back to merely pulling out France from Nato’s integrated command.

So far, so Souverainiste — and often hard to differentiate from the historic wing of the Gaullist party that defined itself in opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

In 2017, Le Pen, a barrister by trade, had miserably crashed and burned during her single debate with Macron between the two rounds. She came unprepared, got names and figures wrong, even had to look at her notes mid-sentence. Facing her, Macron, a former top mandarin at the Ministry of Finance, reeled off his facts and talking points with the condescending smile of a younger man who’s passed all of his exams with flying colours. (He actually didn’t: intimates say his own lasting personal trauma was flunking twice the entry to the elite literary École Normale Supérieure.) Macron, the newcomer, didn’t necessarily come across as sympathique, but he looked a lot more competent than Le Pen. When she realised how badly she’d done, she reportedly spent two days locked at home in a funk before limping back to campaign for the last days.

She always knew she would run again: what else, after all, can someone called Le Pen do? She had been advised, sometimes haphazardly, by a motley group of some 80 senior civil servants, CEOs, Énarques, lawyers and former SpAds who took to calling themselves Les Horaces, from early Roman history, and disagreed as much among themselves as they did with the party faithful. When she started preparing her 2022 campaign, she halved the number of Horaces. She brought in new faces and tightened discipline under her 36-year-old chief of staff, Renaud Labaye, a former Army officer who attended HEC Business school before joining the Ministry of Finance. They are the ones who worked on her current manifesto — as well as drilled her for the probable rerun of the pre-runoff debate, which Le Pen has sworn to herself she will win this time.

Last week Le Monde ran a three-page analysis that tried to “decode” Le Pen’s platform to demonstrate that she was still, in effect, a fascist threat. Its main proof was her promise, if she’s elected, to organise an early referendum on an immigration and national identity bill; a bill passed in this way legally needs not be examined by the Constitutional Council. The constitutional lawyer Dominique Rousseau was quoted calling it “un coup d’état” — even though the recourse to referenda was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in his Fifth Republic Constitution in 1958 (it was used twice by Le Général, and seven times since).

Similarly, her projected measures “against Islamist ideology” differ less from those adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande or Macron (in his recent Bill against Separatism, for instance) than from Zemmour’s blanket claim that “it’s Islam, not just Islamism, that’s against the values of the Republic”. (He tried to walk back on this last week, telling 100,000 Parisian supporters that he had no problem with “assimilated Islam in France”.) Even Valérie Pécresse sounded harder during her ill-fated Paris rally a month ago: “It’s time to stop denying the link between terrorism and immigration.”

“Accusations [like Le Monde’s] help Marine Le Pen more than they hurt her,” says Jean-Yves Camus, France’s leading expert on domestic and international far-Right movements. “Rightly or wrongly, people compare her style — seemingly reasonable, becalmed — to Eric Zemmour’s; as well as her lack of ego to most of her competitors...

Keep reading.

Walking the Transgender Movement Away from the Extremists

This is an amazing essay.

From Jonathan Rauch, at American Purpose, "Today's radical gender ideologues are harming the transgender community the same way left-leaning activists harmed the gay and lesbian rights movement in the early 1990s":

I’m ... well aware that many of the same arguments which were used against gay people are now being deployed against trans people. Gays were (supposedly) redefining marriage; trans people are (supposedly) redefining sex. We (allegedly) smeared all disagreement as homophobic; they (allegedly) smear all disagreement as transphobic. We were usurping democratic majorities, destroying privacy, defying nature, recruiting children, and politicizing science; they’re—well, you get the idea. Seeing the many parallels makes me humble about getting the trans issue wrong.

But I also see a different and more disturbing historical parallel. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian rights movement (as it was then called) came under the sway of left-leaning activists with their own agenda. They wanted as little as possible to do with bourgeois institutions like marriage and the military; they elevated cultural transgression and opposed integration into mainstream society; they imported an assortment of unrelated causes like abortion rights. To be authentically gay, in their view, was to be left-wing and preferably radical.

A loose collection of gay and lesbian conservatives, libertarians, and centrists watched with growing concern. We thought that the activists were dangerously misguided both about America and also gay people’s place in it. We resented their efforts to impose ideological conformity on a diverse population. (In 2000, a fourth of gay voters chose Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.) We saw how they played to the very stereotypes that the anti-gay Right used against us. We knew their claim to represent the lesbian and gay population was false...

RTWT.

 

The Nuking of the American Nuclear Family

I should also be blogging Michelle Malkin more often, but, as noted, my blogging's been light of late, due to big family and work responsibilities. 

That said, I should have more "hotties" posted over the weekend.

Anyway, at the Unz Review:

“Gay poly throuple makes history, lists 3 dads on a birth certificate.”

That’s an actual headline from The New York Post, which last week featured an unsettling trio of men who recruited two female friends to help them conceive and deliver a baby girl named Piper.

Piper is now 3 years old and has a 1-year-old brother named Parker. According to the “gay poly throuple,” Piper told her preschool classmates how proud she was of her plentiful progenitors by bragging: “You have two parents. I have three parents.”

Actually, the “throuple” is really a quintet. If you count Piper’s egg donor and birth surrogate, we’ve now traveled from “Heather Has Two Mommies” (the infamous children’s book normalizing same-sex adoptions published in 1989) to “Piper Has Five Parents.” And in 2021, if you have any discomfort or reservations at all about the nuking of the nuclear family by throuples or quadrouples or dozenouples, then woke society tells us there’s something wrong with us, not them.

Dr. Ian Jenkins, one of Piper’s polyamorous pops, wrote in a newly released book about their “adventures in modern parenting” that the arrangement is “just not a big deal.” Nothing to see here, move along. Two, three, whatever. “Some people seem to think it’s about a ton of sex or something,” Jenkins complained, “or we’re unstable and must do crazy things. (But) it’s really remarkably ordinary and domestic in our house and definitely not ‘Tiger King’ (the creepy Netflix hit series about convicted murder-for-hire zookeeper Joe Exotic, who headed up a three-way “marriage to two men).

