I decided I’d continue with the f0rmat things seem to be fitting into lately, namely that everything in politics has begun pointing to a framing of the 2024 election as the hero’s journey, starring Donald Trump as the hero and the absolutely, morally lost Democrat Party as the villains.
Yesterday’s column showed off some obvious examples of performative villainy. I could easily have turned this column into more of that. But since the weekend approaches, I felt like that might be a bit dour. Instead, we’ll approach this a different way.
Because what they’d have you believe is that Elon Musk is a right-winger, a notion that is utterly absurd under any definition other than the one that seems to be taking shape — and it’s the same definition that now makes right-wingers out of people like J.K. Rowling, Bari Weiss, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, and even Bill Maher.
That definition is very much akin to the Stalinist, or perhaps more to the point the Maoist Chinese Cultural Revolution, definition of a right-winger or conservative, which is to say anyone not willing to go along with the never-ending destruction and remaking of society under the radical egalitarian banner, anyone who at last reaches a point at which they simply cannot endure any more “fundamental transformation,” then becomes a right-winger and a reactionary regardless of how much radical destruction they’ve sanctioned in the past.
By that definition, Musk is very right-wing.
But to hear him tell it, a decade ago he was a slightly liberal centrist. Now he’s somewhere between Francisco Franco and Attila the Hun. Musk is trying to figure out how he’s changed.
And he hasn’t, of course. Remember, in 2008 Barack Obama came out against gay marriage. Now, the party Obama continues to direct from his mansion in Kalorama is busy calling you a bigot if you oppose the local public school grooming your first-grader for gay sex and transgenderism. Back in 2008, Brendan Eich, a co-founder of the internet browser company Mozilla and nobody’s definition of a full-spectrum conservative, wrote a check to the National Organization for Marriage to support a California state constitutional amendment ballot initiative against gay marriage that the public supported (it passed, and then the state Supreme Court invalidated it, which still perplexes). Six years later, Eich was named CEO of the company and shortly thereafter forced to resign over that thousand-dollar donation.
In an X post Thursday, Musk noted the absurdity of the modern age:
This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.
My positions are centrist:
– Secure borders
– Safe & clean cities
– Don’t bankrupt America with spending
– Racism against any race is wrong
– No sterilization below age of consentIs this right-wing? https://t.co/QgRkoem2u4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2024
To answer Elon’s question: yes. This is right-wing.
In detail…
1. Secure Borders Are a Right-Wing Concept
Without a doubt this is a recent development because for time immemorial, the control of one’s borders was considered a bedrock feature of national sovereignty, and of course a national border is simply the enforcement of property rights at scale.
This is ours, and you cannot trespass on it or appropriate from it without our permission.
That ought to be universal, but it isn’t. The Left abandoned such an idea a while ago, because the Left decided the future was internationalist and borderless. And you can’t be a good globalist if you believe in such things as national borders.
Or even such things as property rights.
Because remember, soon you will own nothing and be happy. You’ll be among the first people in human history who can say that, too, but human history is patriarchal and racist, after all, and you shouldn’t know anything about it.
2. Safe and Clean Cities Are Explicitly Right-Wing
I would answer Musk with something I’ve used for several years to describe urban Democrat politics; namely, Weaponized Governmental Failure.
What’s that? Well, I’ve defined it several times here and elsewhere, but to boil it down to the simplest terms, weaponized governmental failure is the practice of deliberately running a city into the ground in order to chase away all of the middle-class voters who would knock urban Democrats, and particularly radical left-wing urban Democrats, from power.
Middle-class voters want things from government. Not massive social programs, mind you, but basic things. They want criminals locked up so their kids can play openly. They want decent schools. They want roads without potholes that lead somewhere useful. They want a modicum of restraint in taxation and spending. They want a prosperous business community and healthy job market.
Achieving those things for a city takes competence, diligence, work ethic, and some level of honesty in government, which makes them utterly anathema to the kind of people who get elected to run an inner city. After all, it’s much better to steal the pothole money and give it to your friends than it is to fill potholes with it.
Weaponized governmental failure came along in the 1980s and 1990s when Democrats realized that not only could they get away with failing to adequately administer those cities in terms of providing basic social goods at a reasonable price, but that it was actually better for business to refuse to. Deliberately running a city into the ground means that it’s the middle-class people who’ll decamp for the suburbs, leaving you a thin skim of rich people, who often tend to be left-wing (especially if they’re not self-made but rather inherited their wealth and thus appreciate it less) and who can obtain their social goods a la carte — their kids go to private schools, they have private security in their neighborhoods, they have the mayor’s cell number courtesy of that maxed-out donation or the fundraiser they hosted for him, so one phone call gets that pothole on the corner fixed), and a mass of poor people.
