It was such a fun time last week watching the perpetual drama queens that make up our national news media boil with rage over two newspapers declining to issue meaningless campaign endorsements. But it also revealed something unsettling about the unhealthy degree of emotional investment they have in this race.
Will the media accept the outcome of the election if Donald Trump wins? It’s far from a foregone conclusion that they will. There’s a strong argument they didn’t the last time Trump won. Why should anyone expect them to accept it this time around?
It’s a question these homely nerds are inclined to ask every elected Republican in the shallowest way possible — some variation of, “Will you accept the outcome of this election no matter what?” (I think every restaurant server from now on should ask Jake Tapper the moment he’s seated, “Will you accept the way your food comes out no matter what? It’s a yes or no question.”)
After the appalling behavior they displayed last week, now is a very crucial time to ask them the same thing. If they were this hysterical over management at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times deciding, there would be no endorsement of Kamala Harris this campaign cycle — the type of endorsement that hasn’t mattered for decades — how can they be expected to acknowledge a Trump victory? And if they won’t, what will it mean to the people who are still influenced by them? They will have essentially been told their elections and their government are invalid. These are the things civil wars are made of.
As silly as the media have made themselves look, they’re dead serious. That a major news publication wouldn’t throw its weight behind the non-Trump candidate means nothing to normal people, but reporters in Washington and New York aren’t normal people. Look how they talk. They say things like “Democracy dies in darkness,” and we laugh because it’s corny. But they believe in earnest it’s a sacred oath binding their entire life’s meaning to a cause: maintaining the Washington and corporate power structure to their financial benefit. To hell with everyone else.
If in 2016 the news media eagerly went along with an absurd hoax that Trump won that election in large part because he conspired with the Russian government, what won’t they say when he wins again? They just spent the past three months telling voters that up is down, black is white, and Kamala is popular. They moved on from the attempt on his life like it was a standard news cycle that had run its course.
How could we expect them to concede defeat after everything they’ve done? And yes, a Kamala defeat will be theirs, too. Her campaign is theirs.
It’s a question they’re not ready to answer because, for them, it’s unthinkable.
Of all the terrible things about Nikki Haley — her enthusiasm for more foreign war funding, her deference to corporate cultural assault — the cringe-worthy attempts to hype her status as a woman (A mom! A wife!) and Indian (“I’m a minority first!,” “I’m as diverse as it gets!”) are the least offensive. But it’s still really, really bad.
Her whole campaign is Hillary 2.0.
Haley currently polls nationally at less than 5 percent, and it’s the same in early Republican primary states Iowa and New Hampshire, so there aren’t a ton of reasons to spend time thinking about her. But it’s truly awe-inspiring that there exist Republicans who still believe there’s anything to gain from the party’s voters by rubbing their faces in identity politics rot.
When have Republicans ever showed any appetite for it? They haven’t. They don’t care. It’s only interesting to the extent that ethnic minorities and women who run for office as Republicans are contrary to the racist media’s preferred narrative. Outside of that, it’s meaningless and has no bearing on a voter’s decision to trust any given candidate with power.
Haley has already disqualified herself for the nomination by cheering on more war between Ukraine and Russia, stupidly undermining the only Republican senator trying to uphold the law that abortions not be funded with taxpayer money, and ceding authority to corporations that promote gross left-wing social causes.
It’s only a bonus that she thinks there’s something novel or compelling about being a nonwhite woman. In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Haley was asked about the first GOP presidential debate next week. “The fellas are going to do what the fellas are gonna do,” she said.
See? Because she’s not one of the fellas. She’s a woman! She’s unique! It’s cool!
At the Iowa State Fair last weekend, Haley walked around in a shirt that said, “UNDERESTIMATE ME — THAT’LL BE FUN.”
Get it? She’s a woman! And she’s in the primary up against nothing but men! And she’s a minority! Whoa! Brave!
Also at the fair, she responded to one question by declaring herself “a minority first,” which proved she’s “as diverse as it gets.” (For good measure, she threw in that “minorities are smart.”)
