Jump to content

The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult


Hugo Stiglitz

Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, C-Man said:

cheryl-cole-okay.gif
 

He’s going to destroy their educational system and in the process a lot of small towns will die when their schools disappear..  FAFO.

Edited by atomheartbevo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

cheryl-cole-okay.gif
 

He’s going to destroy their educational system and in the process a lot of small towns will die when their schools disappear..  FAFO.

He has no authority to implement this and he knows it.  He's already lost one OK Supreme Court case to a local school board, he'll lose this one too.

Edited by SamsCorner
Poor spelling.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, Pancho said:

 

Matt Walsh is a "Type 2." That is the term my son and his friends (at the time paying their bills with a successful Youtube series) would use for people at conventions who would latch onto them to share energy-draining Bad Ideas that might cost them half their revenue. He's a Type Two. Let's get away from this guy and go have fun.

  • Hook 'Em 2
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Did that dude post that anti-Carlin rant on the actual Independence Day?  The most pro-1A comedian in history?  Or was this like a trolling bit?  I mean discounting Carlin's takes on freedom of speech on our birthday?  Is Lenny Bruce asleep at the simulator, what the fuck?  Did this guy not get into the 4th of July pre-fireworks early show in Branson of Larry the Cable Guy and just tweeted out of frustration?  

Let me guess, all these 4th of July day games in MLB featured too many Dominicans and Blacks on our nation's sacred day?  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

Just put in under the 360 bridge and already saw some dipshit cultists with dotard flags and “I’m voting for the convicted felon” shirts. They walk among us. 
 

 

IMG_8918.jpeg

IMG_8919.jpeg

It sure looks like MS13 took his job away, damn near starvation.  

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why a New Conservative Brain Trust Is Resettling Across America - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

Spoiler

July 4, 2024

The Claremont Institute has been located in Southern California since its founding in the late 1970s. From its perch in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, it has become a leading intellectual center of the pro-Trump right.

Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures have been leaving California to find ideologically friendlier climes. Ryan P. Williams, the think tank’s president, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.

His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a major role in 2016 to convince conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute’s vice president for operations and administration has moved there, too. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a small office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May, and said he expects to shrink Claremont’s California headquarters.

“A lot of us share a sense that Christendom is unraveling,” said Skyler Kressin, 38, who is friendly with the Claremont leaders and shares many of their concerns. He left Southern California to move to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2020. “We need to be engaged, we need to be building.”

Image

“There’s an interesting shift going on to Texas. I think there’s a renewed sense of seeking community and shared values and culture amongst right-wing folks.” said Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute.Credit...Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

As Mr. Trump barrels through his third presidential campaign, his supporters buoyed by last week’s debate, many of the young activists and thinkers who have risen under his influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it is a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants. They foresee an aesthetic landscape to match, with more classical architecture and a revived conservative art movement and men wearing traditional suits.

Their vision includes stronger local leadership and a withered national “administrative state,” prompting them to celebrate last week when the Supreme Court effectively ended the “Chevron deference,” which could lead to the weakening of thousands of federal rules on the environment, worker protection and beyond.

Fed up by what they see as an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture, many are moving to what they view as more welcoming states and regions, battling for American society from conservative “fortresses.”

Some see themselves as participants in and advocates for a “great sort,” a societal reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas. (And some, including Mr. Kressin, are simultaneously chasing the cheaper costs of living and safer neighborhoods that fuel many ordinary moves.)

Editors’ Picks

A British Literary Festival Fit for a Queen

Yes, Uncle Sam, We Met on Tinder

Paul Theroux on Necessary Solitude, Risks and the Joy of Writing

Image

Ryan Williams is presented the National Humanities Medal by President Donald Trump on behalf of The Claremont Institute during a ceremony at the White House in November 2019.Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

The year Mr. Kressin moved to Idaho, he and Mr. Williams were part of an informal conversation at Claremont about the need for new institutions in what some hope will be a rejuvenated American society. The idea was a “fraternal community,” as one leader put it, that prioritized in-person meetings. The result was the all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only social organization reserved for Christians. The group has about 10 lodges in various states of development so far, with membership ranging between seven and several dozen people.

