“Vance was a NeverTrumper!”
Here’s why I don’t hold that against him, and in fact, it makes me like and support the modern Vance so much more:

I never hated Trump. I thought claims about him being a fascist or “literally Hitler” were exactly what they are now: hysterics, nonsense, etc. So, in that respect, I wasn’t quite as anti-Trump as Vance was. I was in college, and described myself as a conservative. I voted for Newt Gingrich in the 2012 primaries, and then for Romney in the general. In 2016, I supported Kasich, and then when he dropped out, I voted for Gary Johnson (extremely cringe, I know). I never was going to vote for Hillary (and was happy she lost on election night), but I wouldn’t vote for Trump.

I was a non-religious right-liberal who clutched my pearls at Trump’s crass behavior. I groaned about his déclassé behavior. “How vulgar, how crude.” I thought his supporters were racists, nativists, xenophobes, etc. I laughed about how only “the uneducated” supported him. He was a “rabble rouser” who appealed to our “worst instincts.”

I was only in college, and so I try to afford myself some grace, but I still cringe at my anti-Trump arrogance.

As I said, I guess I still “preferred” Trump in 2016, because I’d never vote for a democrat, but I was still displeased with our options. I knew Trump had a point about the media, but I didn’t buy into the entirety of his “fake news” rants—I thought it was whiny, he was complaining about fair, honest coverage. “Oh well,” I thought, “maybe he can just hold the fort for four years until we get a better candidate or something.”

But then he took office, and I saw over the course of 2017 the floodgates absolutely open—all pretense of neutrality gone from our legacy media institutions. People who I’d previously regarded as (mostly) objective, authoritative, sane voices melting down, peddling conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory to try and “get” Trump. Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the media class advancing every conspiracy theory possible to delegitimize Trump’s victory and presidency. “What the heck is going on here?” I thought as I scrolled the news as a college senior. “This isn’t what the media’s about, is it?” Of course, I was wrong, and Trump had been right: this was exactly what the media had been about for decades—a mouthpiece for the American uniparty. From “Russian pee tapes” to the “Russian collusion” Mueller BS, to the “Ukrainian collusion” hoax—it was lie after lie after lie, peddled not only by democrats and the media but also by what I thought were “respectable” republicans—sore losers of the uniparty.

During all of this, I was also undergoing my religious conversion from atheism to Catholicism as a result of my studies in ancient and medieval philosophy, theology, and political theory (the last of which was under Patrick Deneen). I did not convert for political reasons (you convert to a religion because it’s true, not because it’s “based”), but this religious conversion did occur at the same time as my political conversion. During this conversion, I became exposed to thinkers like Adrian Vermeule, Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari, among others. This is important, and I’ll come back to this.

I was warming up to the idea that Trump has been right all along, and I was warming up to the idea that much of the GOP establishment (which was increasingly resembling the DNC just with a tired Brooks Brothers aesthetic) didn’t have the priorities I thought it did: that is, supporting the president (of the same party!) and advancing the interests of the American people. Instead, I saw a bunch of sore losers honking and squawking and advancing conspiracy theories that never held much water, all in bed with each other and permanent bureaucrats. There was this perverse, unholy alliance of establishment GOP, the DNC, media, and the bureaucracy all fighting against the one man who had the nerve to push back on beltway dogma.

(Continued…) Yeah, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Why weren’t we allowed to say this on the American right? Yeah, the whole “WMD” wasn’t true—Bush was wrong (or lied?). Why weren’t we allowed to say that? Yeah, it’s bad to send all our jobs overseas and gut much of the American Midwest. Why weren’t we allowed to say that?

And why do they hate Trump so much for saying these things? Why are our “elites” acting like such children? Why is our nobility so, well, ignoble? Why are they so eager to send our jobs overseas, allowing entire cities to wither and decay, leading to drug use, suicide, and despair? Why are they so willing to send our young men to fight and die for foreign interests? Why was Trump basically the only guy calling this out? And why were they saying it was so dangerous for him to say these things? Why do the elected leaders in America seem to have such little regard for the American people?

