There’s a certain fellow from the Babylon Bee who has become one of these irritating policemen of the right: you can’t say X or question Y or talk to Z.
I’m a free American, as Dave Smith would say, so you know what? I just might say X or question Y or talk to Z, regardless of what the police think about it.
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I have been known to push back against this particular fellow because the whole thing is so dull and tiresome. Platitudes from 1987 are not going to solve our problems, and as we survey the wreckage of our society and try to figure out precisely what went wrong, we may need to ask some big questions, even if (gasp!) those questions aren’t allowed by the New York Times.
We have all enjoyed and appreciated much of the content from the Babylon Bee, which is part of what makes the present situation so regrettable, and such an unforced error on their part.
It all started with this particular fellow warning that what he calls “the post-liberal Right,” because it doesn’t believe in equality as the central organizing principle of the American republic, is
fundamentally opposed [to] a core tenet of the American founding. It wants a different country than the founders established. But they can’t come out and say that openly because their movement would die. That’s why so many of them lie, obfuscate, and gravitate toward Machiavellian tactics. I’m all for the debate, but debate only works if both sides are honestly representing their own views.
Thus, knowing nothing about the movement he seeks to police, he alleges that people are too afraid to debate his desired topic. I had to break it to him:
M.E. Bradford had famously argued, “Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself — Equality, with the capital ‘E’ — is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.”
Bradford warned that once we decide that we are a nation “dedicated to a proposition,” then the federal government is bound to become a gigantic equality enforcement machine, and you have no right to be surprised or upset when this giant oaf begins to define “equality” in a way that is different and far more invasive from how you do.
Before you know it, every nook and cranny of your society has been turned upside down in the service of this unquenchable “proposition.”
Our Babylon Bee guy, so ready to expel people from the movement, is unfamiliar with this debate, and thinks we’ve been shrinking from it.
No, it’s that Conservatism, Inc., in its present form is too degraded to have a serious discussion of it.
After some more back and forth, I concluded with this:
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As for your point that history matters less than scripture and your principles, my point is that the onus is on you, the one who is attacking others, to know that even Ronald Reagan, hardly an extreme right-winger, nominated as NEH director someone (the erudite Bradford) with the very opinions on equality that have you in your customary smear mode.
I think the reason you find yourself dealing with so many exasperated people on this platform is not that you are so wise and they so uneducable, but that the routine of pointing and shouting at people who are taking our present situation with grave seriousness, and who fear the old platitudes may be inadequate to present challenges, is not being done in good faith, but is rather being done in the manner of the left: that is to say, by denouncing heretics and calling names rather than making any real effort to address the arguments themselves.
The fact that you stumbled so badly when a podcast host simply asked whether you thought the Founding Fathers were “racist” shows you remain in the grip of the left to some extent.
We are inviting you to let the scales fall from your eyes, to see the world as it really is, and to reject the left and its works entirely, never again allowing yourself to feel confused or defensive. Then your work will be so much more valuable, because you will at last have understood the nature of the enemy.
This is not a fight between people who believe in “equality of opportunity” versus people who believe in “equality of outcomes”; nor is it a battle between “individual rights” and those who champion “group rights.” These are superficialities.
Every aspect of the revolutionary spirit needs to be uprooted from your mind if you are going to be the advocate for civilization and the good that your talents make it possible for you to be.
The people who understand this point are not evil. We are not the monsters of your imagination. We weep over what the left has done, all over the world. Our hearts burn for the West. We intend to do much more than weep, however, and step one in that process is to emancipate ourselves from the mental prisons in which our torturers have sought to confine us.
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