In the wreckage of 20 years of American efforts in Afghanistan comes a single silver lining of schadenfreude — the vindication of #NeverBidenism.
A certain class of Never Trumper used Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential primary to transform into “Never Republicans.” These former “conservatives,” in the fervor of their reactionary partisanship, simply became Democrats, forsaking every belief they ever held previously. Lifelong, card-carrying liberals may have disagreed with us conservatives who chose not to vote for either Trump or Biden. But the newly radicalized neocons who swore fealty to Biden genuinely hated us.
The reasons to oppose Trump, the thrice-married adulterer with little care for the virtues of limited government and personal responsibility, were obvious. The Republican brand needed protection from this man. So did the principled defense of limited government and family-centric conservatism. But the reasons to oppose Biden were no less obvious.
For starters, his staff. At the helm was Kamala Harris, a completely unprincipled neophyte every bit as fake as her cackle. And although Biden was not a socialist like Bernie Sanders, or a true believer in Woko Haram like “the Squad,” he still ran on what would become the priciest agenda in history if implemented, and the racial essentialism of critical race theory to boot.
But Biden’s most glaring deficiency was his promise to bring back normalcy.
For all his faults, Trump defied “normalcy,” and the result was a new peace in the Middle East and a secure Southern border for the first time in decades. Trump became the first president of my lifetime not to begin a new war.
On the other hand, Biden has been wrong about every foreign policy issue he has lived through. He even lambasted Ronald Reagan’s legendary “tear down this wall” speech. He favored the illegal bombings in Serbia and Libya. He opposed the successful surges in Iraq and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden raid. He supported the Iraq War.
With a track record like that, it is hardly a coincidence that the most ardent of the newly converted Biden “conservatives” had been the worst warmongering neocons previously — like Biden, wrong about everything.
The anti-anti-Biden pundits (and Biden bootlickers such as Jen Rubin) derided conservatives who were critical of both Trump and Biden as mere “anti-anti-Trumpers.” Over at the neocon asylum of the Bulwark, blogger Jonathan Last accused Rich Lowry, the National Review editor who oversaw the landmark issue of the magazine’s “Against Trump” issue, of jumping in bed with “a party infested with QAnon” and “birthers” because “he will criticize Trump while lacerating those who actually oppose him,” of course ignoring that neocons were happy to coexist with racist birthers long before Trump came down the escalator.
Last’s colleague, Tim Miller, branded Stephen Miller (no relation and no, not the Trump White House Stephen Miller) a “cos-play [sic] non-supporter” of Trump, even though the Spectator contributor never endorsed or voted for Trump.
The anti-anti-Biden camp’s utterly one-dimensional view of partisanship means that Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official who literally orchestrated ripping kids from their mothers at the border, is welcomed with open arms by the group “Republican Voters Against Trump,” while Trump’s fellow thrice-married Charlie Sykes deems persistent Trump critics like Dan McLaughlin an “anti-anti-Trump partisan” for lambasting Kamala Harris’s disregard for norms and limitations on executive power.
If the anti-anti-Biden adherents restricted their hysteria just to Trump himself, then perhaps the Kabul catastrophe would be less of a vindication of their adversaries. But professional anti-anti-Biden tribalists have lost the plot. Just this month, supposed “expert” Tom Nichols accused “anti-anti-Trump folks” of weaponizing the way New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo treated the help as his own personal harem. The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson rejoiced over Democrat Tulsi Gabbard not winning an election she wasn’t actually competing in! Sad.
The very fools who advocated for us to send our sons and brothers into decades more of forever-wars begat Trump’s ascension. Then they mocked conservatives who, despite our refusal to vote for or justify Trump’s personal foibles, stayed true to principle and tried to contain the worst excesses of a party driven to populism after the failed Bush years.
Nothing goodwill come out of Biden’s disaster in Afghanistan. But at least people have all the evidence they need to ignore and shun the anti-anti-Biden sycophants who have been wrong about absolutely everything for so long.
