Decius identified as Michael Anton, the figure on the right

Claremont Institute last Fall made a major splash by publishing a revolutionary manifesto by a Trump-supporting intellectual, who struck learned, classical poses while championing Alt-Right demands for a new blend of Populism and Nationalism to replace the Conservative Movement and the politics of Goldwater, Buckley, and Reagan.

This provocative writer chose to be anonymous, appearing in the mode of 18th century polemicists under a Classical pen-name, in his case: Publius Decius Mus, a 4th century B.C. Roman consul who, according to Livy, facing imminent defeat, deliberately sacrificed himself in battle, having first offered up himself and the enemy to the gods of the Underworld and the Earth, thus gaining for Rome the victory.

Several further articles by Decius appeared during the course of the electoral campaign, and word leaked out in Conservative circles that Decius was none other than Tucker Carlson, who needed to be anonymous because he was right on the verge of a major new deal with Fox News. I, like a lot of people, believed those rumors, but we all politely kept our mouths shut, thinking that, despite our disagreements, the author was entitled to his privacy and his career opportunities.

It appears that it was just as well that nobody went public with the Tucker Carlson rumor, because here is Michael Warren, in the Weekly Standard, telling us that Mousey is a completely different guy, a fellow named Michael Anton.

On a late January afternoon, as press secretary Sean Spicer walked into the White House media briefing room, a tall, thin, bespectacled man poked his head in the doorway for a moment before turning around and heading back into the West Wing. Later that week, at another briefing, the man stayed longer, standing in the corner behind the podium, out of view of the array of television cameras.

The reporters peppering Spicer with questions were unlikely to know it, but the wallflower watching over the proceedings happened to be the leading conservative intellectual to argue for the election of Donald Trump. His pseudonymous essays during the campaign sparked more discussion—and disputation—among thinkers on the right than just about anyone else’s. Rush Limbaugh spent hours on his radio show promoting what he hailed as the writer’s “shaming” of the Never Trump conservatives. Leading conservative opponents of Trump, like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, published critical responses to his most widely read essay. The writer even granted a postelection interview to the New Yorker, on the condition that his real identity not be revealed. The magazine described him as among those trying “to build a governing ideology” around Trump.

Now he’s helping to implement that governing ideology directly. The writer is a senior national-security official in the Trump White House, nearly a decade after serving in a similar role for George W. Bush. His unmasking ends one of the remaining mysteries of last year’s crazy and unpredictable election.

The enigmatic writer’s real name is Michael Anton, and he’s a fast-talking 47-year-old intellectual who, unlike most of his colleagues, can readily quote Roman histories and Renaissance thinkers. But readers knew him throughout 2016 as Publius Decius Mus, first at a now-defunct website called the Journal of American Greatness and later in the online pages of the Claremont Review of Books. As Decius, Anton insisted that electing Trump and implementing Trumpism was the best and only way to stave off American decline—making a cerebral case to make America great again.

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Looking up Michael Anton on the Internet proved tricky.

There appeared to be three of them: one Michael Anton wrote articles for Claremont Review under his real name; one Michael Anton (Michael Anton Mansour) attended Auburn, played football there, and then went to Hollywood where he became an actor, writer, and filmmaker; the third Michael Anton is a sort of contemporary Beau Brummel, a style-maker expert on masculine tailoring and haberdashery, who has written a book, The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style under the pen-name Nicholas Antongiavanni.

Michael Anton Number 3 is all over the place on the Internet, pontificating pompously on male clothing. Photos of him, I believe, are up there misidentified as being of the actor-writer-filmmaker Michael Anton Number 2.

My own guess is that Michael Anton Number 1, Alt-Right Trump supporter and Claremont Review’s Decius, is the same as Michael Anton Number 3, the clothes horse. Compare the photo below to the one above.

Mens’ Tailoring Expert Michael Anton

Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. — Horace.

“Publius Decius Mus” (Mousey as far as I’m concerned) is back.

Jonah Goldberg, in the course of discussing the disconnection from reality of Trumpkins’ narratives, took the time to casually boot Mousey around the block.

