"When will we learn?"

Conservative Chicken Littles will never win us the culture wars. And win them we must.

It’s so widespread by now that I debated writing about it here, but there are elements worth examining in the Matt Walsh dispute with his critics over his tone in re: Dylan Mulvaney’s Fraudrey Hepburn performative, and those elements are not at all new: they speak to a seemingly endless divide within the loose alliance today conflated as “conservative” over strategy and tactics for winning the “culture wars,” itself a term fraught, at various moments in recent political history, with elistist dismissal — another notable problem that has plagued the big tent of “conservatism”.

In fact, when I listened to Matt Walsh addressing his critics, I couldn’t help note that he sounded very much like me — and specifically, very much like me in an essay I published in Hot Air back in 2009 which, for what it’s worth, marked the beginning of my end. You see, I had thought an open debate between those on “our side” about strategy and tactics for defeating the left was something that could prove fruitful. But I was as naive as I was wrong. Because effectively and publicly challenging the arguments being made by fellow conservatives was considered a sin so great at the time that it led to a covert blacklisting and a whisper campaign among many notable sites to deny mine links and traffic. As someone wrote to me during the fallout, “they’ll happily forgive you for being wrong; but they’ll never, ever forgive you for being right.”

But here, 14 years later, we’re seeing the same battle play out, and on nearly identical terms: several outlets that cater to an anti-leftist demographic — whether they identify as conservative or not is immaterial and speaks to their own marketing decisions — reacted to Matt Walsh’s candid evisceration of Dylan Mulvaney’s (to my mind, heavily scripted) red carpet reveal with precisely the same rhetorical strategy I had been confronted with those many years ago: Walsh was criticized not for being wrong factually, but for being correct in a way that many on the right evidently continue to fear is too aggressive. He was too mean, they complained, to the man we were being told is now an objectively “stunning” woman. He was too harsh on a man who now represents womanhood, and whose popularity as a trans woman we should admire and fear. And this meanness was unlikely to win over the otherwise persuadable.

Matt’s response to his critics is a master class in addressing the timeless refrain that we must moderate our speech in order to win over those offended by unvarnished truths — and not a single response to his answering of their complaints is in the least bit persuasive. In fact, many of those Walsh answered quite ostentatiously walked back their earlier criticism, or tried rather transparently to defend it while simultaneously proclaiming that they stood with Walsh from the get go.

This, I submit, is a major step forward. Allow me to explain:

Back in 2009, I’d criticized conservatives who jumped on Rush Limbaugh for a comment he made in re: Barack Obama’s coming presidency, itself taken out of context — intentionally — by the leftwing legacy media. (That intentionality was, and remains, a key part of my argument, but more on that some other time.) In 2008, I likewise blasted those who, in the wake of Obama’s first presidential victory, were eager to depict themselves as happy warriors whose sole disagreement with President-elect Obama was over specific policy. Obama was a “good man,” they told us — and they told us this despite all evidence to the contrary, and in glaring contradistinction to what they’d written of him in the run up to the election. As I wrote at the time:

[…] progressives — who ran a thuggish campaign that consisted of truth squads, attempts to have advertising removed, the personal and very public destruction of private citizens (from Joe the Plumber to Trig Palin) — can take from “high minded” posts like [the one I’m directly reacting to] the message that they can always count on conservative self-righteousness to protect them from recrimination, that their pragmatism and cynicism will always prove successful strategically so long as conservatives maintain a desire to appear above the fray.

[I was accused] of “demonizing” all Democrats, which is patently absurd. In fact, I dealt specifically with denying the appellation “good man” to someone who, through his actions, has proven to be anything but.

It matters who gets called a “good man.” It matters who we say has this country’s best interests at heart. And yes, it’s possible Obama does, to a certain extent — though what is important to recognize is that, at least so far as his governing principles to this point suggest, he doesn’t hold that view from the perspective of the country as it was founded, and as it was intended to be governed.

Which means that Obama’s best interests for the country are really the best interests for a country he’d like to see this one become — a new text that he’d like us to believe will be but an re-interpretation of the original text.

