DAREN JONESCU

Enjoying the view from Limbo

Tagged: NeverTrump

What is The Establishment?

Bill Kristol identifies as a Democrat

What a bore Bill Kristol has become. For years, he was the leading popular spokesman for the Leo Strauss-inspired political advocacy alliance dubbed “neoconservatives,” a bipartisan clan with dreams of reforming a corrupted constitutional republic into a paternalist intellectual’s petri dish — equal parts cherry-picked Platonic moralism, progressive-Hegelian nanny-statism, military adventurism as domestic social engineering project, and (largely feigned) American-grassroots social conservatism. The...

America Descending

In Defense of Human Scum

Here is the latest fireside chat from the President of the United States: The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2019 Allow me to interpret that statement, for...

2020 U.S. Election

NeverTrumpers for Biden, AlwaysTrumpers for Trump

The Republican tribal media and their sheep were pretending to be up in arms this past week over reports that some so-called “NeverTrumpers” were floating the idea of supporting Joe Biden, whom they perceive as the most moderate or least volatile of the Democratic presidential candidates, as a means of thwarting a second Trump term. The tribe’s leaders and followers were (of course)...

Ideas and Reflections

Weekend Reflection: Despicable Me

My writing used to be featured regularly at American Thinker, where I built a substantial readership and gained some name recognition as one of a handful of writers whose work appeared often among the day’s top articles, was frequently linked at other major websites, garnered interview requests, and received on-air citations from national radio hosts. I was proud of my association with American...

What is The Establishment?

NeverTrump Standard-Bearer Goes Full Limbaugh

Let me state my conclusion bluntly, right up front, in order to reject one sickening effect of the Trump era immediately, namely the recasting of wormlike obfuscation as a courageous moral stand: Erick Erickson has decided that the principles which led him to coin the hashtag #NeverTrump no longer apply. Erickson, the founder of RedState, with which he is no longer affiliated, and...

America Descending / What is The Establishment?

The Two Sides of “NeverTrump”

Two of the standard smears Donald Trump’s apologists apply to denigrate Trump’s conservative critics are the term “NeverTrump” used as a pejorative (as in, “Why should I listen to you NeverTrumpers?”), and the related accusation that those who oppose Trump are driven by “hate.” The first of these, the “NeverTrump” label, is typically used with the intention of associating Trump’s critics with the...

Liberty's Labors Lost

Mission Accomplished: The Trump Cult Exposed

Every few days, out of a curiosity more of the morbid than the intellectual variety, I take a deep breath and spend a minute or two perusing the latest collection of repetitive, illogical, myopic cult-bait being chummed at American Thinker. One of the standard bloody morsels offered up for the Trumpiranhas is the daily serving of vitriol against the evil “NeverTrumpers.” The metaphor...

What is The Establishment?

Weekend Reflection: Where There’s a Will…

  George Will, elder statesman of American conservative punditry, is urging readers to vote for Democrats in the 2018 midterms, in effect endorsing Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. Naturally, the erudite Will has an elegant rationalization for supporting panderers to leftist activists — so elegant it almost sounds like dispassionate reasoning, until one remembers that hypocrisy masquerading as dispassionate reasoning is...

America Descending

What Won’t a Cultist Swallow?

I recently noted the psychological projection demonstrated by “New Trumper” cultists like Roger Kimball and Dennis Prager, who wonder aloud how much greater Donald Trump has to make America before the “NeverTrumpers” finally come around and acknowledge him as the Second Coming, or perhaps something even more unique than that. Let’s turn the question back on them, where it belongs: How many ways...

Ideas and Reflections

Roger’s Rules on NeverTrumpers

Of all the arguments so-called NeverTrumpers offered against supporting Donald Trump, even after he became the GOP nominee, one of the most forceful was that Trump would tear the American conservative movement apart, that he couldn’t be better suited to that task had he been selected for it — assuming he wasn’t actually selected for it. There were others, however, who while strongly...