Greyparrot

By annexing Austria, the Nazis violated the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain. These treaties expressly forbade the unification of Austria and Germany. The Anschluss demonstrated Nazi disdain for the post-World War I European order. It was the first act of territorial expansion committed by Nazi Germany.

The other European powers did not punish the Nazis for violating international border treaties. Their acceptance of the Anschluss was a significant act of appeasement. It allowed Adolf Hitler to continue his expansionary policies unchecked.

You demand rights for invaders like Hitler did.

Oh I see, in weird MAGA MORON world the draft dodger who faked a disability and doesn’t have a clue how to shoot a rifle is the manly man.

And the guy who was a Sergeant Major in the Army and has hunted all his life is Tampon Tim.

But that’s because Trump supporters are morons 

Now he has written the book you hold in your hands, which explores many of the themes I’ve focused on in my own work. Yet he does so profoundly, with a readable style that makes accessible its real intellectual rigor.

Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism. The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Yet it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.

If you’ve read a lot of conservative books or think you have a good sense of the conservative movement, I suspect the pages that follow will be surprising—even jarring. Roberts understands economics and supports basic free market principles, but he doesn’t make an idol out of decades old theories. He argues persuasively that the modern financial corporation was almost entirely foreign to the founders of our nation. The closest eighteenth-century analogue to the modern Apple or Google is the British East India company, a monstrous hybrid of public and private power that would have made its subjects completely unable to access an American sense of liberty. The idea that our founders meant to make their citizens subjects to this kind of hybrid power is ahistorical and preposterous, yet too many modern “conservatives” make such an idol out of the market that they ignore this. A private company that can censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats deserves the scrutiny of the Right, not its support. Roberts not only gets this at an instinctive level; he can articulate a political vision to engage in that scrutiny effectively.

Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families. But we should also do something else: create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged. That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. That means protecting American industries—even if it leads to higher consumer prices in the short term. That means listening to our young people who are telling us they can’t afford to buy a home or start a family, not just criticizing them for a lack of virtue. Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.

My childhood was not, by any objective measure, easy. Neither was that of Kevin Roberts. Both of us were negatively impacted by family instability, and both of us were saved by the resilience of the thick network of family—grandparents, aunts, uncles—that is often the first and most effective component of our social safety net. Both of us saw how a factory leaving a town could destroy the economic stability that provided the foundation for those families. And both of us learned to love the country that gave both of us and our families second chances, despite some bumps along the way. In these pages, Kevin is trying to figure out how we preserve as much of what worked in his own life, while correcting what didn’t. To do that, we need more than a politics that simply removes the bad policies of the past. We need to rebuild. We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like.

Here’s an analogy I sometimes use to articulate what the previous generation of conservatives got right and wrong. Imagine a well-maintained garden in a patch of sunlight. It has some imperfections of course, and many weeds. The very thing that makes it attractive for the things we try to cultivate makes it attractive for the things we don’t. In an effort to eliminate the bad, a well-meaning gardener treats the garden with a chemical solution. This kills many of the weeds, but it also kills many of the good things. Undeterred, the gardener keeps adding the solution. Eventually, the soil is inhospitable.

In this analogy, modern liberalism is the gardener, the garden is our country, and the voices discouraging the gardener were conservatives. We were right, of course: in an effort to correct problems—some real, some imagined—we made a lot of mistakes as a country in the 1960s and 1970s.

But to bring the garden back to health, it is not enough to undo the mistakes of the past. The garden needs not just to stop adding a terrible solution, though it does need that. It needs to be recultivated. The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach. As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

Yesterday, as I'm sure you heard, Kamala Harris announced her running mate for president, and the media got their talking points. Like the Operation Mockingbird assets that they are, they mindlessly repeated them...... "Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. What does Walz bring to this? He's described as cuddly. I think she went for maybe a little more of a cuddly choice. Tell us more about the texture of the man; he seems to almost have a twinkle in his eye. Tim Walz is the opposite of weird. He sounds like a football coach, a hunter you could visit with at the hardware store. If you had "weird" and "anti-weird" in the dictionary, you'd have Tim Walz's picture there. I bet he knows how to make a good hot dish casserole. It's his authenticity, an authentic communicator. The word joy comes up a lot. He's joyful, he seems happy. Oh, he's happy, alright—happy to push the most leftist agenda that the Marxist Democrats could possibly imagine, including giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens.