Haley continues to desperately milk the teat of Don Lemon having said on CNN a whole six months ago that she “isn’t in her prime.” At this moment, her campaign’s merchandise store — yes, Nikki Haley swag actually exists — features six items with reference to the “in her prime” remark. A personal favorite is the set of drink can koozies that say, “Past my prime? Hold my beer.”
You go, lady candidate!
Some other fun products include a “women for Nikki” shirt; a T-shirt that says, “If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman” (with the word “woman” in italics); and multiple other items that say, “Sometimes it takes a woman” (a paraphrase of Hillary Clinton’s 2019 bleat, “It often takes a woman…”).
It’s as if Haley is running an experiment to see how hard she can make Republicans wince. During her campaign launch, she said in her speech, “I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
Is Nikki Haley a woman, yes or no? Yes or no. Look at me. SAY IT.
An unofficial slogan of the Haley campaign is some variation of, “Send a bad-ss woman to the White House.”
July 3: “It’s time to send a bad-ss Republican woman to the White House.”
June 30: “We need to send a bad-ss Republican woman to this White House.”
June 4: “It’s time to put a bad-ss woman in the White House.”
Hey, now, SHE’s a firecracker! You don’t wanna mess with HER!
Motherhood, marriage, and heritage don’t overwhelm Republican voters because none of it is impressive. Those qualities are either basic human goals or matters of pure luck of the draw. But if Nikki Haley wants to run as Hillary Clinton 2.0, she’s doing just fine. The outcome will be the same.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long, crooked political careers have been marked by multiple well-established high crimes and misdemeanors. Not the least of these was Hillary’s decision to commit what amounts to multiple felonies by using an insecure private email system to conduct top-secret public business while U.S. secretary of state under Barack Obama.
This criminal behavior that so-called U.S. justice systems openly and repeatedly refused to punish was undertaken to hide treasonous actions. Those include selling political access and favors to foreign adversaries, as journalist Peter Schweizer and others, including The Federalist and members of Congress, have repeatedly and thoroughly documented.
Selling political favors to foreign opponents, including communist China and authoritarian Russia, is clearly treason. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “treason” as: “The betrayal of allegiance toward one’s own country, especially by committing hostile acts against it or aiding its enemies in committing such acts.” The Clintons got filthy rich from it.
Clinton then compounded that with more treasonous conduct when she lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
It is by now well-established that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid various actors to lie to U.S. intelligence agencies about Trump in an operation that eventually essentially negated the 2016 election — including encouraging federal employees’ treasonous behavior and two falsely predicated impeachments — and helped lose Republicans the 2020 election. Her campaign even tacitly confirmed this by paying a slap-on-the-wrist Federal Election Commission fine while still refusing to admit guilt for it a few weeks ago, seven years after the fact.
BREAKING: Last year Hillary Clinton quietly settled a campaign finance violation over reporting the *Steele Dossier* funding as legal services
Did FBI agents ever show up at Hillary Clinton’s house over her clearly criminal and treasonous “documents dispute”? Nope. The FBI’s director instead essentially confirmed she had committed multiple felonies but decided not to investigate or prosecute her for it because she was a presidential candidate for a major political party.
Hillary paid to have Trump falsely smeared as a traitor, laundering the slander through U.S. agencies that are supposed to provide equal justice under the law but now function as weapons to damage Democrats’ political opposition. In conjunction with others in the Obama administration that likely include Obama himself, she colluded with multiple security-state agencies to slander, undermine, hamper, and now threaten with jail time Democrats’ top political opponent.
That’s treason. It’s election erasure. It’s ongoing. And these traitors are all running about totally scot-free, while they jail their political opponents for what at best are misdemeanors, and for which they refuse to prosecute anyone on the left who perpetrates them — from street rioters all the way up to their presidential candidates.
My colleague Elle Purnell pointed out that when Trump countenanced chants of “lock her up” at his rallies over Clinton’s never-penalized repeat criminal behavior, Democrats lost their minds, and insisted this was the stuff of dictatorships, tyranny, and political repression.
