“Why Is Matt Gaetz Defending Katie Hill?” asked Mother Jones, a liberal oppo research outfit masquerading as a news organization. They couldn’t figure it out. Maybe I had nudes. I don’t. At least I hope not. But who really knows anymore? Could it just be a crass political play for young voters? Aren’t we supposed to want young people to vote? Was I gay? If I am, I’m terrible at it. Not that there is anything wrong with it.
In boomer Congress the millennial notion that we’ve all made mistakes—the pictures are everywhere—and we don’t get too worked up about it, is totally alien. My mug shot from an arrest twelve years ago is online. So what? Some people share nudes. Big deal. Do we really care? The president is friends with Kim Kardashian, and we all know how she became famous. Kardashian is now using her fame to help others. Good for her. We millennials contain multitudes.
As millennials, we were handed phones with video cameras at the most hormonal stage of life and we document every transgression. Who needs the deep state when you have an Instagram history of every slutty Halloween costume? What did you think we were going to do? What would we know of our parents and their worst choices if they had been boomeranging through Woodstock naked and throwing the sexual revolution of the ’70s on TikTok? We can’t see them drop acid on Snapchat though they don’t stop chatting about how great it was to break all the rules that they expect us to follow in technicolor. We learned of our parents’ youth through grainy family photos in Sunday’s best. Our children will digitally harvest HD images of the body paint we wore to Coachella. The permanent record they scoffed at is something we live with. Our digital identity is our real identity and vice versa for better and oftentimes for worse.
We need more weirdos in Congress—more MIT geniuses like Rep. Thomas Massie and more risk-takers like Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, who abandoned the black robe of the judiciary for the fray of Congress. We need the freak flags to fly at full—not half-mast. The place is far too boring because it is filled with old bores.
Rep. Charlie Wilson plotted the demise of the Soviet Union amid hookers and blow in a hot tub. Where are all the badasses we were promised?
Only fools would expect this boring batch of octogenarians and septuagenarians to solve our most serious crises when they are themselves on their way to checking out of the hotel of life.
The budget crisis, climate change, Big Tech bias, immigration, or any number of other generational issues require the focus and attention of those who will deal with these crises and their aftermath. The young have perspectives the old do not.
It gives us a chance to be more real, more, yes, representative, if we seize it. Everyone just needs to stop clutching their pearls long enough to evolve. President Trump evolved. So should we.
May 16, 2020
Camp David. Movie theater, watching Tora! Tora! Tora!
“My Kevin is a genius! He said we’d be the first to flip a California seat from blue to red in recent history. We did it!”
McCarthy went all in and won back Katie Hill’s seat in a special election with fantastic candidate recruitment and millions upon millions of dollars. Sex had cost the Democrats power. Or at least a House seat. Or was it momentum? Perhaps a sign of good things to come in the 2020 election? I guess we’ll see.
“Hey, Gaetz.” I was sitting behind the president during the movie. He talks the whole time and doesn’t miss a line. “That thing you did for the girl with the naked pictures. That was a good thing. You were right to do that.”
The president is at his best when he is being magnanimous. But I still couldn’t convince him I never dated her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Uncanceled
The radical Left of the ’90s and ’00s wanted the power to control our lives with government. They essentially won on all fronts.
I wrote most of this book under a coronavirus lockdown strong enough to strangle small businesses to death, but our ailments began much earlier. When Republicans lost elections, government took over health care and the economy. Things weren’t any better when we won. George W. Bush grew government, creating new federal agencies and inventing new authorities to spy on us. After the reign of “43,” now treated as a beloved elder statesman, government was strong enough to have secret courts approve any desired political interference based on fabricated or altered evidence. “Compassionate conservatism” sure was nosy.
Winning against some of our party’s boring standard-bearers—Bush, Romney, McCain—hasn’t satiated the Left’s thirst for power. The Republican losers of yesteryear had fortitude but not electoral success. Perhaps they were wonderful men, some like Sen. McCain even great men, but they were losers all the same, Romney and McCain at the ballot box, Bush in the annals of history. Appeasement is always and everywhere a weak strategy. We were promised “peace through strength,” but we got war without winning.
The conflict that matters most, though, is domestic, and the political struggle here can be just as vicious. Ivanka Trump can’t give a speech at Wichita State to empower women and inspire a modern workforce thanks to leftist pressure there. I don’t want to live in a world too woke for Ivanka. First they came for the nerds; then they came for the hotties. This cannot stand.
The Left wasn’t satisfied feasting on the political carcasses of Republican losers and wimps. They’ve grown hungrier. Today, the woke Left wants to control what we see, hear, and say so they can program what we think. Woketopia
