Why Rod Dehehr likes Victor Orban

 

 

 

Bob Sampson
@bobsalpha1
Complete embrace of authoritarianism framed under “but he fights,” no real interest in conservatism or democracy, just a desire to be the only ones who ever have power.

 

Translation: As I see it, the only choices are between an illiberal left & an illiberal right. Therefore, I choose to give up liberal democracy entirely and support an illiberal right. Further translation: If I can’t get what I want politically, let’s discard democracy entirely.

 

Heino Gulliksen
This is absolutely insane. Orban is a blatant fascist, shutting down free press and stomping on basic freedoms. But sure, he fights against woke-ism and leftists. Why don’t these people just say out loud that they long for democracy to end, so they can be ruled by a new Il Duce?

 

 

 

Rod’s whole argument can be broken down to this: “Norms of acceptable behavior are changing, (as they always have and always will) and because my beliefs are now considered fringe and unnaceptable in many quarters, though I face no official government sanction and am enjoying all the protections of liberal democracy, I would use the government illiberally to punish those who no longer consider me a mainstream.” At no point does Rod even glance at a place where the government has infringed on his rights to practice his faith or speak his mind, but he is “terrified” that private institutions (businesses, colleges, the media, elites, etc) are not doing exactly what he wants regarding a whole slew of hard to define attitudes and policies. Because of this, he would dispense with liberal democracy! What a ridiculous overreaction!

 

but you are in a sense giving up and i
21:25
don’t want to give up on this experiment
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i in fact that really goes against
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everything that i kind of believe in
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like as a conservative all right well
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let me ask you this um
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do you have any sons or daughters who
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have a teenage year in their teenage
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years i have a 10 year old boy and an
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eight-year-old boy the reason i ask is
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this my i have a 17 year old son who’s
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going to be 18 and he was thinking for a
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long time about the military
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about going into the military and i sat
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down on how to talk with him i never
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imagined as a conservative that i would
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have this kind of talk with my son but i
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uh i i said listen whatever you’re
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called to do if you if you’re really
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feeling this calling uh your dad will
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support you on it but here’s what i want
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you to think about and i told him about
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how we were lied to by our government
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and to get into this iraq war and the
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generals lied and lied and lied about
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afghanistan said i don’t want you to
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give your life in the best years of your
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life to following leaders that you
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cannot trust so secondly look what’s
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happening look look at how our
22:27
government is changing uh we’re
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on the lgbt thing now it’s become a huge
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part of foreign policy uh they’ve openly
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stated that and
22:37
are you as an orthodox christian eastern
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orthodox christian you’re going to get
22:40
into the military and are you going to
22:42
have to choose between serving your
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country you’re serving your conscience
22:45
are you going to be put in a position
22:47
where you’re going to have to lie in
22:50
order to protect your your position in
22:52
the military do you want to fight for
22:53
this sort of order an order that is
22:55
going into other countries like hungary
22:58
like poland and elsewhere around the
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world and trying to force them to accept
23:03
post-christian western standards of
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morality i don’t think so and he
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eventually decided he wasn’t going to do
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it i think it had more to do with what
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his friends are doing but the point is
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simply this matt i i used to think i’ve
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always thought america was a good guy

Conservative Facts

Conservative Facts

There was always a yin-yang thing to conservatism. Its hard-headedness and philosophical realism about human nature and the limits it imposes on utopian schemes appealed to some and repulsed others. For those who see politics as a romantic enterprise, a means of pursuing collective salvation, conservatism seems mean-spirited. As Emerson put it: “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” That’s what Ben Shapiro is getting at when he says “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” The hitch is that the reverse is also true: Feelings don’t care about your facts. Tell a young progressive activist we can’t afford socialism and the response will be overtly or subliminally emotional: “Why don’t you care about poor people!” or “Why do you love billionaires!?”

.. What Is Neoconservatism?

Here’s the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia page for neoconservatism:

Neoconservatism (commonly shortened to neocon when labelling its adherents) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawkswho became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party, and the growing New Left and counterculture, in particular the Vietnam protests. Some also began to question their liberal beliefs regarding domestic policies such as the Great Society.

