The Mote in Thine Own Eye (in the Eye of the Conservative): Why Are Conservatives So Naïve That They Refuse to See the Beam in the Eye of Those Who Hate Their Very Existence?

Giving [Nancy Pelosi] breathing room makes it easier for her to install the socialism that Jonah [Goldberg] should worry about instead of what the staff at the New Yorker thinks. As a grown man, I do not seek the approval of those who hate me. I will not accommodate their efforts to ruin me and my country.

— Don Surber

The day I read Liberal Fascism (and it was really a single day or, rather, a single night; on a flight 13 years ago across the Atlantic, I was supposed to rest, sleep if possible, but I couldn't put the massively enlightening — and deeply troubling — eye-opener down), I went from simple admirer of Jonah Goldberg to fervent follower of Jonah Goldberg. 

His regular NRO articles, which I started reading pretty much religiously, confirmed his insight into all manners of subjects — as well as his refusal to bow before the Left while setting them, and their ideas, straight (see half a dozen examples a couple of paragraphs down that have been linked through the years on this blog).

That is why I have been so dumbfounded by his attitude in the past four or five years.

By all means, eviscerate President Donald Trump all you want (although "a bane of humanity"! — really?!) — in 2016 I too was among those who were suspicious of the New York billionaire's intentions — and go after the (rare) Republican who shows signs of delusion and/or derangement.

But can it really be that Jonah himself might be among the latter? Doesn't he realize that the entire left is anti-Jewish (with numerous examples of antisemitism in the past decade(s)) and anti-Christian to boot — not to mention… anti-American?! (Thank you, professor, for the Instapundit link.)

Bookworm's article The West is reverting to paganism (obrigado to Sarah Hoyt) helps explain why Leftism — allegedly anti-superstition, rational, and scientific — is actually akin to a religion itself and, more specifically, to a cult. A cult of Drama Queens and crisis seekers mounting non-ending crusades — not least (and unsurprisingly) against what is quite probably its greatest foe, precisely its main competitor, the entire Judeo-Christian religion along with the nation that is exceptional precisely because it best embodies the Golden Principle.

It is in that perspective that I am shocked by conservatives like Jonah Goldberg going ballistic on one single solitary Republican as well as believing in the Democrats' charge of a "Big Lie" and by devout Christians like Sunday Bible Study teacher (and regular CPAC attendee) Myra Adams likening the Christian rights party to the un-Christian rites party: "Where do people like me go, when both parties are extreme?" Neither does anything but regurgitate mainstream (and deeply partisan plus anti-Christian and anti-Jewish) media focal points. 

What in God's name (if I may use the expression) is it about perspective and partisanship and double standards that these people — along with the squishes in the government (on federal as well as on state level) — fail to understand?!

Has Jonah Goldberg given in to the condescending mainstream media and stopped watching the content of "cable- and Facebook-fueled culture war tribalism" and its "green room farts"? Has he stopped reading people like Derek Hunter? Read his whole article, Jonah (excerpt below), and tell us if the author of Outrage, INC. has a point or if he should just be dismissed like every other conservative is dismissed by the Left (most recently, quite volubly by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and CNN, along with demands for more censorship, governmental as well as by private business)…

Joe Biden has used “the Big Lie” to describe United States senators exercising their constitutional authority to question state certification of the Electoral College vote.

Of course, Biden’s framing was, in and of itself, a Big Lie. Those Senators were not attempting to thwart democracy, they were engaging in it. They weren’t trying to overturn the election results, they were demanding answers to the subversion of the Constitution by state officials circumventing election laws. That should concern everyone. You can tell who benefited from the thwarting of rules by who objects to their enforcement, or even looking into it.

Still, the Big Lies are flying from the left, from their mouths and through the megaphone of journalists.

A Republican’s old Facebook posts are one of the top stories, even though most people have never heard of her and her voters voted for her anyway. She must resign, or so we’re told, because…well, just because. But a Democrat marries her brother to get him citizenship, launders a fortune through her campaign to the joint bank account she shares with her third husband, while spewing Hitler-level anti-Semitism and she’s a rock star. To call it a double standard is to imply there are any other standards Democrats have.

