Victor Davis Hanson Responds to The Bulwark's Attack on Him
A Day After Charlie Sykes' Attack Site Smears His Colleague Hanson as a Nazi, The Very Virtuous David French Appears on Sykes' Podcast

Not taking prisoners here.

A jagoff, supposedly an adviser to Mittens Romney when he was pretending to be Severely Conservative, performed the usual services for Pierre Omidyar and attacked Victor Davis Hanson for his book The Case for Trump. In doing so, he also served The Bulwark's primary mission, as explained by Charlie Sykes: to "taint" any Trump supporting intellectuals and leave them with a "stench," and "make people feel uncomfortable at dinner parties and in green rooms."

So bitchy, so small. This crew is filled with such ambition that they can think of nothing but reputation-smearing operations and Twitter OWNZ.

Hanson responds:

Schoenfeld only fuels the popular perception of The Bulwark Never Trumpers as an angry, coastal elite who are anguished that their warnings about Trump were ignored by both hoi polloi and their conservative "grifters and trolls.” In careerist fury, he now damns others for his own self-immolation -- as if the country must suffer for the sins of not listening to his own genius, which would probably have given the country a 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum.

That Never Trumpers at The Bulwark were wrong about the Trump nomination, the general election, and the first two years of the Trump administration seems only to have fueled their spitefulness. If Schoenfeld is representative of this rump movement, then they are engaging in projection.

How strange to suggest that writing a book about why Trump got elected and why he has done well is proof of one's careerist effort to gain favor with a politician or perhaps find employment in his administration. This is a charge against those who have never worked in a campaign or sought administration employment, leveled by those who most certainly have done one or both in the past and no doubt will in the future -- at least if they can pull off yet another careerist contortion in 2024.

The bitter hostility of Schoenfeld reflects the Trump-assassination theme pushed by celebrities. Just as Madonna, Kathy Griffin, and Johnny Depp vie to see who can most grotesquely envision Trump’s death, so too Never Trumpers seek ever-more-creative ways to gnash their teeth at Trump and his supporters. Instead of trying to smear those with whom they disagree, they might have at least offered a coherent defense of their own creed, such as it is.

Instead of shrill charges and exclamations, Schoenfeld might have explained why Trump got elected, and why the preferred candidates of The Bulwark did not. And why have Republicans not won 51 percent of the presidential vote since 1988, in an era when they’ve done well at the state and local level? And, most important, why exactly do Schoenfeld and his associates oppose a president who has enacted a conservative menu that was once mostly their own? Why do they attack a president who is trying to stop a neosocialist agenda that was once likewise anathema to them?

Were some always closet progressives, and have they now found Trump hatred a convenient entree into the progressive world?

Let me stop you right there, Vic: The answer is "Yes."

Or is it that Trump's agendas must be stopped because his handprints on them soil what they once favored?

No it was that thing you said before.

...

"Little rocket man" may or may not be a puerile presidential outburst, but not achieving annualized 3 percent GDP growth for a decade, or leaving the border wide open, or writing off the industrial heartland, or doing little to address minority unemployment -- or for 20 years soberly and judiciously giving billions to the Kim dynasty as it sought its present arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the West Coast -- may be a far greater moral sin.

If America had listened in 2016 to such Never Trump advocacy, we would now be in the eleventh year of a likely 16-year Obama-Clinton continuum, a tenure well on the way to completing the much-vaunted fundamental progressive transformation of the country -- to the detriment of millions of Americans. Donald Trump for the time being has interrupted that arc of history....

Schoenfeld was once a professed conservative who now conveniently adopts positions he once refuted, and he does so while in pay to a billionaire leftist who in large part underwrites The Bulwark’s invective to damage conservatives.

Since the malleable Schoenfeld is fond of historical allusion, so be it. There was once a proper Cold War term for what he has sadly turned into -- a useful idiot, whose loud but transient and minimal utility to the Left will abruptly cease when Donald Trump leaves office.

And then what?

The mention of "historical allusion" refers to Schoenfeld repeatedly comparing Hanson to Nazi propagandists, and then claiming -- in cowardly, womanly passive-aggression -- that he doesn't mean to say Hanson is a Nazi, just that he, like these Nazi propagandists, is using his education to argue in the service of evil.

That's all.

It's just a coincidence he keeps coming up with comparisons to Nazis, he assures us.

Meanwhile: Guess how David French stands up for his colleague Victor Davis Hanson?

By doing a podcast with Charlie "3-Wives" Sykes, who commissioned the hit-piece on Hanson.

And yes, while Hanson's response was published today, Shoenenfeld's hit piece has been up for at least one day and I think two.

A friend says: "Victor Davis Hanson must quit NR over this."

That, or make it clear that either French goes, or he goes.

Or maybe he should just tell Lowry: Professional courtesy is out the window, now; David French is a valid target for me. And if you don't like it -- fire me, and explain to the donors why French gets special privileges and I get a pink-slip.

Yes, I like that best. Put the coward Lowry into a position where he has to make a decision.

What venomous, sneaky little shits. All parading (waddling, really) around to show off their imagined "virtue."

David French shows as much loyalty to colleagues as Charlie Sykes does to wives.

Update: Alex the Chick points out this isn't the first time Lowry has embraced someone attacking VDH:

This is the second time that fellow "colleagues" at NRO have taken shots at VDH.

Kevin Williamson was, now, is everyone sitting down for this shocking turn of events, an utter, petty, nasty, horrid, small, pathethic twatling about VDH when he was hired by The Atlantic.

NRO took him back when The Atlantic gave him the boot. What was left of my respect for Lowry was destroyed at that point because you don't bring back someone who bad mouthed a co-worker they way Williamson did. You just don't.

Kevin Williamson did in fact go face-down, ass-up for his paymasters (brief though they were) at The Atlantic in attacking Hanson.

VDH responded here, vigorously.

I hope VDH takes that same attitude with regard to the cuck French.

Meanwhile:

Jordan Schaechtel:

While the media has extensively covered this information, little coverage has been devoted to the individuals in charge of the super PAC at the time that it accepted the cash from the China-backed outfit...

Mike Murphy is a high-profile NeverTrumper and a valued member of the Republican consultant class who was best known for working on the failed John McCain presidential campaign...

Murphy, like his close friend Bill Kristol, pretty clearly cottons to the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.

Moreover, the GOP consultant, who is also a NBC contributor, frequently appears on television to advance the Trump-Russia conspiracy.

It is all too ironic that Murphy, who forwards the idea that the president is tied to a foreign government, oversaw an organization that was subject to a potential Chinese influence operation.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:20 PM

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