RUTHFULLY YOURS

About 90 percent of Republican voters eventually supported the political novice Donald Trump by November 2016. Most conservatives saw him as the preferable alternative to the vision and agendas of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps most still do after nine months of his presidency.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/09/message-v-messenger-the-trump-enigma/

Yet almost half of the elite conservative establishment remains opposed to Republican President Trump.

About a quarter of them, it seems, openly despise him. These are prominent Republican senators, think-tank writers, television pundits, op-ed columnists, and generic public intellectuals. MSNBC and CNN are now homes for disgruntled Republicans or former conservative pundits in the way that those outlets once for a time found it useful to welcome in paleo-conservatives opposed to the Bush Administration during the Iraq War.

Bret Stephens, the NeverTrump former conservative at the Wall Street Journal, now advocates the repeal of the Second Amendment in the pages of the New York Times. Did Trump turn off some of the Republican establishment, or liberate it to espouse progressive views that it always held, but found impolitic to express?

The usual conservative status quo complaint against Trump is that the deficiencies of the messenger outweigh the many positives of the message. Or Trump, the person, nullifies the policies that have accompanied Trump into power.

The anti-Trumpians cringe at Trump’s incessant Twitter and news conference spats with everyone from “fake news” reporters at CNN to the San Juan mayor. His marathon rambling speeches at rallies in red-state America remind them that they find Trump supporters on the screen far more alien than they do their liberal counterparts in their own Washington and New York neighborhoods. Never Trumpers certainly are louder in their opposition to Trump than was the Tea Party’s past criticism of McCain or Romney.

They are embarrassed that someone from their own party has a vocabulary that focuses on about four adjectives (“tremendous,” “great,” “awesome,” “wonderful,” etc.), or that he often exaggerates and errs in a manner of Barack Obama, though without the latter’s mellifluousness or Ivy League brand.

The Republican establishment used to lament that the old Reagan Democrats, Tea Party types, and working-class whites of the Midwest had stayed home in 2008 and 2012, and thus allowed good candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney to be steamrolled by Obama’s fatuous “hope and change” identity politics. Now they are either worried or shamed that these same swing voters came out in droves and left the Republican Party in a dominant position at the local, state, and federal level not seen since the 1920s.

In sum, the NeverTrump lament seems to be that whatever good Trump has done is more than outweighed by his “character is destiny” flaws. Neil Gorsuch and scores of conservative circuit court judges; Nikki Haley at the United Nations, James Mattis at Defense, H.R. McMaster at the National Security Council, Mike Pompeo at the CIA, and Rex Tillerson at the State Department, all restoring deterrence; rollbacks of Obama-era executive orders; green-lighting pipeline construction and increased fossil fuel production; protections of Second Amendment rights; restoring national borders; and genuine efforts to reform Obamacare and the tax code—all of that for them is not worth the spectacle of Trump on the national stage. Or for some, all of the above Trump efforts now are seen as disruptive and unnecessary—once the crudity of Trump enlightened the establishment to what it now sees as inherent wrongs present all along in conservative thinking.

The economy is gaining momentum. The stock market is way up. GDP growth exceeds Obama-era levels. Real unemployment (U6) is falling as labor participation improves. Business confidence is growing. Middle-class incomes and corporate profits increase. Consumer confidence is rebounding—all symptoms of an initial, implicit psychological rebuke to the overregulated and dreary business climate of the last eight years.

But again, should the economy hit an annual GDP growth rate of 4 percent, Trump’s popularity would probably not exceed 50 percent; and the NeverTrump establishment likely would not endorse his reelection, even should he appoint three conservative justices and thereby ensure a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.

The New York Times last week broke the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s long record of sexual harassment. Actresses including Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd came forward to detail Weinstein’s depredations, and so did former employees of the man who founded one of the most important independent film companies of the last 30 years, Miramax. The details were so jarring and the trail of abuse so long, that it was impossible to read the story and not come away wondering: How did no one know what he was doing?

But of course people knew about Harvey Weinstein. Like the New York Times, for instance. Sharon Waxman, a former reporter at the Times, writes in The Wrap how she had the story on Weinstein in 2004—and then he bullied the Times into dropping it. Matt Damon and Russell Crowe even called her directly to get her to back off the story. And Miramax was a major advertiser. Her editor at the Times, Jonathan Landman, asked her why it mattered. After all, he told Waxman, “he’s not a publicly elected official.”

Manhattan’s district attorney knew, too. In 2015, Weinstein’s lawyer donated $10,000 to the campaign of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance after he declined to file sexual assault charges against the producer. Given the number of stories that have circulated for so long, Weinstein must have spread millions around New York, Los Angeles, and Europe to pay off lawyers and buy silence, including the silence of his victims. But he had something else going for him, too. He knew his victims would be reluctant to go public because it might suggest that some of their success, their fame even, was a function of their inability to protect themselves from being humiliated by a man who set the bar for humiliating others at the precise level of his own self-loathing.