“Dictatorships lock up the opposition, not democracies,”said Spygate intelligence official Michael McFaul. “Since when do Americans advocate jailing political opponents?” said top Spygate propagandist Julia Ioffe, then at Politico.
“In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents,” Obama said in 2016. “We have fought against those kinds of things.” “In America, we don’t send our political opponents to jail,”tweeted an official Democratic National Committee Twitter account.
REMINDER In 2016 Trump got huge laughs for telling Hillary Clinton she'd be in jail if he was in charge of the law Then there was four years of agitprop about how this proved that Trump was "a dictator who wanted to imprison his political opponents."https://t.co/jJADWmsMSjpic.twitter.com/hNgTVnmI5W
The Clintons are clearly traitors willing to endanger their nation for profit, and it would be fully just to prosecute them as such. Yet as president when he had the chance, Trump decided not to pursue it. According to Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s recently published memoir, “Trump brought up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and surprised Barr by saying that he had wanted the matter to be dropped after the 2016 election,” according to a review of Barr’s memoir in the fall 2022 Claremont Review of Books.
“‘Even if she were guilty,’ he told Barr, “for the election winner to seek prosecution of the loser would make the country look like a ‘banana republic.’”
Ever since riding down his golden escalator, Trump has been ceaselessly vilified as a tinpot dictator, an evil supervillain, an authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. But Democrats cannot change the facts, which include that Trump had fully legitimate justification to prosecute his horribly corrupt political opponent and refused to do so. They can make no such argument for themselves.
So, if it is indeed the stuff of banana republics and ending democracies to jail one’s political opponents, let’s all be clear about which political party is dragging the nation down that route. And let all in authority who care about equal justice under the law begin fiercely applying Democrats’ standards to them until they stop perverting justice to destroy our country.
The no-holds-barred legal shutdown and prosecution of leftist insurrectionists filling state capitols in support of a transgender child murderer would be one such proportionate response.
Even if Democrats really were concerned about our convoluted election regulations, no serious person thinks New York’s district attorney has a case against Trump.
As the saying goes: If even Never Trump Jonah Goldbergdoubts your wisdom in bringing criminal charges against the former president, then you know it’s a stupid case.
Nobody actually says that, but it’s one of many indicators that the indictment potentially coming this week from Democrat New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg (yes, that’s his actual name) is so absurd as to make anyone wonder if our justice system really is a joke.
Trump on Saturday announced that he expected to be arrested soon in relation to the very old, very stale, very tiresome allegation that he violated campaign finance laws when he reimbursed his lawyer for a payment made to a porn actress in order to supposedly cover up a past affair. The accusation is that Trump did it to protect his campaign and intentionally neglected to publicly disclose the payment, as would be required by law.
I think Democrats have no interest whatsoever in campaign finance violations and really just enjoy thinking about Trump’s sex life. But even if they really were concerned with the integrity of our convoluted election money regulations, no serious person thinks Bragg has a case. That’s evidenced no less than by the fact that the people who considered pursuing this charge previously eventually dropped it— including Bragg!
While Trump was in office and Bragg was a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, his office looked at this very case and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. It’s a horse that has been beaten to death, resuscitated, and beaten again. Then smacked on the rear one more time.
But persecuting Trump has no downside for Democrats chasing fame. And now is as good a time as any. The historic nature of putting a former president in handcuffs as he campaigns for another term is too good for a low-rent prosecutor to pass up.
Not so good for a republic that wants to last another year, let alone 200, but that’s never top of mind for people like Bragg.
Try to wrap your mind around it. The former president, the likely Republican presidential nominee in 2024, might be seen on live national television cuffed, placed in the back of a squad car, and taken to a police station for his mug shot. All this over campaign paperwork that would any other time be resolved with a corrected filing and, perhaps, a penalty fee.
And that’s only if you presume Trump is guilty. Rational people think he might have tried hiding an affair, but that it’s absolutely possible it was for other reasons. (I wonder if anyone has ever in American history tried hiding an affair for reasons outside of protecting his prospects to be elected U.S. president. Interesting question, but far from settled!)
