The men’s fashion magazine of record, GQ, plumbed new depths in journalistic sewer-dredging, trashing every conservative that has ever lived and even trying to discredit the U.S. Constitution.
In an extended, stream-of-consciousness rant that is remarkably disjointed even by GQ standards, writer Drew Magary has declared a no-holds-barred war on conservatives that would make Al Sharpton blush.
“Today’s Republican Party is nothing more than a gross celebration of inequality,” Magary explains in his March 21 essay. “It is a loose collective of yahoos and rich assholes and fringe libertarians and pious hypocrites whose only shared trait is their vindictiveness.”
Clearly pandering to the highbrow clientele of the curiously named Gentleman’s Quarterly, Mr. Magary informs readers that Trump is “a graceless, ignorant sack of shit,” while conservatism itself is “a big fucking lie.” William F. Buckley was just “a rich asswipe with an affected accent who never had to worry about money a day in his life.”
It would appear that when Mr. Magary suffers from writer’s block he goes to the nearest public toilet to draw inspiration from the scribblings on the wall.
Having evidently gotten up on the wrong side of bed, Mr. Magary attacks everybody and everything associated with conservatives and conservatism, from Donald Trump back to the U.S. Constitution, taking swipes along the way at Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley, and even Richard Nixon, “who could claim Trump as his spiritual love child.”
Magary harbors special animus toward Russell Kirk, who in trying to formulate the tenets of conservatism, “never addresses racism, or sexism, or environmental issues.” In other words, Kirk committed the utterly inexcusable oversight of failing to foresee and embrace the identity politics that defined the Democratic party in its ill-fated bid for the presidency in 2016.
As a group, Republicans suffer from a “blithe disinterest in progress,” a “complete lack of recognition of injustice,” “lionization of intractability,” “hatred of working government,” a “hilarious lack of creativity,” and “the Pence-ian lust to control everyone’s ‘passions.’”
Mr. Magary declares that he does understand the principled opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, explaining it as follows: “I am a greedy capitalist at heart, and I do not like the prospect of a Commie Russia endgame any more than they did.”
For their part, the nation’s Founding Fathers suffered from “blind spots to the oppressed” when they drafted the Constitution, Magary declares, “so no wonder conservatives are so eager to adhere to that document literally.”
Magary’s singular accomplishment in this extraordinary essay is to have verbally abused so many conservatives living and dead in just 2,200 words, all the while saying almost nothing of substance.
Magary does make one valid point, however. He correctly notes that the fathers of modern conservatism—William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman—are “all dead now,” which cannot be argued with. Readers are left to wonder what relevance this fact has to the rest of the piece, but in this, at least, they cannot accuse Magary of manufacturing fake news.
Otherwise, the essay is an exercise in what liberals do best: expressing how they feel. And Magary feels angry. Very angry. Utterly bereft of reasonable arguments, the article reads like a high school sophomore’s diary entry the evening after being called in for a tongue-lashing from the school principle.
If this is what passes for serious commentary in the GQ world—written apparently for a cadre of fashion-minded drones walking in unthinking liberal lockstep—then the left’s intellectual firepower is at an all-time low.
Outside the bubble, at least for the moment, right-thinking people can breathe easily knowing that their opponents are too busy outdoing one another in bashing dead conservatives to notice what is actually happening in the world.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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