Paul Ryan’s Attack on Trump Proves He’s Played Out

Paul Ryan has popped up again, and it’s not in a good way.

You probably don’t watch a lot of CBS Mornings, and, as such, there’s a good chance you didn’t see this. But we should talk about it nonetheless, because what it shows is the past — and why it’s just that. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Three Basic Truths Behind the Trump Indictment)

Here’s Ryan offering up the strung-out failure addiction of Bush Republicanism, having learned no lessons at all:

Paul Ryan denounces GOP efforts to protect kids from racially divisive & sexual material, telling CBS he's "not a culture war guy" & those issues are "polarizing." Instead, he's focused on China & the debt.

I grew up idolizing him as many 30something conservatives. So lame. pic.twitter.com/OBmC8ieTDC

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 13, 2023

Curtis Houck isn’t wrong. A decade ago, Paul Ryan looked very much like the future of the Republican Party. He seemed like an intelligent guy with a little bit of quirky cool to him, and he at least talked the talk of wanting to do big things.

We never discuss reforming entitlement programs anymore. We’re going to have to do it eventually. Ryan was probably the only serious voice on that issue in this century.

But, of course, he was a failure, and he was a failure for exactly the reasons he stated in that clip:

Fuller Paul Ryan quote: "I'm not a cultural war guy…[i]t's really, polarizing…[O]n some of these issues, I'll side w/the anti-woke crowd…I'm worried about the debt crisis….and China…It's very divisive…I'm a Jack Kemp guy. I believe in inclusive, aspirational politics"

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 13, 2023

“Inclusive, aspirational politics” is a euphemism for Dumping On Your Own Voters. It’s about liking the other side’s voters better than your own and then acting on that preference.

And it’s why, whether or not Donald Trump is the next American president, we are never going back to the Republicanism of Paul Ryan.

Ryan Republicanism Was an Abject Failure

Look, I loved Jack Kemp too. If I could go back to 1980 and make my way into the room when Ronald Reagan was picking a VP, I would not have rested until I convinced him to put Kemp on the ticket instead of the awful George H.W. Bush.

But here’s the painful truth — there is no strain of Republicanism more redolent of abject failure than that which Jack Kemp espoused. Kemp’s “empowerment” conservatism actually made things worse for the GOP’s competitiveness in the cities — and it also indirectly made life in those cities worse.

That inner-city capitalist outreach was a disaster on pretty much every level.

First of all, it was all talk. Republicans didn’t run any of those cities, and “empowerment” wasn’t based on getting to run any of them. Instead, it was based on giving tax incentives for big companies and small- and mid-sized entrepreneurs to make investments in inner cities that had gone bad, rather than letting the market work to turn the suburbs into the capitalist paradises some have become (and some have not).

And it completely missed a number of key issues.

First, those inner-city areas didn’t go bad by accident. They went bad because they were run by corrupt communist scumbags who pillaged the productive classes previously living and working there. Attempting to incentivize the return of the productive classes was just an exercise in leading new lambs to the slaughter. Sure, there were tax breaks here and there in those empowerment zones — where Democrats would allow them — but when the criminals came and looted the workshop or beat up the drivers as they came out of the warehouse, those tax breaks didn’t make much difference.

Second, none of the Jack Kemp crowd ever stopped to think about what the Democrats’ response to this “inclusive, aspirational” politics would be. They found out pretty quickly, though — it was to double and triple down on screaming about racism and to plunge those cities into what we here in this space call “Weaponized Governmental Failure.” And when outside capital came into those awful neighborhoods to gentrify them, a pristine narrative was available — the racist white Republicans were coming in with money to price black people out from their homes.

This video is very much not safe for work. It’s from a couple of years ago and was shot in the 7th Ward of New Orleans, which used to be a monolithically black neighborhood but is now being gentrified by hipster white transplants from all over the place. One of them thought it was a good idea to block off the street and set up a block party with tacos and margaritas and costumes for the kids, and a local BLM activist who ultimately ran for mayor — and lost — showed up to vent rage at the gentrifiers.

WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE AND CONTENT

“I don’t need to be nice. We at war!”

This is what Jack Kemp’s “inclusive, aspirational politics” leads to. It’s been an absolute disaster for the Republican Party.

