The 10 Best Conservative Columnists of 2013 -- Who are the most valuable pieces on the chessboard?

What is the future of conservatism? Which voices should define the priorities of the movement in the coming decades? Who are its most skilled proponents today? How should the movement evolve to face the threats most endangering America?

This list is my effort to advocate for both my favorite writers contributing to answering these questions and the ideas they champion.

- I’m being strict with the “columnist” title – no bloggers, journalists, or feature writers. A “columnist” is one who writes a 700-1400+ word polemical article on a regular basis for an established publication or syndication.

- I’m likewise being strict with the “conservative” title – other various right-of-center ideologies (neoconservatism, libertarianism, Christian theocrats, and paleo-con conspiracists) warrant their own lists. (Which perhaps they might get next year as I continue mapping out today’s most important ideological advocates in the contests of politics, ideas, and culture…)

- In selecting these individuals, I am including them and the ideas they champion in what I’m calling Conservatism 3.0 . This isn’t just a stand-alone list, it’s part of the bigger, ongoing project of my attempt to encourage ideological debate and dialogue. The columnists on this list each write books too and I’m adding their titles to my reading lists at the Freedom Academy Book Club . In next year’s installment of my “radical reading regimen” I’ll blog through their titles too.

- I’m excluding writers that I edit. All of PJM’s columnists and freelancers have been going on a separate list of my favorite writers, which I’ve been accumulating over the last six months and you can read on the last page of this post. And as an extra mention I have to go out of my way to recommend Instapundit Glenn Reynolds’s USA Today columns too. Blogging isn’t the only medium that Glenn’s mastered.

- I’m including excerpts from some of my favorite columns. Fair warning: this article today is over 13,000 words, highlighting some of the year’s best op/eds. (UPDATE: And apparently that means it’s too big for the view-as-single-page or print-this-post feature to work. I’m sorry. I assure you that was not intentional.) It’s really more of a free online e-book — a late Christmas present to all the readers, writers, activists, and patriots who have inspired and encouraged me in my own journey across the political spectrum…

Hey Jaz, I hope you don't mind, but I just had to do this! ;-)

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Finally, my #1 choice for best conservative columnist, two years running, the most talented polemicist today, one who regularly draws on Sowell’s insights…. What single quality must one embody in order to be the queen on the conservative chessboard?

1. Ann Coulter

I already explained back on November 19, The Most Important Reason Why Ann Coulter Is the Best Conservative Columnist:

Ann Coulter is not a conservative columnist who happens to be a Christian and a lawyer. She is a Christian trained and practiced as a lawyer who uses a conservative column to expose evil by name. Conservatism is a means to an end: the defeat of all criminal cultures — from street thugs to Islamists to Democrat Marxist liars — who live in rebellion against Western civilization.

But today, in considering her amidst the other columnists I’ve praised on this list, it’s worth noting that her writing and punditry approach differs 180 degrees with others I’ve already praised on this list. Something worth remembering: after September 11, 2001, National Review stopped publishing Coulter because of these notorious words, which are always worth reprinting because they are correct:

Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.

Whereas the Buckley/National Review tradition seeks to persuade and seduce, the Coulter tradition strives to provoke and infuriate. This approach can work too to draw people into an argument. It’s not a coincidence that Coulter was the columnist I hated the most as a leftist and today she’s the one I like the most. For Coulter it’s more than just using some stinging rhetoric or harsh words, it’s the arguments and facts themselves that do the real cutting. It’s not uncommon that the argument that Coulter chooses to make each week is something nobody else has ever heard of and fewer are prepared to answer. Likewise, she’ll frequently focus on topics that others don’t want to touch, including criticizing sacred cows in the GOP. (Her take-downs of Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Newt Gingrich especially — all reprinted in her new column collection Never Trust a Liberal Over 3–Especially a Republican – are phenomenal.)

Consider these six from this year:

January 30, “Rubio’s Amnesty: A Path to Oblivious for the GOP“:

The Democrats never change their ideas; they change the voters. For decades, Democrats have been working feverishly to create more Democrats by encouraging divorce (another Democratic voter!), illegitimacy (another Democratic voter!) and Third World immigration (another Democratic voter!).
What does it take to be the Queen of the Conservative chessboard? To make yourself feared and hated more than any other piece on the board. At heart ideological bullies are cowards and have to be scared into submission.

Strangely, some Republicans seem determined to create more Democratic voters, too. That will be the primary result of Sen. Marco Rubio’s amnesty plan.
IT’S NOT AMNESTY! Rubio’s proponents cry. They seem to think they can bully Republicans the way the Democrats do, by controlling the language. Rubio’s bill is nothing but amnesty. It isn’t even “amnesty thinly disguised as border enforcement.” This is a wolf in wolf’s clothing.

