The American Conservative Is Increasingly Insane

[LFC]

Dreher, and in fact most of TAC, has picked up the wokeness baton and run around like a maniac screeching at the top of his lungs. I've been checking a few times per week and counting how many articles mention "woke" in the title or very short description on their front on any given day. They've consistently been running at 3-5.

Getting back to Dreher's latest panic attack here we have an absolute class case of whataboutism, something Dreher has claimed in the past to despise.

It’s total hypocrisy by the Woke party and the Woke Capitalists, who are bitching about having to do business in Georgia, but who have no problem doing business in the People’s Republic of China, which is enacting an actual genocide, complete with concentration camps, against the Uighur Muslim people.

Wait, what? If capitalists do business with China then they have to keep their collective mouths shut about the Republican Party's institutionalized attempts at disenfranchising voters, generally those who tend to vote Democrat and those of color? As Dana Carvey's Church Lady character would say, "well isn't THAT special."

There's some ranting about Amazon's power which is, truly, rather formidable but it's really only because they don't to the right's bidding. Once companies make decisions or make statements as a non-government entity that the right doesn't like they're suddenly all up in arms but Hobby Lobby apparently retains those rights. Gee. What's the difference? Dreher finishes up by wetting his underoos.

I believe that soft totalitarianism is coming, because it is the inexorable logic of the post-liberal Left, which has gained control of nearly all the institutions in American life. I strongly believe in preparing for long-term resistance, which is what my book Live Not By Lies is about. But I also believe in fighting these SOBs as hard as we can, while we can. It is not traditionally in the Republican Party’s DNA to be anti-Big Business and anti-institutional, but if the conservative party cannot muster the wherewithal to stick it to Woke Capital, and woke institutions, hard, in the ribs, for the sake of democracy, then by God, let’s start a party that will. These people are ruining America. Until and unless America recovers herself, I’m with my Tory pal Ed West: Yankee go home.

Rod just declared it a war. In fact to them it's clearly a religious war. I'll quote George W of all people and say "Bring it on!" It's long past time to throw these god bothering freaks who demand we live by the rules of their "one true religion" out of government. To quote Dreher, "These people are ruining America."

[goldenvalley]

The man is exhausting. Outrage all the time...I guess it makes his books sell.

[LFC]

Apr 8, 2021 15:59:27 GMT goldenvalley said:

The man is exhausting. Outrage all the time...I guess it makes his books sell.

I've read enough of Dreher and his personal angst over childhood trauma that I am convinced he believes virtually everything he writes. He's not a Hannity or Carlson who will say anything for money and then say they didn't actually say that. Rather he is driven by a massive victim complex and what he writes is so often about what he fears. Being a victim and clinging as hard as possible to orthodox religion (the welcoming father figure to replace his apparently rather cold actual father) is what defines him as a person. That's incredibly sad but he is who he is.

[LFC]

Rod Dreher wrote a piece called Ideology Destroys Sanity, Scholarship. I barely skimmed it but instantly wondered if the self-professed believer in demonic possession and exorcism understands how true the title is on a number of topics including:

• Evolution / "Intelligent" Design
  
• Sexual Preference
  
• Gender Identity
• Donald Trump
  
• The role Christianity has played in persecution of non-believers
  

Any other obvious topics I'm missing where religious ideology destroyed sanity and scholarship?

[LFC]

Another day at TAC, another shrill screed about woke this or woke that. This one is about "woke capitalism" and the fact that the American right-wing has gone so far off the rails that many companies are taking positions that the wingnuts don't like. Some clown wrote a book about it and they're all in. (Other than this book I can't find out online about the author.) Suddenly corporate free speech is a bad thing but they can't say that so instead corporations are being hijacked by activist investors. The crazy is just so breathtakingly expansive that it becomes impossible to keep up.

Conservatives are rightly vexed by “woke capitalism,” exasperated at the ways in which big American corporations are increasingly weighing in on sociopolitical issues—invariably, it seems, in favor of the progressive left. Certainly, many businesses are under pressure to do so.

Sometimes that pressure is open and public. Indeed, it can make national news. But other times it is less so. Many Americans are likely unaware of the coordinated campaigns by shareholder activists—equity owners in a corporation interested in something other than financial gain—to insert their political priorities into those same corporate boardrooms through environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) shareholder proposals.

