Call it a nervous breakdown, an ongoing anxiety attack, or a mental meltdown. The past eight months have been a wonder to behold as some of the smartest conservatives I know suffer various forms of anti-Trump rage. Nothing in recent decades have upset these good people as much as the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.
No domestic or international policy disaster has gotten under their skin like The Donald has.
If I only would’ve kept track of all of the articles — what a collection I would have! Everything you can think of has been said and used against Trump — though new angles of attack are continually being dreamed up. I just read an email the other day from someone outlining in Scripture how the New York billionaire is the anti-Christ. I kid you not.
One of the highest profile blitzkriegs has come from the National Review, which devoted an entire issue to it — and countless articles and posts since. Regardless, I still appreciate the good work the magazine does — though, of course, it fails completely to reach enough people with all that information they produce.
Just four years ago the incredibly smart and courageous Ben Shapiro “named Trump ‘best candidate'” — you can read M Catharine Evans’ article outlining the details. Now Ben is one of the loudest Trump critics. It’s best to just forgive him for this — his talents are important to the conservative movement.
Oh, and the National Review is evidently now at such a fever pitch in their Trump hatred they published an article by the otherwise very talented Kevin D. Williamson that attacks Trump’s supporters. Here is Russ Vaughn writing at American Thinker in an article titled “National Review…the Trump Recruiting Office“:
Unable to stop the phenomenon that has become the Trump movement by attacking its leader, the pretentious princes of the Grand Old Party are now resorting to attacking their own rebellious base, and it is clear that some conservative journalists are too willing to help them do it. The most disturbing of these attacks comes from what has become Trump’s most determined journalistic antagonist, National Review. That NR has now turned its guns on Middle America saddens me, for I have long been a reader and admirer of their many fine writers. I was truly dismayed recently when that conservative publication devoted an entire issue to destroying Trump with almost two dozen leading establishment editors and journalists writing opinion pieces against him. That effort to terminate Trump failed so miserably it is almost laughingly ironic, for not only did it get NR dropped from the next Republican debate, it further established Donald as the anti-establishment leader and broadened his attraction.
Perturbed by their failure to truncate the Trump campaign, National Review is now doubling down in a coming issue with a truly toxic article (behind a pay wall) by roving editor, Kevin D. Williamson. Toxic is the nicest way I can think of to characterize the malevolent tirade that Williamson has produced for a publication apparently hell-bent on reducing its readership to a tiny core of conservative purists. Williamson, who frequently likes to drop into his pieces the downhome bona fide that he’s from West Texas, has probably doomed his chances of ever leading any parades back home with his virulent attack on the blue-collar class, the workers who populate the two largest industries in that region, farming/ranching and the oilfield, in particular, the latter because of the recent collapse of oil prices.
I highly recommend that you read Vaughn’s entire article. In it, he quotes Jazz Shaw at Hot Air who is “shocked, like many other conservative authors who have read Williamson’s diatribe”:
This is truly stunning. A broadside attack on America’s middle class is apparently the last recourse of truly lost and desperate souls. Worst of all, it’s a denial of reality. I don’t know how things are in hardscrabble, white West Texas, but I happen to live in one of those hardscrabble, white Upstate New York burgs and Kevin is living in some sort of dream world. Garbutt serves as a useful metaphor in his tale, but it bears little to no relevance to the reality these communities have dealt with nor the government policy failures which let them down.
Read Russ Vaughn’s article at American Thinker.
As I’ve noted here, here, here and here, it’s a shame that these great conservatives weren’t as angry about the conservative movement’s thirty-year collective failure in the information war. That would be a far better use of their energy.
Image credit: www.barbwire.com.
