From the edited transcript.
What we have to recognize when we're talking about the Right is that the ideology that hitherto was the leading expression of right-wing politics in the United States, the conservative movement, is effectively dead. Donald Trump killed it.
And it's not so much that Donald Trump killed it as he exposed the fact that it was an ideological zombie vampire, and the dates 1951 to 2016 that you see on the tombstone date from that first famous book of William F Buckley, the founder of the modern conservative movement, and its end with the presidential election of 2016. Because the legacy of conservativism is this: it never conserved anything! And that is the most damning thing that you can say about all the conservative organizations, all the conservative opinion leaders all the various Republican groups, all that kind of stuff, all of it was a failure. None of it conserved anything.
Conservatives couldn't even conserve the ladies room. This is an illustration of how badly how completely the conservative movement has failed, and if you talk to a conservative, they love to talk about the Constitution, and yet what they always ignore is the purpose of the Constitution. We have seen that the Constitution has completely and utterly failed in its purpose, a purpose that is stated very clearly in the Preamble. The Preamble states that the purpose of the Constitution is to defend the rights of American posterity, and what "posterity" means is the direct genetic descendants of the people who established the country in 1789.
It does not refer to immigrants, it does not refer to refugees, it does not refer to the descendants of those immigrants who came over much later. You know, this is something that I got in some very intense discussions and arguments with various conservatives(1) who are genuinely good people, genuinely smart people, but they are entirely unable to wrap their heads around the fact that their friends, their family members, people they like, people they approve of, are not and never will be American posterity, and that the Constitution was not written for those people. It wasn't. This is a basic fact, this is an established fact, and the amount of intellectual dishonesty and self-deception that one has to engage in in order to deny the very clear meaning of these words is rather remarkable.
So you know, now we see the same concept being expanded further and further, and what's funny about conservatives is that while at the one hand they push away and they deny the actual historical meaning of various concepts, they also try to deny the obvious consequences of their own positions. You know, if you're running around saying that because all men are created equal that 19th century immigrants therefore equal and their descendants therefore qualify as American posterity, then you cannot deny the position of Iranian president Ahmadinejad who says that America belongs to all the world and that the American government does not have any right or any ability to deny the movement of people into the United States of America. That is the absolutely correct logical conclusion to the conservative argument.
(1) In the public sense, this primarily refers to my debate on Posterity with Tom Kratman. If you take issue with any of my assertions here, I strongly recommend that you read it first before commenting on this issue.
What we have to recognize when we're talking about the Right is that the ideology that hitherto was the leading expression of right-wing politics in the United States, the conservative movement, is effectively dead. Donald Trump killed it.
And it's not so much that Donald Trump killed it as he exposed the fact that it was an ideological zombie vampire, and the dates 1951 to 2016 that you see on the tombstone date from that first famous book of William F Buckley, the founder of the modern conservative movement, and its end with the presidential election of 2016. Because the legacy of conservativism is this: it never conserved anything! And that is the most damning thing that you can say about all the conservative organizations, all the conservative opinion leaders all the various Republican groups, all that kind of stuff, all of it was a failure. None of it conserved anything.
Conservatives couldn't even conserve the ladies room. This is an illustration of how badly how completely the conservative movement has failed, and if you talk to a conservative, they love to talk about the Constitution, and yet what they always ignore is the purpose of the Constitution. We have seen that the Constitution has completely and utterly failed in its purpose, a purpose that is stated very clearly in the Preamble. The Preamble states that the purpose of the Constitution is to defend the rights of American posterity, and what "posterity" means is the direct genetic descendants of the people who established the country in 1789.
It does not refer to immigrants, it does not refer to refugees, it does not refer to the descendants of those immigrants who came over much later. You know, this is something that I got in some very intense discussions and arguments with various conservatives(1) who are genuinely good people, genuinely smart people, but they are entirely unable to wrap their heads around the fact that their friends, their family members, people they like, people they approve of, are not and never will be American posterity, and that the Constitution was not written for those people. It wasn't. This is a basic fact, this is an established fact, and the amount of intellectual dishonesty and self-deception that one has to engage in in order to deny the very clear meaning of these words is rather remarkable.
So you know, now we see the same concept being expanded further and further, and what's funny about conservatives is that while at the one hand they push away and they deny the actual historical meaning of various concepts, they also try to deny the obvious consequences of their own positions. You know, if you're running around saying that because all men are created equal that 19th century immigrants therefore equal and their descendants therefore qualify as American posterity, then you cannot deny the position of Iranian president Ahmadinejad who says that America belongs to all the world and that the American government does not have any right or any ability to deny the movement of people into the United States of America. That is the absolutely correct logical conclusion to the conservative argument.
(1) In the public sense, this primarily refers to my debate on Posterity with Tom Kratman. If you take issue with any of my assertions here, I strongly recommend that you read it first before commenting on this issue.
