Conservatives From The United States

"I’ve been a conservative my entire life. ... So you’d think that the , or CPAC, would be a natural fit. It once was. But on Saturday, after speaking to this year’s gathering, I had to be escorted from the premises by several guards who seemed genuinely concerned for my safety. What happened to me at CPAC is the perfect illustration of the collective experience of a whole swath of conservatives since Donald Trump became the . We built and organized this party — but now we’re made to feel like interlopers."

"I know how encouraged I feel whenever someone simply states the truth."

"Like the Republican Party, CPAC has become heavily Trumpified. ... So it has come to this: a conservative group whose worst fault in years past may have been excessive flat tax enthusiasm now opens its doors to the nationalists of Europe."

"But this time, and particularly in front of this crowd, it felt far more urgent to point out the hypocrisy of our side. How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man (Roy Moore) credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate? I watched my fellow panelists’ eyes widen. And then the booing began. I’d been dreading it for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability. I spoke to a hostile audience for the sake of every person who has watched this spectacle of mendacity in disbelief and misery for the past two years. Just hearing the words you know are true can serve as ballast, steadying your mind when so much seems unreal."

"Others must do as their own consciences require, but I stand with @monacharenEPPC. She stands for true conservative, American, and Judaeo-Christian values."

"I wish we conservatives could clone Mona Charen so that we could keep one for ourselves and give the other to the liberal movement which is equally badly in need of a truth-teller to call out the hypocrites and snollygosters."

"Trump is arguing that through a stronger and more assertive negotiating posture, using all the tools of persuasion theoretically at our disposal, the U.S. should be able to capture more of the gains from free trade. It is quite possible that the free trade regime that results from this approach will be more efficient, more equitable, and more legitimate than what we currently have. Free trade enthusiasts who support President Trump are simply saying that his new approach deserves a chance. No one has abandoned free trade, and if the veterans of NeverTrump would put aside their wounded pride, they might see that there is less distance between them and the administration than they may care to admit."

"Ideologically, Pelosi is a far-left talking points machine. Tactically, she knows nothing else other than how to attack. Her worldview admits of no compromise and there seems to be no space in her imagination for new ideas. She has refashioned her dwindling caucus in her image, as the moderate, red-state Democrats have been steadily decimated, leaving nothing but the bicoastal liberals representing the inner city poor and the elite suburban gentry. She feels no pressure to change or to improve."

"In order for me to give respect to what they're saying, I have to respect them," Lahren said. "And when they're on the internet trolling me, saying nasty, disgusting, vile things - which by the way is really a true testament to the unloving and intolerant left - I laugh it off"

"I grew up watching this mainstream media and seeing a lot of the BS perpetuated by the mainstream media ... and I wanted to combat that. So I started off at an early age, and we're just getting started."

"Donald Trump is right. We are at war and our homeland security and immigration policies are a complete mess. The Syrian refugee issue and the Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have kick-started a much needed debate and have brought some alarming information to the American people. It starts with basic government incompetence and the suffocating PC culture that Republican and Democrat establishment leaders are slaves to along with the liberal media."

"Citizens United has a policy for ISIS and it’s quite simple: Acknowledge it; confront it; and destroy it. By any means necessary, wherever they are in the world. For the sake of future generations, we need to handle this problem without delay before it gets any larger, because right now it’s a cancer that is growing."

"I say to those liberals hell-bent on restricting speech: rather than trying to silence voices and viewpoints you disagree with, join the debate."

"Dana is a fearless conservative who is not afraid to confront the liberal media bias head on,” the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate said in the same statement. “She is a passionate fighter for liberty and an important voice for conservatives. I am thrilled to have Dana on our team and work together to win the White House in 2016."