.. The first neocons were intellectual rebels against the Great Society and the leftward drift of American liberalism (The Public Interest, the first neocon journal, was launched in 1965. It was dedicated entirely to domestic affairs, not foreign policy). Unable to reconcile the facts with the feelings of liberalism, a host of intellectuals decided they would stick with the facts, even if it meant that former friends and allies would call them mean for doing so.

.. The Harrington essay that cemented the term “neoconservatism” in American discourse was titled “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics.” In other words, the original neoconservative critique wasn’t about foreign policy, but domestic policy.

.. According to William F. Buckley, the neoconservatives brought the rigor and language of sociology to conservatism, which until then had been overly, or at least too uniformly, Aristotelian. The Buckleyites (though certainly not folks like Burnham) tended to talk from first principles and natural laws and rights. The neocons looked at the data and discovered that the numbers tended to back up a lot of the things the Aristotelians had been saying.

.. The idea that neoconservatism was primarily about foreign policy, specifically anti-Communism, further complicates things. Part of this is a by-product of the second wave of neoconservatives who joined the movement and the right in the 1970s, mostly through the pages of Commentary. These were rebels against not the welfare state but détente on the right and the radical anti-anti-Communists of the New Left (National Review ran a headline in 1971 on the awakening at Commentary: “Come on In, the Water’s Fine.”) Many of those writers, most famously Jeanne Kirkpatrick, ended up leading the intellectual shock troops of the Reagan administration.

It is certainly true that the foreign-policy neocons emphasized certain things more than generic conservatives, specifically the promotion of democracy abroad. In ill-intentioned hands, this fact is often used as a cover for invidious arguments about the how the neocons never really shed their Trotskyism and were still determined to “export revolution.” But for the most part, it can’t be supported by what these people actually wrote. Moreover, the idea that only neocons care about promoting democracy simply glosses over everything from the stated purpose of the First World War, the Marshall Plan, stuff like JFK’s inaugural address (“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”), and this thing called the Reagan Doctrine.

.. And then there are the Joooooz. Outside of deranged comment sections and the swampy ecosystems of the “alt-right,” the sinister version of this theory is usually only hinted at or alluded to. Neocons only care about Israel is the Trojan horse that lets people get away with not saying the J-word. Those bagel-snarfing warmongers want real Americans to do their fighting for them. Pat Buchanan, when opposing the first Gulf War in 1992, listed only Jewish supporters of the war and then said they’d be sending “American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown” to do the fighting. Subtle.
.. In his memoir, Irving Kristol, “the Godfather of the Neoconservatives,” argued that the movement had run its course and dissolved into the conservative movement generally.
So today, neoconservatism has become what it started out as, an invidious term used by its opponents to single out and demonize people as inauthentic, un-American, unreliable, or otherwise suspicious heretics, traitors, or string-pullers. The chief difference is that they were once aliens in the midst of liberalism, now they are called aliens in the midst of conservatism. And it’s all bullsh**.
.. The editor of American Greatness, a journal whose tagline should be “Coming Up with Reasons Why Donald Trump’s Sh** Doesn’t Stink 24/7” opens with “Neoconservatism is dead, long live American conservatism” and then, amazingly, proceeds to get dumber.
..  A bit further on, he asserts that “for years, neoconservatives undermined and discredited the work of conservatives from Lincoln to Reagan . . .” This is so profoundly unserious that not only is it impossible to know where to begin, it’s a struggle to finish the sentence for fear the stupid will rub off. Does he have in mind the Straussians (Walter Berns, Robert Goldwin, et al.) at that neocon nest the American Enterprise Institute who wrote lovingly about Lincoln at book length for decades?

And what of the scores of neoconservatives who worked for Ronald Reagan and helped him advance the Reaganite agenda? Were they all fifth columnists? Or perhaps they were parasites attaching themselves to a “host organism,” as Buskirk repugnantly describes Kristol?

He doesn’t say, because Buskirk doesn’t rely on an argument. Save for a couple of Bill Kristol tweets out of context, he cites no writing and marshals no evidence. Instead, he lets a wink, or rather the stink, do all of his work. He knows his readers want to hear folderol about neocons. He knows they have their own insidious definitions of what they are and crave to have them confirmed. Bringing any definition or fact to his argument would get in the way of his naked assertions and slimy insinuations.