A packed room at the St. Paul Armory erupted after the governor's signature made driver's licenses for all the law of the land. Driver's licenses for all, huh? Well, while they're at it, they'll probably just end up mailing them some ballots for the election too. I mean, what's next? Is he going to change the Minnesota state flag because it's too offensive to the non-white residents? Oh, wait, what's this? Governor Tim Walz introduces a new Minnesota state flag. Wait a minute, he says the old one is too uncomfortable. Here's the new flag: a white and blue flag with a star on it. That does look familiar. Maybe it's better for Ilhan Omar and her fellow Somali residents in the state because this new Minnesota state flag is very similar to the Somali flag. Something I'll never get tired of saying: Congresswoman Omar, wonderful. When I'm having a tough day or I'm out on mile five of my run and feeling down, I think, Ilhan Omar is a congresswoman, and it just brightens you up. So thank you. Anyone who likes Ilhan Omar obviously hates America, and that includes this creep and his wife. Here she is talking about the 2020 riots for George Floyd and how fantastic they smelled.

"I would say those first days, you know, when there were riots, I could smell the burning tires, and that was a very real thing. I kept the windows open for as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening."

She enjoyed smelling her city burning to the ground. Governor Walz is also very proud of legislation he signed into law last year mandating that all Minnesota public schools, grades 4 through 12, have tampons in the bathrooms—but not for the girls, for the boys. So you know what this means, right? Tim Walz has a new nickname: Tampon Tim. The meme makers were quick to get to work with this one and this one.

Since all the world is a stage and politics is one gigantic reality show, the Democrats staged this cringeworthy phone call between Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, informing him that he was the pick.

"Hi, this is Tim."

"It's Kamala Harris. Good morning, Governor."

"Good morning, Madam Vice President."

"Listen, I want you to do this with me. Let's do this together. Would you be my running mate and let's get this thing on the road?"

"I would be honored, Madam Vice President. The joy that you're bringing back to the country, the enthusiasm that's out there."

Look at him, just a normal Midwestern guy wearing a t-shirt and his hunter's cap, who’s putting tampons in boys' bathrooms. Then he joined Kamala on stage in Philadelphia, and he is quite talented at reading the teleprompter—you’ve got to give him that.

"When it was Republicans who were talking about freedom, it turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor's office."

He's talking about abortions, of course. "In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn't make the same choice for ourselves. There’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business."

That's interesting because in 2020, during the COVID pandemic, he created a hotline for people to call and snitch on their neighbors and businesses that were violating the stay-at-home orders. So the decision in November is quite clear: it's cackling Kamala and Tampon Tim or Donald Trump and JD Vance. This is a guy who's proposed shipping more manufacturing jobs to China, who wants to make the American people more reliant on garbage energy instead of good American energy, and who has proposed defunding the police just as Kamala Harris does. They make an interesting tag team because Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and then the few who got caught, Kamala Harris helped bail them out of jail. It says a lot about Kamala Harris that she doesn't care about the border, she doesn't care about crime, she doesn't care about American energy, and most importantly, she doesn't care about the Americans who have been made to suffer under those policies. We’re now just 90 days from the election, so buckle up because things are going to start accelerating and getting more intense and strange. There’s going to be more disinformation because there’s nothing the Democrats and Marxists won’t do to try to stop Donald Trump and JD Vance from winning.

That’s insane.

Did Trump take a 10 million dollar bribe from Egypt?

But the Biden crime family…

…what about Hunter’s laptop?

The CIA and the FBI suspect that Egypt sent 10 million dollars in cash to bribe Trump and the MAGA MORONS just shrug their shoulders.

What a bunch of true patriots