Didn't Jonah Goldberg — who has seen through the Left on so many subjects, from the JournOlist and the left's alleged propensity for debate and discussion, to their alleged compassion and its opposition to the right allegedly imposing their values, through immigration reform and climate deniers, not to mention the Left's Tyranny of Clichés — once bring extreme focus to the problem, currently as well as historically, by writing the stunning eye-opener, Liberal Fascism? 

Didn't what I called the book's most important single paragraph 13 years ago describe "how liberals cheat in the war of ideas" and thereby prefigure the Antifa riots as well as mainstream and social medias' revolutionary step in late 2020 and early 2021, the massive campaign for the cancellation and the de-platforming and the muzzling of key conservative voices (not least President Trump himself)?

That is how the liberal Gleichschaltung works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible, mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive voices are encouraged, lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity," or "liberation," or "unity," and, most of all, "progress."

 As Bernie Marcus clarified nine years ago what lies behind the squishes' attitude, 

the Republicans play the rules of … golf. In golf, if you miss a putt or you touch the ball, you call a shot on yourself. We're playing the game of golf. The Democrats are playing ice hockey. It's a killer game. And that's the difference in politics. 

This explains, of course, the wide hostility to Donald Trump, a Republican who understood — and who understands — that to fight the Democrat party, a Republican must act like an ice hockey player himself.

As I wrote in my book, the attitude (that of a gentleman, whether truly gentlemanly or simply virtue signalling) is akin to refusing to see the beam in your brother's eye, because of your focus, indeed your obsession, with a mote (real or alleged) in your own eye. 

I don't know if Marjorie Taylor Greene is an antisemite or not, but to quote Bookworm, what we now face in the (heavily partisan) view of just about every member of the Left, not excluding those who now wield massive government power, "Traditional Christians and Jews are now automatically considered to be far-right extremists and, especially, white supremacists." 

Derek Hunter, again:

There’s a media-perpetrated myth that Joe Biden is a moderate; that he’s an honest man. He is not, and never has been. He’s a politician, a Democrat, who now has the authority of the United States government behind him. … We’re in for four years of abuse, of demonization …

Roger Kimball has more on what awaits us:

The Swamp tells us [that those thousands of armed troops in the nation’s capital are] to protect against “domestic terrorism” and “insurrection.”

Thus, we see The Washington Post, megaphone of the richest man in the world, warning that “ideologically motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority … could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence.” That was in a story headlined “The U.S. is finally catching up to the domestic terrorism threat.”

Whence the threat?

Why, from Donald Trump, of course.

Don’t you remember? He “incited” “insurrection,” “sedition,” and “violence” on Jan. 6 when he held a rally in Washington and urged his followers to make their way “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol to “make their voices heard.”

That was the pretext for the latest Washington entertainment, “The Impeachment of Donald Trump, Episode II” of the mini-series. 

Breitbart adds a Tucker Carlson segment showing that Democrats "Think It Is Fine to Mobilize the Army in Order to Put Down Domestic Opinions."

Daniel Greenfield: 

Inside of a month, Democrats had redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy

  … the Democrat media went from writing sympathetic pieces about BLM lawyers throwing molotov cocktails at the police to demanding a thorough purge of every single person who had ever questioned the idea that Joe Biden might not be the most popular politician ever.

 … Questioning an election has become incitement to insurrection. To suggest that there’s anything illegitimate about Biden is sedition. Unity means believing that Joe Biden legitimately won an election for which Democrats changed the rules beforehand, then declared a national emergency, and inaugurated him behind barbed wire and lines of soldiers authorized to shoot. 

 … D.C. isn’t the epicenter of unity and healing, but of a wave of political purges targeting everyone from President Trump to ordinary Americans whose political views are being criminalized.