 I’m not a fan of tu quoque arguments, but the idea that American Greatness has standing to position itself as an organ dedicated to larger principles and ideas is hilarious, given that the website’s only purpose is to attach itself like a remora to Donald Trump, a man who doesn’t even call himself a conservative, even for convenience, anymore. Just this week, American Greatness’s Julie Kelly mocked Nancy French’s childhood trauma of being sexually abused. When I criticized her for it, Kelly snarked back something about how “Never Trumpers” have a problem with the truth. It’s like these people don’t see it. You cannot claim to care about the truth while being a rabid defender of this president’s hourly mendacity.
.. American Greatness ran a piecefloating the idea that Trump’s “covfefe” tweet just might have been a brilliant piece of historically and linguistically literate statecraft. That’s actually plausible compared to the idea that Trump is Moses saving conservatism from a “a purified strain of backward idolatry.”

.. Who is in conflict with the best principles of America: the magazine that for 23 years lionized the founders, Lincoln, and Reagan or the website that rationalizes literally anything Donald Trump does — from crony capitalism to denigrating the First Amendment to paying off porn stars — as either the inventions of his enemies or a small price to pay for national greatness? Not every contributor to American Greatness is dedicated to the art of turd polishing, but that is the site’s larger mission.

.. Trump’s sense of persecution is as contagious as his debating style. Facts are being subordinated to feelings, and the dominant feelings among many Trumpists are simply ugly. And even those who have not turned ugly see no problem working hand in hand with those who have. And how could they, given who they herald as their Moses.

Accused Russian Agent Maria Butina’s Story Reveals Pro-Putin Views In The U.S.

And it raises the question of was this gun rights organization in Russia a real thing? I mean, you can look back and say maybe it was part of a Russian sponsored initiative to connect with conservatives and find a way into Republican politics. Is that a stretch?

HELDERMAN: Experts I’ve spoken to say, no, it’s really not a stretch. We don’t know for certain that that’s why it, in fact, happened. But they do say it’s very odd to think of an organic gun rights group in Russia. Vladimir Putin is an autocratic leader. There have been street protests over the years in Moscow and elsewhere that he has not appreciated and has done real crackdowns against. And so, the notion that he would allow a group to push to arm the citizenry is very unlikely. What we’ve been told is that this group would have been done at least with the approval and knowledge of the government, if not its sort of direction. And so you do have this kind of question, was this all an attempt to make ties with American conservatives?

.. DAVIES: In 2013, Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin invite David Keene, who was then the president of the National Rifle Association – right? – to Russia with some other American gun enthusiasts. Why would members of the NRA be interested in Russia? What was this about?

HELDERMAN: Well, I think that one thing that happens in this time period is people are intrigued by the idea of gun rights in Russia. You know, a lot of people at the NRA sort of came out of the anti-Soviet movement. And the notion that freedoms were opening up, particularly the freedoms that they valued like the right to own a gun, were opening up, was quite interesting. I also understand that the trip was quite fun. This was a trip to attend the annual meeting of Maria Butina’s group, The Right To Bear Arms. And so there were dinners and there were events. We’re told one event was a fashion show featuring women wearing clothing with – designed for concealed carry.

One person who was at that event told us that he went to dinner with Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin, he and his wife, and they presented him with very carefully chosen gifts that showed that they had researched he and his wife’s interests. Special fabric for his wife who was a needlepointer and stamps for him. He was a stamp collector. And so it was a fun trip. There was also a lot of hunting, big-game hunting in the wilds of Russia that a lot of NRA folks were quite interested in.

.. You can kind of see what her appeal would have been at an NRA convention to the leadership there to – you know, the men. And it’s not entirely men, but it is largely older men who are running that organization. She had a sort of frontiers woman quality that I think a lot of people found appealing.