"I think that in a campaign there are certain things that you are going to hear and certain behaviors that you will see that will be tempered by the -- after the election -- tempered by simply just going into the White House. However, that being said, I don’t think that the, for the lack of a better way to put it, the zero relationship with the mainstream media is going to be one of those things. Look, this media has not only impugned the character of half of the country, they’ve done this since 2008, 2009, they’ve definitely did this in 2010. Particularly when they were going to push the unaffordable health care act and get that passed. And they were trying to say anyone who disagreed with it, well you may have to check your soul and have a talk with Jesus, cause something’s seriously wrong with you. It’s probably because the president’s black. That’s one of the things that we all heard over and over again. They questioned everybody’s character. And so I am actually happy, because I have long been a huge critic of the media. And I hate that what I do is considered part of it. Because I don’t consider myself part of them. However, I am very glad to see -- I said this actually on television not too long ago -- I am happy, just frankly, to see them curb-stomped. I mean, let’s be real about it, Grant. These people are just the worst thing that could ever possibly happen just to the American political system right now with the way that they cover so many things. For instance, when -- nobody gets a fair shake on policy, no one gets a fair shake where it concerns immigration. They conflate illegal and legal immigration. They conflate a number of things, particularly the coverage on gun control. I have so many things that I hate about mainstream media, there is no way we’re going to fit it in the allotted time today. They are the rat bastards of the earth. They are the boil on the backside of American politics. I have no other nice way to put it."

"We’ve had it with your narratives, your propaganda, your fake news. We’ve had it with your constant protection of your Democrat overlords, your refusal to acknowledge any truth that upsets the fragile construct that you believe is real life. And we’ve had it with your tone-deaf assertion that you are in any way truth or fact-based journalism. Consider this the shot across your proverbial bow. In short? We’re coming for you."

"They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America, and I’m freedom’s safest place."

"As one of the original founders of the modern-day Tea Party movement, I watched grassroots conservatives support Ted Cruz’s David and Goliath success against Dewhurst and the Republican establishment. Cruz has fought to repeal Obamacare, shrink the size of government; he has defended our gun rights, our right to privacy, our sovereignty and borders. I personally feel that Ted Cruz is the best choice to reverse America’s road to ruin and am proud to support him in the 2016 Republican primary."

"I think it’s easier to mourn over a lion that’s been killed than over a baby that’s been killed, I think that’s how far we are from our humanity,"

"[A] lot of conservatives have been calling for Lahrens head since her View appearance, insisting it's an embarrassment and an outrage that such a pro-choice harpy could be a public face of Republicanism. As with Milo Yiannopoulos—who said all sorts of horrible things about women, Muslims, transgender people, etc., but was only ousted from polite conservatism after joking about pedophilic priests—it's telling (if predictable) that tepidly pro-choice views are the dealbreaker for the right with Lahren, while things like calling Black Lives Matter activists "the new KKK," referring to the Middle East as a "sandbox" that needs to be bombed, and defending the shooting of unarmed black men by cops never really rustled Republican jimmies."

"I'm not a big fan of right-wing infotainment personality Tomi Lahren. I think she's a hack. On the other hand, she ought to be defended from accusations of hypocrisy in the wake of Lahrens public confession that she's still on her parents' healthcare plan. … Nor is it at all clear that Lahren would be without insurance in the absence of Obamacare. Indeed, in the absence of Obamacare, premiums for high-deductible insurance for someone like Lahren would likely have been much lower, and Lahren may have easily been able to afford it. In fact, it may be that Lahren would have rather been able to purchase a high-deductible plan rather than be on her parent's plan. Maybe she hates having to go through her parents for coverage. However, since Obamacare has massively increased premium costs for young people not on group plans, getting insurance through her parents may now be Lahrens best option. ¶ Thus, if we consider the unseen side effects of Obamacare regulations in this case, it may be that Lahren is actually a victim of Obamacare."

"I'm for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well."

"The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests."

"I still think the worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them."

"More goods and fewer people is the slogan I should like to see carried at the head of humanity's march into the future."

"It was natural that idealistic people who had ceased to believe in heaven should think up some bright hope for humanity on earth. That, I think, more than any objection to "capitalism", accounts for the spread of the socialist dream, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries."

