As Long As Never Trumpers Keep Banging On About Their Unappreciated Heroics ...

...for warning Murrica about the dangers of Donald Trump in 2016, and how they were told they were nuts...

Nichols:  The second thing that occurs to me, Charlie, as you were talking about truths in the streets and the elections, you know, when ... when you and I and many other people became never Trumpers back in 2016 we ... we were warning people about scenarios that weren't even close to this bad and we were told that we were nuts. 

Sykes:  I know.

Nichols:  So, I think it is time to say this stuff now more than ever and to remind people when they say, "Well, you're just being alarmist." Hey, a lot of you said we were being alarmist in 2016, and we weren't even we weren't saying things that were even close to what's happening now.

...I will keep banging on about how, long before 2016, when Liberals were warning people about the dangerous trajectory the GOP was on -- the trajectory that led directly to the rise of Trump -- men like Charlie Sykes and Tom Nichols routinely mocked us, dismissed us and said we were nuts.

And the thing is, they not only still do, they block anyone who brings the subject up.  

So -- for all my "All hands on deck... / The enemy of my enemy... / We're all on the same side now" readers -- let me ask, a simple question.

Why?

If being an early warner about the direction the GOP was headed is an act of derring-do worthy of mention and merit, why are men like Nichols and Sykes so grimly dug in on pretending we never existed?  That we who have been right about the Right all along, must still dismissed through gritted teeth as flaky, soft-headed children who not only don't deserve a spot at the adult's table, but maybe, sorta, kinda, if you squint real hard... are somehow complicit in the rise of the Donald Trump?

Why?

And the only answer I can come up with that fits the facts are commerce and arrogance.  

Commerce

The story of Trump which the legacy media wants to tell is one of a sudden, inexplicable phenomenon which no one could have seen coming.  Because the alternative -- that trajectory of the Republican Party was right there for anyone to see, and that the legacy media was not merely blind to what was happening inside the Republican Party, but pathologically wedded to the Both Sides Do It lie that enabled Trump’s rise -- is thoroughly damning and therefore completely unacceptable. 

Never Trumpers stick to the former story.  We disreputable hippies tell the latter.  Guess which one gets rewarded and sold and resold by the legacy media?

Arrogance

It is completely incomprehensible to the Conservative brain -- whether they fly the Never Trump banner now, or the Trump flag -- that we dirty fucking hippies could ever be right about anything.  Much less right about the Right.  And much, much less right about the Right during all the decades when they were arrogantly wrong about what was going on, in public, right in front of them, in their own party, every fucking day.  That cannot conceive of a universe in which every caricature of the Left they casually threw around -- fatally foolish, alarmist, blind, parochial, living in a dream world, obdurately head-in-the-sand, crackpot -- actually applies to them.  

They cannot conceive of a universe where the movement they devoted their adult lives to was directly responsible for Trump.

They cannot conceive it. They cannot admit it. And they cannot forgive anyone who points it out.

And once they successfully colonized the media (see "Commerce" above) they could use their very large megaphone to drown out the very inconvenient past.  I wrote a whole long thing about this in 2019.  In fact I wrote a whole lots of long things about it, and eventually got bored with being lectured about "All hands on deck... / The enemy of my enemy... / We're all on the same side now".   This is one small piece from "The Aristocrats":

...
By the time Donald Trump came slithering down the escalator to declare himself for office, the lords and ladies of the Beltway media had already become institutionally addicted to the depraved luxury of never being answerable for being horribly wrong all the time.  They came to believe that it was somehow in the natural order of things that they be paid to appear on national teevee or in national news publications to haughtily spout their insipid opinions about imaginary Responsible Conservatives, Noble Republicans, Sensible Centrists and those naughty Extremes on Both Sides who inhabited the fictional "Center/Right" country they had conjured into being.

And once it all blew up in their faces -- once it became obvious (yet again) that they never had the slightest idea what was really going on in their own country and that the Left had been right about the Right all along and -- the Never Trumpers reacted exactly you would expect entitled royalty to react.

Exactly like exiled Russian aristocracy after the revolution.

Aristocrats who had been run out of their country by the serfs they had exploited.

Aristocrats who suddenly found themselves financially dependent on the largess of people they detested.

Aristocrats who, with that special, asshole-arrogance that comes with an inbred sense of entitlement,  become indignant when their hosts don't snap to and do as they're told.

Aristocrats who still believe in their God-given right to command a national spotlight and who go right on airily insisting they know what the serfs really want...

And, OK, one more bit from years gone by.  From "Her Serene Highness,The Most Indignant Princess Mona Charen, Is Deeply Disappointed with the Liberal Servants Who Were Supposed to Attend to Her Every Wish and Whim": 

Spare a (very) little pity for Her Serene Highness, The Most Indignant Princess Mona Charen (from Politico):

How a Democrat Can Win Over a Never-Trumper  

And if you don’t think you need us, you should think twice. 

By Mona Charen July 09, 2019

Having built an entire career taking the lash to us stoopid Liberals over --

Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)  

-- and over --

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First 

-- again, you would think by now we stoopid Liberals would know our place in the Great Conservative Hierarchy of All Things.

From Politico:

Democrats would be wise to embrace that sensibility, in the person of Biden or another, not just because it could win, but because it’s important for all of us, right and left, to turn our faces away from Caesarism—of the right or the left.

Because according Conservative aristocratic theology, in the same way God created the GOP base of infinitely reprogrammable bigots and imbeciles as a mighty instrument of Deregulation and Tax Cuts to be wielded by Republican nobility like Mona Charen, so too did God create Liberals in order to give Republican nobles like Mona Charen an easy way to make an excellent living.

You see, according to their faith, you and I exist solely to provide her and the rest of her caste with hippies to punch.  With scapegoats to blame.

And yet now that the reprogrammable meathead GOP base that she and the rest of Conservative nobility spent the 40 years cultivating have run the Conservative nobles out of their own party -- now that every Republican nightmare we stoopid Liberals have been warning against for decades has come to pass with a vengeance -- Princess Mona is stunned to find that we stoopid Liberals have gotten all uppity...

It is true dangers our nation now faces have grown exponentially worse.

But it is also true that, in the face of this grave and growing danger from the Right, to keep dismissing those on the Left who saw it coming before anyone else is madness.

I Am The Liberal Media