She had grown up in Siberia, which is quite exotic. She talked about how she had lived in the forests of Siberia, where she had learned to hunt bears and wolves. She had, at a very early age, started a chain of furniture stores that had been, apparently, somewhat successful and then sold the chain and moved to Moscow with the proceeds to kind of make her way in the world. So she was kind of a capitalist. She was, obviously, attractive. She was a real networker. She would urge people to become friends with her on Facebook. She would hand out her card. She was very friendly, wanted to make friends with people.

.. And the other thing that we’ve heard was that some people assumed that because she ran this gun rights group, she was actually sort of anti-Putin. I don’t think she would make comments against the government. But there was a sort of assumption that Russia was a restrictive society. And so she was doing something sort of feisty and rebellious by organizing this group. And it doesn’t seem as though people gave a lot of thought to the fact that that was probably a sign that the government was actually supporting her. And of course Alexander Torshin was part of the Putin government.

.. But conservatives had started to become intrigued with Putin’s Russia around a few issues. And one of them, as you noted, is conservative Christians. Russia was a much more traditional society than ours. There’s a valuing of traditional gender roles that many conservative Christians find appealing.

The Russian government has also been very famously anti-gay rights, which Christian conservatives also appreciated. There’s also been a renewal of the Orthodox Church, which is something that Vladimir Putin has really advanced for his own goals in many cases. And so there’s been this kind of intrigue for American conservatives in what’s been going on in Russia.

.. Pat Buchanan wrote an opinion column in 2013 urging Americans to take another look at Putin. You see American conservatives who actually go to Russia and testify in front of the Duma in favor of anti-gay laws. There are various kinds of conferences that are held. Torshin actually hosted or helped host in Moscow his own prayer breakfast, kind of similar to the National Prayer Breakfast that you see here in Washington each year. It brought together Russian Orthodox leaders. But some American Christians started to go to Russia to attend that event. And so that was a way for Torshin to meet Americans as well.

.. We now know that Mr. Torshin, in his role as a banker, had some meetings with U.S. government officials in 2015 at the Federal Reserve that Ms. Butina also attended. And so they would go back and forth from Russia to the United States meeting people. And Maria Butina’s social media is sort of full of photos of her meeting high-profile people – Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal.

She, in fact, attended the kick-off of Scott Walker’s presidential campaign in Wisconsin. That was at a time when Scott Walker was considered the likely frontrunner in the field, so she seemed to show some particular interest in the man who was thought to be the leading candidate.

.. It was an event called FreedomFest, which was a gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas in July of 2015. So this was just really a few weeks after Donald Trump had announced that he was running for president. And Marco Rubio spoke at this event. Donald Trump spoke at this event. And she made her way to a microphone in a big crowd and asked then-candidate Trump, essentially, what’s your position on Russia? And what do you think of sanctions?

.. And as far as we can tell, it looks like this might have been the first time he was asked about those issues on the presidential campaign trail. And he, for the first time, offered what became kind of his standard response on those questions, which was that, you know, I know Putin. I get along with Putin. Of course, he didn’t actually know Putin. He had never met him. But that was something he said frequently on the campaign trail. So he said he knew Putin. He got along with him. And he thought it was a good thing if the United States could get along with Russia.

.. The government says that there is evidence of that. They have started to introduce some of it in court. I imagine we’ll see more over time. Largely, it comes in the form of messages sent back and forth between her and Alexander Torshin. Apparently, they exchanged thousands of messages through the direct message function of Twitter. And in some of those messages, they have quite explicit conversations about how she can advance the interests of the Kremlin to build better ties between the U.S. and Russia through her work here. There is even a message on the night of the election where she writes to him. You know, they have sort of a long conversation celebrating Donald Trump’s election. And then, she writes to him, I await your orders.

.. Now, I should say her lawyer is very insistent, a zealous advocate for his client, very insistent that she is exactly what you just described – an interested student who wanted to learn about American politics, was not employed by the Russian government and that the messages we’ve seen so far from the U.S. government are cherry-picked notes amongst thousands between two people who had a close personal relationship. And so, you know, we’ll see how that plays out in court. You know, it is true that this is not exactly advanced tradecraft that you might…

DAVIES: Right.

