Mr. French was always a sassy sort.
Posted on 10/05/2021 4:07:00 PM PDT by lasereye
TUCKER CARLSON: Why did you leave National Review?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Because there were certain issues that would pop up occasionally, and I could predict what the answer was going to be. The Covington kids. I just sensed that before we knew anything, people would come and condemn them.
TUCKER CARLSON: People at NR condemned the Covington kids?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think there were certain people in the Republican movement, or establishment, who felt it is their duty to internally police their own, and that's kind of a virtue signal to the left.
We are just part of your class, we share the same values as you do, and we keep our crazies. And they are not empirical.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They're having Officer Sicknik lie in state, but I want to know where is the evidence is that he was killed? He wasn't killed, he died of a stroke
TUCKER CARLSON: NR wasn't on that?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: No. No. An "armed insurrection." There were no weapons found on the people they arrested.
So these issues, I would get angry about, and I would try to convey that anger, but I think a lot of them felt it was their duty as Republican establishmentarians to tell the world they didn't approve of Donald Trump's tweets or his crudity.
My message was always: But, it's good for the middle class.
TUCKER CARLSON: What issues did they think were important?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I don't know, I think there's an image that a lot of Republicans have, both in politics and they sort of represent a sober and judicious way of looking at the world, and we are the adults in the room.
I thought they would be champions of the middle class, but I don't think they were.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
David French and Jonah Goldberg hate conservatives. Good for Victor for leaving.
Mr. French was always a sassy sort.
This actually goes all the way back to WFB himself (R.I.P.). He did not want NR to be a venue for Birchers or serious populists. Buckley’s own “In Search of Anti-Semitism” took unfair swipes at Pat Buchanan and especially Joseph Sobran.
French lives in Maury County TN. He must hate being there. Not many liberals around.
The problem is that the “establishment republicans” who infest NR stand for nothing. They have no platform, no principles, no mission, nothing. They are not conservatives, as we know, and they are not populists, as we also know. So what are they? I think FR has come up with the answer. Assistant democrats.
The Birchers were the home of loony conspiracy theories. I think they believed that Nixon was secretly an agent of the Soviet Union IIRC.
I think that NR will soon go the way of Bill Kristol’s magazine - into extinction. Jonah Goldberg has fallen far, and David French even further. There’s another guy (Kevin Williamson?) who’s name I can’t recall at the moment who actually was going to go work for The Atlantic, until some Atlantic staff gave the thumbs-down because he was deemed tainted by his years at NR.
Some of them largely take conservative positions on the economy and fiscal issues, at least in the abstract. I believe they are otherwise not conservative at all.
The likes of the NR bitches should be shoved to the back of the line where they belong.
Good on VDH and Tucker for hosting.
I liked Sobran; he did brief radio commentary for a while. I think he passes away relatively young about 15 years ago.
I think John Stormer was JBS and I think he was correct about what he wrote ... none dare call it treason - 25 years later.
““In Search of Anti-Semitism” took unfair swipes at Pat Buchanan””
But nary a word about Jimmy Carter.
The mainline GOP have ALWAYS been Country Clubby aristocratic bluebloods who couldn’t be bothered about what serviles — like people from Nebraska, or Arkansas — thought or needed.
They recognize that conservative economic policies are necessary to have plenty of money to support leftist social policies. That fence rail can only be sat on so long. The left has overwhelmed out economics and it is going to eat up the NR as well as the fools of the corporate state who think they can control the totalitarians that control the Biden Administration.
CRT is one of the biggest virtual signals ever...but I know what you are getting at. The are urbanites who must keep their hipster attitude and cannot mingle with the "rural" conservative slime
Bttt
Once known as “Rockefeller Republicans.”
As long as they oppose Trump they can be accepted by the people they are virtue signaling to I think. But, opposing the people trying to remove CRT seems like he’s trying to stick his thumb in the eye of the conservative base.
French and Goldberg themselves left NR because it wasn’t sufficiently anti-Trump.
But Hanson is right that the virtue-signaling is still a problem among the powers that be at NR. And he’s right that it’s a class thing. Going back to Bill Buckley, NR’s viewpoint has always been aligned with the cultural elite.
Personally, I still like a lot of what I read at NR. Kyle Smith’s movie reviews and opinion pieces are good. Michael Dougherty gets the trad Catholic viewpoint out there. With that said, their audience is getting narrower and narrower. You can play to the elites, the snobs, but that strategy is questionable when that cohort drift further and further left. In Bill Buckley’s day, probably at least half of snobs were conservative. Those days are gone when a doofus like Biden sweeps America’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
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