August 21, “Arab Spring: Worst Soap Opera Ever”:

Obama’s bombing of Gadhafi was also enthusiastically supported at the Times. Gadhafi, you see, had killed hundreds of his own people. Meanwhile, President Bashar Hafez al-Assad of Syria can preside over the slaughter of more than 100,000 of his people since that time without a cross word from the left.
Libyan people proceeded to stalk and kill Gadhafi in the desert (video on YouTube). A year later, the happy people of Libya murdered our ambassador and three other Embassy staff. But as Hillary said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
After all their carping about the Iraq War, you’d think liberals would have waited a few years before getting sentimental about democracy in Egypt and Libya. At least democracy is working in Iraq, despite Obama’s attempt to wreck it by withdrawing all U.S. troops. (We still have troops in Germany — but not in Bush’s Iraq.) Still, our ambassador wasn’t assassinated in Baghdad.
…
The one place Obama should have intervened was Iran. The moderate, pro-Western, educated Iranian people were being shot in the street in 2009 for protesting an election stolen by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a messianic lunatic in a Members Only jacket. There was a clear alternative in that case that didn’t involve the Muslim Brotherhood, to wit: the actual winner of the election.
But Obama turned his back on the Iranians. Democrats are so opposed to promoting the United States’ interests around the globe, it doesn’t occur to them that, sometimes, our national interests might coincide with the interests of other people.

September 18, “Crazier than Liberals”:

Liberals will pretend to have missed the news that the Washington Navy Yard shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic. They refuse to acknowledge that the mass murder problem — as well as the homeless problem — only began after crazy people were thrown out of institutions in the 1970s. They tell us crapping in your pants on a New York City sidewalk is a “civil right.” They say that haranguing passersby on the street about your persecution by various movie stars is a form of “free speech.”
Only after a mass murder committed by a psychotic with a firearm do liberals spring to life and suggest a solution: Take away everyone’s guns.
Taking guns away from the mentally stable only makes us less safe: Even psychotics know enough to keep choosing “Gun-Free Zones” for their mass murders. If Americans are serious about preventing massacres like the ones at the Washington Navy Yard, Newtown, Tucson, Aurora and Virginia Tech, it’s time to review our civil commitment laws.
After this latest shooting, will the left finally let us do something about the dangerously mentally ill?

November 20: “Alec Baldwin Vs Liberal Bullies”:

Bullying is the essence of politics for the left. They bully those they disdain, like Palin, with adolescent insults. They bully everyone with the threat of losing a career because of a word. They bully Americans with more than 1 million federal regulations. They bully men through feminist-designed divorce and sexual harassment laws –magically suspended in the case of President Clinton because liberals approved of his pro-abortion views.
That isn’t the rule of law; it’s the rule of bullies.
Conservatives believe people have a right to be left alone, whether from the word police, the government or delusional nuts, no matter how much they want “closure.” But most of all, conservatives don’t think the rules apply only to our political opponents — a liberal trademark, borrowed from the feminists.
We apply our principles even to people whose politics we dislike.

December 11, “Words with Fiends“:

This is how parents waste half a million dollars on their kids’ educations. Instead of learning how to make a point, their kids are learning how to end communication by denying the meaning of words.

December 26, “Kwanzaa: The Holiday Brought to You by the FBI“:

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga — founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better.By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution (although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers). Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves.United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a huge help to the black community: Three of the four suspects recently arrested for the fatal carjacking at the Short Hills, N.J., mall were named Basim, Hanif and Karif.)It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of Mein Kampf — and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear. Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the “framed” murder of two whites included: “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department” and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. “was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt” — an interesting standard of proof.)

Look, Coulter knows exactly what she’s doing when she says “outrageous” things that provoke attention — it’s a technique she has adapted from Rush Limbaugh who wrote the introduction to her second book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. They both know how to play the mainstream media like a violin. But for all the criticism she’s taken from more soft-spoken conservatives for her “rhetoric” I’m not sure that her reputation actually hurts her when engaging with progressives. Quite the opposite, in fact. So-called liberals expect that every time Coulter opens her mouth she’s going to spit a dagger into their heart. But when it comes to her values and positions she’s genuinely much more reasonable and sensible than one would ever expect. It turns out that what she said in If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans is actually true:

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m a middle-of-the-road moderate and the rest of you are crazy.”

Don’t believe me? Just look at the incredulity of Marc Lamont Hill and CNN’s Don Lemon when she makes arguments about the N-word that resonate with them.

The effect of dialogues like these on progressives whose minds aren’t solidly sealed shut? “Gee, if that Ann Coulter has a smart point to make about this, and she says that just about all right-wingers think what she’s saying, what else might she and the rest of them be right about?”

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