The group’s goals, according to leaders, include identifying “local elites” across the country and cultivating “potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime” — by which they mean a second Trump presidency, but also a future they describe in sweeping and sometimes apocalyptic terms. Some warn of a coming societal breakdown that will require armed, right-minded citizens to restore order.

The group’s ties to Claremont give it access to influence in a future Trump administration: Mr. Anton served on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, and a Claremont board member, John Eastman, advised Mr. Trump’s 2020 election campaign. He faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia over schemes to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost that race.

Their rhetoric can sound expansive to the point of opacity. “As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children,” the group’s website proclaims. “The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.”

Their output, so far, looks more modest. Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.” The men socialize outside of meetings and pass each other business.

Image

Skyler Kressin and his family moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from Southern California in 2020.Credit...Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

The circle’s critics say they present a cleaned-up version of some of the darkest elements of the right, including a cultural homogeneity to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.

“It’s this idea of organizing discontent at the local level and building a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half-century would just keep moving the Republican Party further and further rightward, and mobilizing voters in discontented parts of the country, a lot of them men,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the crowd. “It’s a highbrow version of the militia movement.”

In its first two years, leaders said, SACR received significant funding from Charles Haywood, a former business owner in Indiana. Mr. Haywood seems to delight in being an online provocateur. He has called the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, an “electoral justice protest” and praised the racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints.”

Posting on the platform X last month, he wrote that foreign-born citizens should be deported for offenses including “working for Left causes.” Other leaders attribute the apocalyptic tone of the group’s founding documents to Mr. Haywood, who declined to comment.

Image

An interior scene in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Many of the young conservatives who have risen under Mr. Trump’s influence see themselves as part of a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Credit...Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

Members of the society are young, mostly white-collar (and mostly white), and often wealthy. Some have left elite institutions to start their own firms and invest in conservative-leaning ventures.

Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, a Dallas-based journal that serves as an informal in-house publication for the movement, is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.

Mr. Abbotoy is betting big on the revitalization of the rural South more broadly, as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. He sees the Tennessee project as a “playbook” for future developments in which neighbors share conservative social values and enjoy, he suggested, a kind of ambient Christian culture.

“I personally would happily pay high H.O.A. fees to be in a neighborhood where I have to drive by an architecturally significant church every day, and I can hear church bells,” he said.

The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationally, was a watershed moment for Mr. Abbotoy and other conservatives’ understanding of how quickly the ground could shift under their feet. It is a decision that signaled to them the onset of an era that the conservative Christian writer Aaron Renn — who has spoken at the fraternal society’s events — calls “negative world,” an influential concept that describes a culture in which “being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society.”

Image

Josh Abbotoy, director of the American Reformer, is counting on the revitalization of the rural South as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. Credit...Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

Mr. Abbotoy was raised in an evangelical culture that encouraged conservative Christians to go out into “the world” and influence secular institutions, including corporations and universities. But that approach, which defined the last several generations of mainstream evangelicalism, feels increasingly untenable to people in his circle.

Mr. Abbotoy, who graduated from Harvard Law School, left a job with a major infrastructure company in 2021 and came to work for Nate Fischer, a Dallas venture capitalist and prolific networker whose firm invests in conservative projects and opposes “DEI/ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture.” Mr. Fischer is the president of SACR’s Dallas chapter.

Andrew Beck, a brand consultant for conservative politicians and entities including SACR and Claremont, moved with his wife and their now six children, along with his parents and five of his siblings and their families, from Staten Island to suburbs north of Dallas in 2020. Almost 30 members of the family now live in the same area, just as they did in New York.

