“Never
retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.”
Donald Trump has internalized the maxim Benjamin Jowett gave to
his students at Balliol who would soon be running the empire.
And in rejecting demands that he apologize for his remarks about
the La Raza judge presiding over the class-action suit against Trump
University, the Donald is instinctively correct
Assume, as we must, that Trump believes what he said.
Why, then, should he apologize for speaking the truth, as he
sees it?
To do so would be to submit to extortion, to recant, to confess
to a sin he does not believe he committed. It would be to capitulate to
pressure, to tell a lie to stop the beating, to grovel before the Inquisition
of Political Correctness.
Trump is cheered today because he defies the commands of
political correctness, and, to the astonishment of enemies and admirers alike,
he gets away with it.
To the establishment, Trump is thus a far greater menace than
Bernie Sanders, who simply wants to push his soak-the-rich party a little
further in the direction of Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
But Trump, with his defiant refusal to apologize for remarks
about “rapists” among illegal immigrants from Mexico, and banning Muslims, is
doing something far more significant.
He is hurling his “Non serviam!” in the face of the
establishment. He is declaring: “I reject your moral authority. You have no
right to sit in judgment of me. I will defy any moral sanction you impose, and
get away with it. And my people will stand by me.”
Trump’s rebellion is not only against the Republican elite but
against the establishment’s claim to define what is right and wrong, true and
false, acceptable and unacceptable, in this republic.
Contrast Trump with Paul Ryan, who has buckled pathetically.
The speaker says Trump’s remark about Judge Gonzalo Curiel being
hostile to him, probably because the judge is Mexican-American, is the
“textbook definition of a racist comment.”
But Ryan’s remark raises fewer questions about Trump’s beliefs
than it does about the depth of Ryan’s mind.
We have seen a former president of Mexico curse Trump. We have
heard Mexican-American journalists and politicians savage him. We have watched
Hispanic rioters burn the American flag and flaunt the Mexican flag outside
Trump rallies.
We are told Trump “provoked” these folks, to such a degree they
are not entirely to blame for their actions.
Yet the simple suggestion that a Mexican-American judge might
also be affected is “the textbook definition of a racist comment”?
The most depressing aspect of this episode is to witness the
Republican Party in full panic, trashing Trump to mollify the media who detest
them.
To see how far the party has come, consider:
After he had locked up his nomination, Barry Goldwater rose on
the floor of the Senate in June of 1964 and voted “No” on the Civil Rights Act.
The senator believed that the federal government was usurping the power of the
states. He could not countenance this, no matter how noble the cause.
Say what you will about him, Barry Goldwater would never be
found among this cut-and-run crowd that is deserting Trump to appease an angry
elite.
These Republicans seem to
believe that, if or when Trump goes down, this whole unfortunate affair will be
over, and they can go back to business as usual.
Sorry, but there is no going
back.
The nationalist
resistance to the invasion across our Southern border and the will to preserve
the unique character of America are surging, and they have their counterparts
all across Europe. People sense that the fate and future of the West are in the
balance.
While Trump defies
political correctness here, in Europe one can scarcely keep track of the
anti-EU and anti-immigrant nationalist and separatist parties sprouting up from
the Atlantic to the Urals.
Call it identity
politics, call it tribalism, call it ethnonationalism; it and Islamism are the
two most powerful forces on earth.
A decade ago, if one
spoke other than derisively of parties like the National Front in France, the
blacklisters would come around. Now, the establishments in the West are on the
defensive — when they are not openly on the run.
The day of the Bilderberger is
over.
Back to Jowett. When the British were serenely confident in the
superiority of their tribe, faith, culture, and civilization, they went out and
conquered and ruled and remade the world, and for the better.
When they embraced the guilt-besotted liberalism that James
Burnham called the “ideology of Western suicide,” it all came down.
The empire collapsed, the establishment burbled its endless
apologies for how wicked it had been, and the great colonial powers of Europe
threw open their borders to the peoples they had colonized, who are now coming
to occupy and remake the mother countries.
But suddenly, to the shock of an establishment reconciled to its
fate, populist resistance, call it Trumpism, seems everywhere to be rising.