Those Leaked Group Chats

Introduction

So a situation was created a short while ago when somebody leaked texts from a group chat of Young Republican up-and-comers from various states around the country, and that chat contained various levels of rancidity, if you know what I mean. The leak stratagem worked initially, and various apologies were offered by people close to the Young Republicans, up to and including the Young Republican National Federation’s board. They called the chat “vile and inexcusable,” and deactivated the Kansas chapter. There did not seem to be any relationship between the cravenness of the apologies and the willingness of those making hay out of the situation to accept the apologies.

And then, in conformity to Newton’s third law of motion, I saw a bunch of people responding to all of this by tweeting “I don’t care about a leaked group chat” alongside various pictures—Erika Kirk, or Charlie Kirk, or that poor Ukrainian girl on the train. All of this was as much as to say that the left should spare us the outrage. Once they stop shooting people and burning down cities, after twenty years they might eventually reacquire enough moral capital to say something like tut tut. Until then, we don’t want to hear nothing.

The vice-president then weighed in—and this was interesting, because he didn’t really have to—and he said that young kids do edgy stuff, as in, dumb stuff, and they shouldn’t do that really, but that we shouldn’t let this episode ruin their lives. Let the healing begin!

I joined the conversation by saying this:

And then, as the kids say, I got ratioed in the comments—ratioed with enthusiasm and verve, and with a good deal more heat than light. But as light is not exactly their jam, we should overlook that part.

Not having learned my lesson, I followed up with this baby:

The missing word at the end there is thread.

A very similar thing then happened. If the ratio-quotient is to be believed, it turns out that I am a very bad person. But then, you already knew that.

Look! Halley’s Comet!

So a wife catches her husband cheating on her with a neighbor lady. When confronted, he says, “I don’t care about a little cheating so long as there are still pride parades in San Francisco!” Now we can all quite agree that the pride parades are, on the scale of outrages, a much greater abomination than one suburban dalliance. And they really are far worse. Nevertheless, as the man’s wife so trenchantly observes, the suburban dalliance is not a little thing. One still notices it.

Murdering people on campus is far worse than saying faggot in a group chat. Yes. Murdering girls on trains is far worse than calling blacks monkeys. That is also true. Nevertheless . . . wait, wait. Here’s another stumper. Burning down Minneapolis is way worse than one of your employees helping himself to twenty dollars out of the tip jar. But still . . . is it wrong to fire that employee? Would he have the right to turn around in the doorway, right after you had removed his indentures, and fire back at you with steely gaze and a “Remember Minneapolis!”

Well, no. He should have remembered Minneapolis before swiping the twenty bucks.

The Right Way and the Wrong Way

The wrong way to talk about this is to say, “I don’t care about the leaked group chat” right next to a picture of some leftist outrage. By wrong, I mean cloth-headed. You’re not helping.

The right way is to say “I don’t want to hear about the leaked group chat from the people who defend this.” And then post your picture of Charlie Kirk. And the tweet right after that (2/2) should be, “But I really do want to hear about the leaked group chat from people like this.” Then you would have a picture of Paul Washer, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, or R.L. Dabney.

It is fine to want to save the country. It is good and right to labor in the cause of saving the West. But do not forget or neglect the saving of your own soul.

What About the Leaker?

Some of those responding to me asked what I thought should happen to the leaker. What about him?

My reply to this is that the leaker should also be kept out of all strategy meetings UNLESS . . . unless he could show that he attempted to get the appropriate authorities in-house to do something. If he did not do that, and leaked straight to the press, then he is a standing security risk, and is just as bad as the other punks. But if he notified the people who could have shut down the nonsense internally, and then they did nothing, then he had the right to release the chat—and of course, without any doctoring. But if that was the scenario, then to be a true whistleblower, he should also have released his communications with his superiors, in which he let them know about the problem, and by this means documenting their failure to act. That apparently did not happen. If it had happened, this whole thing would be a much bigger controversy.

So, yeah, the leaker should be out of all the strategy meetings too. Let’s not ruin his life either, but young people do need to learn the basics. Speaking of the basics, let us move on to one of the more fundamental of the basics.

What’s So Hard to Understand About “Don’t Be a Moron”?

Now I understand that once you have tasted greatness, it is hard to remember where you are. It is hard to keep your head. I mean, suppose you have once interned in Washington D.C., and during that time, you have held the door for a sitting U.S. senator, not once but twice, and there was that other time when you got a cup of coffee for that cabinet minister who was in your building for an interview. The drafts that blow down the corridors of power are pretty heady, and would naturally make any twenty-two-year-old believe that he was ten feet tall and bullet proof. Why, naturally.

However . . . There is nothing worse than politics without accountability. And by this, I do not mean accountability to the unaccountable left. I mean accountability to God and His Word. I mean a conservative activism that understands that the foundation of our ethical system cannot be “owning the libs.” The word “based” is not a universal disinfectant.

And if we want grown-ups in positions of authority who understand biblical accountability, then the young people who are growing up into those positions must learn that accountability. There will be those who dismiss this very Christian conviction as somehow living under the progressive gaze. These are the people who would get a third of the way through the Sermon on the Mount, only to walk away muttering, “What a lame message! Stupid Jew.”

There were almost 300 FBI operatives in the J6 crowd. There for crowd control, they did precious little crowd controlling. Right? What did they actually want the crowd to do? They wanted the crowd to keep on being morons. They were there to help them be morons. And those patriotic grandmas who were part of the incursion were being played for chumps. Their motives were quite sincere, but sincerity is not necessary a moron-retardant. Sometimes it is even an accelerant.

There was a great cultural battle at the Capitol that day, and the progressives won that battle, and they won it walking away. The leftists looked at the hapless patriots milling around there, pulled their shirts over their heads and rolled down their socks. The Left dined out on that episode for years.

So if you are carrying on behind the scenes in your very own group chat, if your idea of advancing the cause of true conservatism is by throwing around ethnic epithets, just imagine your private messages emblazoned on the front page of the New York Times. And then ask yourself why the New York Times would consider that to be newsworthy. The answer is that you and your version of conservatism just made their day. And ruined the day of those leaders who were trying to do something worthwhile. The reason they consider it newsworthy is that it delights them to find based ninnyhammers on the right who fit their profile. They love it when they discover Neanderthals right out of central casting.

So try to avoid being . . . brassy, based, boneheaded.

And Always Remember the Real Threat

When it comes to preserving our civic liberties, the Left is the only true threat, the only real threat. There is no chance of us losing anything to goose-stepping Nazis, to dank-right misogynists, or to groypers. None of that is going to happen. Look at the tawdriest and most disheveled specimens on the right, and the one thing you do not see is the future. I don’t see any scenario where that approach rolls into town and carries all before it. They are not going to recover the West. They couldn’t recover a taco stand.

So why have I spent so much energy on them? Why have I written so much about them?

Because the Left is the true threat, and that is the stone cold truth. These guys on the right can call it based, but what they are doing is making the slanders of the Left seem plausible, and when you make their lies seem plausible, you are folded right into their operations.

Imagine an FBI guy infiltrating your group. Run a thought experiment. Is he going to be the mild one? The steady-not-so-fast guy? The quiet one who cautions everyone not to be hot-headed? No, he would the one on the payroll urging everyone to consider the viability of kidnapping Elon Musk. And then . . . and then, some of the group start striving to outdo him without being on the fed payroll at all. They do that work for free.

Ask yourself this. If you actually were on the fed payroll, trying to cause trouble and make everyone look bad, would you be doing basically the same things you are doing now? If the answer is yes, then stop it.

The reason I oppose the dank right is because I am always fighting the left.