“Something is shifting that’s tectonic,” said Mr. Beck, who wrote a widely shared essay on “re-Christianizing America” for Claremont’s online magazine the American Mind. “It’s not so much about staking out some stronghold where you can live in a cocoon, it’s to be a part of a place you can truly consider to be home.”

Members must be male, belong to a “Trinitarian Christian” church, a broad category that includes Catholics and Protestants, but not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members must also describe themselves as “unhyphenated Americans,” a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urging the full assimilation of immigrants.

Image

An issue of the Claremont Review of Books from winter 2016-2017.Credit...Brad Torchia for The New York Times

The group’s interdenominational membership reflects the fact that in the Trump era, conservative Christianity is increasingly becoming a cultural and political identity, with theological differences falling to the wayside and Christianity serving as a kind of generic expression of rebellion against modernity. A significant minority of members are Catholic, including Mr. Kressin. The group also includes Presbyterians, Baptists and charismatics.

In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown in Idaho, the streets are clean and people leave their doors unlocked. His family lives in a house they can afford to own, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and hymnals and classic novels line shelves on the wall.

“Many in our generation are very, very much longing for rootedness,” he said. “And they were raised in an era where that was really not valued very much.”

On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning stroll out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and soaring views of the crystalline lake below. At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Starting over in Idaho, Mr. Kressin said later, was part of a project so long term that he does not expect to see its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only really mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even start building a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”

 

  • Rage+1 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, SimonBolivar said:

Why a New Conservative Brain Trust Is Resettling Across America - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

  Hide contents

July 4, 2024

The Claremont Institute has been located in Southern California since its founding in the late 1970s. From its perch in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, it has become a leading intellectual center of the pro-Trump right.

Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures have been leaving California to find ideologically friendlier climes. Ryan P. Williams, the think tank’s president, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.

His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a major role in 2016 to convince conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute’s vice president for operations and administration has moved there, too. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a small office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May, and said he expects to shrink Claremont’s California headquarters.

“A lot of us share a sense that Christendom is unraveling,” said Skyler Kressin, 38, who is friendly with the Claremont leaders and shares many of their concerns. He left Southern California to move to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2020. “We need to be engaged, we need to be building.”

Image

“There’s an interesting shift going on to Texas. I think there’s a renewed sense of seeking community and shared values and culture amongst right-wing folks.” said Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute.Credit...Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

As Mr. Trump barrels through his third presidential campaign, his supporters buoyed by last week’s debate, many of the young activists and thinkers who have risen under his influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it is a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants. They foresee an aesthetic landscape to match, with more classical architecture and a revived conservative art movement and men wearing traditional suits.

Their vision includes stronger local leadership and a withered national “administrative state,” prompting them to celebrate last week when the Supreme Court effectively ended the “Chevron deference,” which could lead to the weakening of thousands of federal rules on the environment, worker protection and beyond.

Fed up by what they see as an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture, many are moving to what they view as more welcoming states and regions, battling for American society from conservative “fortresses.”

Some see themselves as participants in and advocates for a “great sort,” a societal reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas. (And some, including Mr. Kressin, are simultaneously chasing the cheaper costs of living and safer neighborhoods that fuel many ordinary moves.)

Editors’ Picks

A British Literary Festival Fit for a Queen

Yes, Uncle Sam, We Met on Tinder

Paul Theroux on Necessary Solitude, Risks and the Joy of Writing

Image

Ryan Williams is presented the National Humanities Medal by President Donald Trump on behalf of The Claremont Institute during a ceremony at the White House in November 2019.Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

The year Mr. Kressin moved to Idaho, he and Mr. Williams were part of an informal conversation at Claremont about the need for new institutions in what some hope will be a rejuvenated American society. The idea was a “fraternal community,” as one leader put it, that prioritized in-person meetings. The result was the all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only social organization reserved for Christians. The group has about 10 lodges in various states of development so far, with membership ranging between seven and several dozen people.

