Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says: Stay Off My Corner Charlie Sykes

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any recently-former Republican pundit, in possession of  premium seating at the Beltway Media Adult Table, secretly wants to live the life of a Liberal blogger.

And why wouldn't they?  After all, the life of the Liberal blogger is amazing!  Not just the embarrassing amounts of money.  Or the acclaim.  Or the book deals.  Or the speaking engagements.  Or the high-level consulting offers about which we are presently unable to speak.  

But more than all of that, what we Liberal blogger value most is the near-universal respect and esteem we enjoy from the American political media establishment.  Just the sheer amount of praise and congratulations that pour in thanking us for being right about the Right all along, and warning the country, so early on and so accurately, about the disastrous trajectory the Republican party was on ...well, let's just say there aren't enough hours in the day to get out all the personalized "You're Welcome" notes we would like to send.  

Which is why we all have large and well-paid staffs who attend to such things.

For example, here we find Mr. Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark getting gussied in Liberal blogger threads in order to drag America's most prominent White, gay, childless, Catholic, Tory, Conservative, Libertarian phrenologist.  And thanks to Alert Reader "Dexter" for passing it along!

Why is the Right Losing the Young?

What Andrew Sullivan gets right...and absurdly wrong.

Of course, recently-former Republican pundits like Mr. Sykes don't want to scuff up their True Conserative [TruCon (tm)]  credentials by actually being icky Liberal bloggers, or even acknowledging  that we icky Liberal bloggers  a) exist and, b) were right about the Right all along.   Because in the media terrarium in which they live, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. 

In their world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.  And since they are regularly gifted such largess, they are obviously not icky Liberals.  

Instead, they have recast themselves as some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur, who are definitely not what passes for Conservative these days, but instead are pureblood TruCons (tm) who are also free to smack around their recently-former fellow traveling public intellectuals when it those fellow travelers drop trou in public and remind everyone they're really just goofball stoner pseudolibertarian nitwits.

Here is more of what TruCon-and-definitely-not-icky-Liberal Charlie Sykes is just now noticing about  Mr. Andrew Sullivan.

Here, Sullivan offers a series of tortured and, frankly, confusing proposals. Sullivan begins by suggesting that the right should start sounding more like… Barack Obama...

He proposes somehow blending this renewed Obama-ism with what he calls “South Park” conservatism that “constantly mock[s] the humorlessness, newspeak, and censoriousness of our new woke overlords.”

And:

Sullivan cites the influence of comedians like Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr or Matt and Trey. “They understand that a truly diverse society needs wicked humor to vent its tensions, not pious censorship and threats of cancellation to suppress them all.”

Somehow, somewhere, he seems to imagine that all of this will lead to younger voters flocking back to the party fronted by Kevin McCarthy et. al.

And:

But his wish-casting also highlights the gap between the actual, real-world right and the right of Sullivan’s imagination.

What he describing is, in fact, the sort of centrist liberalism that has been roundly and enthusiastically rejected by a conservative movement that which bears little resemblance to the nuanced right of Sullivan’s hopes.

And:

Sullivan thinks that cultural figures like “JK Rowling, Lil Nas X, Mike White, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald (!) and Arnold Schwarzenegger” will “help scramble the idea that embracing diversity means simply adopting the mantras of the woke sect.”

Unmentioned are the actual stars of the conservative movement as-it-actually-exists, such as Charlie Kirk and the trolls of TPUSA, whose approach to “diversity” bears little resemblance to what Sullivan is describing.

And:

To be sure, Sullivan does not hold up any of these misfit toys as the key to winning back the young.

Instead, the one political figure he cites is… Ron DeSantis.

In my long-running and award-ready series, "Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says",  I have pointed out that Mr. Sullivan has always been aggressively clueless about his adopted country.  Until about five minutes ago, he would barely acknowledge that we had fought a civil war over slavery, that Jim Crow had been a real thing with real, long-term consequences, that racism was still a powerful force of gravity in American life and politics, or that the Republican party had embraced racism (along with xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, gun nuttery,anti-Semitism ,  the monstrous perversion of Christianity that is Conservatives Evangelicalism, etc., etc. etc.) as a means to achieve political power.

Instead, Sullivan became one of the Right's most outspoken Useful Idiots by helping the the rotting zombie corpse of actual Conservatism hide behind a Disneyfied fantasy version of Conservatism.  And when that all fell apart, he showed up, hat in hand, to join the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, and has maintained the same pitch of hysterical alarm at both the actual fascism on the Right and the wildly exaggerated/largely imaginary "humorlessness, newspeak, and censoriousness of our new woke overlords” on the Left.  

Since then Sullivan's vision of America appears to be the residue of some combination of fearfully peering out some cartoon version of this country at it from between the slats of his Washington D.C. condo, his seething anger at being knocked off the top of the Conservative public intellectual dung heap, and the voices of his never-cited-by-name "liberal friends" who all agree with him about all this horrible "woke" business and who all appear to be cousins of Tom Friedman's ubiquitous wise local cab drive who, regardless of what country Friedman was traveling in, always manifested themselves out of thin air just in time and with just the right quaint provincial quotes and folk wisdom that Friedman needed to finish his article about the world being a flat Lexus or whatever.  

Oh, and of that stuff I wrote about "largess" and "escape velocity" and recently-former Republicans likes Sykes recasting themselves as a rare and singular new species of haploid political minotaur sounds familiar, it should.  It's what I wrote about Mr. Andrew Sullivan all the way back in December of 2009 on the occasion of his “Tis a far, far better place I go” speech resigning from Conservatism but reassuring everyone that he was definitely not, not, not some icky Liberal now.  

So Andrew Sullivan ("Daily Dish") and Charles Johnson ("Little Green Footballs") are sharing the last lifeboat leaving the shattered hull of the Party of God before it slides beneath the waves.

(Of course that ship has been sinking into the Mariana Trench of Crazy for, what, 30 years now? Well I guess the shark-infested water and the sounds of the alarm bell are only now reaching the First Class cabins…)

Sullivan delivered his “Tis a far, far better place I go” speech here, which said, in part:

For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in "The Conservative Soul").

Now in the whole of Mr. Sullivan's text, I could not help but notice that he italicized-for-emphasis only twice, one of which he deployed here -- "cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not)" -- to underscore how very much NOT a Liberal he is...

13 years later we find that, like ants following a pheromone trail from the nest to a stash of yummy-yummy sugar, every recently-former Republican in the media has found their way to the same TruCon (tm) Elysium.

A paradise  suspended between the actual fascist freak show that now "goes by the name 'conservative' in America" and the fairy tale horrors of the Left and our "woke overlords".  

But for me, the funniest part in all of this is watching TruCon (tm) arrivistes like Sykes, still damp from debarking from their own leaky lifeboats, beating up on one of original TruCon (tm) pioneers responsible for opened this rich and fertile definitely-NOT-a-Liberal-but-apes-everything-Liberals-have-been-saying-for-decades frontier for arrivistes like Sykes so long ago.

This is why we...

Burn The Lifeboats