Weirdly, one of Piper’s other dads, Jeremy, is also a zookeeper like Joe Exotic whom the other two met through an online dating service. All very “remarkably ordinary and domestic.” Ho-hum.

Neighborhoods, cities and nations are safer, healthier and more prosperous where nuclear families are the norm. But for the sake of social justice and modern progressivism, we are all just supposed to shake our heads politely and keep our alarm about the sexual slippery slope to ourselves. As University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox summarized in a 2020 article reviewing the benefits of two-parent married households for The Atlantic magazine, “sadly, adults who are unrelated to children are much more likely to abuse or neglect them than their own parents are.”

Never mind all the scientific studies showing an elevated risk of child sexual abuse in households where children live with unrelated adults. Never mind the CDC data showing that introducing men unrelated to the children in a family elevates the risk of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of those children by about nine times higher than the rate experienced by children raised in normal, stable nuclear family of married biological parents and their children...

Still more.

 

Trump's Digital Advantage

I love this!

Thomas Edsall, at NYT, "Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists":

https://t.co/TxRBYFkX0F via ⁦@Edsall⁩

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 29, 2020

In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.”

Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this large, untapped reservoir — Republican-leaning white Catholics who could bolster Trump’s numbers in a battleground state.

Burch, whose organization opposes abortion and gay marriage, made his plans clear:

We are already building the largest Catholic voter mobilization program ever. And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Our plan spans at least 7 states (and growing), and includes millions of Catholic voters.

How did Catholic Vote come up with these particular church attendance numbers for 199,241 Catholics? With geofencing, a technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area — a church, for example, or a stadium, a school or an entire town.

Geofencing is just one of the new tools of digital campaigning, a largely unregulated field of political combat in which voters have little or no idea of how they are being manipulated, in which traditional disclosure requirements are inoperative and key actors are anonymous. It is a weapon of choice. Once an area is geofenced, commercial data companies can acquire the mobile phone ID numbers of those within the boundary.

This is how the National Catholic Reporter described the process in an article earlier this month:

Politically minded geofencers capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices. That data can be matched against other easily obtained databases, including voter profiles, which give marketers identifying information such as names, addresses and voter registration status.

Such information can be a gold mine.

Burch described what CatholicVote.org initiated in the 2018 election. “We created ad campaigns targeted to mobile devices that have been inside of Catholic churches,” Burch explained. What’s more,

We told Catholics in Missouri the truth about then-Senator Claire McCaskill — that she was pro-abortion, was unwilling to protect the Little Sisters of the Poor, and opposed Catholic judicial nominees because of their religious beliefs. And she lost.

If you attend an evangelical or a Catholic Church, a women’s rights march or a political rally of any kind, especially in a seriously contested state, the odds are that your cellphone ID number, home address, partisan affiliation and the identifying information of the people around you will be provided by geofencing marketers to campaigns, lobbyists and other interest groups.

With increasing speed, digital technology is transforming politics, constantly providing novel ways to target specific individuals, to get the unregistered registered, to turn out marginal voters, to persuade the undecided and to suppress support for the opposition.

Democrats and Republicans agree that the Trump campaign is far ahead of the Democratic Party in the use of this technology, capitalizing on its substantial investment during the 2016 election and benefiting from an uninterrupted high-tech drive since then.

Republicans “have a big advantage this time,” Ben Nuckels, a Democratic media consultant said in a phone interview. “They not only have all the data from 2016 but they have been building this operation into a nonstop juggernaut.”

The new technology, Nuckels continued, allows campaigns to “deliver a broader narrative over the top” on television and other media, while “underneath in digital you are delivering ads that are tailored to those voters that you need to influence and persuade the most.”

RTWT.

Catholic Vote's 2008 campaign video is here.

Partisan Realignment After the 2016 Election

This is the best piece I've read on our current crisis of political polarization.

It's not a crisis of governmental institutions. It's a crisis of the party system. What a great read.

From Stanford political scientists David Brady and Bruce Cain, at National Affairs, "Are Our Parties Realigning?":

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE GOP

The election of Donald Trump was even more of a blow to any expectations of a new equilibrium than the back-and-forth elections of the prior decades. Not only was he not a standard Republican on free trade, taxes, entitlements, and so on, but the Republicans in Congress did not expect him to win. Their reaction to his victory was to try to pull together and pass the legislation they thought mandated by their 2010 wins six years earlier: end Obamacare, reform taxes, cut regulation, and increase energy production, among other longstanding Republican agenda items.

But the narrow Senate margin and Trump's lack of policy knowledge and legislative skill left Republicans with only a tax-bill victory. Obamacare is still the law of the land; immigration reform and budget policy remain problematic; and Trump is a more divisive president than either Bush or Obama. Thus our system — already burdened by partisan divisiveness, close elections, and few incentives for parties to cooperate on public policy — is saddled with an inexperienced, chaotic president and a governing party with no clear sense of what it wants or what voters want.

One result has been a struggle to define the GOP, which has sometimes seemed like a fight between the party's longstanding priorities and some of President Trump's particular emphases. But the battle lines have not been very clear — especially since neither the practical and contemporary meaning of the party's longstanding priorities nor Trump's beliefs are actually all that clear at this point, and since disputes about the president's character often overshadow internal policy debates.

If Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress in 2018, then the battle lines could be drawn more clearly, because those congressional Republicans who have held back criticism of Trump in order to pass legislation will no longer need to restrain themselves in the battle for the party. The 2018 and 2020 election cycles will, by and large, shape what Republicans become post-Trump. Republican incumbents might buy into Trump's views on immigration, deficits, trade, and so on to appease the Trump base, and thus change the party. Or the battle between Trump-like candidates and traditional Republicans could yield a new set of internal divisions and patterns. Or traditional Republican views might come to be reaffirmed.