The group’s goals, according to leaders, include identifying “local elites” across the country and cultivating “potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime” — by which they mean a second Trump presidency, but also a future they describe in sweeping and sometimes apocalyptic terms. Some warn of a coming societal breakdown that will require armed, right-minded citizens to restore order.

The group’s ties to Claremont give it access to influence in a future Trump administration: Mr. Anton served on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, and a Claremont board member, John Eastman, advised Mr. Trump’s 2020 election campaign. He faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia over schemes to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost that race.

Their rhetoric can sound expansive to the point of opacity. “As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children,” the group’s website proclaims. “The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.”

Their output, so far, looks more modest. Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.” The men socialize outside of meetings and pass each other business.

Image

Skyler Kressin and his family moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from Southern California in 2020.Credit...Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

The circle’s critics say they present a cleaned-up version of some of the darkest elements of the right, including a cultural homogeneity to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.

“It’s this idea of organizing discontent at the local level and building a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half-century would just keep moving the Republican Party further and further rightward, and mobilizing voters in discontented parts of the country, a lot of them men,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the crowd. “It’s a highbrow version of the militia movement.”

In its first two years, leaders said, SACR received significant funding from Charles Haywood, a former business owner in Indiana. Mr. Haywood seems to delight in being an online provocateur. He has called the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, an “electoral justice protest” and praised the racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints.”

Posting on the platform X last month, he wrote that foreign-born citizens should be deported for offenses including “working for Left causes.” Other leaders attribute the apocalyptic tone of the group’s founding documents to Mr. Haywood, who declined to comment.

Image

An interior scene in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Many of the young conservatives who have risen under Mr. Trump’s influence see themselves as part of a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Credit...Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

Members of the society are young, mostly white-collar (and mostly white), and often wealthy. Some have left elite institutions to start their own firms and invest in conservative-leaning ventures.

Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, a Dallas-based journal that serves as an informal in-house publication for the movement, is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.

Mr. Abbotoy is betting big on the revitalization of the rural South more broadly, as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. He sees the Tennessee project as a “playbook” for future developments in which neighbors share conservative social values and enjoy, he suggested, a kind of ambient Christian culture.

“I personally would happily pay high H.O.A. fees to be in a neighborhood where I have to drive by an architecturally significant church every day, and I can hear church bells,” he said.

The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationally, was a watershed moment for Mr. Abbotoy and other conservatives’ understanding of how quickly the ground could shift under their feet. It is a decision that signaled to them the onset of an era that the conservative Christian writer Aaron Renn — who has spoken at the fraternal society’s events — calls “negative world,” an influential concept that describes a culture in which “being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society.”

Image

Josh Abbotoy, director of the American Reformer, is counting on the revitalization of the rural South as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. Credit...Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

Mr. Abbotoy was raised in an evangelical culture that encouraged conservative Christians to go out into “the world” and influence secular institutions, including corporations and universities. But that approach, which defined the last several generations of mainstream evangelicalism, feels increasingly untenable to people in his circle.

Mr. Abbotoy, who graduated from Harvard Law School, left a job with a major infrastructure company in 2021 and came to work for Nate Fischer, a Dallas venture capitalist and prolific networker whose firm invests in conservative projects and opposes “DEI/ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture.” Mr. Fischer is the president of SACR’s Dallas chapter.

Andrew Beck, a brand consultant for conservative politicians and entities including SACR and Claremont, moved with his wife and their now six children, along with his parents and five of his siblings and their families, from Staten Island to suburbs north of Dallas in 2020. Almost 30 members of the family now live in the same area, just as they did in New York.

“Something is shifting that’s tectonic,” said Mr. Beck, who wrote a widely shared essay on “re-Christianizing America” for Claremont’s online magazine the American Mind. “It’s not so much about staking out some stronghold where you can live in a cocoon, it’s to be a part of a place you can truly consider to be home.”