"Libertarians used to tell us that ‘the love of freedom is the strongest of political motives,’ but recent events have taught us the extravagance of this opinion. The ‘herd-instinct’ and the yearning for paternal authority are often as strong. Indeed the tendency of men to gang up under a leader and submit to his will is of all political traits the best attested by history. It has been so shockingly exemplified in modem times that only a somnambulist could ignore it in trying to build, or defend, a free society. His first concern should be to make sure that no one gang or group-neither the proletariat, nor the capitalists, nor the landowners, no the bankers, nor the army, nor the church, nor the government itself-shall have exclusive power."

"A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to be a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectical philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with the qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up."

"An armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. 'Totalitarian state' is merely the modern name for tyranny."

"Stalinism, as we have seen, contains all of the evils of Nazism and Fascism, most of them in extremer form."

"Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple, ... better described as superfascist."

"I omit from consideration here the fact that people who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral, but in favor of the status quo."

"Marxists profess to reject religion in favor of science, but they cherish a belief that the external universe is evolving with reliable, if not divine, necessity in exactly the direction in which they want to go."

"Hegelism is like a mental disease—you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it."

"What happened here is the most significant, as it is the most devastating human thing that has happened in America since Sherman marched to the sea."

"A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything."

"Max Eastman, one of the foremost writers and teachers of the country, went to Fargo, North Dakota, to deliver a lecture on "Democracy." A great crowd evidently interested in the thing we were fighting to make the world safe for, gathered in the court to listen to what he had to say. A drunken mob, led by a judge and a "very respectable" attorney, invaded the "temple of justice" and would have murdered Max Eastman but for the sublime heroism and unflinching courage of a woman. An attempted murder of Max Eastman was flaunted as an exhibition of the "spirit of Americanism.""

"Mr. Eastman, like all good doctrinaire Marxians, was somewhat taken aback at seeing how quickly, easily, and apparently naturally the Marxian system in Russia slid off into an autocratic regime of outrageous tyranny."

"The Masses was the only male-edited socialist journal that consistently affirmed the importance of equality as essential for the full development of the lives of both men and women. In a satiric piece, Floyd Dell took up the arguments of the antifeminists. "I thought, you see, that [women] were persons like myself. Well, they aren't. I know better now." Eastman took the same line. Under an egalitarian political and social system, girls "will grow up to be interested and living individuals, and satisfy their ambitions only with the highest prizes of adventure and achievement that life offers. And the benefit of that will fall upon us all-but chiefly upon the children of these women when they are mothers. ... Only a developed and fully constituted individual is fit to be the mother of a child. Only one who has herself made the most of the present, is fit to hold in her arms the hope of the future.""

"Two editors of the Masses, Crystal Eastman's brother Max and Floyd Dell, used that journal for vigorous advocacy of feminist issues. In it Eastman attacked American socialist men for their indifference to women's rights. "The members of the Socialist Party in America, on the whole, have been like every other group of sexually selfish men. None of them got up and actively went into the suffrage propaganda until after they saw that suffrage was coming and they would soon have to be asking for women's votes." He demanded of the socialists: "Sex Equality is a question by itself. Answer it.""

"war means recruiting propaganda, conscription, military discipline, the death penalty, the whole damnable business of organized dying and killing. Max Eastman said in Madison Square Garden two years ago, "When our own war comes you'll know it, because it won't be necessary to conscript the workers to fight in it." I thought he spoke a profound truth. I do not think so now. When we heard about those democratic regiments formed in Russia after the first revolution, I thought, "This is a real workers' army." Now I know there can be no such thing as a democratic army. People don't want to die, and except for a few glorious fanatics they are not going to vote themselves into the front line trenches."

"behind them (The Masses staff) still throbbed the tradition of nineteenth-century American radicalism, the un-ambiguous nay-saying of Thoreau and the Abolitionists. This tradition implied that the individual person was still able to square off against the authority of the state; it signified a stance-one could not quite speak of it as a politics-of individual defiance and rectitude, little concerned because little involved with the complexities of society. The radicalism of nineteenth-century New England had been a radicalism of individual declaration far more than of collective action; and while Max Eastman and his friends were indeed connected with a movement, the Socialist party of Debs, in essential spirit they were intellectual freebooters, more concerned with speaking out than speaking to. They swore by Marx, but behind them could still be heard the voices of Thoreau and Wendell Phillips-and it was a good thing."