In his recent and timely book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business, Stephen R. Soukup calls shareholder proposals “the primary tool of the corporate activist”—and for good reason. Any shareholder, provided they meet certain requirements, may submit proposals to corporate management to be voted on by other shareholders at the company’s annual meeting. These are typically written in the form of a request or recommendation. Large institutional investors (index funds, public pensions, etc.) hold outsized voting power, and many rely on third-party advisory services for recommendations on how they should vote.

Activists, keen on influencing powerful companies to adopt their sociopolitical priorities, buy shares in corporations simply to file proposals that further those priorities. Importantly, the objective isn’t always necessarily to win a majority vote. Proposals that fail, yet still receive substantial or increased support, signal momentum on a particular ESG issue and put pressure on management. Sometimes a company will elect to negotiate on a proposal beforehand to preempt such a vote.

Here's the big finish.

The Conservative Path Forward

Recent polling by Scott Rasmussen suggests a majority of Americans oppose companies taking positions on political issues. Frustrated that many are nevertheless doing so, however, some conservatives have called for boycotting the offending company’s products or services, or otherwise trying to punish them through disengagement. While the frustration is understandable—and vocally dissatisfied customers can certainly be effective—such actions in isolation may well be counterproductive over the long term.

Instead, as Danhof and others have prominently argued, conservatives should prioritize engaging directly with companies that have drifted inappropriately and unnecessarily into politics. Shareholder votes are one avenue through which this can be done. The lopsided ideological breakdown of the Proxy Preview’s catalog of proposals—where conservative ones amounted to all of 5 percent of the total—suggests that the progressive Left has certainly embraced this approach. If the recent and varied eruptions of woke capitalism are any indication, that strategy is paying off.

There are multiple things wrong with these two paragraphs starting out with "Scott Rasmussen." On to the meat of the Rasmussen propaganda results. Real polling that shows 59% of Americans are "belief-driven buyers." It's quite coincidental that Rasmussen found that 59% believe companies taking social stances increases divisiveness in this country. It's tough to square the two if you believe in Rasmussen, which I don't. Then we can look at boycotts and conservative shareholder activism. The fact is that the people most pissed off about companies taking stances they don't like (not that they take stances) don't have the leverage to move the needle all that much because they represent a smaller slice of GDP and a much smaller slice of younger i.e. future customers. So boycotts from the right have little impact and the average age of the Faux News demographic can't compete for businesses' attention.

I don't know why they're complaining. This is Second Amendment rights for corporations in action, the exact thing that Republicans have supported for decades.

Of course they'll never grasp that their views are just flat out unpopular. Their beliefs are beyond examination.

[LFC]

Classic Dreher. David French wrote a piece that strongly considers that the collapse of religious institutions is coming much from within rather than from external forces. Rod, being Rod, puts on his objective hat for just a second.

I stopped right there to consider my own thoughts. I realized that for me, it’s not an either-or, but a both-and — and that this is why so many people on both sides of the question find me frustrating.

Oh, that's nice. Then he loses his shit about sex and immediately blames the lion's share of the churches' problems on the sodomites, fornicators, and pornography.

I believe that we live in a post-Christian and increasingly anti-Christian society and culture, one that is rapidly making it harder for faithful small-o orthodox Christians (that is to say, Christians who do not agree with the party line on sexual issues) to exist meaningfully in the public square. Nobody is going to cancel a Christian for his or her traditional beliefs and practices regarding luxury, avarice, gluttony, or any of the other so-called “deadly sins”. But resist the world’s view on lust, and you find yourself in a world of trouble.

First nobody gives a crap a Christian's beliefs on lust ... until they bleed into telling everybody else how to live. And maybe, just maybe, if religion was able to approach and discuss sexuality in a calm, thoughtful, adult manner it wouldn't have quite the same conflict with normal people. (Too snide and bitchy?)

[goldenvalley]

Apr 19, 2021 21:50:47 GMT LFC said:

And maybe, just maybe, if religion was able to approach and discuss sexuality in a calm, thoughtful, adult manner it wouldn't have quite the same conflict with normal people. (Too snide and bitchy?)