If Bragg brings an indictment, that’s one up for him and another one down for faith in America.
The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.
How the Russian Bots Story Followed the Playbook
In 2016, then-Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook launched the conspiracy theory that then-candidate Trump was in cahoots with Russia and colluding together to steal the 2016 election. One dossier full of bunk allegations commissioned by the Clinton campaign later, the entire media establishment, in tandem with a politicized intelligence community, was running with the Russia collusion hoax.
One of the many conspiracy theories thrown at the wall was that Russia was influencing U.S. voters via social media, including through armies of “bot” accounts. As my colleague Joy Pullmann has noted, U.S. intelligence agencies propelled that claim with an “intelligence community assessment” on Jan. 6, 2017, “signed off publicly by the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA concluding that Trump’s election was boosted by Russian social media content farms.”
Regime media ran with it the same narrative before and after that assessment that turned out to be false:
The Washington Post: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 2016.
Politico Magazine: “How Russia Wins an Election” (spoiler: “the Kremlin’s troll army swarmed the web to spread disinformation and undermine trust in the electoral system,” the piece says), December 2016.
NPR: “How Russian Twitter Bots Pumped Out Fake News During The 2016 Election,” April 2017.
New York Times: “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” September 2017.
Mother Jones: “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election — Including Many Likely From Russia,” October 2017.
The “Twitter Files” revealed just weeks ago that media pressure on this story, combined with threats from elected Democrats, were successful in getting Twitter to obey U.S. intelligence agency requests for information suppression, even though Twitter executives couldn’t find any evidence of coordinated Russian disinformation campaigns on their platform.
31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.
In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”
Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR
Hilariously, Tim Starks, the same writer who wrote WaPo’s admission this week that Russian bots had “little influence” on the election, had written a 2019 piece for Politico titled “Russia’s manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed.”
While media outlets were running cover for the story, they slapped “fact” “checks” on those who challenged the narrative, including the U.S. president. And (you guessed it) they cited the intel community’s Jan. 6, 2017 report as evidence — the same one now called into question by The Washington Post’s latest admission.
Those allegations, along with several other now-debunked claims about Trump-Russia collusion, were the basis for a special counsel investigation and a presidential impeachment, all part of a narrative aimed at kneecapping Trump’s time in office. The Mueller investigation even indicted a Russian bot farm for election interference.
Only now — after Trump has been successfully hounded out of the White House, now that almost half of likely voters have been convinced that Russia probably “changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” and everyone else has forgotten about the story — does The Washington Post come around to admitting that those troublesome Russian bots didn’t really do much after all.
5 Other Times Corporate Media Followed the Same Strategy
The Twitter bots story was just one of many instances of regime media running with the same strategy. They do it almost daily, but here are just five of the most egregious examples in recent memory.
Covid: From masks to lockdowns to vaccines, we were hounded by media bullhorns for years about the untouchable efficacy of every recommendation the “experts” tossed our way. Those who resisted, in person or on social media, were vilified and censored. Workers lost jobs, kids fell behind in school, non-Covid medical patients were denied potentially life-saving treatments and surgeries, neighbors shunned each other, and people were forced to get experimental injections they didn’t want.
Only after the reigning narrative had been used to quash its intended targets for two years did its messengers admit the truths the rest of us had been saying from the beginning.
Inflation: Despite the obvious pitfalls of Covid-era decisions to shut down the entire nation’s economy and then hand out free money to everyone screwed over by government lockdowns, regime media insisted that inflation wasn’t happening under the newly minted Biden administration. CNBC told us to “Ignore ‘hysterical people’ — inflation is not here to stay, economist says.”
“Inflation isn’t a real danger,” insisted WaPo. “The Inflation Scare Doesn’t Match Reality,” said Forbes. The New York Times offered “179 Reasons You Probably Don’t Need to Panic About Inflation.”
Now that we’re undoubtedly experiencing the worst inflation in four decades, the talking point has changed to “actually, inflation is good.”
