The War Party is Recycling Their ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ Mantra
In his first week in office, Donald Trump has accomplished a kind of Normandy landing, “flooding the zone” with common-sense, patriotic, and sane policies imposed by executive order, reversing many of the most extreme policies of the Biden administration—policies our half-neutered, half-compromised Republicans in Congress never even bothered to fight. At best, Republicans during the Biden administration made token efforts of resistance, occasionally drafting doomed, stand-alone bills designed to showcase their credentials to their MAGA constituents but which were, in fact, only half-hearted efforts.
The real power of Congress is the power of the purse—which our founders carefully deposited under Article II in the branch that most reflects the popular will, the House of Representatives—remembering, as they did, the battles the British Parliament had to wage against absolutizing monarchs. For decades, GOP leaders blithely tossed aside that sacred power, making backroom deals with Democrats for “omnibus” bills that funded Biden’s FBI persecution of Christians, his transgender madness (even on military bases), his influx of more than 10 million immigrants, and hundreds of billions to fund his bloody quagmire in Ukraine. GOP leadership willfully set up conservative representatives in ways that would require them to vote for all of that, or be blamed for recklessly “shutting down the government.”
That’s why it’s so refreshing, even exhilarating, to see Trump hack through the Gordian Knot which the Vichy GOP helped to tangle. In one week, we have seen the blanket pardon of Jan. 6 election integrity protestors, pardons for peaceful pro-life demonstrators, the beginning of deportation efforts for violent foreign criminals, and the rejection of 47 genders by the federal government. Indeed, Trump is hitting so many pinatas that the floor is covered with candy, and our propaganda media hasn’t got the bandwidth or the brain cells to whip up the requisite moral panics to stop him.
Trump’s first week in office felt like, dare we say it? … the first week in a Pat Buchanan administration. We’re all experiencing something we almost never get to feel: a sense of vindication.
So what could go wrong? A lot of things. Let’s leave aside things that stand outside Trump’s control—such as another, but successful, attempt his life, or an unprovoked foreign invasion.
Apart from those awful prospects, those who wish to cripple Trump in office and stop the MAGA takeover of the GOP have one lever they can pull that would indeed crush his momentum, blunt all his initiatives, and poison his legacy as thoroughly as the ghostly swamps round Chernobyl: Another pointless foreign war.
Who remembers George W. Bush for anything beyond the catastrophic and pointless war in Iraq? Surely nobody recalls the noises he made during his 2000 campaign about a “modest foreign policy.” That war didn’t just break the national bank, transferring some $138 billion in taxpayers’ cash to companies like Halliburton. It caused at least 600,000 civilian deaths, put the country in Iran’s political orbit, and allowed the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Iraqi Christians, whose churches had stood since the time of the Apostles.
That war also gave us the election of Barack Obama, and his court appointees, who handed us Obergefell—a decision which did indeed, as predicted, lead to the legal persecution of Christians right here at home. Obama, in office, used Bush’s Patriot Act to turn our FBI into a kind of American Stasi, which targeted conservatives and Christians.
America paid a high price for blithely following the war party in 2003. How did they sell that war to us? In part by pimping shaky intelligence that genuine experts in our intelligence community knew was unreliable, as the great Chronicles columnist Justin Raimondo warned the world at the time.
But another front might have been even more important: The ferocious effort to censor, cancel, shame, and scapegoat conservative critics of the war. Remember David Frum? His 2003 front-page story in National Review, “Unpatriotic Conservatives” was a kind of Stalinist purge trial in print, accusing longtime stalwarts and patriots of being anti-American cranks and hateful extremists. At the time, one of us (John Zmirak) wrote:
The lone wolves Frum presumes to exile—serious, flinty, sometimes wrongheaded and mostly crotchety, unclubbable thinkers such as Peter Brimelow, Lew Rockwell, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Justin Raimondo—have each added far more to the stock of interesting arguments on the Right than Frum ever will. They have each, in different ways, helped blow away the cloud of rhetoric, demagoguery, and lies that passes for political debate in this country. They each write with careful reference to history, reverence for the Western tradition, and an understanding of our country and its Constitution—instead of spewing mindless, provocative slogans such “Axis of Evil,” or “Nuke Mecca.” They each provoke serious thought among their readers. But then, that isn’t what Frum cares about. As far as I can tell, it never was.
Now the same War Party is recycling their tactics for the same reasons—except that the war they have in mind this time is one with Iran. The lead targets are Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Curt Mills of The American Conservative, and Trump’s Mideast emissary Steven Witkoff. A concerted campaign has begun to try to cancel such skeptics of another trillion-dollar war with unimaginable consequences that’s not in America’s interests and to portray opponents to such an effort as “isolationists,” “defeatists,” and of course, enemies of Israel.
The battle over Gabbard’s confirmation might prove the conflict that decides whether Trump’s presidency moves forward and reshapes American politics … or peters out into nothing. Likewise, in 2017, Trump’s entire term in office was wrecked by his deferring to Mike Pence and firing General Mike Flynn, leaving the deep state in place unsupervised to spend the next four years falsely impeaching him and undermining his legal authority. Let’s pray that Trump stands firm. The future of our country, and the lives of millions of helpless civilians in the region, stand in the balance.