You, too snide and bitchy? That's why we like you around here.  I think Rue calls it salty on another thread.

What is this small o-orthodox stuff?  A made up brand of religion that allows one to claim fealty to some unorganized yet originalist version of Dreher's personal religion?

[indy]

Apr 19, 2021 20:12:21 GMT LFC said:

Another day at TAC, another shrill screed about woke this or woke that. This one is about "woke capitalism" and the fact that the American right-wing has gone so far off the rails that many companies are taking positions that the wingnuts don't like. Some clown wrote a book about it and they're all in. (Other than this book I can't find out online about the author.) Suddenly corporate free speech is a bad thing but they can't say that so instead corporations are being hijacked by activist investors. The crazy is just so breathtakingly expansive that it becomes impossible to keep up.

Conservatives are rightly vexed by “woke capitalism,” exasperated at the ways in which big American corporations are increasingly weighing in on sociopolitical issues—invariably, it seems, in favor of the progressive left. Certainly, many businesses are under pressure to do so.

Sometimes that pressure is open and public. Indeed, it can make national news. But other times it is less so. Many Americans are likely unaware of the coordinated campaigns by shareholder activists—equity owners in a corporation interested in something other than financial gain—to insert their political priorities into those same corporate boardrooms through environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) shareholder proposals.

In his recent and timely book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business, Stephen R. Soukup calls shareholder proposals “the primary tool of the corporate activist”—and for good reason. Any shareholder, provided they meet certain requirements, may submit proposals to corporate management to be voted on by other shareholders at the company’s annual meeting. These are typically written in the form of a request or recommendation. Large institutional investors (index funds, public pensions, etc.) hold outsized voting power, and many rely on third-party advisory services for recommendations on how they should vote.

Activists, keen on influencing powerful companies to adopt their sociopolitical priorities, buy shares in corporations simply to file proposals that further those priorities. Importantly, the objective isn’t always necessarily to win a majority vote. Proposals that fail, yet still receive substantial or increased support, signal momentum on a particular ESG issue and put pressure on management. Sometimes a company will elect to negotiate on a proposal beforehand to preempt such a vote.

Here's the big finish.

The Conservative Path Forward

Recent polling by Scott Rasmussen suggests a majority of Americans oppose companies taking positions on political issues. Frustrated that many are nevertheless doing so, however, some conservatives have called for boycotting the offending company’s products or services, or otherwise trying to punish them through disengagement. While the frustration is understandable—and vocally dissatisfied customers can certainly be effective—such actions in isolation may well be counterproductive over the long term.

Instead, as Danhof and others have prominently argued, conservatives should prioritize engaging directly with companies that have drifted inappropriately and unnecessarily into politics. Shareholder votes are one avenue through which this can be done. The lopsided ideological breakdown of the Proxy Preview’s catalog of proposals—where conservative ones amounted to all of 5 percent of the total—suggests that the progressive Left has certainly embraced this approach. If the recent and varied eruptions of woke capitalism are any indication, that strategy is paying off.

There are multiple things wrong with these two paragraphs starting out with "Scott Rasmussen." On to the meat of the Rasmussen propaganda results. Real polling that shows 59% of Americans are "belief-driven buyers." It's quite coincidental that Rasmussen found that 59% believe companies taking social stances increases divisiveness in this country. It's tough to square the two if you believe in Rasmussen, which I don't. Then we can look at boycotts and conservative shareholder activism. The fact is that the people most pissed off about companies taking stances they don't like (not that they take stances) don't have the leverage to move the needle all that much because they represent a smaller slice of GDP and a much smaller slice of younger i.e. future customers. So boycotts from the right have little impact and the average age of the Faux News demographic can't compete for businesses' attention.

I don't know why they're complaining. This is Second Amendment rights for corporations in action, the exact thing that Republicans have supported for decades.

Of course they'll never grasp that their views are just flat out unpopular. Their beliefs are beyond examination.

So the argument is that the owners of the company, which is what shareholders are, should run their company by listening to what the polls say? Isn't that...dare I say it...socialism?

[LFC]

TAC is a big old bucket o' crazy today! Here are 3 of the silliest. Dreher is responsible for only one of them.