Hollywood is full of connoisseurs like Weinstein, men whose erotic imaginations are fueled primarily by humiliation, who glut their sensibilities with the most exquisite refinements of shame. A journalist once told me about visiting another very famous Hollywood producer—you’d know the name—who exhibited for my friend his collection of photographs of famous female actresses—you’d know their names, too—performing sexual acts for his private viewing. As with Weinstein, this man’s chief thrill was humiliation, and the more famous the target the more roundly it was savored: Even her, a big star—these people will do anything to land a role; they’re so awful, they’ll even do it for me.

One of the refrains you hear today from media experts and journalists is that they’d known about Weinstein’s transgressions for a long time. The problem, they say, was that no one was able to nail down the story.

Nonsense. Everyone had it, not just Waxman. Sure, reporters hadn’t been able to get any stars to go on the record. But that means the story journalists were pursuing wasn’t really about Weinstein’s sexual depredations. It means that what they wanted was a story about actresses, junior executives, or assistants who had been humiliated, maybe raped, and chose to remain quiet in exchange for money and/or a shot at fame.

Of course no one was going to get that on the record—very few journalists would even want to publish a story like that. But journalists always had the actual story of how a Hollywood producer humiliated and sexually assaulted women. How? Because he victimized journalists.

Fox News reporter Lauren Sivan told Huffington Post that a decade ago, Weinstein masturbated in front of her. She says she didn’t say anything at the time, when she was an anchor on a local cable show, because she was “fearful of the power that Weinstein wielded in the media.” She was right and her fear was understandable.

Writing in New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister remembers the time when she asked Weinstein an interview question at a book party, he screamed at her, spit in her face, called her a “c—t,” and then put her boyfriend in a headlock and dragged him to the street. Traister said nothing at the time because she figured she had little chance against “that kind of force.”

When “The Sopranos” took up the issue of Christopher Columbus back in 2002, the episode was widely panned as the series’ worst.

The show features Tony Soprano’s son reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” at the breakfast table—and then dismissing Columbus as a “slave trader” to his parents’ irritation. Likewise, members of Tony’s crew learn of a scheduled protest by Native Americans at a local Columbus Day parade, and then go to bust it up. In a discussion with his associates, one of them tells Tony that Columbus was “no better than Adolf Hitler. ” By the end, we have real life: Even the gangsters are divided, and everyone is aggrieved.

In its own time, critics ripped the episode as inauthentic. Fifteen years later, it looks spot on. Not for its depiction of Italian-Americans, but for the way it captures the strife and mindlessness that are the harvest of progressive protests pretending to be about diversity and expanded respect for other cultures.

In the run-up to this Monday’s parades and commemorations, one Antifa group called for a “Deface Columbus Day” in support of indigenous peoples who have been victims of “colonialism and genocide.” Some didn’t need the call: Even before the holiday weekend, Columbus statues across America have been beheaded, sledgehammered and splashed with paint.

In response to the provocations, some have tried reason. Christopher Scalia, a media consultant for the National Christopher Columbus Association, says the organization has just launched a new webpage called TruthAboutColumbus.com in hopes of putting forward a more balanced portrait of the man. Columbus, it says, was both a man of his time and a man ahead of his time.

But for all the talk about the “real” Columbus, protesters are unlikely to take up the invitation for further study and debate. For the defining fact of the modern progressive is that he is a pest, and what he wants here is simply to ruin any public celebration an ordinary American might enjoy, whether it be Italian-Americans celebrating Columbus or NFL fans sitting down to watch a game.

Ditto for the call to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. Few Americans would have an issue with dedicating a day to the achievements of our continent’s native peoples, or even with the claim that these achievements have not been given their just due. But again, the anti-Columbus movement is not about making room for the celebration of indigenous peoples. It’s about taking away a holiday enjoyed by others, or at least creating enough dissonance to suck the life out of it.

Their problem is that Columbus is not so easy to exorcise from American life. At the time of the Revolutionary War, Columbus symbolized the New World and its break from the Old. Still later the idealized Columbus, which was feminized along classical lines, became even more important than the man. There’s a reason the nation’s capital became the District of Columbia.

Later, Catholic immigrants—and not only Italians—saw in Columbus a way to connect their faith, which many American-born citizens regarded as alien, to their new home. It is no coincidence, for example, that the University of Notre Dame’s main building features a series of Columbus murals that depict the story of what some regard as America’s Catholic founding. CONTINUE AT SITE