Members must be male, belong to a “Trinitarian Christian” church, a broad category that includes Catholics and Protestants, but not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members must also describe themselves as “unhyphenated Americans,” a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urging the full assimilation of immigrants.

Image

An issue of the Claremont Review of Books from winter 2016-2017.Credit...Brad Torchia for The New York Times

The group’s interdenominational membership reflects the fact that in the Trump era, conservative Christianity is increasingly becoming a cultural and political identity, with theological differences falling to the wayside and Christianity serving as a kind of generic expression of rebellion against modernity. A significant minority of members are Catholic, including Mr. Kressin. The group also includes Presbyterians, Baptists and charismatics.

In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown in Idaho, the streets are clean and people leave their doors unlocked. His family lives in a house they can afford to own, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and hymnals and classic novels line shelves on the wall.

“Many in our generation are very, very much longing for rootedness,” he said. “And they were raised in an era where that was really not valued very much.”

On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning stroll out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and soaring views of the crystalline lake below. At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Starting over in Idaho, Mr. Kressin said later, was part of a project so long term that he does not expect to see its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only really mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even start building a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”

 

Sure sure... all totally aligned with Biblical Christianity. 

Dallas sounds like it is getting even more insufferable.

Who could have ever predicted this...

"ON NOVEMBER 4 1960, FOUR DAYS before the general election, vice presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson came to town. It was Republican Tag Day in Dallas, and the downtown lunch crowd was being canvassed by three hundred women in red, white, and blue. They were Dallas congressman Bruce Alger’s women. Many of them were in the junior league, and they looked disarmingly girlish in their patriotic outfits and their red coif hats with ribbons streaming down the back. They were passing out literature for the Nixon-Lodge campaign. It was chilly, and some of them wore their minks.

Johnson had spoken earlier that morning in Arlington, and as he entered Dallas a city policeman pulled over his Lincoln to warn him of a “little disturbance” awaiting him at the Baker Hotel, where the Johnsons traditionally stayed. Commerce Street in front of the hotel was filling up with tag girls, who had now transformed themselves into an eager mob, complete with placards that Alger had stored in the Baker overnight. The cop advised Senator Johnson to use the hotel’s Akard Street entrance to avoid the demonstration.

Several women spotted the Johnsons arriving and rushed over to surround their car. As Lady Bird was stepping out, one of the pickets impulsively snatched Mrs. Johnson’s gloves from her hands and threw them in the gutter. Lady Bird went white. It was still a time when incivility was rare in politics, when public figures felt safe in crowds. No one, perhaps not even the tag girls themselves, was prepared to understand the ferocity and the anger of these apparently happy and well-cared-for women.

Johnson rushed Lady Bird into the lobby of the Baker, which was packed with jeering tag girls. As he entered the elevator Johnson turned and said, “You ought to be glad you live in a country where you have the legal right to boo and hiss at a man who is running for the vice presidency of the United States.” There was an instant of silence, then a voice in the back of the crowd yelled, “Louder and funnier, Lyndon.”

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1988/november/was-dallas-a-city-of-hate/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, mdmost said:

Oh eat a fucking bag of dicks. Dallas of 1960 is not the Dallas of today. It's on the most consistently blue cities in Texas now. 

I think it's more about Dallas adjacent places than Dallas proper, which is still a lot more blue than most places in Texas.

Edited by SimonBolivar
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

I think it's more about Dallas adjacent places than Dallas proper, which is still a lot more blue than most places in Texas.

Oh sure. The article says all of that is in the northern suburbs. Everything is growing up that way since Frisco exploded. North of town is a MAGA stronghold. I would say that's directly an answer to how blue/minority Dallas has become. It's why I never have a desire to head up that way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, SimonBolivar said:

Why a New Conservative Brain Trust Is Resettling Across America - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

  Hide contents

July 4, 2024

The Claremont Institute has been located in Southern California since its founding in the late 1970s. From its perch in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, it has become a leading intellectual center of the pro-Trump right.

Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures have been leaving California to find ideologically friendlier climes. Ryan P. Williams, the think tank’s president, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.

His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a major role in 2016 to convince conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute’s vice president for operations and administration has moved there, too. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a small office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May, and said he expects to shrink Claremont’s California headquarters.

“A lot of us share a sense that Christendom is unraveling,” said Skyler Kressin, 38, who is friendly with the Claremont leaders and shares many of their concerns. He left Southern California to move to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2020. “We need to be engaged, we need to be building.”

Image

“There’s an interesting shift going on to Texas. I think there’s a renewed sense of seeking community and shared values and culture amongst right-wing folks.” said Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute.Credit...Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

As Mr. Trump barrels through his third presidential campaign, his supporters buoyed by last week’s debate, many of the young activists and thinkers who have risen under his influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it is a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants. They foresee an aesthetic landscape to match, with more classical architecture and a revived conservative art movement and men wearing traditional suits.

Their vision includes stronger local leadership and a withered national “administrative state,” prompting them to celebrate last week when the Supreme Court effectively ended the “Chevron deference,” which could lead to the weakening of thousands of federal rules on the environment, worker protection and beyond.

Fed up by what they see as an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture, many are moving to what they view as more welcoming states and regions, battling for American society from conservative “fortresses.”

Some see themselves as participants in and advocates for a “great sort,” a societal reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas. (And some, including Mr. Kressin, are simultaneously chasing the cheaper costs of living and safer neighborhoods that fuel many ordinary moves.)

Editors’ Picks

A British Literary Festival Fit for a Queen

Yes, Uncle Sam, We Met on Tinder

Paul Theroux on Necessary Solitude, Risks and the Joy of Writing

Image

Ryan Williams is presented the National Humanities Medal by President Donald Trump on behalf of The Claremont Institute during a ceremony at the White House in November 2019.Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

The year Mr. Kressin moved to Idaho, he and Mr. Williams were part of an informal conversation at Claremont about the need for new institutions in what some hope will be a rejuvenated American society. The idea was a “fraternal community,” as one leader put it, that prioritized in-person meetings. The result was the all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only social organization reserved for Christians. The group has about 10 lodges in various states of development so far, with membership ranging between seven and several dozen people.

The group’s goals, according to leaders, include identifying “local elites” across the country and cultivating “potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime” — by which they mean a second Trump presidency, but also a future they describe in sweeping and sometimes apocalyptic terms. Some warn of a coming societal breakdown that will require armed, right-minded citizens to restore order.

The group’s ties to Claremont give it access to influence in a future Trump administration: Mr. Anton served on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, and a Claremont board member, John Eastman, advised Mr. Trump’s 2020 election campaign. He faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia over schemes to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost that race.

Their rhetoric can sound expansive to the point of opacity. “As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children,” the group’s website proclaims. “The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.”

Their output, so far, looks more modest. Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.” The men socialize outside of meetings and pass each other business.

Image

Skyler Kressin and his family moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from Southern California in 2020.Credit...Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

The circle’s critics say they present a cleaned-up version of some of the darkest elements of the right, including a cultural homogeneity to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.

“It’s this idea of organizing discontent at the local level and building a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half-century would just keep moving the Republican Party further and further rightward, and mobilizing voters in discontented parts of the country, a lot of them men,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the crowd. “It’s a highbrow version of the militia movement.”

In its first two years, leaders said, SACR received significant funding from Charles Haywood, a former business owner in Indiana. Mr. Haywood seems to delight in being an online provocateur. He has called the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, an “electoral justice protest” and praised the racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints.”

Posting on the platform X last month, he wrote that foreign-born citizens should be deported for offenses including “working for Left causes.” Other leaders attribute the apocalyptic tone of the group’s founding documents to Mr. Haywood, who declined to comment.