The dimensions of the battle are revealed in survey data that YouGov has collected over the past few years. Starting in May 2015, they interviewed a panel of 5,000 Americans 17 times, with more interviews scheduled prior to the 2018 elections. The results have shown that Trump voters, compared to those Republicans who voted in the primaries for other candidates, are older, whiter, less well-educated, have lower incomes, and are disproportionately from the Southern, border, and Midwestern states. They are also, on average, angrier about politics, more likely to believe that many in the government are crooks, and  more dissatisfied with government. They are very anti-trade and anti-immigration and favor taxing the rich (those making over $250,000).

When asked about illegal immigrants living in the U.S. now, 70% of Trump supporters said they should be required to leave, while less than 35% of other Republicans agreed. In fact, a slight majority of other Republicans thought that they should be allowed to stay and acquire citizenship. On social issues such as gay marriage and the death penalty, Trump supporters were much more conservative than their fellow Republicans; in fact, a majority of other Republicans opposed the death penalty. In the post-election surveys, by a two-to-one margin, Trump Republicans favored a Muslim ban, while other Republicans opposed the ban. The battle for the heart and soul of the party is underway.

While these issues will be important, perhaps even more important is the extent to which Trump Republicans and other Republicans differ regarding the president. The August 2017 YouGov re-contact survey showed that 92% of early Trump supporters liked him, with 72% liking him a lot; Republicans who weren't early supporters, however, liked him less, with only 29% liking him a lot. The president's ability to retain the support of his base means those Republicans running for Congress must face the delicate task of appealing to that base in both the primary and general elections. Ed Gillespie's run for governor of Virginia in 2017 was an excellent example of such balancing. As one Washington Post article put it a few days before the election, "Gillespie is at the center of a civil war that is dividing his party, one pitting the Republican establishment he personifies with his four-star credentials against the anti-Washington forces that propelled President Trump's rise."

The battle between the Trump wing and other Republicans will play out numerous times over the next two election cycles, and the future of the party hangs on who wins. Crucial to Republican success will be suburban independents and Republican women who chose Trump over Hillary but today do not like the president. Off-year election turnout numbers in Virginia and Alabama confirm the importance of these voters.

THE RACE TO REALIGNMENT

In American political science, the standard party-change model has focused on "realigning elections," wherein one party achieves dominance that lasts long enough to resolve the key issues generated by the instability of the era. Those issues, in our time, appear to be challenges like immigration, inequality, family and social breakdown, worker insecurity, automation, trade, America's role in the world, and environmental challenges, among others.

Some observers suggest that Democrats have the best chance to arrive at a formula that captures a durable majority on most of these issues. As of this writing, the 2018 generic congressional poll favors Democrats by seven points (according to the RealClearPolitics average), and Trump's popularity is low. Historically, presidents in their first term often lose seats at the midterm election. And winning the House, the Senate, or both in 2018 would be seen as a harbinger of winning control of the government in 2020.

Control of all the elected branches would give Democrats a base of support from which to reduce inequality, reform the immigration system, and restore American leadership in the economic realm, on the environment, and in other respects. Nice scenario, if you ask any progressive. But there are many reasons why the Democrats are likely to fail in their efforts to create a new stable majority. The first and most obvious is that Democrats, like Republicans, are badly split on how the party should respond to both the Trump presidency and the dominant issues of our time. The result is that the number of Democrats running for president in 2020 may well be in the double digits, creating divisions that resemble those the Republicans faced in 2016.

Second, potential candidates are already favoring policies, like Medicare for all and free tuition, that even Californians know are not affordable. These views don't actually represent today's Democratic coalition all that well. In YouGov surveys, Democrats, by over two-to-one, favor cutting spending over raising taxes to balance the budget, and by almost two-to-one, they believe that quite a few in government do not know what they are doing. In regard to free tuition, 40% of Democratic voters are either against it or are not sure that it would work. Thus, the Democrats have not achieved agreement within their party regarding policies that deal with today's core challenges, and a multi-candidate presidential primary is not likely to resolve the issues and create a stable majority. That leaves the Democrats, like the Republicans, divided and not unified, and, just as with the GOP, the necessary changes seem more likely to occur in primary and general-election contests over the next few electoral cycles. The Democratic Party does not look ready to step up; the Republicans don't either.

Here again, a student of history would be reminded of the closing decades of the 19th century, when there were pro-silver Republicans and pro-gold Democrats (like President Cleveland) and the same intra-party mix on tariffs and immigration and many other prominent issues. Control of the government shifted back and forth between these unsteady parties over and over again. But by 1896, the sorting of the parties had occurred, and Republicans were pro-gold, pro-tariffs, and so on, while the Democrats under William Jennings Bryan were the opposite. The electorate, in that case, chose Republicans, and the ensuing stability gave rise to economic growth and a period of prosperity.

A broadly similar transformation is very likely in our future. The sorting process in the Republican Party has begun, with the Democrats to follow in 2020. This time the sorting will not be conservatives to the GOP and liberals to the Democrats, since that has already occurred and has defined the very order that is growing exhausted. Rather, the coming era will be defined by questions like what do conservatism and liberalism mean to Republicans and Democrats, and which vision will the American people support? Whichever way it turns out, the parties have finally begun the process of adjusting to the realities of the new global economy.

The shapes our parties are likely to take might be easier to see if we consider their most extreme possible forms — which aren't where we will end up but can show us the contours of possibility. For Republicans, these are the possible alternatives on either pole: a Trump-like Republican Party that is anti-immigrant, protectionist, anti-gay marriage, dependent on entitlements, white, old, not well-educated, and concentrated in the southern and central United States; or a party that favors markets and smaller government, and is not anti-immigration per se but is, rather, more libertarian and diverse in membership.

