Sympathy for the Insurgency

This is a transcript from my radio show. You can listen to the podcast clip above.

Debbie Dingell is a Congresswoman from Michigan. She was on television this morning talking about the infrastructure bill.

Debbie Dingell:
Jake, I'm going to approach this differently than you are. The fact of the matter is, the speaker is working very hard. And there is nobody I know ... I'm a seasoned soul around the Capitol. I was married to a master legislator. There is nobody better at legislating. She is trying to get a path to get there. And Democrats are united, that failure is not an option.

Debbie Dingell:
She's working very hard with the White House, the president, the Senate, and members of the caucus, who are united. 96% of us are like, it's very simple. We've got to have both of these bills. The president's vision, when he ran, was the build Back Better plan. And she is trying to get a path that all of us together can agree on and vote on. And we'll see when that happens.

Democrats are working hard to get a bill passed. To a degree, Pelosi has a difficult job. The progressives really think they're in charge and have forgotten that there is a system they have to work through. Jonah Goldberg wrote a brilliant book years ago you should read, called Liberal Fascism. It documents how actually fascism isn't a conservative ideology. It was actually a very progressive ideology. In the 1920s, American progressives embraced fascism and Mussolini. I mean, it was Margaret Sanger who flirted with Hitler. One of the things about fascism that has always been intriguing to progressives is that you snap your finger and you get something done. You make the trains run on time.

I was on a train with Tom Friedman one time. It was the Acela Express from New York to Washington. I'll never forget, we're coming into Washington and the porter tries to take his stuff from him. He just blows up at the porter and actually says something along the lines of, this would never happen in China, or some such. There are people on the left who love authoritarianism. They just didn't like Donald Trump. They're perfectly fine with authoritarianism as long as they're in charge of it.

The progressives to a degree, are those people. They try to make everything about race and white supremacy because they want to delegitimize the system. Here is Ayanna Pressley talking about abortion yesterday in the House of Representatives.

Ayanna Pressley:
These misguided bans will not actually prevent all abortions. They simply put safe and necessary abortion care out of reach for our most vulnerable. Specifically, our lowest-income sisters, our queer, trans, and non-binary siblings. Black Latinx, AAPI immigrants, disabled, and indigenous folks. And none of this is happenstance. It is precise. Like the roots of the anti-abortion movement, these bans are rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy.

Patriarchy and white supremacy. See, anything they don't like is patriarchy and white supremacy. Anything is. I mean, they play the race card because they want to delegitimize so that they can advance. Progressives are impatient.

Back to Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism. One of the points he makes is that the left has no sense of history because they don't believe they have to worry about history. They can always advance.

There's an impatience with progressivism because they are intent on progress, progress in their direction. But what's it getting them? Nothing right now. They didn't get anything they wanted. They've had nothing. So they're amplifying their delegitimization of the system, the Senate, the filibuster, the states, the Constitution, whatever they can, to try to get something and it's not working for them.

Now, they're going to get something. The problem here is that a lot of progressives are zealots for their cause. So they'll get something, but it won't be what they want completely. They won't like it, but they'll have to accept it. They'll have to learn to compromise. I'm sympathetic here in this degree. In 2004, some friends of mine got me to help them start redstate.com and put me in charge of it. Red State was kind of on the vanguard of conservative activism of the day. We were the Tea party before there was a Tea party.

And we would fight the Bush administration on, well, the Harriet Miers nomination, on immigration, on the budget, on spending, on No Child Left Behind. We fought Republicans. We wanted our way or the highway. We wanted government shutdowns. I still like government shutdowns. We were willing to hold the debt ceiling hostage. We were willing to shoot the hostages and we never really got our way. In fact, on occasion, we would pick candidates to run, and they would lose in primaries. Mitch McConnell and others would destroy them. Or, in the case of Indiana, we beat Dick Lugar with Richard Murdoch and then Murdoch floundered in the general election.

To some degree, that caused Donald Trump, the establishment fighting back. They would never give conservatives what they wanted. They would make a lot of promises, and then they would never keep their promises and it made a lot of us mad. A lot of conservatives who were so tired of the broken promises of the establishment, finally said, you know what? Let's find someone to burn it all down. And they ultimately settled on Donald Trump.

If you paid careful attention, you saw the establishment consume parts of the Trump administration. The Export-Import Bank is still around. Corporate America has hooks in a lot of things. Although not as many things as some people think. There are real conspiracy theories out there, like pharmaceutical companies and ivermectin and suppression of truth and stuff like that, which is kind of kooky conspiracy theory stuff. I'm surprised by the number of smart people who believe this stuff. It's not always “follow the money,” you know. Sometimes it is.