Biden’s Plagiarized Afghanistan Withdrawal is a childish, primal shriek that could have come straight from the Mango Mussolini himself. The upshot is Biden is getting credit for Trump's work ... that he didn't actually accomplish.

Joe Biden would like to bring the troops home from Afghanistan. It’s such a daringly original idea that no one has even attempted it since…the last administration.

Back in 2020, Donald Trump negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that would have seen the United States leave Afghanistan about a week from now on May 1. When Biden entered the Oval Office, he was faced with a decision: whether or not to stick to Trump’s plan. He deliberated. He scratched his chin. He consulted with the government’s gigantic foreign policy bureaucracy, winning him plaudits from the fun-loving Washington Post. He even suggested fresh diplomatic talks with the Taliban.

And then he announced his decision. The troops would still leave Afghanistan, only the withdrawal deadline would be moved forward to the deeply strategic and not at all political date of September 11.

Upon which the news media promptly exploded with jubilation. I don’t mean to sound peevish—I support withdrawing from Afghanistan no matter who gives the order—but reading the press coverage has sometimes made me feel like I’ve been blasted through a wormhole. The New York Times, for example, in its writeup on the announcement, reported that Biden “will have accomplished a goal that his two immediate predecessors, Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, embraced but never completed.” Yes, except that Obama surged troops into Afghanistan, while Trump was in the process of pulling them out until he was interrupted by Biden, a bit of context the Times buried like a midnight edit to the “1619 Project.”

America’s New Justice System, Funded by Soros and Zuckerberg is pretty much what it sounds like. Apparently they are funding the takeover the of justice system at the local level and destroying America. BTW this shrill little piece of drivel is all over 22 out of 29 D.A. elections (it doesn't say state level) which apparently Soros won personally or some such freakout.

George Soros funding a new wave of radically lenient district attorneys across America to remake its justice system at the county level sounds like a right-wing conspiracy theory, but it’s true. He explained why he was going to do it in his recent book In Defense of Open Society. His commitment to the program was announced by the ACLU in 2015. And the financial record of the endeavor has been tracked by dozens of news outlets over the past several years.

The 90-year-old financier and megadonor laid out his case for nationwide criminal justice reform in the second chapter of In Defense of Open Society, itself an updated version of a 2012 essay. He cited such measures as one of the major objectives in his America-related philanthropy agenda.

In November 2014, Soros’s Open Society Foundation gave $50 million to the ACLU’s Campaign to End Mass Incarceration. The ACLU put out a press release about the donation, restating their commitment to cutting U.S. incarceration rates in half by 2020 in what would be “the most ambitious effort to end mass incarceration in American history.”

Shortly after making this donation, Soros began steadily contributing large sums to progressive candidates for district attorney (D.A.) positions all over the country. He has spent more than $18 million on left-wing D.A.s since 2015 with mostly successful results (only seven losses out of 29 races).

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have started giving grants to bail funds and prosecutor reform groups, too. In the 2019–2020 grant period, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) gave $1 million to the Tides Center’s project Fair and Just Prosecution to “promote thought leadership for elected district attorneys.” The group trains future D.A.s by hosting things like summer clerkship programs in prosecutors’ offices for law students.

The consequences of all these efforts to re-engineer the U.S. justice system at the local level are as one would expect.

As multiple data sets confirm, 2020 was a record year for violent crime. Preliminary FBI data show that murder rates went up everywhere in America in 2020, and not by a little—by 24.7 percent, if measured nationwide. Criminal justice expert John Roman said 2020’s surge “is the largest increase in violence we’ve seen since 1960, when we started collecting formal crime statistics.”

In Philadelphia, homicides have gone up 29 percent since April 2020, making 2020 the city’s most violent year in over three decades. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney who received almost $1.7 million from Soros in 2017, blames other forces, especially COVID-19 lockdowns closing hosts of programs—including public school itself—that normally keep young men off the streets and out of trouble. “I do not believe that people who have had the wisdom to elect progressive prosecutors all over the country, and increasingly, all of a sudden are going to get the stupids,” Krasner said, arguing that the universal rise in murder refutes critics’ “scapegoating” of new progressive D.A.s.