There’s no healing to be found in show trials and political purges.

And you freak out, Jonah, and you expect us to freak out, about an unknown conservative?! (Or about Trump himself, for that matter?! Is he the one who wants to "completely [overturn] the Constitutional order"?! Have you never read the book called… Liberal Fascism?!)

Moreover, this woman is just like the Confederate statues and the Rebel flags — an easy target. It is quite clear that this easy target is not the last, far from it, only the first to start off a campaign; give in and she is only the first of the many who must be ousted the Congress — calls have already going out left and right for the scalps of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, as well as all the skeptics in Congress who voted against certification, to be not censured but ousted once and for all… No one is to remain in power who doubts the (improbable) victory of Sleepy Joe. The Left is here to stay once and for all. With a boot on your neck forever.

Besides that — and this is a message to Democrats and media members as well as to Jonah — the very fact that all of you are so adamant in refusing to even entertain what in the final analysis is quite a banal idea — that there was, or may have been, voter fraud during an election (local, state, and/or national), any election — is actually one of the main pieces of evidence that the accusations of voter fraud of 2020 was, and is, real and very serious.

Having said all that, it is time to turn to Don Surber's reply to Jonah Goldberg (thanks to Ed Driscoll and Glenn Reynolds).

Five years ago, on January 26, 2015, Jonah said on Fox, "Donald Trump has a long record of clownishly pretending he’s going to run for president, and people take him seriously — including a lot of people at this network, which drives me crazy."

And he said, "I think Donald Trump is a bane of humanity."

 

 … By going on and on about President Trump's style, he missed the substance of the most genuine and most successful conservative president since Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Now Jonah is unhappy with the party. 

He wrote, "A party of conspiracy theorists and would-be secessionists will be a failed party—I hope. A party merely perceived as a party of conspiracy theorists and would-be secessionists will be a failed party—I hope."

I do not know about that.

Democrats seem to do OK with their Russian Collusion conspiracy theorists, AOC, the Squad, and that presidential candidate who sniffed little girls. 

If Jonah is upset with the state of the Republican Party these days, he has no one but himself and the rest of the frauds in Washington to blame. They spent 2016 trying to bring Donald Trump down and then the next four years trying to trip up President Trump.

 

A Republican Congress refused to repeal and replace Obamacare, as they promised they would.

A Republican Congress refused to fund building the wall.

A Republican Congress refused to investigate Spygate.

And Paul Ryan and 40 other lifers in the House refused to seek re-election in 2018, knowing this would saddle the nation with Speaker Nancy.

That is far more dangerous to the nation than some congresswoman's old postings and retweets. The sabotage of the Republican Party by the people it sends to Washington is legendary.

In 2008, they abandoned Sarah Palin.

In 2010, they abandoned Christine O'Donnell.

In 2012, they abandoned Todd Akin.

In 2016, they abandoned Donald Trump.

In 2017, they abandoned Roy Moore.

And in 2018, they abandoned the country by paving the way for Democrats to take back the House.

Name a Democrat nominee for public office that his party has abandoned. You cannot because Democrats band together. When Anthony Weiner was caught in his underwear on Twitter, it took a few weeks of late-night jokes to get Nancy to tell him to resign.

 

I refuse to denounce Congresswoman Greene because I am not suicidal. Nancy barely has a majority in the House. Picking off a few newcomer Republicans would give her breathing room. 

Giving her that breathing room makes it easier for her to install the socialism that Jonah should worry about instead of what the staff at the New Yorker thinks. As a grown man, I do not seek the approval of those who hate me. I will not accommodate their efforts to ruin me and my country.

Maybe Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg want us to be the stupid party, but I don't.

That's right, believe it or not: some of us are determined not to join the "bowing" GOP leaders on their suicide mission. Glenn Reynolds adds that

Yes, QAnon is stupid — and probably a disinfo program intended to harm the Trump movement — but it’s pretty rich, after four years of Russian Collusion and #Resistance and “hacked election” talk, to act as if this is somehow a largely Republican problem. And “the rules?” What rules are those? Not any rules that we’ve been operating under since 2016.

