Alex the Chick Rant: David French's Strange Notions of Who Needs/Deserves His White Knighting, and Who Doesn't

As you know, David French is currently White Knighting for NFL millionaires.

He has previously White Knighted for Bari Weiss (New York Times columnist making, I assume, sweet bank), Kevin Williamson (permanent member of the Conservatism, Inc. quilting bee), and Charles Murray (political scientist and author who has a lot of nice postings in conservative institutions).

Now, I don't have any particular beef with those folks. I'm not a fan of Williamson's but I don't want him blackballed.

But I do seem to notice the sorts of people French is willing to exert himself to White Knight for: The people Peggy Noonan called "The Protected."

Note that she talks mostly about immigration and its effects here, but I'd suggest that people read "threats of firing due to speech/beliefs" in place of "concerns over displacement by uncontrolled immigration."

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

But actually that's been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we're in.

Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.

But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful--those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let's stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they've got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them--in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union--literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They're insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

...

If you are an unprotected American--one with limited resources and negligible access to power--you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years' experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won't protect you and the Republicans won't help you.

...

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration--its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine--more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

Note that "The Protected" of the Conservatism, Inc. commentariat don't have to fear that their employers will be pressured to fire them due to their political opinions -- except, of course, if they stop being relevant to readers. (But every writer faces that; you can't complain if your audience deserts you.)

"The Protected" do not have to fear a firing, so long as they stay in their little Conservatism, Inc. think-tank and magazine safe spaces.

But 99.9% of conservatives in America do not work in such safe spaces, and do have to fear that something they say in the breakroom or on Twitter -- or in a Google employee suggestion thread where employee suggestions were expressly solicited -- will get them fired.

I wonder if they realize that, or if they're too removed from the day-to-day lived reality of 99.9% of conservatives in this country to get that on any kind of meaningful gut level.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

...

This is a terrible feature of our age--that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

And a country really can't continue this way.

In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn't seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You're on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

...

I don't know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.

So: Tomi Lahren, a commentator with a much lower profile than The Protected members of the clicque David French prefers to exert himself in defense of, warrants only two words in a retweet after an assault.

On the other hand, a leftwing professor celebrating the death of Barbara Bush warrants a full essay by French, scolding Unprotected Conservatives for suggesting that the rules applied to them on a daily basis should also apply to Protected Progressives.

What a notion, huh?

And after the NFL lays down the rule for years that conservative-tilted on-field political messages will be fined, they then role over for a Black Lives Matter inspired protest against the flag.

Unprotected Conservatives once again think: Maybe the rules applied against Unprotected Conservatives should, perhaps, also apply to Protected Progressives?

Well, David French is here to White Knight again for the Protected.

As Alex the Chick write:

This [tweet came] after he wrote an execrable piece at the beginning of the month out right attacking Evangelicals for not caring about Stormy Davis and he was getting a TON of push back on it.

Chris Stigall twetted about that article:

Let it sink in no Trump voter was under the impression he was our moral better. Let it sink in the American left wants to silence & marginalize your moral voice in the public square & in policy. Trump may not meet your standards, but he was willing to fight to defend your voice. https://t.co/hX1As5tM25

— Chris Stigall (@ChrisStigall) May 3, 2018

To which French replied as follows:

I’m quite capable of defending my own voice. I don’t need a POTUS to do that. For generations Evangelicals believed character mattered in politicians (because it does). Now they’re the group least likely to care. And that’s pathetic. https://t.co/Jo37ZNyd3s

— David French (@DavidAFrench) May 3, 2018

Now French wants to handwring about the NFL players being told if you want to make a political statement, you can do so by staying in the locker room rather than kneeling?

Suck my girl dick, French. Suck it deep.

David French once again heaps scorn on the Deplorables who would like to have some of the protections of the Protected Classes, and claims that no man should need any White Knighting from another. Silly Evangelicals should just use the power of their voices and... um, get published in National Review like this cuck can easily do?

So free speech only belongs to professional writers with steady gigs at dedicated conservative platforms they can't be fired from?

And anyone who seeks some Protection -- as French himself has -- is just a mewling baby?

Meanwhile, while he castigates the whiny Christian Evangelists for their pussy-baby whining about wanting some protection for their own expression of beliefs, he rushes right into the fray in a hot-blooded frenzy to defend, once again, millionaire members of the Protected Class (similar to himself in terms of clout and power and unfireability).

And meanwhile -- not a word about other Unprotected Conservatives like Lauren Southern, who got ordered by police into a no-lawyer interrogation by UK terrorism police because she once indulged in the provocation of passing out a leaflet that said "Allah is Gay."

Here's the thing:

We know these c***s (and I don't mean cucks this time) will go to the mat for their fellow travelers and their sacred rights of free expression.

We equally know they will not lift one of their writerly pale thin fingers to say a single word about the purges, mobs, and speech-firings besetting the rest of us.

Perhaps it's time to withdraw any support we have been giving our ungrateful Protected "thought-leaders" so that they may know what it feels like -- if just a little bit -- to be a member of the Unprotected classes.

You cannot govern a country you've never visited, and you cannot lead a movement whose members you not only have never met, but are obviously proud that you've never shaken their grubby workman's hands.

In the meantime, if you want David French and his fellow Protected Class members to take an interest in your speech rights, I suggest you undertake the mission of either becoming a millionaire or a neocon writer at the New York Times, and then he'll rush to your defense with gangbusters gusto.

You just have to be Clubbable. You just have to be of the right Class, Dear.

You just have to be someone with enough clout that you may be in a position to offer David French a favor or a job in the near to middle future.

That's all you have to do.

Oh -- and, despite his obvious stalwart loyalty to members of the Monied Class and Credentialed Class, and his obvious disgust for the "populists" not in those classes who think that they, as Americans, should also have the right to speak freely -- he'll lecture your ears off about the dangers of "tribalism" if given any chance to do so.

posted by Ace of Spades at 04:30 PM

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