And what would TAC be these days without at least one meltdown using the term "woke.". (Dreher of course but it's used in other articles that are up right now.) That brings us this panty wetting bit of hyperbole called Woke Capitalists As Mini-Chinas.

Crispin Sartwell writes, in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled):
Capitalism and communism, opposed in ideology, turn out to be compatible in the real world. And perhaps the conceptual opposition is also collapsing in the West, as capitalism goes woke and sneaker commercials become indistinguishable from AOC campaign materials except by their production values.
More:If China’s communists have appropriated capitalism, in “woke capitalism” the capitalists have appropriated socialism. This is applied both internally, as companies focus on the ideological re-education of their employees with diversity training and the like, and externally, as those companies relentlessly if implausibly portray themselves as the agents of an egalitarian future. The new voter laws in Georgia will fall, if they do, to challenges not from the Justice Department or the courts, but from Major League Baseball, Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, which operate at once as profit-making concerns and political organizations. Rather like mini-Chinas.
This is why the Chinese social credit system will be the way our American oligarchs, corporate and state, will control us. Let me explain.

He then descends into a discussion of companies using cookies to track people's likes, dislikes, purchases, etc. So how does this get us to some form of woke China? He's glad you asked!

It’s coming, this merger of consumer sales and social control. This is why it matters massively if Woke Capitalists use their market power to compel certain political outcomes. Again, consider Amazon’s decision to stop selling books that put forward a critical point of view on transgender ideology. I have explained here that this is perfectly within Amazon’s legal rights, but given Amazon’s stranglehold on book retailing, its decision has the effect of powerfully discouraging that any books like that will ever be written. This is left-wing illiberalism, tout court.

Left-wing illiberal democracy won’t come to us via pure autocracy, as in China. It will come from the merger of elites in government, business, and other institutions, and their enforcement of their ideology through the market, and via technology embraced by surveillance capitalists — and by the rest of us, as the cost of participating in the modern economy.

Unless we can stop them.

Cue dramatic music.

[goldenvalley]

Poor Dreher. He doesn't realize that capitalists have always used their market power to determine outcomes...political or commercial. Perhaps he didn't notice because he only shops at his version of woke businesses.

I think he's in Budapest now...but he's not Jewish so he'll be okay there and he can continue to make himself think the Hungarian president is really solicitous of small "o" orthodox religion and not just using the image to enhance his control and power over the country.

[LFC]

This is the current cover of TAC. Scary stuff.

[RichTBikkies]

May 4, 2021 15:03:55 GMT LFC said:

This is the current cover of TAC. Scary stuff.


Betteridge's law of headlines

[AnBr]

"Ideas over ideology, principles over party" Bawhahahahahahaha!!!!

[pnwguy]

May 4, 2021 15:51:38 GMT AnBr said:

"Ideas over ideology, principles over party" Bawhahahahahahaha!!!!

"Trumpism over citizens, Fascism over democracy"

[LFC]

TAC covered Rep. Liz Cheney's imminent demise in what is now, unfortunately, a classic TAC manner. Bold of the author's pushback against reality is mine.

Sweeping things under the rug has become something of a forte for Kevin McCarthy.

Six years ago, the Bakersfield, California congressman was a vote away from the speakership, when John Boehner, now a cannabis lobbyist and wry memoirist, was forced from power. McCarthy was poised to wield the gavel when innuendo (never proved) that he had carried on an affair with a fellow member likely did in his bid. He stayed on as party leader and has held on for grim death ever since.

McCarthy watched as Donald Trump, someone he was recorded as saying that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin paid, “I swear to God,” seized the presidency. He watched as Paul Ryan’s speakership floundered as surely as had his vice presidential bid years prior, flattened by an underwhelming Obamacare alternative. With Ryan out of the picture, he became the last of “the young guns” in power.

Never as ideological as the now-Fox News board member or Eric Cantor, the defrocked former majority leader, McCarthy became buddies with President Trump.

He was even briefly considered for White House chief of staff. McCarthy took command of his caucus when the GOP ceded the House to Nancy Pelosi. And McCarthy set what has become his party’s course in the wake of the Jan. 6 riots: rejection of the violence, acknowledgement of Trump’s irresponsibility in their run-up, but in tandem, a rejection of the second impeachment attempt as as well the efforts by some Democrats to turn the security state on the American people.