The Democrats, likewise, face a similar polar choice: a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren Party that pushes socialist-leaning policies (Medicare for all, free tuition, a smaller military, higher taxes, and more regulation) joined to an identity politics that excludes moderates from swing states; or a Democratic Party more like that envisioned by the Clinton-era Democratic Leadership Council, which is center-left on economic policy, inclusive on social issues, relatively moderate on defense and immigration, and somewhat resistant to identity politics.

The battles between these alternatives have already begun in some primaries. And the likely outcome is not any of the polar opposites, but a shuffling of the issues that gives shape to complex coalitions...

RTWT, at the link.

Democrats Still Don't Get It

From Allie Stuckey, at Town Hall, "What Democrats Still Don't Get":

What Democrats Still Don't Get https://t.co/py4yb6eSC9

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 11, 2018

Since the election, there has been ample speculation about how Trump “happened.” Last week, Obama offered his hypothesis: resentment and paranoia on the right. He lamented the destruction of the Republican Party and the ensuing demise of America because of the divisiveness and bigotry propagated by the president and those who support him.

It seems that most on the left agree with Obama’s view. Progressives purport that enthusiasm for Trump is bolstered by “white fragility”— an insecurity that white voices, once dominant, are now being drowned out by increasingly influential minority groups bolstered by demographic changes. Trump is their “white knight,” ushered in to defend their right to power and superiority.

While it may be easy for Trump’s opposition to dismiss him as the personification of white supremacy, it is also ignorant of the meaningful concerns of the Americans who voted for him. Real, significant changes in American culture and morality that have occurred over the past decade have varied the priorities of the populace, and it is unproductive to discount these in favor of blanket accusations of racism and resentment.

As America has moved quickly and drastically to the left, it has abandoned a portion of its citizenry who still hold to what are now considered “traditional” mores. So, while many who voted for Trump may have indeed done so out of insecurity and fear, these feelings were primarily instigated not by changes in demographics but by changes in values.

The progressive revolution has taken on many forms since the turn of the century, successfully shifting opinion on issues like sexuality, gender, race, immigration and welfare. Take gay marriage: In 2001, 31% of Americans favored same-sex unions. In 2009, the percentage had only increased to 37%. By 2017, that number had surged to 62%. In only eight years, public opinion changed by 25 percentage points—more than four times than it had during the previous eight years.

Regarding racism, in 2009, only 26% of Americans viewed it as a “big problem.” By 2017, that number had more than doubled to 58%. Along party lines, 32% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans saw racism as a major issue in 2009. During the eight years of Obama’s presidency, those numbers shot up to 76% for Democrats and 37% for Republicans.

A month after Trump’s election victory, Issie Lapowsky of Wired noted that, despite a Republican win, the country is indeed moving to the left:

“Over the eight years Barack Obama has served as president, public opinion in the United States has shifted decisively leftward. Think about it. When Obama came to office, he still hadn’t publicly supported same sex marriage. Last year, the White House was lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage. Over the last year, bottom line-driven businesses have boycotted entire states over discriminatory policies against LGBT people. A law prohibiting transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice just cost North Carolina’s Pat McCrory the governorship. Undocumented immigrants have come out of hiding, banding together online to discuss their struggles. And in November, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada all voted to make recreational marijuana legal.”

She’s right: the majority of Americans are becoming more progressive, particularly on social issues. This isn’t surprising. Evolving views on things like sexuality, race and immigration are to be expected after eight years of the most progressive presidency in history. Plus, millennials, soon-to-be the largest generation in existence, are extremely left-leaning, and, now in their 20s and 30s, have an influential voice in civic discourse. By nature, progressivism continually advances, conquering new moral, cultural, social and political territory with every step. In recent years, the movement has been extremely successful in gaining ground. Those left behind have barely had time to take it in.

Yes—there is real fear, and, to Obama’s point, perhaps some resentment amongst those who are not on board the progressive train. But, despite what many on the left claim, this has more to do with the changing moral, social landscape than it does racial identity and so-called bigotry. And it is not only the changes themselves that have caused anxiety, it is the attitude of those who promote these changes...

More.

Big Win for Religious Freedom in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission

Actually, it's apparently a very narrow ruling touching on the nature of religious bias in Colorado's anti-discrimination legislation, but either way, conservative proponents of freedom of expression and religious belief are going to be jumping for the moon today.

At the Washington Post, "Supreme Court rules in favor of baker who would not make wedding cake for gay couple":

Supreme Court narrowly rules for a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple https://t.co/ovz7BwsqGG

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 4, 2018

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled for a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple.

In an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy that leaves many questions unanswered, the court held that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had not adequately taken into account the religious beliefs of baker Jack Phillips.

In fact, Kennedy said, the commission had been hostile to Baker’s faith, denying him the neutral consideration he deserved. While the justices split in their reasoning, only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

Kennedy wrote that the question of when religious beliefs must give way to anti-discrimination laws might be different in future cases. But in this case, he said, Phillips did not get the proper consideration.

“The Court’s precedents make clear that the baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, might have his right to the free exercise of religion limited by generally applicable laws,” he wrote. “Still, the delicate question of when the free exercise of his religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power needed to be determined in an adjudication in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor in the balance the State sought to reach. That requirement, however, was not met here.”

Phillips contended that dual guarantees in the First Amendment — for free speech and for the free exercise of religion — protect him against Colorado’s public accommodations law, which requires businesses to serve customers equally regardless of “disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry.”

Scattered across the country, florists, bakers, photographers and others have claimed that being forced to offer their wedding services to same-sex couples violates their rights. Courts have routinely turned down the business owners, as the Colorado Court of Appeals did in the Phillips case, saying that state anti-discrimination laws require businesses that are open to the public to treat all potential customers equally.