The Steele dossier: After British agent Christopher Steele was hired by the Clinton campaign’s opposition research firm to write now-debunked rumors about Trump in what became known as the Steele dossier, Steele shopped the story out to media outlets, which ran with the hoax. The New York Times even got a Pulitzer for it. The information in the dossier, which corporate media coverage helped legitimize, was used by the Obama FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Journalists who questioned the concocted narrative were called conspiracy theorists.
After the damage to the Trump campaign (and eventually, the Trump administration) was done, corporate media admitted, in a laughable understatement, that the “Arrest of Steele dossier source forces some news outlets to reexamine their coverage.”
Irreversible surgeries for gender dysphoria: Corporate media helped fuel the epidemic of sexual confusion giving rise to disfiguring surgeries and hormone “treatments” for people, including children, with gender dysphoria. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post pounced on anyone who challenged the dogma that pumping teenagers with off-label hormones and dicing up their genitalia was a totally safe and normal thing to be celebrated. People like The Federalist’s own John Daniel Davidson are still locked out of their social media accounts for telling the truth about the transgender craze.
Sandwiched between op-eds decrying critics of transgenderism, The Times allows no one but itself to wonder, belatedly: “Is There a Cost?“
Hunter Biden laptop: When the New York Post published damning revelations about the Biden family’s overseas business dealings shortly before the 2020 presidential election, legacy outlets smeared the story as “disinformation” and a Russian info op.
“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” parroted Politico. CBS’s Lesley Stahl called the laptop “discredited.” NPR told readers, “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” The Post and others who shared the story had their social media accounts frozen or their posts taken down.
A year and a half later, The New York Times quietly admitted — in the 24th paragraph of an article about Hunter Biden’s taxes — that “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop … [was] authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” By then, the 2020 election was safely in Joe Biden’s hands.
Don’t think those six instances are the only times regime media have run the same playbook. By now, it’s their standard practice.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
Since a civil war is about to break out and destroy the modern Republican Party — fingers crossed — let me tell you what grinds my gears.
Young NatCons, many of whom I know and like, seem to be under the impression that they’ve stumbled upon some fresh, electrifying governing philosophy. Really, they’re peddling ideas that already failed to take hold 30 years ago when the environment was far more socially conservative and there were far more working-class voters to draw on. If Americans want class-obsessed statists doling out family-busting welfare checks and whining about Wall Street hedge funds, there is already a party willing to scratch that itch. We don’t need two.
“National conservatism”— granted, still in an amorphous stage — offers a far too narrow agenda for any kind of enduring political consensus. It lacks idealism. It’s a movement tethered to the grievances of a shrinking demographic of rural and Rust-Belt workers with high school degrees at the expense of a growing demographic of college-educated suburbanites.
The “New Right” loves to mock “zombie Reaganism.” Well, the ’80s fusionist coalition, which stressed upward meritocratic mobility, free markets, federalism, patriotism, and autonomy from the soul-crushing federal bureaucracy, was by all historical measures more successful than the Buchananism that followed or Rockefellerism that preceded. Zombie Reaganism was a dramatic success not only in 1980 but also in 1994 and again in 2010 and 2014. The “shining city on a hill” might sound like corny boomerism, but it’s still infinitely more enticing than the bleak apocalypticism of Flight 93.
Too many conservatives misconstrued Donald Trump’s slim 2016 victory as a national realignment. It was a mirage. Trump, a uniquely positioned celebrity candidate, benefitted not only from Obama fatigue but, more than anything else, the cosmic unlikability of Hillary Clinton. Yes, the GOP needed an attitude adjustment, a stiffening of the spine. There is no denying Trump’s presidency achieved some positive results (most of them, incidentally, also on the “zombie Reaganism” front with deregulation and the judiciary), and he made inroads with working-class voters and Latinos. But Republicans have now blown three elections catering to largely incoherent NatCon populism.