And, for this, he would draw the disapproval of Liz Cheney, the Wyoming representative, Republican scion and neoconservative last hope. For McCarthy, this failure of messaging did not stop at the impeachment vote, of which she was in the pronounced minority of her party, its members (if polling is to be believed) or its leaders. Cheney, the chair of the House Republican Conference and arguably highest-ranking Republican woman left in Washington, continued to draw contrasts with the pragmatic, if panned McCarthy regime.

[LFC]

In the past few days TAC has put up just one piece about Cheney. It attempts to make the case that Liz Cheney hates Trump because of Afghanistan. Yep, this is what passes for conservative "scholarship" on TAC these days. Oh, yeah. Did you know that Trump "got us to the finish line on withdrawal from Afghanistan?"

This week, House Republicans are set to remove Representative Liz Cheney from their leadership, in a move that has already launched a thousand op-eds. Defenders of Cheney, including Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, have huge incentive to make her ouster about Donald Trump and “January 6.” Her opposition, by contrast, wants to make this about professionalism: Her unhinged attacks demonstrate that she is not leadership material. As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy noted, in a truthful and vapid comment, GOP House members are concerned Liz cannot “carry out the message.”

Neither side wants to state the obvious. It’s no mystery why Liz Cheney hates Donald Trump so much: It’s about Afghanistan, and the Bush legacy.

On the surface her personal beef with Trump is designed to look like it’s all about “democracy.” She just really feels compelled to keep writing op-eds and speaking out about what is, politically, ancient history, too. It looks undisciplined, but that can’t be right. I recently spoke with a good friend who has had a working relationship with Cheney for a while, and this person noted: “She is brilliant and always in control. If you want someone to read your financials and give granular advice, she’s your woman.”

This doesn’t sound like someone who would recklessly blow up her political future. But my friend went on: “She’s always in control…except on foreign policy. Move into that territory and her eyes transform into those of a zealot.”

By all rights, Cheney should be praising the most pro-Wyoming president in her lifetime, Donald Trump. And by all rights she should be attacking, rather than fist-bumping, Joe Biden, whose program is already killing jobs back home. On Wyoming issue after issue, Trump scores ahead, far ahead of Biden, which is why he won the state in 2020 by 44 percent. That’s a landslide. That’s more than a landslide.

But Trump got us to the finish line on withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Biden is more hawkish, and so Trump gets attacked, and Biden gets Liz’s praise. In fact, Biden’s announcement of a new (unwisely delayed) withdrawal timetable drew a rare rebuke from her. The decision to continue with the Trump withdrawal at all was, to her, a “reckless decision.”

[LFC]

This amusing piece from TAC is a full blown meltdown of a dark money group that supports Democratic candidates. To read it you'd think that they invented dark money PACs. And can you imagine an article on this topic that doesn't even mention the Citizens United decision that Republicans fought so hard for? As is so often the case on TAC anymore the comments are much more incisive and fact based than the article. This summed it up nicely.

philadelphialawyer

Yeah, bemoaning BOTH "dark money" AND efforts to end "dark money" is about as specious as one can get! If it really is the First Amendment (and not just the interpretation of it in Citizens United) that protects the activities of North Fund, et al, and "dark money" generally (including conservative dark money), well then, what's the beef here? Or, looking at it from the other end of the telescope, if the problem is North Fund, et al, and "dark money" generally, perhaps the First Amendment interpretation in CU needs to be revisited, in which case there would be no "serious breach."

This is another good one.

gnt

If you want to actually do something other than whine about the issue, you should contact your senator to express your support for Senate bill S1. This is the Senate equivalent of House bill HR1, and deals with voting rights, election security and election spending. Both bills contain provisions to force the disclosure of sources of funding used in elections.

Republicans do not appear to have been concerned about dark money in elections until they came up on the short side of the balance. Perhaps finding themselves in that position will motivate them to deal with the issue.

[LFC]

A quick glance at TAC shows not one piece on the ouster of Liz Cheney between yesterday and today. Not one. I guess it's not an important event for "conservatives."