There’s no dispute about what triggered the court case in 2012, when same-sex marriage was prohibited in Colorado. Charlie Craig and David Mullins decided to get married in Massachusetts, where it was legal. They would return to Denver for a reception, and those helping with the plans suggested they get a cake from Masterpiece bakery...

Also at Memeorandum.

The Hateful Ideology and Rhetoric of Homosexual Rights

I get some mean and nasty homosexuals at my college. And to think, it's been 10 years since Proposition 8. Maybe a deep backlash is setting in, and none too soon.

Read Andrew "Milky Loads" Sullivan, at New York Magazine:

Andrew Sullivan: Since achieving marriage rights, there’s been a radicalization of the gay rights movement’s ideology and rhetoric https://t.co/naGSy5UjH4

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 28, 2018

"The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery."

https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018

"Social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life."

https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018

President Trump's Political Base Unshaken

Well, it's been almost a year in office. We have the midterms in about 11 months and then we're off to the 2020 races. For the life of me I don't know how President Trump's going to pull off reelection. I thought this immediately upon his election in 2016, with the entire political establishment against him: Democrats, establishment Republicans, the corrupt media, Hollywood, and just about every other cultural institution you can think of. I love what he's doing --- and I believe he's changing this country for the better --- but the odds of beating back all the forces of leftist hatred seem insurmountable.

It'll be a miracle. We need it, though, badly, so I'll pray.

In any case, here's the Associated Press, "In the heart of Trump Country, his base’s faith is unshaken":

.@AP spent the year traveling to communities that flipped from blue to red and helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. How do they think he's doing? Read today’s story: https://t.co/xki14Uxi8F
Find the Trump Country series here: https://t.co/c4f0f1jatD

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 28, 2017

SANDY HOOK, Ky. — The regulars amble in before dawn and claim their usual table, the one next to an old box television playing the news on mute.

Steven Whitt fires up the coffee pot and flips on the fluorescent sign in the window of the Frosty Freeze, his diner that looks and sounds and smells about the same as it did when it opened a half-century ago. Coffee is 50 cents a cup, refills 25 cents. The pot sits on the counter, and payment is based on the honor system.

People like it that way, he thinks. It reminds them of a time before the world seemed to stray away from them, when coal was king and the values of the nation seemed the same as the values here, in God’s Country, in this small county isolated in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Everyone in town comes to his diner for nostalgia and homestyle cooking. And, recently, news reporters come from all over the world to puzzle over politics — because Elliott County, a blue-collar union stronghold, voted for the Democrat in each and every presidential election for its 147-year existence.

Until Donald Trump came along and promised to wind back the clock.

“He was the hope we were all waiting on, the guy riding up on the white horse. There was a new energy about everybody here,” says Whitt.

“I still see it.”

Despite the president’s dismal approval ratings and lethargic legislative achievements, he remains profoundly popular here in these mountains, a region so badly battered by the collapse of the coal industry it became the symbolic heart of Trump’s white working-class base.

The frenetic churn of the national news, the ceaseless Twitter taunts, the daily declarations of outrage scroll soundlessly across the bottom of the diner’s television screen, rarely registering. When they do, Trump doesn’t shoulder the blame — because the allegiance of those here is as emotional as it is economic.

It means God, guns, patriotism, saying “Merry Christmas” and not Happy Holidays. It means validation of their indignation about a changing nation: gay marriage and immigration and factories moving overseas. It means tearing down the political system that neglected them again and again in favor of the big cities that feel a world away.

On those counts, they believe Trump has delivered, even if his promised blue-collar renaissance has not yet materialized. He’s punching at all the people who let them down for so long — the presidential embodiment of their own discontent.

“He’s already done enough to get my vote again, without a doubt, no question,” Wes Lewis, a retired pipefitter and one of Whitt’s regulars, declares as he deals the day’s first hand of cards.

He thinks the mines and the factories will soon roar back to life, and if they don’t, he believes they would have if Democrats and Republicans and the media — all “crooked as a barrel of fishhooks” — had gotten out of the way. What Lewis has now that he didn’t have before Trump is a belief that his president is pulling for people like him.

“One thing I hear in here a lot is that nobody’s gonna push him into a corner,” says Whitt, 35. “He’s a fighter. I think they like the bluntness of it.”

He plops down at an empty table next to the card game, drops a stack of mail onto his lap and begins flipping through the envelopes...

More.

Radical Leftists Are Never Considered 'Fringe'

Here's this, at the far-left NYT (safe link), "The Showdown Over How We Define Fringe Views in America":

Today in the United States, sweeping majorities of the public say they support fair housing laws and the ideal of integrated schools. Nine in 10 say they would back a black candidate for president from their own party, and the same say they approve of marriage between blacks and whites. That last issue has undergone one of the greatest transformations in polling over the last 50 years. In 1960, just 4 percent of Americans approved.

More than a triumph over private prejudice, these numbers reflect changing social norms. The country hasn’t extinguished racism. But society — universities, employers, cultural institutions, the military — has made clearer over time that people who hold racist views had better nurse them off in the corner.

But these norms may be fraying. Since the last presidential election, and particularly since white supremacists rallied this month, unmasked, in Charlottesville, Va., the line between acceptable and ostracized views has started to become less stark. When President Trump declined to condemn white supremacists more forcefully, he ignited a fight that at its core is about how we define norms in America: Who gets to be part of civil society, and whose views belong on the fringe?

That fight is being waged by opposing protesters across the country and by pundits daily on TV. The president’s critics fear that he is inviting white supremacists out of the corner, helping ideas that have become widely reviled in America to be redefined as reasonable opinions — just part of the discussion.