Consider the anonymous writer Decius (whose identity is known to anyone who cares to know it and hidden from the masses of people who couldn’t give a rat’s ass. But I will honor this ridiculous conceit.) Decius’s most famous piece of work — and it was a piece of work — was his Flight 93 Election essay in which he argued that this election poses an existential threat to America’s survival. Either we charge the cockpit and vote for Trump, or the figurative terrorists of the Clinton cabal kill us all. Either you muster the courage to fight the terrorists, or you’re with the terrorists. Moreover, if you don’t agree with his Manichean prescription, it’s probably because you’re acting to protect your status as a member of the “Davos class” or some other phylum of pocket-lining, rent-seeking remoras. I think that argument is grotesque on the merits, and unworthy of the author.

As I explained in a previous G-File, it’s also remarkably cowardly. He invokes the heroism of the passengers of Flight 93. Decius’s pseudonym harkens back to a Roman martyr who bravely gave his life to save the Republic. And yet, he’s unwilling to risk putting his own name on the literary bombs he throws for fear of losing his own Davos-class-worthy lifestyle.

In a more recent essay, Decius attacks my AEI colleague James Pethokoukis for writing a piece titled “A Conservative Case against Trump’s Apocalyptic View of America.” It’s worth noting that Decius had to misrepresent Pethokoukis argument from the outset. The title of Pethokoukis’s piece begins “A Conservative Case” — meaning that it is one argument among many other possible arguments. Decius changes it into the conservative case, suggesting that James is trying to assert that his is the only way conservatives should see the issues. That’s not Pethokoukis’s style, but it is the style of the man who says if you disagree with him about Trump, you’re a sell-out in favor of destroying America. Pethokoukis’s sin, according to Decius, is to even suggest that apocalyptic despair about America might be an overreaction to the current plight of our country. He goes on to write, with no sense of irony:

I don’t know James Pethokoukis. But I know lots of “conservatives” just like him: eager, even giddy, to throw anyone ostensibly on their side to the Leftist wolves.

I’m tired of being shot in the back my “friends.” It’s high time to turn around and let them shoot me in the face, in frank acknowledgement that I am their enemy.

I don’t think Decius is my enemy. But he clearly thinks anyone not in lockstep with his worldview is his. Still, I do have one suggestion. If you want your supposed enemies to shoot you in the face, stop hiding behind a pseudonym.

I dwell on Decius here not just because I am appalled by the way he’s been writing in bad faith, but also because it illustrates my larger point. As an actual argument, Decius makes some fine points about the current state of America — many of which I agree with in whole or in part. But in its totality it isn’t really an argument at all. It’s a cri de coeur, a venting of feelings. The passion, no doubt sincerely felt, has taken reason hostage. The correct response to so much of this venting isn’t to rebut his points case by case, but to simply say, “Lighten up, Francis.”

Mousey didn’t like it and has penned another of his hyper-pretentious, long-winded essays in reply. I find trying to dissect substantive arguments out of his writings is much like trying to pick up mercury from a tabletop with a pair of chopsticks. There is all that verbiage and all that self-congratulatory triumphant posing, but underneath it there is nothing but the same Alt-Right party-line delusional worldview:

This election is apocalyptic. Conservatives owe Trump support, because this is the Apocalypse, man, and you’re on the Alt-Right Trump side or you’re for Hillary.

And, finally, when this election is over, and he doesn’t say it, but he means “after Trump loses,” conservatives better fall in line with Trump’s issues, i.e. Nativism, Protectionism, Isolationism, or there will be a split.

Well, Mousey, I’d reply, there already is a split. You and your friends went whoring off supporting an unqualified, unconservative, populist mountebank without a shred of principles, rejecting every qualified, conservative, and electable candidate in the process. If the GOP had nominated any legitimate, respectable conservative, he’d be coming up on beating Hillary in a landslide. You and Trump lost this election. Not Jonah Goldberg, James Pethokoukis, or me.

The Conservative Movement rose after WWII, in defiance of fashion, the received view of history, and the status quo, to dominate the Republican Party; to elect Ronald Reagan president; to defeat the Soviet Union, liberate Central Europe, and win the Cold War; and to establish a sufficiently powerful intellectual opposition to Collectivist Statism that in the 1990s the Left’s candidates in Britain and America both acknowledged openly that “the era of Big Government is over.”