[pnwguy]

May 13, 2021 15:26:00 GMT LFC said:

A quick glance at TAC shows not one piece on the ouster of Liz Cheney between yesterday and today. Not one. I guess it's not an important event for "conservatives."

"Move along folks, nothing to see here..."

[goldenvalley]

May 13, 2021 15:36:41 GMT pnwguy said:

May 13, 2021 15:26:00 GMT LFC said:

A quick glance at TAC shows not one piece on the ouster of Liz Cheney between yesterday and today. Not one. I guess it's not an important event for "conservatives."

"Move along folks, nothing to see here..."

I guess some writers' concerns about cancel culture is not pinged by this event.

[LFC]

Wingnut Watch: TAC still no articles on the ouster of Liz Cheney and the replacement of her with somebody pushing The Big Lie. The last discussion of what might happen was on May 9, 5 days ago.

[LFC]

TAC has given the lead story (top, left-hand of their page) to a complete and total COVID crank who is still misrepresenting the early reason for not wearing a mask (i.e. they were needed for front line workers) and refusing to admit that basic actions like mask wearing, social distancing, and preventing large groups from assembling indoors were highly effective. This clown could be (and probably has been) on Newsmax or Alex Jones and fit right in.

Last year, America went to war against an invisible enemy. Calling himself a “wartime president,” Donald Trump deemed the outbreak of COVID-19 “worse than Pearl Harbor … worse than the World Trade Center.” Democrats echoed his martial rhetoric. Joe Biden proposed a revival of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board. Andrew Cuomo urged Americans to support our troops, though in this battle, he said, “the troops are healthcare professionals.”

Wartime spirit spread. Every night at seven, the streets of Manhattan echoed with cheers for “frontline” healthcare workers. Vegetable seeds were backordered for “victory gardens.” A writer in the Atlantic hailed “one of the most beautiful moments in our country’s long history—a moment of shared, galvanizing national spirit that has existed in perhaps only in a handful of epochal years before, like 1776, 1861, 1933, and 1941, and, in modern times, after 9/11.”

Lockdowns, social distancing, and masks were promoted not just for their health effects but as expressions of officially approved public spiritedness. Cuomo asked: “You want to honor the healthcare workers, and the people who literally gave their lives? … Wear a mask.” The journalist Matthew Zeitlin wrote: “To contribute to a great national cause in World War II you had to, like, die face down in the muck on some tiny pacific island. Now you can literally stay at home, watch the Sopranos or that Netflix dating show and be a hero.”

Dissent was not tolerated. Those who challenged lockdowns and masking requirements were depicted as white nationalists, neo-Nazis, or simply unhinged. As with the flag pin after 9/11, failure to wear a mask could be taken as a sign of disloyalty.

Given the recent history of American warmaking, claims that we are at war with the virus should be sobering.

Yes, that last sentence is as insane as you think. No, the rest of the article doesn't get any better. A number of the comments are actually pretty brutal.

[LFC]

I missed this but it looks like TAC dumped Daniel Larison, their only consistently sane writer, back in March.

Moving On
Daniel Larison  Mar 5

As some of you will have noticed, I am no longer at The American Conservative. I was fired earlier today, so you won’t be finding my writing on their site any longer. I don’t know how much time I will be putting into this site, but the chances are good that I will be posting more frequently here in the future.

[indy]

May 19, 2021 16:10:29 GMT LFC said:

I missed this but it looks like TAC dumped Daniel Larison, their only consistently sane writer, back in March.

Moving On
Daniel Larison  Mar 5

As some of you will have noticed, I am no longer at The American Conservative. I was fired earlier today, so you won’t be finding my writing on their site any longer. I don’t know how much time I will be putting into this site, but the chances are good that I will be posting more frequently here in the future.

There is literally no reason to ever look at TAC again.

[pnwguy]

May 19, 2021 16:59:06 GMT indy said:

May 19, 2021 16:10:29 GMT LFC said:

I missed this but it looks like TAC dumped Daniel Larison, their only consistently sane writer, back in March.

There is literally no reason to ever look at TAC again.

Except that it's like a sonar test for a boat captain, to gauge how deep the bottom is.  Every so often you have to glance at the instrument panel.