RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is the kind of thing that conservatives should print up and carry around with them for throw-down challenges against leftists.

I’ve long admired Rep Dan Crenshaw (R. Tex.) for the knack he has to clearly state conservative principles – and his willingness to speak out constantly about those principles. One of Trump’s problems was his inability to articulate principles. His practical instincts were good but he – along with way too many Republican politicians – allowed Democrats to win the war of words. On Friday, Crenshaw again used gift in this area with a Twitter thread that lists 22 core conservative principles that we need to fight for in this lunatic Democrat era.

Crenshaw went down in my estimation last month when he attacked Trump over the events at Capitol Hill (an attack at odds with the facts) and when he pushed back against ousting Liz Cheney from her leadership position in the House after she voted in favor of impeaching President Trump. Both of those stands looked remarkably like pandering to the Bush crowd and the Democrats. I strongly disagreed with them then and I still do now.

On Friday, though, Crenshaw published a Twitter thread (which I’m presenting below as a straight text list) that deserves respect. In it, he simply and clearly articulates principles that are the antithesis of the madness the Biden administration and the rest of the Democrat party crew are imposing on our nation:

The Conservative Guide to the Culture Wars (in no particular order):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-equality-lost-to-equity-11613155938?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS

“Yet Mr. Steele also sees “more and more blacks” pushing back against “the tribalism of race” as it collides with the “reality of freedom.” He views the Black Lives Matter movement as a desperate attempt to salvage tribalism. For all his indignation, Mr. Steele foresees a better future. “Millions of black individuals, living their lives as individuals, will take us beyond tribes and into true American citizenship. Many blacks are thriving already. Their children will do even better.”

Mr. Steele, 75, is a longstanding conservative commentator on race in America and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. We speak over Zoom a week after President Biden signed an Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity, intended to address “entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions.” In his remarks at the signing, Mr. Biden seemed to suggest that his is a project aimed at reshaping American governance. “We need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government,” the president said. “It has to be the business of the whole of government.”

I can almost hear Mr. Steele growl in his study in Monterey, Calif., as I read these words aloud. “This equity is a term that has no meaning,” he says, “but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that somebody’s a bigot.” Its message is that there’s “inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Equity in this “new sense,” Mr. Steele says, can be understood only as “a strategy.” The president is promising to “fix America morally, and aligning himself with the strategy of black people to gain power by focusing on victimization. He’s saying, ‘America must tackle that problem and create programs that help minorities achieve equity’—whatever that may be.”

The idea of equality has been eclipsed, Mr. Steele says, in part because “it was a little too specific” and bore the baggage of the old civil-rights movement. “We fought for equality 60 years ago,” he says. It was a struggle that brought his black father and white mother together. (They married in 1944. All of her siblings abandoned her, “and never came back.”) “We won the civil-rights legislation in the ’60s,” Mr. Steele says, “and the term ‘equality’ is exhausted now. And it’s lost much of its mystique—because you can measure it.”