Trump: "It is my profound honor to be the first president in U.S. history to attend the March for Life!"

It's hard to take people who are plainly more liberal than conservative shrieking "Trump's not a real conservative" when for 40 years those same undercover liberals have strongly advised GOP presidents to stay away from the March for Life.

Is Trump really a conservative?

I don't know. Is my lawyer really on my side? If he keep doing a good job at pressing my claims in court and defending me from accusations, do I care if he's "really on my side" or just on my side because I pay him?

Is my lawyer acting like he's on my side just because he loves me or due to the facts that our interests align, and he can expect to profit by advancing my interests?

Does it matter?

You know, Milton Friedman said, approximately, never count on a politician to "do the right thing." Only count on politicians to do things which are in their own interest.

And Donald Trump has, for whatever reason, decided that advancing the conservative cause is in his own self-interest.

Meanwhile, the NeverTrump critics of the billionaire's-playground "conservative media" have an entirely different set of interests -- career interests which include making sure they're always considered "safe and reasonable Polite Company Conservatives" who can be hired by Michael Bloomberg and other leftwing media tycoons, and making sure their columns comport with the political and economic imperatives of the identities-concealed AEI corporate/billionaire donors paying their home mortgage payments.

Trump acts as if he's on my side.

Which the True Conservatives never do. The "True Conservatives" only seem to get emotionally invested in politics when it affords them a chance to attack real conservatives and make a show for their liberal friends of "patrolling their own."

Always eager to build up goodwill with possible future liberal employers... at the expense of losing all goodwill from actual conservative voters.

These guys are "not on your side." They do not write for you. You are not their clients.

You are their commodity, the thing they package up and sell to their actual clients, their employers, their donors.

Ever wonder why they spend so much time trying to convince conservatives of the rightness of liberal ideas, and so little time trying to convince liberals of the rightness of conservative ones?

So here's that Fake Conservative Trump, doing what "Real Conservatives" have always lacked the courage to urge presidents to do.

Or have been paid not to urge them to do.

"Unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House," Trump declared. He mentioned his administration's efforts on the Mexico City Policy, a pro-life rule on Title X funding, support for the Little Sisters of the Poor, new rules preserving faith-based adoption, and his 187 confirmed originalist federal judges.

"Sadly, the far-left is actively working to erase our God-given rights, shut down faith-based charities, ban religious believers from the public square, and silence Americans who believe in the sanctity of life," the president declared. "They are coming after me because I am fighting for you and we are fighting for those who have no voice, and we will win."

Given that it was during last year's March for Life that the "True Conservative" grifters in our movement decided to use their influence to slander a pro-life 16-year-old for the crime of Being White While Protesting, it's a great time to re-read Julie Kelly's carpet-bombing of the "Call Out 'Conservatives'" who gleefully join the left whenever possible.

On Sunday afternoon, as the media's narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet's editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a "hoax" and that Frankovich's "strongly worded post" had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.

That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no "calling out" other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.

Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, "Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It," wrote Kyle Smith.

But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, "the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace." Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich's vicious post as just "different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions."

Goldberg and Lowry also retweeted false accounts of the event to their hundreds of thousands of followers, inviting even more people to join in in the public lynching of a boy.

So, what motivated a seemingly measured man like Frankovich to pen a midnight hit piece on teenagers? What compelled Lowry and Nordlinger to join the outrage mob, and Goldberg to defend their choice? Why do NeverTrump (or even SometimesTrump) "conservatives" like Lowry more often than not side with the Left's mercenaries in the media who are hellbent on destroying this presidency and the people who support it? After all, these are the same folks who warn us on a daily basis that the president cannot be trusted, that he’s a dishonest purveyor of the truth, and that his cult-like followers have no ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

The easy explanation for their bad behavior this weekend would be confirmation bias, the propensity to select or ignore evidence to support a specific viewpoint. Anti-Trump "conservatives" long ago decided that Donald Trump not only is unfit for office, but that his supporters are ignorant rubes with racist tendencies. (NR's David French wrote recently that Trump is the reason for a supposed--but actually imaginary--rise in white supremacy.)

In an interview Monday night, Goldberg again defended his side’s confirmation bias by invoking another tactic--false equivalence. "The confirmation bias that says, ah ha, this proves that the people I disagree with aren’t just wrong, they're evil, which is rampant on both sides of the aisle these days." Contrary to how Goldberg tries to sell it, it's pernicious on one side: His.

But this time they crossed a line.

Yes, this time they made it quite clear with whom their true political/cultural allegiances lay. The masks slipped, a little too far to recover in time.

And I think we all really want to have more "True Conservatism" preached at us by people who gleefully join with the left in viciously slandering pro-life teens.

And we need to have "accountability and honesty" preached at us by people who refuse to this very day to admit their role in the mob savaging, or confess what bad wiring might have caused them to do so.

posted by Ace at 04:58 PM

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