“They are explicitly trying to do that,” Tina Fetner, a sociologist at McMaster University in Ontario, said of members of white supremacist groups. Until recently, they were ignored. But now the president is repeating their memes and the distorted versions of history that prop up their views, she said. As a result, the news media is broadly covering them, too.

“This is exactly the process of how social change happens,” Ms. Fetner said. “It’s not because all of a sudden there is more racism now than there was a few weeks ago. It’s that the absolute condemnation of those most abhorrent views is crumbling away because the president isn’t fulfilling that role.”

Ms. Fetner has studied the transformation in views on gay rights and same-sex marriage. The shifts around race and gender similarly reflect not just widening acceptance of equality, but also the rising condemnation of anyone who vocally opposes it.

Polls don’t necessarily capture how people truly feel; they capture what people are willing to say to a pollster. But the idea that some people might lie in surveys illustrates how social norms work. And political scientists suspect that part of what Mr. Trump has done, through his anti-immigrant and nativist appeals, is encourage people who might have kept silent in the past about their racist views to express them in public.

“For all these years, this is a group of people that’s been very bitter about the fact that they feel like they can’t speak,” said Sarah Sobieraj, a sociologist at Tufts. “It’s not just that their policies haven’t been popular.” And then Mr. Trump says similar things, with a powerful platform, without apology.

When norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture. “It’s really all of those things that we’re watching right now — they’re all up for discussion,” Ms. Sobieraj said...

This, of course, is all B.S., because it's only the alleged "alt-right" whose views are considered "fringe" and unacceptable. You never get wall-to-wall coverage of major stories like just last week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son stated that radical leftists are the far bigger threat today. (See the Times of Israel, "Yair Netanyahu says leftists more dangerous than neo-Nazis.")

As I've said for years, the Democrats' motto is "no enemies on the left," and that motto is now the default position of all the major actors of the institutional left. See John Fund, at NRO (via Memeorandum), "‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of Too Many Liberals."

I haven't been following politics, or blogging politics, all that much this last couple of weeks. And you can see why. We're in the middle of an all-out war on the Trump administration and his supporters, and there's no depth the leftist mass media won't sink in its campaign against truth and decency.

Radical leftists are the real threat to American freedom, prosperity, and security. And to defeat the radical left, you have to defeat all the institutions of cultural, economic, and political domination now working against traditional America. It's a cold civil war at this point, but that's just temporary. Regular folks will only take so much before they put up a fight. And as the radical left is never satisfied (as evidenced by the current leftist campaign to remove Confederate statues from the public sphere across the country), there comes a time when you have to stand up and be held to account for your values.

That's where we are today in America. There will be blood.

Court Rules Kentucky Print Shop Has Right to Avoid Making Gay Pride T-shirts

Good.

Screw the homosexual Nazis.

At WSJ (via Memeorandum and Vox Populi):

Court Rules Kentucky Print Shop Has Right to Avoid Making Gay Pride Shirts... https://t.co/xEoLZoiPgp

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) May 13, 2017

A Kentucky appellate court on Friday ruled that the Christian owner of a printing shop in Lexington had the right to refuse to make T-shirts promoting a local gay pride festival.

The dispute represents the latest court fight testing the limits of antidiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide.

The cases have led to a number of state court rulings against Christian-owned businesses that refused to bake cakes, design floral arrangements or take portrait photographs for same-sex weddings.

The ruling by the Kentucky Court of Appeals favored the business owner. A crucial difference in this case was the expressive nature of the service denied: literally words on a shirt.

In a split vote, a three-judge panel concluded that the store, Hands on Originals, couldn’t be forced to print a message with which the owner disagreed.

The dispute started in 2012 when Gay and Lesbian Services Organization in Kentucky asked Hands on Originals to make T-shirts with the name and logo of a pride festival...

Flashback to the Weekly Standard, "You Will Be Assimilated":

You Will Be Assimilatedhttp://t.co/1gu8Ivan7U pic.twitter.com/dguZejRK72

— The Weekly Standard (@weeklystandard) June 26, 2015

Democrats Still Haven't Faced Their God Problem

From Salena Zito, at the New York Post:

Democrats still haven't faced their God problem https://t.co/Aivj3h2S3Q via @nypost

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) March 20, 2017

PHILADELPHIA — The Democratic Party has a God problem.

And over the last couple of decades, as its base became more educated, less religious and more urban, this problem has only grown.

Some of this has to do with lower church attendance in cities versus rural areas, and the Democratic Party’s increasing reliance on urban voters. Some of it is the divisiveness of social or cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage. And the divide has seemingly sapped Democrats’ ability to communicate to religious Americans.

Especially if those people of faith are white, according to Brad Chism, a longtime and respected Democratic strategist based in Mississippi.

“And that problem extends to the national media, who by and large are mostly Democrats, meaning you have these powerful forces who do not understand more than half of the people in this country,” he said.

Chism makes a crucial point about what this means for American politics: Some of the greatest moral advancements in our country’s history have been accomplished largely through the influence of the church and churchgoing people, especially through the 20th century.

“You look at women’s suffrage, civil rights, the abolition of slavery and all of these massive other changes — religion and religious people have played a role in moving society toward a higher plane,” said Chism.

“We’ve seen that recently as well, but a lot of progressives and liberal Democrats don’t see the role of religion in society, and that is a big mistake,” he said.

And it’s a mistake people like Kevin Washo are trying to rectify, though they feel like they’re swimming against the tide. A day before the Democratic National Convention opened here last July, Washo, a Catholic and prominent national Democrat, organized a private Mass led by a Jesuit priest in the conference room of a prestigious law firm in a shimmering Market Street skyscraper.

That imagery is a far cry from the 2012 Democratic convention, when the hall exploded in turmoil as Democrats voted to amend their party’s platform to include the word “God.” The platform initially had dropped previous platform language that referenced God. After an outcry, convention chairman Antonio Villaraigosa returned to the stage to take a floor vote on a motion to reinsert the language.