There is no one reason or person culpable for the right’s failures in 2022, but there are certain types of candidates finding success. Ron DeSantis, Brain Kemp, and (in 2020) Glenn Youngkin can call out crony capitalism without sounding like Ralph Nader’s comms director. All of them have been highly critical of lawlessness of illegal immigration, but none of them come off like chauvinists. All of them supported heartbeat bills and election integrity laws, and above all, they are competent administrators of government.
The white-collar worker in Virginia or North Carolina, living in a multi-use neighborhood, probably isn’t as preoccupied with drag queen story hour or the intrigues of Big Tech or the Justice Department or Chinese tariffs — as important as those issues might be — as Josh Hawley seems to believe. The suburban voter might be more socially liberal these days, but they are still dispositional conservative. And one strongly suspects they would rather see public school reform, bigger retirement accounts, and lower property tax bills than a commissar regulating the internet or some protectionist policy killing economic dynamism.
Of course, the New Right would like to claim DeSantis as one of their own. Allie Beth Stuckey, like many on the “New Right,” maintains that the Florida governor’s impressive win tells us: “we’re done with the old, corporate tax cuts GOP. We want you to use all the power available to you to crush the entities crushing us.”
That’s a Twitter reality. In the real world, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Florida (and Texas and Arizona) to enjoy an inviting regulatory environment, low taxes, and relative freedom — not to watch the governor teach Disney a lesson. A politician who cuts taxes and opens schools and businesses, despite pressure from the federal government, isn’t “crushing” anyone, he is freeing them. A politician who insists that state-run elementary schools should teach kids math, science, and history rather than identitarianism, myths, and sexuality has a compelling story to tell parents.
DeSantis is also a politician. So he shows up at trendy NatCon conferences, in the same way he used to chase trendy Tea Party endorsements from Club For Growth and FreedomWorks. Despite the left’s claims, DeSantis doesn’t strike me as an ideologue, but rather a champion of normalcy. Maybe incumbents were successful in 2022 because people are sick of drama?
What about J.D. Vance, though, David? Different types of candidates appeal to different regions. No one is arguing that Zombie populism is without any traction. Before Vance, there was Rick Santorum, whose message also had a limited allure. Yes, Vance can win in Ohio. Mike DeWine, about the most milquetoast moderate imaginable, can also win in Ohio, and by a bigger margin. Does Vance win Arizona or Nevada? Probably not. Does Blake Masters win in Ohio? Probably. But Americans are moving to Henderson, Nevada, and Boise, Idaho, not Akron, Ohio.
In the meantime, the New Right’s intellectual movement is a Trojan horse for a bunch of corrosive authoritarian “post-liberal” ideas. If a malleable “common good” means jettisoning limiting principles, well, no thank you. Plenty of secular right-wingers like myself have been defending religious freedom on neutral, classical liberal grounds. Today, the New Right tells me those notions are dead. If that’s true, I wonder who will be left to defend them 10 years from now?
By the way, if you’re under the impression that the New Right think-tankers and technocrats who rail against “elites” and “libertarians” and romanticize lunch-pail unionism are going to send their kids to work in warehouses for minimum wage, I have news for you. That’s reserved for the plebs. It’s no surprise that Compact, the New Right magazine standing athwart the “libertine left and a libertarian right,” employs a Marxist editor or that so many anti-woke socialists feel comfortable allying with the New Right. That’s a Twitter realignment, however, not a real-world one.
Fortunately, it’s highly unlikely that the average Republican with a small business is as antagonistic to the notion of individual liberty as the average First Things editor. The average voter tends not to treat every loss as if it were the end of Rome. It’s bad out there. But people who tell you this is the worst era in history or that we’re facing insurmountable unique problems are just as hysterical as the people who tell you democracy is over. Most Americans realize politics is a grind. I’d love to live in a minarchist paradise, but I’m a realist. There are approximately 349,999 million people who think differently. That’s how it shakes out in a diverse, sprawling nation. A national party needs to broaden its message to convince — not just follow the whims — of as many voters as possible. NatCons are headed in the wrong direction.
My friends believe the Republican Party establishment is incompetent and cowardly. Maybe. Thankfully, we don’t have a binary choice. May both factions fail.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post, and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
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