Somebody named Charles C.W. Cooke posted a diatribe at National Review directed at Donald Trump and his supporters. I haven't considered NR to be in any real sense 'conservative' or right-wing for some years now, especially after their purges of the politically incorrect writers in their employ. Lately they have been making a sporadic effort (or is it a pretense?) at appearing somewhat conservative, even flirting with political incorrectness on issues like immigration.
But by featuring pieces like this one, they are not helping themselves if they are hoping to lure some right-wing readers. I think their main concern is respectability, and it's clear from this article that many Republicans like Cooke look down on Trump and his followers. This kind of attitude is more often seen from the left, but the respectable Republicans seem to be closer in spirit to the liberals these days.
Cooke questions whether Trump is in fact a 'conservative.' I will just say this: anybody who is not conservative on the issue of immigration, that is, anyone who does not favor restrictions on immigration (legal and illegal) is not 'conservative' in any meaningful sense of the word. The NR crowd and their ilk in the Republican Party should invent some new label for themselves, if they are not concerned with preserving the people of this country, and by ''the people'', I mean those of us who make up the core population of the country, those of us who are not recent arrivals. Some use the term ''generational Americans'', but the pre-1965 population of this country are the core population. Conserving the people of this country and the culture they created should be first on the list of things to 'conserve.'
The Republican 'respectables' seem to believe, along with the hardcore liberals, that the people of this country are fungible, interchangeable, and they seem to accept this recent idea that you can overturn the population of a country and still pretend it's the same country. Well, I have a news flash for those people: change the people and you change the country. Replace the core American population with Third Worlders, whether they are here "legally" or not, and you have another Third World, polyglot country, not the America that existed up until 1965.
Of course many of today's adults were not born until well after 1965, but even people who are younger still have a dim memory of the America that was, before the immigrants began to flood into every corner, every nook and cranny of this country. Gradually we were left with this changeling America, as I call it, and our ''leaders'' and politicians gaslight us and try to convince us that America has always been as it is today; nothing has really changed except we have so much ''diversity'' and that, they say, is our ''strength."
No. Our strength, when we still had it, was based on our commonalities, and on our relative homogeneity -- the fact that most core population Americans were of similar stock, kindred.
So Trump's great appeal for many people is that he is the only one of the candidates who is addressing the immigration crisis, and in blunt, politically incorrect terms. How long has it been since we saw a candidate from either party who was willing to do that? The rest speak in hollow platitudes ("nation of immigrants'', "a better life", etc.) or make mealy-mouthed, equivocal pronouncements that are not convincing.
Trump is an exception, too, in that he refuses to apologize when the usual suspects feign offense or outrage, and demand he retract his words. What other politician or public figure has stood up to the lefty 'crybullies'?
Donald Trump certainly has the 'right enemies': the mainstream media apparently loathe him, and are showing symptoms of full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. The mad-dog liberals are frothing over Trump. And the NR crowd apparently share the left's feelings. So the fact that the 'right' people hate Trump makes me respect him more.
And the issue of whether Moslems publicly celebrated on 9/11 seems to have Mr. Cooke all up in arms; he doubts it. I can only offer anecdotal evidence from trusted sources. I have friends in New Jersey (where I once lived) who commuted every day by train to Wall Street. One such good friend told me that she witnessed a number of Moslems in Hoboken high-fiving each other after the Twin Towers went down. They were cheering and laughing. Of course this is anecdotal and not absolute proof, but my friend is not a liar, and she was not the only one witnessing this in a very public place. When there are so many testimonies to the same kind of incidents, that should constitute very good evidence that it happened. How many witnesses do you need to establish it as fact? There are plenty. I believe it because I heard it from trustworthy sources. I don't know why Cooke and the other Trump critics are trying to discredit many of the witnesses. The critics on the ''right'' seem to be just echoing what the left says. Are they afraid of forfeiting their 'respectability' by being associated with Trump? They want to distance themselves lest they be tainted. Let them. We are seeing who is who, and it isn't pretty.
It seems to me that the people at NR are caught in their own ''feedback loop", not Trump and his supporters.Labels: borders, cultural Marxism, divisiveness, elites, ethnopatriotism, GOP, Media, Moslems, party politics