As you might know, I’ve been a weekly guest on the Eric Metaxas Show for the past several years. I have the dubious distinction of knowing that it was one of my appearances on the 2020 election that got Eric banned from YouTube. But the heaviest flak is a sign that you’re over the target, isn’t it? Thankfully, Eric takes that manful attitude, so I continue to appear.

Two weeks ago, we were talking about vaccine mandates, social media censorship, and other threats to our liberty, when we wandered a little off topic. Eric brought up the ongoing virulent hatred of Donald Trump among some self-styled conservatives — some of whom he has counted as friends.

Eric Didn’t Need the Fresh Air Fund

Eric and I have a lot in common. We were both born in Astoria General Hospital. We’re both from blue-collar families of rather recent immigrants (his parents, my grandparents) from southeastern Europe. We both grew up in highly ceremonial, widely corrupted churches. We both went to Yale in the early 1980s — in fact, we shared one seminar on 19^th century English poetry. We didn’t meet at Yale, oddly enough, but a decade later in the pro-life movement in New York City. And we’ve been friends ever since.

But there’s a key difference between us, which came up on the air. Eric grew up with nice people, in peaceful suburban Connecticut. And he’s at heart a kindly fellow. So it’s baked deep into his nature to find the best in people. He looks for the most hopeful motives, imagines the best intentions, as his starting point in assessing folks.

I was raised … I won’t say “by wolves in the forest,” because our tenement didn’t allow them. I grew up with George Costanza’s parents in the New York City of the 70s and 80s, the age of Son of Sam, Bernhard Goetz and urban looting. If you’ve seen the movie Joker, you’ll understand my childhood. So I take “original sin” as the starting point when I analyze people’s behavior. Next I consider as motives “the world, the flesh, and the Devil.” If none of those account for what someone is doing, I’ll weigh the possibility that he’s in fact well-meaning. That’s why it was refreshing getting to know Eric, since he actually is.

Why’d So Many Men Pledge the Sorority of Beta Dogma Stigma?

In our talk on air, Eric raised the question of what exactly it was about Donald Trump that triggered so many conservatives, from Rich Lowry and David French to Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher, to react to him so violently, so harshly and unfairly. I mean, people like me who’d opposed the Iraq war and mass immigration still duly trooped off to vote for nominees like George W. Bush and John McCain. Why were so many apparently principled conservatives pulling for Joe Biden to win?

“What about Donald Trump set them off, do you think?” Eric asked me. I answered quickly:

“Absolutely nothing. Donald Trump was the light you turn on in the kitchen that shows where the cockroaches are.”

The Bush Dynasty Hijacked the Republican Party

I went to explain that the conservative movement relaunched by Ronald Reagan in 1976 had been hijacked no later than 1984. The vice-presidential nominee he’d chosen, George H.W. Bush, was not a conservative. Pro-choice for previous decades, Bush grew up the son of the treasurer of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, who’d helped Margaret Sanger to found the group. Once in the White House, Bush inexorably shoved out the true-believing conservatives (some of them are my friends), and filled the administration and the party’s upper reaches with little faded clones of himself, vassals of the royal house of Bush.

These pro-business elitists privately snickered at the social issues. That was red meat for the rubes. They wanted mass immigration to raise corporate profits and provide cheap domestic labor — like the Mexican nannies whom George W. Bush fondly recalls really raised him. These people didn’t care about gun rights, affirmative action, pro-family policies or the threats posed by feminism. They took for granted as permanent our fragile social order, and scoffed at the likes of Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, and Rick Santorum. The Planned Parenthood Republicans of the Bush faction held a vast percentage of their own party’s voting base in quiet contempt.

When You’re Selling Fakes, You Must Quash the Genuine Article

And whenever a real conservative came forward who threatened to pay attention to cultural issues, the needs of America’s working class, or the poison of multiculturalism, they united to destroy him. That’s why they smeared Pat Buchanan as being a quasi-Nazi. It’s why Sarah Palin’s own RNC-picked staff were mocking her in private. It’s why neocon bloggers came together to drive Trent Lott from the Senate. And why so many credentialed “conservatives” pounced on Steve Bannon, Nick Sandmann, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the January 6 protestors.

It’s also why the fake, Potemkin conservative movement reacted to Donald Trump like vampires to a dump truck full of garlic.

The Frauds Have Been Exposed

It’s taking far too long, but the aristocrats’ wing of the GOP is finally falling into ruin. We folks in the servants’ quarters have picked up our pitchforks and driven out our masters. Let them go skulk with the Democrats whose fundamental worldview they always shared anyway.

What’s taking the place of the icy, technocratic program of the country-club Republicans? Something much healthier, more patriotic, populist and Christian. Josh Hammer describes it nicely in his latest at American Greatness. It’s a working class coalition that crosses ethnic lines, attracting culturally conservative non-white, blue collar voters. It turns out that millions of black churchgoers want nothing to do with Marxism in blackface (Critical Race Theory). Nor do second generation Latinos feel any attachment to open borders. They do want a strong defense, decent paying jobs, gun rights, and safe communities. That’s the Republican party of the future.

Let the NeverTrump posers who used to sneer at us from atop our own party’s ticket go beg for handouts from a party that caters to Antifa and trades in racial and sexual obsessions. I wish them all the luck they deserve.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”