Against Conservatism Inc’s GriftBy Rod Dreher
March 10, 2022
I commend to you heartily George O’Neill’s great TAC piece about the rottenness at the heart of Conservatism, Inc. George, who is a generous funder of conservative initiatives, writes about a meeting in Florida for donors that he attended late last year:
I was being foolish. Just as the meeting was to begin, in walked Matt Schlapp, the head of the group feasting on conservative donors at CPAC. Schlapp is the very definition of Conservatism, Inc. He provides the RNC and other establishment mouthpieces platforms to spin their views. And now, here he was purporting to offer a real alternative. It saddened me beyond words. After Schlapp’s presentation, replete with pep talks from a number of career operatives about how we could send money to a new and better organization, I realized the whole event was a head-fake to convince donors who are unwilling to support the Swamp to give money to a Swamp organization disguised as an anti-Swamp organization.
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You should ask yourself: why is it that the most effective opposition to the racist, anti-American, destructive Critical Race Theory infesting American educational institutions and others is a young guy from the Pacific Northwest, Christopher Rufo, and not any Republican Party politician or DC think tank or activist group. Why is it that it took a self-organized coalition of parents in Northern Virginia to stand up effectively to arrogant CRT educrats, while Conservatism Inc. fiddled and fundraised? Why is by far the most important voice for conservative beliefs a broadcaster, Tucker Carlson, than anyone affiliated with the GOP establishment and Conservatism, Inc.? Donors, if you want to see real change, donate to people like Chris Rufo.
I was stunned this week to read that Matt Schlapp, one of the most important and successful conservative operators of his generation, writing sympathetically about Lia Thomas, the male-to-female transgender athlete who is destroying women’s athletics under woke NCAA rules allowing biological males who identify as women to compete against females. It is an outrage, not only against women athletes, but more broadly as an acute manifestation of a civilization-destroying madness sweeping our country: gender ideology. Don’t look to Washington Republicans for resistance. If GOP-led resistance is happening, it’s happening at the local level, with politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has directed the state’s child protection agency to investigate parents pursuing hormonal and surgical alterations of their minor children as child abuse. The case is tied up in court now, and Abbott might not prevail — but at least he’s fighting against this horrible phenomenon.
Similarly with Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida and his various initiatives, especially the controversial (to liberals) bill that prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in schools up to the third grade and limits it to age-appropriate in higher grades. Liberals are screaming that it punishes LGBT children and their families, but what it really does is protect the rights of parents to prevent their children from being propagandized by gender-ideology activists. Contrast that with the useless Republican Gov. of Utah, Spencer Cox, who plans to veto a bill passed by the state’s legislature that would prohibit transgender student athletes from sports competitions.
Anyway, here’s what Schlapp tweeted:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cpac-against-conservatism-inc-grift/