As someone who believes in the principles upon which this country was founded, I refuse to allow that a man whose ideological predispositions compel him to radically redefine that “imperfect document” that is the Constitution, has this country’s best interests at heart.

And I likewise refuse to allow that a man whose thuggish deeds and unsavory associations have defined him be granted the honor of “good man.” Because to do so is to make a mockery of good men, and to cede yet another bit of our ability to evaluate and describe and conclude in good faith into a bit of “hate speech” that won’t help the GOP regain power.

To which I say, outlaws ain’t team players. And it’s time to be outlaws.

I took offense to what to me seemed a penchant by certain types of conservatives to straddle the fence in order to avoid the most directed of the left’s ire, because as I noted at the time, Obama’s election was likely to set race relations back 50 years, and politicize the entirety of the bureaucratic state; and there was literally nothing to be gained, in my mind, from glossing over Obama’s overt radicalism and anti-American, red-diaper baby worldview, simply to position oneself as a more thoughtful and nuanced conservative. I believed this to be posturing, and the posturing to be self-serving: “I’m one of the good ones with whom the left can have a productive conversation,” their ostentatious graciousness screamed to me. “I’m nothing like those full-throated birthers who, let’s face it, probably are a bit racist and icky, and who I’d prefer were not on my side.” And while it’s quite possible I was ascribing malignant motives to those who truly believed that politics is not a contact sport, or that the left was interested in solving problems rather than creating them and then exploiting them for power, the critique I offered was genuine, and it spoke to the strategy we should take going forward as a movement. I summarized my position thusly at the Hot Air essay’s conclusion:

If we are worried about “undecided voters” who get nothing but soundbite news, we must work to change the culture of how news is delivered. For my part, I don’t want to have to measure every word I say with the thought in mind that somebody is going to take me out of context. Instead, I’d like to be free to say what I mean, and when my meaning is obvious, I would like to know that honest people have my back — and will tell dishonest people to stop being dishonest, and uninformed people that they need to smarten up before they presume to join the conversation.

Back in 2009, the conservative “influencers” who won the battle stood on the side of Mitch McConnell against troublemakers like me. McConnell peevishly warned that, thanks to extremists and cranks like those who agreed with my tactics, the GOP was in danger of becoming a “regional party.” The idea of the unclean conservative boor began to take root in mainstream GOP press. Conservative influencers with the most clout took backhanded shots at TEA Partiers, pro-lifers, climate science skeptics, and — in the face of Trump’s populism — began openly deriding the filthy masses they’d always presumed to speak for. These influencers were largely Bush-era neocons who became among the first to sign on as Never Trumpers, and to this day would rather have Joe Biden in office than have to live once again through the cultural assault that in their minds marked Trump’s presidency.

To them, it is always about tone. It is always about appearances.

Or so they claim. Me, I’ve come to believe that on the field of the culture wars, these types tacitly side with the credentialed elite, and they despise the kind of “God, Family, Country” conservatism that coalesced around America First populism. They are often, willingly or not, saboteurs to the cultural causes of modern conservatism — the kinds of self-styled Expert class who just happen to favor deregulation and lower taxes.

Importantly, though, I’m sensing some change. And Matt Walsh has been crucial in bringing that change about: in this iteration of the internecine war over strategy, Walsh’s position — that speaking plain truth is precisely the way to win — has garnered incredible support. The “nice” anti-leftists looking to capitalize on attacks against Walsh’s tone have been met with the kind of push back that threatens to destabilize their readership / viewership, not cause Walsh’s to suffer.

This suggests to me that, in answer to the titular question of this piece, a lot of people have learned — and are learning more and more every day — that there is no peace to be had with the left.

And that deferring to their contrived outrage in order to appease an always hypothetical “middle” predisposed to despise us, is a losing proposition, championed by those for whom losing more slowly is the sine qua non of their political selves.

This is progress. And Walsh has too much juice to be knocked out as easily as I was.

Here’s a famous axiom I just now invented that all committed conservatives should keep in mind as they engage the culture wars moving forward: Losers are losers precisely because they lose.

So. When will we learn, indeed?