So what has Conservatism done for you lately? says the Alt-Right.

Political reality and political possibility, alas! move slowly and at a ponderous pace, sometimes moved in one direction or the other by Fortune, beyond the immediate control of any collection or alliance of us mortals.

George W. Bush screwed up and allowed the Left to turn public opinion against his military efforts, then Fate handed the Progressive Left both an economic crash weeks before the election and a well-spoken radical candidate with extraordinary symbolic appeal. Meanwhile the Left’s long march through the Culture and the Institutions went on, arriving recently at points frequently downright comedic.

I and the other conservatives I know generally thought that GWB really ought to have done a better job, but he actually was not consulting on a daily basis with most of us. We were supremely unlucky in 2008 and still unlucky in 2012, but frankly I think this year Fate was really getting outrageously out-of-hand.

No one contends that the detailed principles of the post-WWII Conservative Movement are written in stone, but if anyone is going to try to revise Conservatism’s policy preferences and positions, it is going to take better arguments and a better grasp of history than any of either the low-information, big-mouth shitbirds or the pretentious windbags with imaginary togas currently operating on the Alt-Right have so far ever shown.

It is regrettable that the Left dominates the universities, the media, and the Arts. Tell you what, after Trump loses, and the Conservative Movement splits permanently, why don’t you and Pat Buchanan and Mike Cernovich and Vox Day all go take the Culture and the Institutions back? It will give you something to do besides complain about how all the #NeverTrumpers stabbed you in the back.

He is responding (angrily) to the above tweet on “American Greatness,” one of those self-important little Alt-Right sites, founded, it tells us, because “The soil of the conservative movement is exhausted. It needs fertilization, re-sowing, and diligent cultivation if it is to thrive again.”

(Personally, as a life-long Movement Conservative, I get pretty sick of this bunch or that bunch of inferior writers who want to substitute Nativism (and frequently merely as the polite, public version of White Nationalism) for Conservatism telling me that Conservatives have failed them by not winning every election and public policy battle in their short lifetimes, and therefore all conservative intellectuals should step aside in favor of Pepe the frog and Donald Trump.)

Trumpkins like Mousey have only this one argument: if you are not for Trump, you are electing Hillary, and Hillary’s election would be the worst disastrous irreversible Apocalyptic thing, and it will be all your fault!

I don’t precisely fit the paradigm of Mousey’s conservative target, who is supposed to be saying: “I’ve always found a way to support every Republican nominee and mostly have been proud to do so, even when some of them had not been my ideal candidate and I found serious reasons for disagreement. Trump is the first one I consider beyond the pale, because of” — the reasoning varies a little. “As such, I simply cannot vote for him, and I find that to be the saddest thing ever to happen in my political life.”

Like a lot of people, I have no intention of voting for either Donald or Hillary. But this is not the first time I declined to vote for the Republican nominee. I didn’t vote Nixon in 1972, the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. I considered (correctly) that Nixon was not a conservative and was not trustworthy, and I certainly wasn’t going to vote for George McGovern, running as the candidate of commies, either. I threw away my vote by casting it (ironically) for John Schmitz, a whacky Bircher.

I also voted for neither major party candidate in 1992. I knew personally and liked George H.W. Bush, but thought his breaking his word on “no new taxes” made it impossible for me to support him. I obviously wouldn’t vote for Bubba either. So I voted that time for Pat Buchanan (a vote I have come to regret over the years). I think Trump is less conservative and even less trustworthy than Nixon, and a more preposterous presidential candidate than John Schmitz. And I’m not sad in the least. I have no problem at all declining to support Trump.

Where I guess I differ from Mousey there is I never supposed that my single vote was actually determinative, so I do not believe that my abstention from supporting Trump means I will have elected Hillary. Au contraire, I would suggest to Mousey that the people really responsible for electing Hillary (who seems, at this point, unavoidably destined to win) are all the low-grade morons who chose to support an unqualified, unelectable laughingstock with an atrocious character over a huge number of qualified and legitimate other candidates, pretty much any of whom would actually have beaten Hillary with a landslide. When Hillary wins, I have to break it to you, Publius, old boy, it will really be your fault. Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol did not make all you lemmings jump off the cliff.