The floor vote quite clearly failed as Villaraigosa repeated the roll call. Eventually he declared that “the ayes have it,” and loud boos exploded across the arena.

The headlines that came out of that debacle — “Democrats boo God” was a common one — ended up making matters worse for those, like Washo and Chism, who would like to see their party counter the perception of its estrangement from people of faith...

Washo and Chism need to get real: The Democrats are a Marxist party. They've doctrinally abandoned God as a matter of ideology and politics. Any outward expression of faith on the part of Democrat office-seekers is artifice. I mean, c'mon. Abortion politics, to mention just one policy item, is predicated on the rejection of moral values and Biblical teaching: Jeremiah 1:5: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations..."

A leopard doesn't change its spots. The Democrats won't change theirs.

Will X. Walters, Plaintiff in San Diego Gay Pride Nudity Case, Dead of an Apparent Suicide (VIDEO)

What a waste.

At the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Man who lost gay pride nudity case against SDPD dies of apparent suicide":

A man who unsuccessfully sued San Diego police over his public nudity arrest at a gay pride festival was found dead Wednesday night at his Hillcrest apartment in an apparent suicide, authorities said.

The death of Will X. Walters comes about two weeks after a federal jury delivered the verdict in favor of police.

Walters’ attorney, Chris Morris, said Walters was shocked by the Dec. 13 verdict and immediately left the downtown San Diego federal courthouse after it was announced.

Morris said he hadn’t heard from Walters since and had tried to reach him in the days that followed. Friends also tried checking on him, the lawyer said.

San Diego police were called to the apartment by a neighbor late Wednesday.

His time of death was not known. The county Medical Examiner’s Office said the death remained under investigation.

“Will Walters was a valiant warrior for his cause, and he will be missed by those who knew him and the community he fought for,” Morris said Thursday...

Maybe he should have just paid the fines, or whatever, and let it go.

This case isn't worth taking your life. But apparently, his identity as a homosexual man was everything and he wanted that fully validated, or else. I'll bet the guy was a pushy in-your-face advocate for same-sex marriage and all that. Homosexual activists are like that.

More (via Memeorandum).

Outpouring of Anger Has Little Recent Parallel (VIDEO)

It's the shock of it all. Leftist thought they had it in the bag, that, combines with the utter repudiation of the depraved far-left ideology, and it's really set them off.

At LAT, "Tempers on both sides flare in California after Trump's unexpected election victory":

A Bay Area teacher was put on leave for comparing President-elect Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. A woman speaking Assyrian on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train was accosted by another passenger who told her, “Trump might deport you.”

Some Latino students in Northern California were given mock “deportation letters” by a classmate. And a high school student in San Mateo County was given a bloody nose after voicing support for Trump on Instagram.

In the days since Trump was elected president of the United States, one thing has been certain in this divided country: Tensions are high.

The outpouring of anger has little recent historic parallel, said John J. Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican policy aide. Pitney said the closest comparison was with the election of 1800 in which Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in a bitterly waged campaign that included the candidates trading insults.

For many people, this year’s election was less a choice between two candidates than about whether voters felt they would have a place in America, he said.

“A lot of people didn’t just see this election as a matter of political choice but a matter of identity,” Pitney said. “On the one hand, many of the people who voted for Trump see themselves as forgotten and disrespected, and many of the people who are against Trump see themselves as groups under threat. Feelings are going to run very hot.”

Demonstrators across the country have blocked streets in protest of the president-elect. On Saturday, some 8,000 people marched from MacArthur Park to downtown Los Angeles, shouting “Not my president!” as they formed one of the nation’s largest demonstrations so far. Hundreds more peacefully rallied in Hollywood on Sunday.

In other instances, demonstrating has turned ugly. Los Angeles police arrested hundreds of protesters who marched in downtown L.A. in recent days, saying they vandalized property, blocked roads, hurled bottles and refused to disperse. Taggers scrawled anti-Trump messages and profanity on downtown buildings, tunnels, sidewalks — even on a television news van and a police cruiser.

Anxiety has been so high that calls to anti-suicide and crisis hotlines have spiked since the votes were counted.

Steve Mendelsohn, deputy executive director of The Trevor Project, a West Hollywood-based organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ people, said his organization has seen a dramatic increase in calls and messages this week.

“Over 95% of those who called mentioned Donald Trump,” Mendelsohn said. “The general theme was anxiety and fear.”

They worried about potential bullying, their healthcare and whether gay marriage would be reversed, he said. On Wednesday and Thursday, the organization received 688 calls and messages. On the same days last year, they got 307 such contacts, he said.

Fernando Guerra, a political scientist and director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said the surprise outcome of the election, which many polls had predicted would be won by Democrat Hillary Clinton, is a major factor in the intense reactions.

“So many groups were told this wasn’t going to happen, both Trump and Clinton supporters,” Guerra said. “Both are shocked.”

Guerra said that while he thinks the protests are “a great outlet for a lot of people feeling threatened and emotionally displaced,” the large demonstrations will  last only a few weeks (and possibly re-emerge around Trump’s January inauguration) because it is difficult to organize and sustain ongoing protests.

He also believes the uptick in racially charged incidents is temporary because American public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to racism — especially if Trump and his supporters condemn racist acts.

“This is where leadership counts,” Guerra said...

More.

An Emerging Alliance Between Neocons and Hillary?