HELDERMAN: …Imagine from intelligence operatives. You know, they weren’t really hiding their activities. They were pictured together all the time. She accompanied him to events. And, you know, you don’t generally imagine spies exchanging messages through Twitter.

.. You were describing how Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin, this prominent Russian, were active in developing relationships in the United States with Republicans, with conservatives, with people in the National Rifle Association. Maria Butina also developed a close relationship with a guy who is described in the government filings, I believe, as U.S. person number one. We believe this is Paul Erickson, right? Tell us about him.

HELDERMAN: Paul Erickson is a figure who’s been sort of at the edges of Republican politics going way, way back. He went to Yale as an undergraduate, where he was a classmate of Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who went to jail a few years ago. He was active supporting Reagan in the ’80s. And he served as a key campaign official in the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan. And he was a frequent attender of things like NRA meetings and CPAC meetings, knows a lot of people in the movement in the party.

Our understanding is that he was in the group who went to Moscow in 2013, and that that’s where he and Maria Butina met. And that shortly after that, they began a romantic relationship of some kind. And he would then help her on her trips, introduce her to people, take her around, take her to parties. Their relationship then, I think, became closer when Maria Butina arrived in the United States to attend graduate school in August of 2016.

DAVIES: Right. So he was sort of an important part of her developing network of political relationships.

HELDERMAN: Yeah, that’s right. He was an important part of introducing her to important people. And one of the things that’s quite interesting about Paul Erickson is the question of what he thought Maria’s relationship was with the government of Russia. There are some emails that have been submitted in court that suggest he was very aware of the fact that her goal was to advance the interests of the government. Now, I should say he has not been charged with anything. He’s been accused of no wrongdoing. But it does seem as though he had quite a lot of awareness of her activities.

There was even a document seized from his apartment, a sort of bullet point list where he is describing things having to do with Maria Butina’s Russian patriots in waiting. And one of the bullet points actually says, how to respond to FSB job offer. It says something very similar to that. And FSB, of course, is the Russian intelligence service. It’s the successor agency to the KGB. So he seemed to be aware of some kind of job offer from the FSB. We haven’t heard a lot more about that yet, but I imagine we’ll be hearing more from the government or potentially from Mr. Erickson as the court case against Maria Butina proceeds.

.. HELDERMAN: So the government has alleged that this relationship was duplicitous, essentially suggesting it was just part of her cover story. It was a way to be able to live in the United States. They’ve said that they’ve seized documents in which she complains about Paul Erickson and specifically expresses disdain that she has to live with him. And, of course, they’ve alleged that she was offering sex to other people, and particularly, offering sex in exchange for some kind of position or job with a special interest organization.

DAVIES: Right. She was 29. He was 56, right?

HELDERMAN: That’s right. There was a dramatic age difference between them. And, you know, we’ve talked to some of her classmates at American University who talked about how they were a sort of known couple on campus. She would bring him to social events. And that caused a lot of kind of murmuring and chattering. Her classmates were typically in their 20s, many of them actually younger than she was at 29. And so she was bringing this man who was decades her senior to, you know, college parties.

.. DAVIES: Is there also an allegation that she contacted a group on the left in a way that aroused suspicions of cyber penetration or something?

HELDERMAN: Yeah. This is something that we at The Washington Post have reported. So the program that she was in at American University, her particular concentration was cybersecurity, which perhaps one might think that is suspicious or at least ironic, but that was her area of interest. And we know that in the summer of 2017, she reached out to a progressive civil rights organization in the Washington area and said that she was a graduate student at American University. And that as part of a school project, she was interested in meeting with them and interviewing them about their cyber vulnerabilities.

At the time that the group received this email, there had already been some press coverage about her, long stories about her work with Torshin and her work with the NRA. The group sent this to their IT security consulting company. It’s the person who runs that company is who told us about this. He got that email and was immediately suspicious and right away picked up the phone and called the FBI.

.. HELDERMAN: It is easy to look at these things and say, what’s wrong with this? She went to public events. She went to dinners. On the other hand, I think it’s worth remembering that counterintelligence folks will tell you that this is the stuff of influence operations, that, you know, it is not usually riding around in cars – in trunks of cars and dead drops necessarily. It’s going to academic conferences. It’s cozying up to business leaders. It’s collecting all kinds of intelligence on kind of American power centers.