"Eastman was a brilliant polemicist, but he too could not long preserve the innocence of The Masses-no one could have. He found that he had to start asking questions of himself, and once you begin doing that you can never be sure the answers will please you. Thus Eastman began his astonishing political career, for a time dropping into the dogmatism of early American communism, then moving, in the late twenties, to the honor and courage of being the first left-wing anti-Stalinist intellectual in this country, and finally becoming a convert to the conservatism of The Readers Digest."

"During her junior year at Vassar in 1902 Crystal wrote in her journal that men were typically "clever, powerful, selfish and animal"-except for her brother Max. And, she wrote, should she ever marry a man he would have to have Max's qualities: "I don't believe there is a feeling in the world too refined and imagined for him to appreciate." Crystal thought her brother might not like it, but she thought it was "the highest compliment you can pay a man to say that he has the fineness of feeling and sympathy of a woman... All mothers ought to cultivate it in their boys.""

"By May 1916, Eastman and his sister, Crystal Eastman, the leading spirit of the American Union Against Militarism, were working hard to combat the mounting drive toward American participation in the war. With such people as Paul V. Kellogg, Amos Pinchot, Winthrop D. Lane, and Randolph Bourne, Eastman spoke at mass meetings in various parts of the country, telling his audiences that nothing was to be gained by joining in on the kill, that all chance of appealing to Germany's liberal elements would be lost with America's entrance against it. After April 1917, Eastman's tone hardened. He knew now that the brief interlude of fun and freedom had ended, that the New Freedom was finished and the New Intolerance had begun. "You can't even collect your thoughts," he told an audience on July 18, 1917, "without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage. They give you ninety days for quoting the Declaration of Independence, six months for quoting the Bible, and pretty soon somebody is going to get a life sentence for quoting Woodrow Wilson in the wrong connection.""

"So far, at any rate, as I shaped its policy, the guiding ideal of the magazine was that every individual should be made free to live and grow in his own chosen way. That was what I hoped might be achieved with all this distasteful palaver about politics and economics. Even if it cannot be achieved, I would say to myself, the good life consists in striving towards it. As my notebook of those days declares: "I can bear the prospect that the world may never be free, but I can not bear the prospect of my living in it and not taking part in the fight for freedom.""

"This freedom from dogma enabled us to join independently in the struggle for racial equality and woman's rights, for intelligent sex relations, above all (and beneath all) for birth and population control. Socialist dogma declared that all these problems would be solved when the economy of capitalism was replaced by a cooperative commonwealth. I was convinced to the contrary."

"Art Young drew a picture of a complacent cherub carrying a tiny pail of water dipped from the "Ocean of Truth." The pail was marked "Dogma," and my editorial read: "I publish this little picture in answer to numberless correspondents who want to know just what this magazine is trying to do.' It is trying not to try to empty the ocean, for one thing. And in a propaganda paper that alone is a task.""

"It is this catholicity of The Masses, its freedom from the one-track mental habit of the rabid devotee of a cause, for which I as editor was most responsible. I never could see why people with a zeal for improving life should be indifferent to the living of it. Why cannot one be young-hearted, gay, laughing, audacious, full of animal spirits, and yet also use his brains? The everlasting cerebral attitude of such papers as The Nation and The New Republic, the steady, unbillowy, unjoy-disturbed throbbing of grey matter in their pages, makes me, after some months, a little dogsick. And yet on the other hand I hate and always did hate smart-alecky and irresponsible leftism. This posture of mind was, I think, my chief contribution to The Masses."

"The Masses marked, I have been told, the first appearance of "realism" in an American magazine. But I was ignorant of, and indifferent to, schools of art and literature. Of the new movement in art represented by John Sloan, George Bellows, and the other pupils of Robert Henri, I had never heard."