And you can stop all the recriminations and appeals. You bozos are not qualified, not remotely, to replace serious conservative intellectuals. In the first place, you are not really conservative. Your political posture is a kind of anti-leftism buried in a larger volume of anti-elitism and xenophobia. You essentially oppose at least some significant portion of the left-wing agenda by adopting precisely the reactionary postures of irrational animosity and failed resentment that the left loves to accuse conservatives of being all about. You are the left’s dream opponents.

We are obviously not really on the same side. You guys are Nativists (if not downright 1488-ers) with your knickers in a twist over some Hispanic worker with a leaf-blower in his hand. You don’t want limited government. You want entitlements for you, just not for those other guys over there. You want a Bismarkian alliance between a government on the Right and your own White lower middle class. You are not in favor of economic liberty or laissez faire or free trade. You want protective tariffs to defend you from foreign manufacturing competition, and you want closed borders and a wall to protect you from domestic labor competition. You are not interested in defending freedom outside the United States. That kind of thing is for Jewish neocons. You want nothing that is not all about you personally. The correct foreign policy is pre-WWII “America First” isolationism. No wonder you guys are not professional conservative intellectuals. You obviously failed both Economics and History at school.

And let me add one more very important point. The rest of us are really sick and tired of hearing about how you dipshit imbeciles are impatiently waiting to take over political and intellectual leadership from the unworthy cadre presently in charge on the Right. Well, Trump is going down in flames, and you are, as your candidate would say, Losers! Yuge Losers! You have nothing to sell but resentment, bad economics, and discredited and reprehensible political impulses. The Know Nothings lost in the 1850s and they are losing again in 2016. You are not taking over anything. You will be discredited by this election, and your kind will, in future, soon cease to have influence over Conservatism or the GOP.

Publius Decius Mus (aka Mousey) is back, lying on his klinÄ“ and being interviewed by one of those self-important Alt-Right blogs, which recently sprang into existence to repair the “exhausted soil” of the Conservative Movement with “fertilizing, re-sowing, and diligent cultivation.” Well, I am skeptical of their diligence, and I think the Alt-Right is bent on sowing only the most noxious and pestilential political weeds, but I will grant that they have plenty of male cattle manure to offer to fertilize the soil.

Read the rest of this entry »

David French has the situation pegged.

So the anonymous guy who wrote the now-famous “Flight 93” essay — you know, the “intellectual” defense of Trump that’s been talked about endlessly for the last eight days — is now back with a “restatement,” where he responds to the multiple critiques of his first piece. I have the same problem with the restatement as I had with the first essay, and it’s the same problem I’ve had with every single allegedly intellectual defense of Trump I’ve ever read.

Simply put, these folks don’t defend the real, live Donald Trump. They create someone else entirely — we’ll call him Fake Trump — and defend Fake Trump against all comers. Fake Trump, for example isn’t going to embroil us in foreign wars. But Real Trump supported both the Iraq invasion and the Libyan intervention (Flight 93 dude calls Libya “perhaps the worst security policy mistake in US history”), and during this campaign (just last week!) has supported indefinite foreign occupation for resource extraction.

Fake Trump is going to put a stop social justice crusading and defend life. Real Trump at best doesn’t care about religious liberty or abortion and at worst not only declares that Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things,” he’s arguably one of the sexual revolution’s most ardent practitioners.

Fake Trump, to quote Flight 93 dude again, is “mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation.” This is spit-out-your-coffee hilarious. Real Trump doesn’t know the slightest thing about the Constitution, but he’s more than happy to suppress your free speech rights if it means the media is more compliant, and he’s more than happy to take your home from you if he can replace it with a Trump casino.

Read the whole thing.

“Publius Decius Mus”

Mousey is back, responding with feigned humility to the widespread attention his Grand Trumpkin Manifesto in the Claremont Review received, and making essentially lame efforts to respond to criticism.

In the first place, I did not notice a lot of people calling Mousey “cowardly” for using that pen-name out of Livy. I think most people agreed with me in simply finding it extravagantly pretentious and downright incongruous in combining the highfalutin’ display of Classical erudition in service to the sloping-simian-forehead preference for Know-Nothing-ism redivivus which is the ideological foundation of the Trump Movement.