And one of the things that’s really interesting here is, if indeed this was a Russian influence operation, it shows a real sophisticated understanding of the U.S. political system to understand that the way to potentially shape conservative and Republican politics is not necessarily to only target it or try to influence elected leaders but to work through these very powerful special interest groups, particularly the NRA. That just shows real understanding of how the U.S. works.

.. HELDERMAN: Yeah. It’s interesting. Congressman Rohrabacher is an example of a number of people you see who were very active in the anti-Soviet movement in the ’80s and now have become what appears outwardly pro-Russian. It seems to be part of what they have found intriguing about Putin’s Russia is that they believe it kind of represents a full 180 shift from Soviet times. Under the Soviet Union, religion, of course, was persecuted. Now, the Putin government very strongly promotes the Orthodox Church.

.. I think one thing that’s important to understand is that, you know, there’s a continuum in Russia that we, as Americans, maybe would find unfamiliar. I think we sort of view people as either spies or not spies.

And in Russia, the state touches far more aspects of life than what we are used to here. So you have all kinds of people who aren’t necessarily working for the government but are sometimes asked by government officials, by intelligence officials to kind of sit down for a little chat and provide information about the trip they just took to America or the business meeting they just had. And that’s just the way life works in Russia. The government requires much more of you as a citizen. And so many more people can be seen as acting on behalf of the government than I think we are accustomed to.

The Hypocrisy of Never Trump Neoconservatives

it’s really hard to stomach Never Trump neoconservatives who now complain about Republican tribalismcults of personality, and blind loyalty to the current president—because virtually all of them used to engage in and endorse the very same behavior.

.. George W. Bush-era hawks thrived by capitalizing on a popular Republican president, corralling the Right accordingly and ostracizing conservatives who dared step out of line. In a story about President Trump’s enduring support within his party, The New York Times gave a useful comparison on Saturday: “Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is now about 90 percent…the only modern Republican president more popular with his party than Mr. Trump at this point in his first term, according to Gallup, was George W. Bush after the country united in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.”

.. If conservatives now behave as though failing to defend Trump is tantamount to treason, the early 2000s weren’t much different.

.. Unlike the polarized national divide over Trump, the post-9/11 period saw an America overwhelmingly support Bush and the Iraq war.’

.. The entire war on terror narrative—the Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, the demotion of any constitutional or limited governmentagenda—became the new popular definition of conservatism at that time, and blind loyalty to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney was expected of everyone on the Right.

.. In his now infamous “Unpatriotic Conservatives” essay at National Review, Frum declared conservatives Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak, libertarians Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo, and others on the Right who opposed the Iraq war as persona non grata.

.. “They began by hating the neoconservatives,” Frum wrote. “They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.” He continued: “War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen—and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

Talk about tribalism.

..  today’s leading Never Trumpers—who didn’t rigidly enforce the party line, which was made all the easier by a Republican base enthralled by their president almost exclusively on the basis of his foreign policy agenda. This disposition permeated talk radio and Fox News and the entire American Right, with fealty to Bush as its core.

.. When Ron Paul ran for president in 2008, the libertarian GOP congressman’s popularity exploded precisely because he challenged the war on terror party line directly, beginning with an explosive exchange with Rudy Giuliani over foreign policy at a 2007 Republican primary debate. Virtually every Republican who ran for president in 2008 and many of their supporters tried to paint Paul as a Republican imposter—someone whose refusal to back Bush-Cheney and question his party made him ineligible for membership in the GOP. Unquestioning fidelity to the righteousness of Bush’s war ran so deep that even in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, many of the candidates hesitated to bring themselves to admit that Iraqhad been a mistake, despite the rest of the country and world having come to that conclusion years prior.

.. Show me the Trumpiest Deplorable in a red MAGA hat you can find, and I’ll show you his Saddam “Insane”-hating, Bush Country—We-Gotta-Fight’em-Over-There-So-We-Don’t-Have-To-Fight’em-Over-Here—predecessor from a decade prior.