Who cannot agree with Don Surber?

To paraphrase the most insightful sign of the Tea Party Movement: It doesn't matter who you have represent the GOP party (Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, a Bush, a Trump, etc…), Jonah, it doesn't matter if you repudiate Marjorie Taylor Greene or David Duke or the Proud Boys — the Left will call you (or, alternatively, your followers — if not both) racist anyway. And the media will end up demonizing you anyway. And that will lose you votes, yes, even among "the very conservative voters in [your] district." 

(Back in the 1980s, an analyst said that the point of Kremlin disinformation was not to get the entire population to change its mind, nor a majority nor even a minority, not even a sizable one; just 5%. If 5% could be counted on to believe a certain piece of Soviet propaganda, a national election might be turned towards the USSR's preferred candidate or outcome — I believe that the subject was the KGB-originated story of the creation of the AIDS virus by the CIA and that this story emerged (again?) before an election or a referendum in Spain either to join or more likely (later) to remain within NATO.)

Yes, Jonah, I am talking about the media you now trust, the ones wanting to silence cable news, scare away Fox's advertisers, close down Parler, cancel the Epoch Times, banish the OneAmericaNetwork, and shut down Newsmax TV. (In fact, you could say that every MSM outlet in the nation, along with a number of private companies, have been competing to turn into Brett Kimberlin.) After all, the warriors for the truth who oppose these outliers' "green room farts" are in total agreement with you for wanting to protect "some decent Americans who’ve been deluded by cable- and Facebook-fueled culture war tribalism."

Don't you — you, Jonah, of all people — know the The First Rule of MSM News Coverage? 

Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative; when those prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration — and treating it as representative is deemed hateful. (Andrew Klavan)

Does Jonah not feel the oppression? "Biden is now unapologetically leading the most radical left-wing movement in the nation’s history", writes Victor Davis Hanson, and

Right-leaning Americans are living as if  occupied by a foreign power intent on denigrating and destroying our way of life, impoverishing us, and punishing us for objecting. (Angelo Codevilla at American Greatness)

Can Jonah find no "bane of humanity" among the left? (He hasn't seemed to mention many in the past four or five years.) Can Mitch McConnell find no "cancer", not a single one, in the Democrat party? The only people who want to "completely [overturn] the Constitutional order," Jonah, are members of the Left which, as you yourself once wrote about, has been burning for a hundred years or more to rid the Constitution of the electoral college and thereby overturn said Constitution, giving most power to the left-run cities and giving the Republican party the death knell in the process. And yes, Jonah, that (packing the courts, sinking the electoral college, creating a 51st and a 52nd state, etc, etc, etc…), along with hard evidence of cheating, voter fraud, and stealing the election, is proof enough for fighting back with lawsuits and with other obstacles to certification. (Dennis Prager makes several common-sense remarks in his Numerous Troubling Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored, but as Stacy McCain points out (thanks to Ed Driscoll), "the important thing about the media narrative … is how skepticism is basically forbidden.")

If the left gets its most fervent (and secret) wish, it doesn't matter if the GOP will reflect a Trump party or a (Not?) Running With Scissors party or a party of "conspiracy theorists and would-be secessionists" or a party of "gasoline-fighters, meme-warrior entertainers, grifters, and tinfoil hatters" or an exciting conservatism or a boring conservatism. 

It will be a defanged party and the United States will be like California or any country of Europe, a de facto one-party state, always leaning more or less left, always devoted to rewriting history, and always engaged in oppressing the half of the population that still believes in freedom along with regular religion. 

What in God's name is it that a Jonah Goldberg or a Myra Adams or, for that matter, a Mitch McConnell or a Mike Pence do not understand about that?

Update: Stephen Kruiser is also frustrated, and asks:

How long do the mainstream media hacks have to keep exposing themselves as frothing-at-the-mouth haters of conservatives before conservatives get it?