Secondly, the problem with Mousey’s “Flight 93” analogy is its hysterical hyperbole. Yes, Hillary becoming president would be bad, but it would not really be quite as bad a Obama being elected. Obama was a red-diaper-baby from a no-kidding Communist family straight out of the extreme radical left-wing fringe with a personal background as professional agitator and close pal of Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama was elected with the wind at his back, successfully promoted by the partisan media and entertainment industry into a Pop Culture phenomenon roughly as popular as the Beatles in 1964.

Hillary, by comparison, is just a greasy, greedy, cynical democrat pol, now old and wrinkled and with all the charisma of a Metropolitan Museum mummy. Obama walked into office with a revolutionary mandate. Hillary, if she wins, will really be a lame-duck, seat-filling an Obama Third Term that should never have occurred. The likelihood of her winning a second term is poor.

It’s always bad seeing a democrat elected, but consider the alternative.

Mousy is a delusional Trumpkin, who thinks that the Trump candidacy is actually about something political. He is obviously an idiot.

Donald Trump is not conservative. Donald Trump is not political. Donald Trump doesn’t love you or the other numbnuts and yobbos supporting him. Donald Trump knows from nothing about policy, political theory, the Constitution, the Administrative State, and he could care less.

Donald Trump is only about Donald Trump. He is the complete pragmatist. The Administrative State? Trump has been working in cahoots with the Administrative State all his life. Trump’s real estate projects were all built via special permits. concessions, and tax breaks from and political bargains with the Administrative State, and Donald has been paying off the politicians running it throughout his career. Donald Trump is an operator, not a revolutionary.

Yesterday, Trump announced a great big shiny new $159 billion unfunded Child Care entitlement, suggested by his daughter(!). There’s your revolutionary reformer of the Administrative State in action.

Does Mousey even really care about entitlements, deficits, and the Administrative State? I wonder.

He sums up his defense of Trump being not dangerous, prone to tyranny, or insane, thusly:

Trump by contrast promises not to launch misguided wars, to protect our borders, and to focus immigration policy on the well-being of the currently-constituted American people. Who is truly more moderate: the colorful loudmouth with the sensible agenda or the corrupt, icy careerist with the radical agenda?

So, the sensible agenda consists of Nativism and Isolationism?

I don’t disagree with the batrachian inhabitants of the Buchananite fever swamp about the absence of American responsibility and general undesirability of admitting Muslim “refugees.” But, I think myself that the hubbub about Hispanic laborers is foolish and misguided, and the notion of the same country that owns the Statue of Liberty building a thousand-mile anti-immigrant wall is self-contradictory.

The United States inherited from Britain, after WWII, the role of guarantor of Freedom of the Seas and Policeman of the World. It is not some kind of happy accident that the US has the dominant voice in international financial treaties, that the US dollar is the world reserve currency, and that US culture is the world standard. American economic prosperity is directly linked to America’s role of world leadership. Doubtless, White House Administrations could do a lot better job of devising coherent policies and defending them against foreign and domestic critics, but retreat and Isolationism would be a cowardly and lousy option.

And so, we arrive at the real crux of the matter. Donald Trump is not a conservative or really a Republican at all. Our ill-designed primary system misfired, our lamentable culture clocked in, the failures of our educational system were felt, and the crooked timber of humanity did it again. It should have been a landslide Republican year. There were plenty of worthy candidates, but demos gave away the nomination to a charlatan and a buffoon.

Demos prefers noise and excitement to gravity and substance every time. And, like Mousey there, a portion of demos has become infected with some ancient strains of American political pathologies, making them sick and mad.

We obviously lose whatever happens this year, but I think we probably have more to lose via the election of Donald Trump. There is the issue of Trump’s instability, irrationality, and unpredictability. You really ought not to give supreme power to a limitlessly spoiled narcissist. Rome did it a few times, and the results were not pretty.

But it’s even simpler than that. Both candidates are dishonest and gravely flawed. Either one of them, I think it is easy to predict, will preside over scandals and sensational disasters. Either one of them will soon become an albastross around that candidate’s respective party’s neck. I’d rather have the political corpse of Hillary around the democrat party’s neck. (Though I won’t vote for her.)