I am very sympathetic to watching Democrats promise all sorts of things to progressives and then stab them in the back, because it happened to me as a conservative activist. Now, that tells me as well that the progressives will ultimately get their own Donald Trump. The difference between conservatives and progressives on this front is that the media will never, ever admit that that's what's happened. You will never see the media demand progressive's distance themselves from their own version of Trump, because they'll never acknowledge that it's the truth.

This is going to break the Democratic party and one of the reasons it's going to break the Democratic party is because of climate change. Climate change is becoming the sinister issue of the era for the left. They genuinely are appalled at what they see as the future of the country in terms of climate. Greta Thunberg made an appearance yesterday.

Greta Thunberg:
This is all we hear from our so-called leaders, words. Words that sound great, but so far has led to no action. Build Back Better. Blah-blah-blah. Green economy, blah-blah-blah. Net zero by 2050, blah, blah blah.

Hear that? She's a true believer. She's a zealot. She's been taken advantage of by others older than her, and they really told her, you got a decade left, kid, or you're going to die. A lot of the progressives believe this. A lot of them believe they're going to die. We're all going to die. The world is going to cross a tipping point from which there will be no return. We will have Waterworld. Kevin Costner will be leader Supreme.

Notice her attack on Build Back Better, blah, blah, blah. That's a slam at Joe Biden and the progressives believe it. See, they have substituted real religion for something they themselves have made. We live in Romans 1 times. They worship creation, not the Creator. They have internalized that the world is going to burn. It is, just not the way they think.

They genuinely believe that we have a decade left. You and I can say, well, 30 years ago they were saying we had a decade left. 20 years ago they were saying we had a decade left. 10 years ago they were saying we had a decade left. They always say, we got a decade left. It's always a decade left. They were saying by 2013, there would be no ice left in the Arctic. They were saying by 2020, the glaciers would have all melted in Antarctica. They're still there.

But just because they were wrong about the date, doesn't mean they don't believe it. All of those eschatologically affixed Protestant prophets who claim the end times are upon us and Jesus is coming back yesterday, they still believe Jesus is coming back, they just got the date wrong. When they predict the end of the world is upon us and it doesn't happen, it doesn't mean they think they’re fundamentally wrong, they just think they got the date wrong. The progressives think the same thing. The progressives think we've got about a decade left or else.

So they off to compromise with themselves, down from $6 trillion to $5 trillion to $3 trillion and here comes Joe Manchin. He says, nope. 1.5 or else. Now progressives are going to have to pick, what is really important to them? What's really important to the progressives? Is it expanding the social safety welfare net or is it stopping the world from burning? Pick. By the way, if they pick climate change, Joe Manchin says they still can't ban fossil fuels.

Not only will Joe Manchin tell them they can't get rid of fossil fuels, but they're not allowed to get rid of the subsidies, the tax credits, and tax deductions for oil drillers and oil providers, and oil refiners. They're not allowed to do that. Joe Manchin says he'll kill the deal if they try to do that. To make matters worse for them, Joe Manchin wants to be in charge of the clean energy standards. He doesn't want Bernie Sanders to do it. Bernie Sanders says this could kill off any hope of solving the climate crisis. Yeah. That's kind of Joe Manchin's point.

The left now has to choose in a way conservatives have never had to choose. You see, conservatives have never really believed that if we didn't get what we wanted, the world would end. We may think the American way of life would end. We may think that the country could be upended. Progressives really, truly, genuinely, honestly believe that if they don't get what they want, the entire world will end. Our way of life won't go away, we will go away. They've internalized that.

Along comes a Democrat. They are in the Democratic party. One of their allies in the Democratic party, two of them no less, on behalf of multiple more, are saying, we don't believe this. You may have internalized it as religious dogma, but we don't believe it. The progressives believe they're right. They believe in the certainty of their cause. You've got Ezra Klein in the New York Times and someone else in the New Yorker, openly interviewing a man and talking about his book that now advocates for enviro-terrorism around the world. Bombings around the world. That environmentalists need to learn how to make pipe bombs to blow up oil refineries. That's how desperate they're getting.

Meanwhile, Joe Manchin is saying I don't care and we're not getting rid of fossil fuels. What do you do? You have internalized that mankind has a decade left and a majority of your party believes it. Do you compromise with Manchin or do you try to work the system? Or do you try to trust Joe Biden to do it? There's no easy path forward for the people who believe the sky is falling.

It's going to be really fun to watch.