Who are easy to govern with feel-good stupidities like midnight basketball or the defenestration of historical landmarks.
Trash a city just enough, and the middle-class voters will seethe in the suburbs while you’ll never lose an election again no matter no corrupt or incompetent you are.
So yeah — it’s a right-wing concept that an American city should be other than an open sewer of drugs, crime, filth, and human debris.
3. If Fiscal Conservatism Is Anything, It’s Right-Wing
Let’s just say that aspirationally, keeping government spending in check is a right-wing value.
In practice, the people who are supposed to represent the Right in our constitutional republic do an abjectly horrible job of reining in spending.
Perhaps the less said about this the better because, as I said above, it’s almost the weekend and I’m trying to keep this column as sunny as I can. But the best way to sum things up would be to say that when the Right is in control of an institution of government and it becomes fiscally incontinent, it’s considered to be a failure. When the Left is in control of such a spendthrift institution, they’re doing exactly what they set out to do.
Yes, this means we need a better conservative political class. And we need it soon because $34 trillion-plus in federal debt will reduce us to chaos and ruin over the intermediate or maybe even short term.
Only the Right can fix this. The Left surely cannot. Ask them about it and their solutions start and end with confiscating all the money from those who have it.
4. A Colorblind Society? Practically Fascism!
You don’t have to be all that old to remember when this was a universal value that both the Left and the Right professed. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was properly credited with establishing a reasonably rapid consensus for what had been billed as a left-wing idea that people should be treated not according to the color of their skin but the content of their character during his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech; a decade or so after he was shot by a white Democrat, that value proposition had become part of the national ethos.
But for the people who make their living on race, and those are certainly not conservative people, a colorblind society is very bad for business. So King’s formulation had to go.
Don’t believe me? Go ask Barack Obama, who rode into office as a racial healer and proceeded to burn America down according to race. Obama — and I talk about this at length in Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama — never believed in King’s creed. He was always about using race as a cudgel to beat this society into shards.
Perhaps the most famous black conservative, and possibly the most successful elevator of black Americans ever born, Booker T. Washington, had the Left’s “civil rights” mob pegged perfectly. Of them he said:
There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Nobody on the right supports grievance-mongers with financial donations, and therefore those people are all on the left. So the preservation of the old colorblind consensus is explicitly a right-wing value now.
5. Opposition to Transgenderism Makes You Hitler
The funniest thing in American politics is Joe Biden reading off a teleprompter the various idiocies the Democrats demand on the question of transgenderism. At this point, Biden is the Ron Burgundy of American politics; whatever is on that teleprompter, he will read, regardless if it tracks with his known beliefs.
And but for the sexualization of children, which can often lead to the mental and emotional problems that manifest in transgenderism among children or later among adults — Biden is on video time and again explicitly supporting the sexualization of kids, not to mention the scandalous references in a diary kept by his daughter to showering naked with her father at 12 years of age — it’s hard to imagine a sentient Joe Biden being anything but repulsed by drag queens and defective people like the Nashville shooter.
Nonetheless, we have trans advocates bearing their fake breasts on the White House lawn, we have transvestite White House staffers cutting videos in the West Wing, we have the No. 2 man in the Department of Health and Human Services, a man named Richard Levine, calling himself Rachel and presenting — quite unconvincingly — as a woman, and we have the former director of the nation’s nuclear stockpile as not only a transvestite but as a pilferer of luggage from airport baggage carousels as a form of shopping to support his fetish.
And that’s really just the beginning of what modern Democrats are up to in their gender-bending crusade. Here’s the latest:
Transgenderism is a terrible mental illness being normalized by advocates mostly in the progressive wing of the Democrat Party (but sadly, among others, too)
It is, without doubt, the most threatening and destructive force working in our society… https://t.co/shY08KOEIn
— The Big Easy Conservative (@BigEasyConserv) March 21, 2024
All of the morally defensible civil rights causes embarked upon when there was a good-faith Left in this country have become mainstream and largely concluded their great project. What’s left is the bad-faith crusades, and the rackets those generate. So yes, putting a stop to this, and all of the other abuses of the Society of Villains the Left has become, is explicitly — and solely, at present — a right-wing burden.
That Musk sees himself as a centrist dragooned into the ranks of conservatives is immaterial. He’s not down with the revolution, so he’s the enemy of the revolutionaries. Welcome aboard, Elon. And roll up those sleeves, because there’s lots of work to do.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Behold, the Villains: Biden Family Defenders Make the Case for a Hero