Doug Wilson
In a treatise where he gives reasons he un-subscribed from National Review
Doug’s beef here is not that NR fights like thugs. He seems to think the current cast at NR fights like Aristocrats at the Queen’s Centennial. No, Doug is protesting people on the genuine right who by his lights don’t have the court jester’s touch like he (presumably) does.
Now mind you I don’t mind the cavorting barbs of the Court Jester when well placed. I laugh as uproariously as the next guy when the Court Jester’s sardonic humor lands a clean blow. I get the idea that one way to defeat the ideological enemy is by mocking him and scorning him to death.
However, unlike Doug, I am not opposed to the thugs on our side whose humor is more like swallowing well boiled barbed wire with a garnish of freshly harvested Carolina Reaper pepper. I cannot get too overwrought by the guys who are on our side being “over the top,” or “mean” to those who are supporting men playing women’s field hockey or who support Brucelyn Jenner for Governor, or who get aroused when watching Volodymyr Zelensky do his gay prancing-dancing routine.
Doug, though less than a decade older than me, belongs to another era. He seems to think that brass knuckles and lead pipes are not chic enough and so too gauche for any true Jesus loving Christian to use. However, Doug seems to fail to realize that we are well past the exit that allowed for only the use of the rapier — not that I have a problem with the rapier, mind you. However, neither do I have a problem with the use of the rhetorical claymore when necessary. Doug to the contrary seems to abjure that idea.
Doug seems to have forgotten there is a time and a place for everything under the sun. There is a time to use the rapier and a time to use the claymore. There is a time to be all light horse cavalry and a time to be a armored tank division. There is a time to be the court jester and a time to be the court executioner and Pope Doug doesn’t get to be the guy who arbitrarily determines what time requires which disposition and which tool. Sorry, Doug, it would be nice if the court jester and rapier approach would be sufficient to unseat the illuminati and NWO. I get your advice that we should be happy warriors but I promise, I can be full of guffaws and whimsy while launching my rhetorical cluster bombs. Hey, it’s OK Doug, I draw smiley faces on my cluster bombs before I launch them.
Honestly, what I see Doug doing in this clip is taking up the mantle of William F. Buckley to contain the conservative stream according to his sense of decorum. Buckley was constantly pruning the conservative movement of its most effective assassins. With Buckley the thugs who had to be controlled were the Birchers first and eventually over time it was Peter Brimelow and then Joe Sobran and then Sam Francis and then John Derbyshire. Anybody who was really making an impact against the left, found Buckley eliminating them because they were being too much like an armored tank division. It’s easy to see why Doug was so charmed with Mr. Buckley.
Buckley saw himself as the keeper of the Holy Grail of true Conservatism. In that role Buckley diluted the effective protest that a muscular conservatism might have otherwise made to those early versions of the culture wars. Of course as a CIA asset, Buckley did the work of the devil in his controlling conservatism and keeping it in-between reliable and controllable river-banks.
And so Dougie seems to be trying to take up that Buckley-ian mantle within the Conservative Christian Church. Doug will determine who criticizes effectively as a cavalier or who criticizes the enemy ineffectively like the dreaded thug that Doug creates with his rhetoric.
So for whatever it is worth Doug I will be choosing myself which weapon that is appropriate to the occasion. At times that will be the sardonic sting of the Court Jester. At other times it will be the rapier of the Cavalier. Then there will be times I go all thuggish and use my rhetorical claymore.
The thing that really raises my pique with Doug in this piece is his insistence at the end of the video that Jesus argued just the way that Doug is advocating. Per Doug, Jesus was never “mean” or akin to an armored tank division. Jesus was always the chap who defeated his enemy via the usage of his joie de vivre. Jesus, per Doug, set the example of being the light cavalry and not the armored division and yet when I see my Liege-Lord Jesus launching His explosives “Woes” upon His enemy I see the work of an armored tank and not the work of light cavalry. Doug’s appeal to Jesus example that only uses the rhetorical rapier as the only proper way to engage the enemy is a irresponsible and convenient twisting of scripture that is unworthy of Doug.
Again, none of what has been written here should be seen as an excuse for using a rhetorical sledge hammer when a fly swatter would be more appropriate. I am not suggesting that the vile fens of Mordor have to pour from our mouths at all times when opposing the enemy. There are times when the fairy dust of Tinkerbell will be sufficient to discomfit the enemy. I am merely insisting that there are times when the rhetorical glove that we slap across the enemy’s face needs to have a brick in it.
At that point Doug and I disagree.
