by Matthew Boose
For years we have heard from Democrats about the obligation of Republicans to “stand up to Trump.” These lamentations have taken on new ferver since the GOP denied Democrats their latest wish, by voting to acquit Donald Trump of inciting “insurrection.”
Democrats tell us this acquittal was merely the latest attack on democracy by the Republican Party which, we are to believe, has totally devolved into QAnon-inspired “domestic extremism.”
What the Democrats desire is a GOP that is “principled and strong,” as Joe Biden put it.
What they mean by “strong” is a party that does their bidding and, instead of opposing Democrats, stands up against you.
Opposition is an intolerable burden to this Democratic Party. The rest of the country is supposed to understand that the things Democrats want are what everyone should want. This understanding is supposed to be so well-established that only traitors would dare withhold gratification for whatever impulse is moving them at the moment.
Reasons are never supplied, only threats, all amounting to some variation on, “Hey racist dumb people who we hate, do this thing for us right now, or else.” Are we ever allowed to say “no”?
Why should Americans desire uncontrolled mass migration? Who decided that was an incontestable fact of American life?
Why should Trump supporters, whom the Left openly despises and now readily describes as “domestic extremists” deserving to be fired from their jobs, censored, spied on and destroyed by the force of the security state, be upset that Trump was acquitted?
Why should Trump supporters join the Left in grieving an “insurrection” that the Left is using to disingenuously target them?
Why are conservatives required to welcome their persecution?
No one can answer these questions, because they are absurd. Of course, they are not questions that are supposed to be asked in the first place. Conservatives are supposed to accept that they are the bad guys and eventually come around to doing what the Left says.
Don’t Keep Playing a Rigged Game
The impeachment clown show brought this to the fore. Trump’s lawyers did a splendid job rattling off the Left’s long train of abuses, from the “mostly peaceful” riots over the summer to their relentless effort to overthrow Trump, as they spent years defaming him as a Russian agent.
The point they raised was critical, and one that cannot go unaddressed: why are some riots OK, but not others? Why is it fine for some people to question the legitimacy of elections, but not others? Underneath lurks one all-important question: Why must conservatives play this rigged game?
The Left sneered. What Trump’s lawyers had failed to understand is that the Left can never step out of line, and anyone who suggests they have is making a “false equivalence.” Liberals good, conservatives bad. Capisce?
Democrats never have to moderate, only Republicans. The funny thing is, as much as the Left likes to paint the GOP as beholden to “extremists,” it’s hard to think of what more the GOP could do to betray their own voter base. They seldom put up a fight on any issue of consequence to their voters, and they do absolutely nothing to protect them from our hostile ruling class.
Just compare how Republicans responded to the Capitol “insurrection” to how Democrats reacted to the far more extensive, far more destructive Black Lives Matter riots this summer. Not one Democrat has accepted any responsibility for the latter; rather, they seized at the first opportunity to erase those riots from memory, before moving to persecute their political opponents with propaganda, likening Trump’s 74.2 million voters to al-Qaeda.
They didn’t even blink. On the other hand, Republican doofuses fell over themselves to play into the “insurrection” narrative, preparing the noose that Democrats would use to target their voters.
Moments after Trump’s acquittal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called for his prosecution. McConnell was also among those Republicans who condemned U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a freshman lawmaker who, according to propagandists in the mouthbreather media, is a dangerous “extremist” Republicans must expel, for some reason.
True, Greene is an aberration in a sense: she has more courage than most in her party, and shows unconcealed contempt for the Left. That’s against the rules, obviously, and so Democrats hate her. But shouldn’t America be more alarmed, more offended, that mouthbreathers in cable news call for drone strikes on American citizens than they are about some freshman lawmaker’s old Facebook posts?
For leftist propagandists, Greene serves a similar purpose to that of the Proud Boys. It wasn’t Black Lives Matter but the Proud Boys—a trivial group that is threatening to no one—Americans were told to fear this summer, in order to distract them from the “mostly peaceful” riots Democrats still have not acknowledged.
We Are All Extremists Now
The controversy with Greene isn’t really about her, just like the insipid “insurrection” propaganda isn’t about Trump or what he supposedly did. It’s about classifying Trump’s supporters as illegitimate and un-American. Trump, Greene, and anyone who stands up for these people is “the enemy within,” as Nancy Pelosi put it.
Democrats think all Republicans are “extremists” now, even “Moscow Mitch.” Instead of engaging in outrage theater over supposed “extremists” in their ranks and playing into imbecilic, overwrought narratives of “insurrection,” Republicans should be focusing on protecting their voters from psychopaths who want to destroy them.
Otherwise, what reason is there to vote for the GOP?
There’s nothing esoteric about this: to win elections, you have to actually help your core voters. The GOP’s core voters are middle-class people living in majority-white small towns. They live in a country where they are told, increasingly, that they have no place. What little representation they have left is being stripped away. They have been treated as foreigners in their own homeland for years, and now this hatred is hardening into a formal class distinction. They are like a disease, a problem that needs solving. They must be reeducated, shamed, suppressed, and pushed to the margins.
Convicting Trump would have sent a message that Republicans won’t lift a finger to protect people from what’s coming. Not that we would need much convincing.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
Photo “Trump Supporters” by Anthony Crider. CC BY 2.0.
