Longtime “conservative” columnist David French has held forth at that routinely far right publication The New York Times.
Oops. Sorry. French holds forth there at The Times but as the universe knows, The Times hasn’t been conservative since before Adam and Eve walked the earth eating apples.
Recently, French penned this headline for The Times.
To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris
Shocking.
Not.
The New York Times “conservative” columnist David French is a graduate of the National Review and doubles elsewhere, has decidedly abandoned matters conservative.
This time around he says things like this, which deserve a response:
Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism.
As someone who actually served in the Reagan White House as a White House political director, I don’t recall Mr. French’s presence when the Reagan staff was doing battle for our ideological commander in chief.
And surely someone as smart as French is understands exactly what he’s doing — even if he pretends it isn’t so.
He protests that he’s “going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.”
Really? As someone who, with Reagan colleagues, did serious political battle to get constitutional conservatives confirmed to the Supreme Court, and who has listened personally to President Trump discussing his commitment to continuing to do the same in a second term that he did in his first, I distinctly recall the appointments of Supreme Court Judges with names like Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch. He was particularly proud of his conservative appointments to the lower federal courts.
Again that sentence directly from French:
But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.
Hello? There is zero question that if Harris were to win this election and she had the opportunity to appoint Supreme Court Justices, she would appoint radical jurists. And what about federal judges on the lower courts? Without question her appointees would be solidly far left — just like Harris herself.
Ergo, without question, French is out there saying in essence that he wants a retiring conservative judge to be replaced by a far left liberal.
Got it. Message received.
Perhaps even more telling is that the “conservative” French has bought hook, line, and sinker into the idea that a corrupt left-wing government, Justice Department, and various local Democrat governments has in fact not done what it so plainly has done: weaponize federal, state, and local governments to get President Biden’s — and now Vice President Harris’s — main political opponent: Donald Trump.
There is nothing remotely “conservative” about this massive, decidedly corrupt use of government. But French signs on — and by voting for Harris is clearly stating he is signing on for more.
When he focuses on the issue of voter fraud, French quite tellingly is silent about the extensive record of voter fraud right here in my own state of Pennsylvania. Voter fraud which has been long documented — say again documented — right here in this space. As here (READ MORE: The ‘Washington Post’ Attacks Pennsylvania Election Audit).
Without the slightest sense of irony, French says:
Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day.
Hello? Barely a month ago Trump himself narrowly escaped assassination, with a Trump rally-goer being shot to death and two others wounded. Not only no mention of this, but zero mention of the far-left BLM riots that went on for six months in over 500 American cities.
Was there a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th? Yes. Not mentioned by French that it was caused by a relative handful — just over a thousand — protestors out of tens of thousands of peaceful protestors who followed President Trump’s instructions to “peacefully and patriotically” protest.
The sad reality is that time after time, long before Trump was on the scene, protests in Washington D.C. have been of a similar nature — overwhelmingly peaceful with sometimes a handful committing violence. Pick an issue — anti-Vietnam War protests in 1971 (40,000 participants in Washington, 12,000 arrested), or later anti-Iraq War protests, Occupy Wall Street protests and so on and so on. Needless to say, Donald Trump was nowhere in sight.
Then there was this from French:
In many ways, the most concretely conservative action I can take in this election is to vote for the candidate who will stand against Vladimir Putin.
Say what?
The object of an American president when dealing with a decidedly American foe is to make sure there is no war. It is, as both Trump and Reagan believed, “peace through strength.”
Yet there is French voting proudly for the Vice President who, with her President, sent such a flagrant signal of weakness to America’s enemies that one, Russia’s Putin, chose to invade Ukraine. Putin did not invade Ukraine on Trump’s watch — but on the Biden-Harris watch. And French wants the decidedly non-conservative more of that weakness.
Then there is this:
Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.
Um, no. When it comes to our NATO allies, Trump simply wants them to pay their share of the freight. So too did President Dwight Eisenhower, history records. Neither were anti-NATO.
In sum, David French is the current version of all those Establishment Republicans who warned against the supposed disaster of nominating Ronald Reagan. As I warned of those anti-Reagan RINO’s back in 2015: Yes, Trump Can Win — The American Spectator | USA News and Politics| USA News and Politics
Among the jewels from all those hysterical about the rise of Reagan in those days:
- New York’s Republican Senator Jacob Javits: Reagan’s positions are “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.
- Vice President Nelson Rockefeller dismissed Reagan as “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.
- Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy said Reagan’s candidacy was “foolhardy” and would lead to a “crushing defeat” for the Republican Party. “It could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.”
- Former President Gerald Ford: “I hear more and more often that we don’t want, can’t afford to have a replay of 1964.” If the Republican Party nominates Ronald Reagan “it would be an impossible situation” because Reagan “is perceived as a most conservative Republican. A very conservative Republican can’t win in a national election.” Asked if that meant Ford thought Reagan can’t win, Ford replied to the New York Times: “That’s right.” The Times story went on to observe that Ford thought “Mr. Reagan would be a sure-loser in November” and that Reagan held “extreme and too-simple views.”
And so it went as Reagan was on the march.
In other words? David French is signing on to voting for one of the most far-left presidential candidates since Democrats nominated the similarly far-left South Dakota Senator George McGovern in 1972. He is signing on for a far left Supreme Court, a far left federal judiciary, a far left economic and foreign policy.
God bless America, French, as with his fellow voting Americans, has the freedom to vote the way he wants.
But under no circumstances is his choice remotely close to to saving “Conservatism From Itself.”
On the contrary.
On the contrary. And surely someone as smart as French is understands exactly what he’s doing — even if he pretends it isn’t so.
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