There is finally the danger that Trump’s election could empower within the Republican Party the stupid, primitive, grotesque Alt-Right elements which reject all real conservative principles in favor of fundamentally un-American, discredited, and reprehensible ideas. Rejecting the wise-ass morons of the Alt-Right is reason enough not to vote for Donald Trump all by itself.

The Alt-Right rejects the conservative intellectual tradition and all serious ideas in favor of Populism, yet at the same time a number of its mouthpieces are prone to strike poses of learned Classicism, using pennames out of Livy like “Publius Decius Mus,” making reference to the strategic deficiencies of Hannibal, and throwing in a bit of Greek (thymos/θῡμός) for purposes of insult.

I’m afraid that trying to pretend to be Victor Davis Hanson, Donald Kagan, or Cato the Elder while trying to peddle a combination of the politics of Pat Buchanan and Millard Fillmore does not really impress anyone.

I am referring, of course, specifically to The Flight 93 Election, the latest grand Trumpkin manifesto, which Claremont Review ought to have been ashamed of publishing.

“Publish Decius Mus,” hereafter referred to as “Mousey,” inevitably commences with the most popular thesis in the Trumpshirt party line: the claim that this particular election is uniquely climactic and apocalyptic. Were Hillary to win, we are given to understand, her re-election is inevitable, the successful passage and implementation of heaven-only-knows-what next jolie cadeau de la Révolution française is inevitable, the Republic is doomed, and the war against the forces of darkness is lost forever.

Mousey’s thesis is, of course, arrant rubbish. Hillary is just another democrat, a democrat not even as leftist as the current 8-year inhabitant of the White House. Hillary isn’t nearly as ideological as Obama, nor is she nearly as slippery and competent as her spouse. Doubtless, were she to be elected, it would be a bad thing, and we could expect a re-play of the first Clinton presidential term. We should expect Hillary to try for One Big Leftwing Thing. If the Republicans in Congress turn back her assault, we again win the mid-term elections, Hillary pulls in her horns, and (blessed) governmental gridlock recurs. Hillary hasn’t got Bill’s gifts and there is no reason at all to assume that she would be a popular president or be likely to win re-election. On the contrary, I think there is an excellent chance that Hillary will screw the pooch, wind up buried in more scandals, and end her term putting the democrat party right behind the 8-ball for a long time to come.

Trump, on the other hand, is an extremely dangerous gamble. What might, or might not, an incredibly spoiled, willful, narcissistic 70-year-old millionaire, who may not be playing with a full deck, do? It is impossible to predict. That is the problem with making a geriatric Caligula president.

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Ben Shapiro, at Daily Wire, did a fine job of demolishing Mousey’s nonsense.

What sort of “fundamental” change is Publius looking for, you ask? (“Interesting choice of phrase, that.” — Barack Obama) Not conservatism – that’s failed: “Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption?”

No conservative would actually write this. Decentralization and federalism, combined with a renewed societal focus on virtue implemented at a familial and communal level, are the solution to an encroaching federal government. They are the only solution.

But what is Publius’ solution? Why, Trump, of course! “[Matthew] Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.’ That sounds a lot like Trumpism,” writes our Roman hero.

So in other words, screw conservatism, let’s get the Big Government corporatist ad hoc blue dog Democrat in here. The guy who donated to Hillary Clinton will surely fix things better than founding ideals ever have.

From there, Publius moves on to blame. Why won’t conservatives just agree with him? Because they must be paid off! “Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others…. So what do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks.” This is the last refuge of the desperate Trump advocate – everyone with whom they disagree has been bribed. The system is rigged. Someone ought to ask Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham or Breitbart.com just how much money they’ve lost backing Trump with the ardently hot passion of a thousand smoldering suns. The answer: not a dime. And they’ve gained ratings and presumably, the massive money that comes along with such ratings. Some of us have actively foregone significant money not to worship at the Trumpian altar. It’s truly incredible how Trump supporters darkly suggest that Jonah Goldberg is somehow getting rich off of opposing Trump but simultaneously say National Review is going bankrupt. Which is it, dolts?

Read the whole thing.