From Paul Gottfried, at FrontPage Magazine, "THE HYSTERICAL LEFT AND THE REST OF US":

Last week in Commentary, neocon publicist Noah Rothman brazenly or stupidly denied the obvious. Having learned that Hillary Clinton, in a speech before the American Foreign Legion, trotted out such phrases as “America the indispensable nation” and “American the exceptional nation,” Rothman attributes the belief that the Democratic candidate is a “closet neo-conservative” to the “hysterical left.” Rothman assails a nutcase Left for what may be self-evident to the rest of us: “It is in Clinton’s implicit admission that the next president must begin the work of repairing the damage done to geopolitical stability and American preeminence by Barack Obama that has them in a tizzy. But that’s not neoconservatism; it’s not even ideological. It is simply reality.” Further: “The left isn’t just furious at Clinton for failing to denounce her neo-conservative endorsers; they’re aggravated by the fact that she’s undermining Barack Obama’s legacy.”

The Left may have discerned a very real connection between Hillary and her “neo-conservative endorsers.” These endorsers come in two kinds: the outright toadies like Max Boot and Robert Kagan who have jumped aboard the Hillary express; and those “conservative” publicists like Erick Erickson, Kevin Williamson, Bill Kristol, George Will and Jonah Goldberg who are doing everything humanly possible to blacken the reputation and political viability of Hillary’s opponent, without explicitly declaring for Shrillery. It is also totally disingenuous to ascribe the obvious conclusion entirely to critics on the Left. The Right that is supporting Trump has assumed the same thing as “the hysterical left” about the neocons’ extremely cozy relation to Hillary.

Rothman engages in more mystification when he tells us that Hillary is embracing “reality” when she sounds like a neocon, without really being one.  But Rothman’s “simply reality” is profoundly “ideological,” his denials not to the contrary, and he asserts, even more misleadingly, that what he represents is a “conservative foreign policy.” Rothman’s “conservative foreign policy” means of course a neoconservative one, of the kind we encounter in explicitly neoconservative publications. But most Americans who view themselves as being on the Right might have second thoughts about Rothman’s “conservative” policy.

They might believe like Trump that we should destroy ISIS and stand by proven allies but unlike Commentary, Weekly Standard and the National Endowment for Democracy, these Americans whom Rothman pretends don’t exist are not interested in nation-building or exporting the present version of American liberal democracy to the far flung corners of the globe. Trump wins the support of such people because he seems to be reviving a realistic foreign policy (although I wish he would articulate it more consistently). There is nothing even vaguely “conservative” about what the neoconservatives intend to do internationally. Nor can I find anything that distinguishes them from Hillary on social policy. Whether the subject is immigration, gay marriage, or the rest of the LGBT agenda, neoconservative publicists stand with the Democrats or are at least delighted to accommodate them. Even more importantly, they don’t give a damn what kind of wackos President Clinton would appoint to federal courts.

Lest I be accused of painting with overly broad strokes, I should point out that some public figures long associated with the neocons have disengaged and are now enthusiastically backing Trump. Presumably these erstwhile friends of the neoconservatives, including Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Rudolph Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and David Horowitz, have ceased to be “conservatives” in the way in which the neocons would apply that term. That designation is now reserved for the Never-Trumpers and Hillary’s neocon advisers.  This may be a dishonest move but it’s also a daring one. Given their vast media resources and relatively cordial relations with the liberal Left, especially since they’ve begun to work directly or indirectly for Hillary, neoconservatives who are fighting Trump or have declared for the Democratic candidate may still be able to shape the “conservative” public conversation. In the 1980s the founding generation of neoconservatives managed to occupy the establishment Right and to neutralize opposition on the Right. In the end, they used their extensive media and philanthropic contacts to become the most powerful force in the conservative movement.

But this success may be hard to match in the present circumstances. For one thing, as the commentator David Goldman (Spengler) has observed, the parents of John Podhoretz and Bill Kristol were much more talented, resourceful leaders than those who are now running the family business. Bill Kristol “makes the mistake of thinking that he still matters.” He heads a movement that engages “in cultish self-adoration” and which has been consistently foolish in its statements about foreign policy, especially when young Kristol compared the disastrous Arab spring to the American founding. Spengler also expresses disapproval for the infantile fashion in which the neoconservatives have “crushed dissent ruthlessly and declared anathema upon anyone who questioned them,” or at least on anyone on the Right who questions their doctrinal authority.

The neocon second generation are also hemorrhaging what is left of their older advocates, much of whom have defected to Trump and the populist Right. These older allies have been among the more prominent and more articulate representatives of their side; and what is left of the neocon camp is now being led by self-absorbed mediocrities, who, as Spengler notes, inherited the status they never worked for and for which they lack serious qualifications. Others in their camp may find it hard to pretend to be “conservatives,” except for being associated with a neoconservative foreign policy that is in no way conservative. Despite all their media and philanthropic assets, the minicons are not working from the same strength as those who set up their movement and brought it to power.

In fact these clumsy operators are setting the stage for a new alliance on Right that may eventually sideline them. This front is slowly taking shape around Trump’s campaign; and whether or not he wins, a Right that stands in opposition to the second generation of neoconservatives is already emerging. In all likelihood this movement will be far more successful in gaining influence and media accessibility than was the Old Right of the 1990s, of which I was a frustrated part. Although purges have been a constant aspect of the conservative establishment, particularly since the neocons took it over in the late 1980s, this ostracizing process may not work anymore against the critics of Jonah, Noah, Rich and Erick. The personalities on the other side may be too prominent to be simply purged or denied the use of the “conservative” label. Some things do change; and unfortunately for Commentary, this may be one of them.

Actually, Commentary remains my favorite magazine on the conservative right. It's just that I'm waiting for this electoral season to blow over, and hopefully for things to get more back to normal. Of course, if Trump wins things may never be normal again on the right, but I won't worry too much about it: the Democrat-left will be out of power by then.

And by the way, I think I align with the older neocons, especially Norman Podhoretz, who is awesome. Frankly, I don't care much for John Podhoretz or Bill Kristol, the latter whom especially seems to have lost his marbles.

Hat Tip: Blazing Cat Fur.