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The Bulwark
It’s funny how catalysts work.
In chemical terms, catalysts are things that accelerate reactions but that are not themselves consumed in those reactions. When you add oxygen to a fire, the rate of burning is increased — but the oxygen is consumed in the process: oxygen is not a catalyst. On the other hand, the platinum in the catalytic converter in your car is a catalyst: it catalyzes (facilitates) a chemical reaction that reduces toxic carbon monoxide and waste hydrocarbons, converting these substances into, largely, non-toxic carbon dioxide and water. (Platinum isn’t a perfect catalyst, in that it’s gradually changed in the process, but it does a good job nonetheless.)
President Trump was a kind of catalyst. He caused a lot of conservatives to undergo a chemical transformation, and to become something other than, and, I think, less than, the conservatives they used to be, all without undergoing any obvious transformation himself. We need look no further than The Bulwark to see a beautiful example of this peculiar transformation.
The folks who founded The Bulwark were once respectable conservatives, but the catalyzing effect of an encounter with President Trump’s peculiar brand of unconscious knee-jerk conservatism (a style which, while never really to my liking, I nonetheless profoundly miss) changed them.
And so these august luminaries of once-upon-a-time conservatism are now running stories like this one: Guns Should be Safe, Legal, and Rare. Let me try to put this gently, but still in keeping with the tone of the piece (which would run afoul of the Ricochet CoC for its casual use of the F-bomb): To hell with that, you whinging pansies of The Bulwark.
Or how about this gem? Can Biden Become America’s Next Great President?
No. No, he can’t. Because he’s an incompetent who doesn’t understand the first thing about American greatness, has always pandered to the mainstream of his mediocre party, and is now in the thrall of his wife or whoever programs his enhanced-font teleprompter and sets out his medications every day. There is nothing about the man that ever hinted at greatness, and nothing about him now that even suggests basic competence. He’s a doddering place-holder, rewarded for not being someone roundly hated by the media and targeted by them and Big Tech for destruction.
What an amazing catalyst was President Trump, to transform such erstwhile political stalwarts as Mona Charen and Bill Kristol and Jonathan V. Last and Charlie Sykes into such mealy and base metal.
The Bulwark has become a woke leftist rag, albeit a virtual one. They should now be seen as yet another organ of the progressive mainstream media.
Maybe I’m sorry to lose these sad mediocre Quislings. But I don’t think I am.
Published in Politics
So you used to read Jerry Pournelle too? Sorely missed.
This is outstanding.
Thomas Sowell has been asked, in various contexts, what he would say to the leftists, cronies, race-baiters, and assorted apparatchiks and he has said “Nothing” or “Goodbye” because, as he explains, they cannot be persuaded to change their ways: It is in their self-interest to continue to do us harm: Virtue is unprofitable for them, while evil is highly lucrative.
I don’t understand the value of people defending the Bulwark though. It is odd.
Insiders will see value in defending the Bulwark in direct proportion to how much they see the Bulwark as being a bulwark against those who seek to free individual citizens from totalizing and impoverishing control by the corrupt system of cronies and statists.
Also, Trump gives some people the vapors, and so that old enemy-of-my-enemy thing kicks in.
This is highly related to the fact that I prefer to stick to policy and things that are pretty similar. When you move off of that, things get messy.
Also known as “better dead than rude”.