Image

An interior scene in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Many of the young conservatives who have risen under Mr. Trump’s influence see themselves as part of a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Credit...Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

Members of the society are young, mostly white-collar (and mostly white), and often wealthy. Some have left elite institutions to start their own firms and invest in conservative-leaning ventures.

Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, a Dallas-based journal that serves as an informal in-house publication for the movement, is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.

Mr. Abbotoy is betting big on the revitalization of the rural South more broadly, as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. He sees the Tennessee project as a “playbook” for future developments in which neighbors share conservative social values and enjoy, he suggested, a kind of ambient Christian culture.

“I personally would happily pay high H.O.A. fees to be in a neighborhood where I have to drive by an architecturally significant church every day, and I can hear church bells,” he said.

The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationally, was a watershed moment for Mr. Abbotoy and other conservatives’ understanding of how quickly the ground could shift under their feet. It is a decision that signaled to them the onset of an era that the conservative Christian writer Aaron Renn — who has spoken at the fraternal society’s events — calls “negative world,” an influential concept that describes a culture in which “being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society.”

Image

Josh Abbotoy, director of the American Reformer, is counting on the revitalization of the rural South as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. Credit...Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

Mr. Abbotoy was raised in an evangelical culture that encouraged conservative Christians to go out into “the world” and influence secular institutions, including corporations and universities. But that approach, which defined the last several generations of mainstream evangelicalism, feels increasingly untenable to people in his circle.

Mr. Abbotoy, who graduated from Harvard Law School, left a job with a major infrastructure company in 2021 and came to work for Nate Fischer, a Dallas venture capitalist and prolific networker whose firm invests in conservative projects and opposes “DEI/ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture.” Mr. Fischer is the president of SACR’s Dallas chapter.

Andrew Beck, a brand consultant for conservative politicians and entities including SACR and Claremont, moved with his wife and their now six children, along with his parents and five of his siblings and their families, from Staten Island to suburbs north of Dallas in 2020. Almost 30 members of the family now live in the same area, just as they did in New York.

“Something is shifting that’s tectonic,” said Mr. Beck, who wrote a widely shared essay on “re-Christianizing America” for Claremont’s online magazine the American Mind. “It’s not so much about staking out some stronghold where you can live in a cocoon, it’s to be a part of a place you can truly consider to be home.”

Members must be male, belong to a “Trinitarian Christian” church, a broad category that includes Catholics and Protestants, but not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members must also describe themselves as “unhyphenated Americans,” a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urging the full assimilation of immigrants.

Image

An issue of the Claremont Review of Books from winter 2016-2017.Credit...Brad Torchia for The New York Times

The group’s interdenominational membership reflects the fact that in the Trump era, conservative Christianity is increasingly becoming a cultural and political identity, with theological differences falling to the wayside and Christianity serving as a kind of generic expression of rebellion against modernity. A significant minority of members are Catholic, including Mr. Kressin. The group also includes Presbyterians, Baptists and charismatics.

In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown in Idaho, the streets are clean and people leave their doors unlocked. His family lives in a house they can afford to own, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and hymnals and classic novels line shelves on the wall.

“Many in our generation are very, very much longing for rootedness,” he said. “And they were raised in an era where that was really not valued very much.”

On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning stroll out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and soaring views of the crystalline lake below. At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Starting over in Idaho, Mr. Kressin said later, was part of a project so long term that he does not expect to see its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only really mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even start building a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”

 

Claremont is a cool town, and I'm happy to see these fuckheads leave. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, C-Man said:

NC MAGA gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson says “some people need killin’ “

https://www.threads.net/@francisfordcopulate/post/C9DiC2XxYka/?xmt=AQGz_YvRSPW5CkFjnsvxxAkkVMVJuDhZQ5L5kWrMLe_e4Q

So much for that whole Ten Commandments thing.

And, if that's a Trump sign 10 feet from his pulpit, he needs to pay some motherfuckin taxes.

  • Hook 'Em 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites



×
×
  • Create New...