Because while it’s wasted billions of dollars of mostly Republican tax money to essentially harden the animosity of urban minorities against ever voting Republican, it made suckers out of Republican voters who were paying for our own Ls.

In another of its tellings, this was “compassionate conservatism” — “compassion” defined as more welfare paid by the Right to the Left with nothing given in return; responsibility without authority, the classic dilemma of the mark. How many times have you heard the rotters and looters who run our cities blaming Republicans who don’t live there for all their troubles?

Another is “criminal justice reform,” the effect of which has been one of the worst crime waves in American history, as the other side paid off that “bipartisan” initiative in Soros district attorneys who side with criminals nonstop. In New Orleans, as of Sunday, there have been 3,637 cars stolen this year, up from 1,376 this time last year. That’s what “compassion,” what “inclusive, aspirational” politics, brings to an inner city. Major insurers won’t write insurance on certain kinds of cars in the Big Easy anymore because those cars will inevitably be stolen. (RELATED: We Are Jews Against Soros)

It’s not a terrible bet that the Cooper Mini the lady in the video used to block the street off has been stolen this year. Especially in New Orleans’ 7th Ward. How exactly do you bring “inclusive, aspirational” politics to a place where the stores are looted just because they’re there?

And there’s more.

Think of vouchers for inner-city schools, paid for by suburbanites having to pay full price for private schools or high-rent independent school districts, no longer exclusive thanks to free benefits for children of core Democrat voters. Did the program pay dividends among the recipients? No. Instead, it alienated many of the suburban white voters the modern GOP was built on.

Of course, the suburbanites gave the Democrats another look. Their own party was too busy with “inclusive, aspirational” giveaways to voters from the other side to take care of their own base.

And on and on.

And Paul Ryan, who idolizes Kemp, somehow thinks he has the solutions that Donald Trump doesn’t?

Trump may well be problematic. But his difficulties in recapturing the White House for the GOP, whatever those might be, certainly don’t stem from his policies being inferior to Ryan’s.

Everybody knows this but Paul Ryan.

The Secret Paul Ryan Doesn’t Know

In fact, the secret of Trump’s success can be boiled down to the fact that he’s the first Republican politician since Reagan actually willing to give his own voters what they’re asking for.

And Republican voters don’t really ask for all that much. It really ought not be so hard to satisfy us, despite the persistent difficulties the “inclusive, aspirational” politicians have in doing so.

One of the most basic and fervent asks is that the party actually stand up to the cultural degradation of the Left, particularly as it has metastasized into outright child molestation and wholesale vulgarity.

There are shemales baring their fake breasts on the White House lawn while the queer rainbow flag hangs triumphantly in a position of dominance flanked by a pair of subservient American flags, and the current administration is busily arraigning a former president over boxes of documents sitting in locked rooms. And Paul Ryan wants to … talk about the deficit.

He wants to talk about money when the American people rightly recognize that the country’s political, cultural and economic institutions have all collapsed.

As Daniel Greenfield noted in a very important piece at Front Page Magazine Tuesday, three in four Republicans now consider themselves social conservatives. They’re not a bunch of Jesus freaks reading Pat Robertson quotes out of a little red book; they’re looking around the country, and what they see is Sodom and Gomorrah. Most of them aren’t even all that religious, but the state of the culture to them looks like what they would associate with the end times, and they know you can’t run a society on Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and Dylan Mulvaney. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Transgender ‘Health Care’ and Instagram Pedophilia Exposed)

Conservatives have never, ever been on offense in the culture war. We’ve been on defense since people started reading Antonio Gramsci and acting on his rantings about the need to destroy Christianity, charity, and nationalism to bring about the Marxist revolution almost nobody wants. And Paul Ryan says he’s “not a culture war guy.”

What a weak, feckless, useless, worthless waste he made of his political career and … whatever this is that has followed.

Ryan Republicanism, Bush Republicanism, Romney Republicanism — call it whatever you want; it has no place in this current moment. Paul Ryan is not a wartime consigliere, and, as the foul-mouthed ruffian in the gentrifier’s taco-and-margarita-block-party video says, “We at war.”

And, frankly, while I’d say he’s probably wrong about almost everything, I would much rather have that unpleasant fellow in my foxhole than Paul Ryan. At least that guy knows what he’s fighting for and why.

Ryan? He just wants to count the money as his side loses a war that he won’t even fight. Good riddance to all of that.

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