It’s even worse as a member of the PMC—a member of a “learned profession,” such as a lawyer. The amount of disdain for middle Americans—normal, good people—that I witnessed during law school only crystallized my frustrations with people who were, ostensibly, the same class and clan as I was. But these overeducated snobs weren’t my people: they were members of that same ignoble nobility—minor lords, compared to the media magnates, but still, “elites” in the broader sense of the term. These people looked forward to their six figure careers and, at least largely, looked upon Americans who worked with their hands for a living with such disdain. Such arrogance.

That had been me, just a few years prior. I was that snob. I was aspiring to become a member of that hideous, ignoble nobility. I had thought it was a picture of success: a member of the “laptop class” who can work anywhere, be moved to anywhere, untethered by time or place. Fluid and without commitments to anyone beyond myself. It’s easy to look down on others—especially normal people who are very much tethered to time and place—when you’ve transcended those things.

But it wasn’t who I wanted to be. As I said earlier, it was during this time I was studying under, among others, Professor Patrick Deneen, reading the works of folks like Russell Kirk, Christopher Lasch, and others. Under Deneen’s tutelage, I really began to appreciate that nobility obliges—noblesse oblige. Gifts such as money and education should not be used to advance your own interests or those of your own class—you should use them to help people who don’t have such privileges. Rights confer duties. If Lasch’s works taught me anything, it’s that there’s a real “revolt of the elites” (from the plutocrats to the PMC) happening in this country. I had been onboard with that revolt for years, trying so very hard to distance myself from millions of people who’d been forgotten, written off, by the people in charge of this country, that ignoble nobility.

(Continued…)

Something I’ve come to notice about people who post maps like this online—it doesn’t have to be about architecture, it can be about anything—is that whenever they make small, very region-specific distinctions, it demonstrates they’re from that part of the country, but they have no problem turning around and painting other huge swaths of the country as all the same.

And it’s usually always people from the northeast who do this. They’ll make all these little distinctions for their neck of the woods (because they know them) but then act like no such distinctions for other parts of the country exist. The audacity it takes to group Montana, Nebraska, much of Oklahoma and Texas, Arizona, and portions of New Mexico like this is astounding.

If the right wants a prayer of success, it needs to invest in imagination and a positive vision—as well as just positivity in general.

With maybe 2 exceptions, every mainstream “conservative” figure is a chronically angry outrage merchant, an unlikable curmudgeon, a smug Scrooge Be friendly, be kind. Be more charitable than the mainstream right and all of the left (easy to do). Analyze media through a classical or Christian lens—don’t just whine about things being “woke.” Stop dunking on 29-year old single women on a holiday.

Presented without comment This is why they support workers rights and unionization of baristas and Amazon employees in large cities, but not welders or factory workers in rust belt towns. The “workers rights” stuff comes second to shared values

Massive thread (sorry, I’m a wordcel).

Much attention has been given to how men are single later into life, how they aren’t having sex.

The lowering rate at which men have sex is a problem, but it’s also an indicator of a broader social problem that others have discussed. The problem isn’t, in and of itself, that men are having sex at lower rates. The problem is *why* this is occurring. Hint: it’s not the death of the patriarchy. A coalescence of factors has led to all young people, but particularly men, being socially atomized and alienated.

A lot of time is spent discussing “the death of the American mall” on this website and in publicans but far more interesting to me is the transformation of the American mall. I still know of many malls—but they’re not the malls we remember from the 90s and early 2000s. Malls today, those that are thriving today, are markedly different. Many are half indoor, half outdoor. They don’t have a GameStop, or a Spencer’s Gifts, or an FYE, or American Eagle, or Hollister, or PacSun. Hell, they don’t have Macy’s or JCPenney.