The conservative movement in North America is going through a strange mental breakdown, though frankly it's a long time coming. It's manifested perfectly in Rebel Media's embrace of thinly veiled white supremacist rhetoric, the kind that uses "cuck" and "SJW" as an insult with a straight face. It is principally moved by whatever irks liberals the most, and nobody on the right is immune anymore. Certainly not Conrad Black.
For a trained and knowledgeable historian, Conrad Black doesn't seem aware of the history of which he's a part. His stubborn biases cast doubt over whether he is really paying attention at all. For example: he retweets Trump calling Chuck Schumer a hypocrite, quite unaware that having coffee with Putin at an event isn't the problem; it was the blatant, stupid lying about meeting with Russians from Trump's camp that's causing the stir.
Black's National Post columns go hand in hand with the tweets he likes and shares, each reflective of an ego trying to salvage his support of what's appearing to be a totally incompetent presidency. His commentary paints a unified picture of a stupid, blinkered fool who fell for Trump's big-league charisma and stuttered ad-libs. He pens verbose, embarrassing fellatios to try and convince anyone who still cares about Black that Trump support can be an intellectually-sounding pursuit. Black can support Trump and then write, without a hint of irony, a column entitled, "From TV drama to the news media, the prime-time programming of Western decline." Square the following passage with Trump, the man:
From time to time I have gone all the way through the available channels, about a thousand of them, and apart from old movies, some of these elaborate special series like Homeland and Breaking Bad, a few documentaries, and some music on straight sound channels, it is the most unutterable rubbish imaginable, with an average of program quality inferior to what we had with an antenna on the roof and six channels at the time the three of us had first met.This process of dumbing down has afflicted education very severely also. We are all scandalized at how ignorant of almost everything most secondary school graduates and many holders of undergraduate degrees are.
Despite the money, column space, and thesaurus-like vocabulary, Conrad Black can't hide what he's become. He's not an in-touch-yet-ornery commentator, but a negationist historian who shrouds his cheerleading for the elite with a disregard for the elite. Lipstick on a pig, etc.
Black has devoted many columns to the defense of Donald Trump. Donald Trump, the host of The Apprentice, a man who accuses his predecessor of tapping his office and then gloats about the failure of Arnold Schwarzenegger. A man who is either using "bigly" or "big-league" for every other adjective. Black's dressing down of our culture is woefully incomplete without a little introspection that would take into account his recent defense of the ultimate celebrity politician, but I doubt introspection is a strong suit for Black.
It doesn't take a rigorous diagnosis to see why Black believes what he does: he loves Donald Trump, a man who made Stephen Baldwin and Piers Morgan sell street hot dogs on prime-time television, because Trump is a wealthy person getting away with running roughshod over politics. Black’s columns are a sneering rundown of events surrounding Trump, peppered with laughable assertions that seem to run counter to what's happening inside the White House. Black claims to be disgusted by the Washington elite, and this disgust leads him to write things like “[c]ontrary to the wails of apprehension from the universal alarmist consensus, the transition process has been handled very smoothly and has produced widely admired candidates to fill the great offices of the United States government.” These capital-T Truths are hard to scrape out because they're surrounded by Black’s insufferable prose, but they’re there, with no evidence to back them up other than Black’s total trust in his fellow elite.
Black brushes asides criticism of Trump with sentences like “all the bunk and hype about Trump being a sexist and racist and possibly a madman.” Lines like this, so dismissive of what Trump actually says, should come with annotation: “Fortunately, Trump is not at all xenophobic (“He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings – rulings that people can’t even believe.”), fascistic (“In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate."), racist (“Who the f*** knows? I mean, really, who knows how much the Japs will pay for Manhattan property these days?”) or sexist ("You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her... wherever.")." It doesn't matter that Trump campaigned for the Central Park Five's execution long after they were proven not guilty - Black's the kind of man who needs a person to put on a Klan outfit and use the n-word with a hard r before even thinking about running sentences through a racial filter. I'd accuse him of sticking his fingers in his ears and humming, but even that would be more intellectually honest than his dismissiveness.
None of it matters, and nothing Trump will do will matter. To Black, the whole circus is worth it because Trump “has capitalized brilliantly, before and since the election, on the fact that about two-thirds of Americans don’t trust the media, and he has used social media and his powerful supporters in the talk-radio industry to counter, confront and overwhelm the sniggering, gibbering claque of the leftist Washington-New York-Los Angeles media and entertainment communities." Black's gone from conservative intellectual to a right-wing ideological anarchist: any position is great as long as it bugs those smug liberals. Who cares if he lied, consistently, about even the smallest things, to get to the presidency? The media needs to be taken down a peg, presumably because they didn't sympathize when Black was put in jail.
Donald Trump is the result of the thing Black decries, and Black is ignorant about his own decline, too. Trump's victory was paved with the dumbing down of Western culture, and he used the very medium Conrad Black so loathes. Donald Trump used hyperkinetic reality TV and trashy tabloids to control the narrative about himself. Black's been played, and yet he blames the "ignorant" secondary school graduates. He can't even take personal responsibility. How conservative.
Because of who Donald is, a moneyed elite, Black can't help but root for him.He sees what he wants to - a man with no regard for the Washington elite, who tapped into "forgotten" America's anger - and ignores everything else - literally everything else about Trump. He's that person who defends watching every iteration of the Real Housewives - "it's a great look at personal relationships and I love the drama!" - except his guilty pleasure has actual, horrific ramifications.
But Black is also a historian, and as such knows the power of being able to write history. He's stumbled upon a golden opportunity to write negationist history as it unfolds, before the leftists can get their hands on it. This scramble to control the narrative reflects Trump, too, and the lies and propaganda he and his underlings try to sell. It reflects a lot of insecure elites, who know their facade is quickly eroding and need to salvage what they can. In a way, it's sort of sad (not Sad!). Black, a man with a reputation as a clear-eyed historian, can write passages like this, never acknowledging that Trump lost the popular vote:
Because of who Donald is, a moneyed elite, Black can't help but root for him.He sees what he wants to - a man with no regard for the Washington elite, who tapped into "forgotten" America's anger - and ignores everything else - literally everything else about Trump. He's that person who defends watching every iteration of the Real Housewives - "it's a great look at personal relationships and I love the drama!" - except his guilty pleasure has actual, horrific ramifications.
But Black is also a historian, and as such knows the power of being able to write history. He's stumbled upon a golden opportunity to write negationist history as it unfolds, before the leftists can get their hands on it. This scramble to control the narrative reflects Trump, too, and the lies and propaganda he and his underlings try to sell. It reflects a lot of insecure elites, who know their facade is quickly eroding and need to salvage what they can. In a way, it's sort of sad (not Sad!). Black, a man with a reputation as a clear-eyed historian, can write passages like this, never acknowledging that Trump lost the popular vote:
Donald Trump is right to call his narrow and numerically minority victory a “landslide.” He ran against all the Republicans and all the Democrats, the hackneyed Bush-McCain-Romney also-rans, the Cruz loopy-right, the Clinton-Obama incumbency, and the Sanders left, almost all the Washington media and almost all the polls, and the entire pay-to-play casino of lobbyists in the great Washington sleaze factory.”
This sort of reimagining of the narrative is exactly what conservatives claim "negationist" historians like Howard Zinn do. But it doesn't matter. Moneyed elite won Washington on November 8, 2016. To Black, it's about time they, and by extension he, got their due.
