John Podhoretz – The Abortion Lobby’s Dream Opponent

Can you imagine trying to fight a war with Loyal Oppositionist and Vichy Republican John Podhoretz on your side? Every time you poked your head above the trenches, you’d have to check the area behind your own lines, look left, look right, and then only after assuring yourself that Podhoretz isn’t around, could you even think about looking out into no-man’s land for men wearing the uniform of the enemy. On the intellectual field of battle, he serves the same role that Soviet Political Officers served the Red Army in World War II. He may fire a few desultory shots at the common foe, but he saves his energy and focus for shooting his allies in the back if they fight in the wrong way or with insufficient fervor for the Party itself.

Johnny P., protecting Ze Party from the real enemy – those who threaten his quisling sinecure.

One of his recent tirades against those whose dedication to liberty is more important than their dedication to his fellow Party apparatchiks was a lament that evangelicals hadn’t done enough to stop the alt-right.  Specifically, a tweet linking to this a Radix Journal essay, which calls for members of the alt-right to abandon their pro-life stance.  This is one of those cases where a simple lie requires more thought and analysis than Twitter permits in its 140 characters.  It won’t take much thought, this being one of Podhoretz’s more profoundly stupid attacks on the alt-right, and that’s clearing a pretty high bar.

The first and most obvious objection to Podhoretz’s characterization of the alt-right as a movement filled with pro-abortion crusaders is that his evidence consists of an essay attempting to convince the alt-right to abandon its staunch pro-life stance.  Let me parse that down a bit more for people whose intellectual capacity is stunted by frequent and repeated exposure to Podhoretz’s enervating blather: if the people you’re writing for need to be convinced to change to be in favor of abortion…that means they are NOT pro-abortion.

That should do it.  No more needs to be said.

For those of you with enough intellect to see through Podhoretz’s ham fisted attempts to purge the right of any effective resistance to his masters on the left, we should look a little deeper.  To do so, we’ll need to understand what the alt-right really is.

But first, and to stay on the “Podhoretz is an idiot” point, let’s look at what it is not.

The alt-right is not a top-down organization whereby a few authority figures issue decrees that we foot soldiers parrot back en masse.  It’s not an ancient and creaking hidebound institution whose tenets have been hashed out, written in stone, and then constantly betrayed by the authority figures like those mentioned in the previous sentence.  It’s not Republicans.  Those are the sorts of movements that Podhoretz has grown up and grown old with, and those are the only sorts of movements that Podhoretz understands.

When confronted with a movement like the alt-right, he can only analyze that movement through the keyhole camera of his previous experience, and it is by way of this lumbering and inaccurate understanding of the modern political landscape that Podhoretz comes to his false understanding of the alt-right.

Instead, the alt-right is a loose coalition of small and fractious groups and lone individuals united under a common banner.  In addition to the unifying principles of liberty, non-interventionist foreign policy, and nationalism, each group brings its own political bugaboos to the table.  It may be white nationalism, it may be pro-abortionism, it may be advocates for full blown Christian theocracy in America.  Whatever.

It’s useful for the globalist media, and their lapdogs like Podhoretz, to whitewash the alt-right ideology by selecting choice slices of the movement to elevate to the status of ‘leadership’, but as with any other story on the front page of the New York Times, that is a carefully crafted narrative built on choice facts designed to influence readers to support the agenda of globalists like Podhoretz.
This is not a new thing for guys like Podhoretz.  They have long policed their right flank, purging it of anyone not sufficiently willing to cave-in and surrender to the inevitable victory of the left.  Like sandbaggers and doomsayers through history, Podhoretz advocates a noble and doomed opposition that contents itself with dealing temporary reverses to the enemy, and a bit of minor sabotage here and there, but never a full-on resistance or fight.  Why, if the conservatives lose the fight, he advocates, then liberals will get what they want, so it’s best to simply not fight and give them want they want up front.  That’ll teach them.

If you needed a third reason to ignore Podhoretz’s inane scribbling, and as further evidence for the preceding thought, bear in mind the long and unbroken string of surrenders, losses, and outright failure of the establishment conservatives on the issue of abortion.  When it comes to the actual  results of that fight, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between supporting a guaranteed loser like Podhoretz and supporting greasy unequivocal supporters of Planned Parenthood like Jezebel.com, PBS, or NPR.  Consider the establishment right’s position of constant loss but dang we tried and didn’t win the wrong way, which is its central position.  While the alt-right may have outliers like Radix desperately churning the water for a shift towards pro-abortion positions, they are a distinct minority. 

Physiognomy is real.

If you love the idea of nobly and ineffectively losing when it comes to halting the murder of the unborn, by all means, continue to support Podhoretz.  But given Team Podhoretz’s complete and utter failure on the issue over the last four decades, those of us who want to win that fight must be willing to try something new.  That something new is the alt-right, and the more of us who are willing to stand up and push the alt-right towards the defense of  life and liberty for Americans, the born and the unborn, the more likely we will be to defeat those who fight to implement pro-abortion policies.  You know, like Planned Parenthood, Radix, and John Podhoretz.  Three murderous monsters in a pod.