In 2016, many were persuaded to support Trump because of the case Michael Anton made in “The Flight 93 Election.” We saw exactly this totalitarian mindset from the Left, and took a chance with Trump. Even if he couldn’t roll back the tide, he wouldn’t be empowering the Left.
Lots of people in conservative world flipped out—that they couldn’t get over their distaste for Trump personally despite the stakes—was indicative that they, as some of us have taken to saying, “don’t know what time it is.”
The Left’s behavior with Kavanaugh isn’t something that just popped up; it began in the universities w Title IX and had washed through elite media by 2016. Some of us saw it coming very clearly. Others didn’t—they actually preferred to follow 8 years of Obama with Clinton.
What’s bonkers to me most of all is, many of the people who didn’t see the stakes clearly in 2016 had actually written books—and very persuasively!—about the danger of an increasingly totalitarian Left.
Many of us still find it pretty offensive that the people who “don’t know what time it is” are almost all employed by conservative websites, think tanks and magazines. This professional class should’ve been the very first to understand the stakes. But no.
The paramount issue is free expression. @AceofSpadesHQ said once that these folks get paid to give their opinions, so mostly they’re not in danger of getting fired from their job or losing everything because of a tweet or a social media post, like most American conservatives are.