This is my response to Allahpundit finally leaving Hotair and exiting the conservative pundit space.

Allahpundit was a conservative political commentator for a long time. I remember back when I was in law school in 2004, following his blog "Allah is in the house" in which he LARPed as the Muslim God Allah and made fun of terrorists and Democrats. It was one of the funniest things online at the time. I knew he was going places, and he did.

From his blog his patron Michelle Malkin boosted him to the commercial web site Hotair, where he's been for 16 years. He mentioned that he's written 36,591 total posts. I've probably read most of them.

In his earlier, pre-Trump years, he was a consistently right wing voice. But somewhere between 2016-2020, he changed, and he changed in a big way. He wouldn't admit this. In his mind, I'm sure he thinks that he didn't change, everyone else did. But he's wrong.

When I first went on twitter a couple years ago, I followed him. His posts on Twitter were almost unrecognizable from the man I used to read regularly. Quite frankly, he had transformed into a garden variety moderate Democrat, not a Right winger at all. It took me some time to understand why he changed, but I think I have a reasonably confident answer:

FEAR.

Allahpundit joined the Right out of fear. The precipitating event was 9/11. Fear of terrorism caused a flight to right wing authoritarianism. This explains why Allahpundit took a sharp Left turn in 2020: the fearful in 2020 embraced Left wing authoritarianism in response to COVID. Allahpundit's takes on COVID lined up perfectly with those of mainstream Democrats and Redditors. All talk of freedom and individuality was purged from his mind. It's a sad thing to see.

But that wasn't the only thing Allahpundit was irrationally afraid of: Trump. I openly admit Trump tried to build a cult of personality around himself, but anyone with common sense could see that he was never going to be able to pull it off. Even on January 6, the day that struck such UTTER TERROR into the hearts of these laughable little scared children, there were at most a few dozen people willing to fight the cops for Trump, and most of them only got keyed up because the cops started getting aggressive with them first and it escalated.

I can forgive a Right winger not liking Trump. Trump is not the Right. Hell, Trump betrayed Right wing principles on more than 1 occasion. But I can't forgive a person for taking left wing political positions, sounding and acting like a filthy Democrat, and then trying to pretend that this is somehow justified by their desire to undermine Trump. Nah, it isn't about Trump anymore, it's about having so much TDS that you want to nuke the entire Right in revenge for the perception that the Right is corrupt for having embraced Trump at all. But why did the Right embrace Trump? Because the Left has been beating up on and personally attacking the Right nonstop for over a decade, and Trump was the 1st and only candidate willing to punch back hard and keep throwing punches. Trump actually made the Right feel like it wasn't stuck playing perpetual defense whining "b-b-but we're not racist! honest!" all the damn time.

And this is how I know AP is not a Republican and hasn't been a Republican for a long time now:

What is the right’s “cause” at this point? What cause does the Republican Party presently serve? It has no meaningful policy agenda. It literally has no platform. The closest thing it has to a cause is justifying abuses of state power to own the libs and defending whatever Trump’s latest boorish or corrupt thought-fart happens to be. Imagine being a propagandist for a cause as impoverished as that.

Sounds like something AOC would write, and of course it's wrong. Imagine how stupid AP needs to be to be VERY ONLINE and not even be able to mentally recall the most recent Republican Platform embodied by Republican Senators in Rick Scott's 12 point Plan: https://rescueamerica.com/12-point-plan/ I would say that that is a pretty good summary of where the Republican Party is at in terms of policy preferences. (1) American pride and school choice, (2) color blindness and racial equality, (3) re-fund the police and support law and order (4) secure our border, better quality immigrants, and no welfare for immigrants (5) stop socialism and grow the economy, balance the budget and cut government spending (6) reduce federal power, return it to the states, and get the debt under control (7) election security (8) promote the American family (9) "Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. We believe in science" (10) protect religious liberty and stop big tech censorship (11) "We are Americans, not globalists" (12) CUT TAXES.

HELL YEAH, BROTHER.

That's a lot of ambitious policy proposals and causes, so how is AP saying "Republicans don't stand for anything?" Because he's a libtard now, and libtards have this weird mental defect where they think that the sole function of government is to push socialist authoritarian policies down the throats of Americans. Anything like, like the 12 point above, it practically invisible and incomprehensible to them. They can only think in terms of dictatorial edicts that declare top-down socialist war on things, without ever solving them. ("war on poverty" anyone?)

And THAT is the problem with Allahpundit and Nevertrumpers like him: maybe they used to be Republicans back in the GWB era when they thought Right wing socialism was on the menu, but these people are fundamentally socialists, authoritarians, and statists, and they look around and see that the Right loathes the Government now. Rather than admitting that they're socialists, they scapegoat Trump and the supposed threat he poses (which anyone without diagnosable TDS can plainly see is no threat) in order to deflect from the fact that they simply love Big Government, and loved it when GWB-era Republicans ran up spending to make them feel safe from terrorism with security theater.

The GOP does have a cause. The cause is consolidating power. Overturn the rigged elections, purge the disloyal bureaucrats, smash the corrupt institutions that stand in the way. Give the leader a free hand. It’s plain as day to those who are willing to see where this is going, what the highest ambitions of this personality cult are.

Literal TDS. Sad. Nothing in the above bears any resemblance to reality.

I would rather fail as a writer than succeed if success means being some demagogue’s footstool. To the extent my work at Hot Air has made that clear, I’m happy with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyr_complex

Never forget, it’s not the 30 percent of Trump worshipers within the party who brought the GOP to what it is. It’s the next 50 percent, the look-what-the-libs-made-me-do zombie partisans, who could have said no but didn’t. I said no. Put it on my tombstone.

"The entire Right wing is evil and must be destroyed because I don't like Trump" TDS. As a member of that "next 50 percent", let me say this to AP: I am thinking with crystal clear clarity. You, on the other hand, have had all your logic and reason derailed by what I can only describe as a mental illness.

If the average populist slobberer had a few like you in their ear, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in... You can count on one hand the number of successful right-of-center sites willing to hold populism to account for its excesses and the Dispatch is a very distinguished member of that distinguished group. Of course I’d be interested in writing for it.

I only highlight this in closing to make a final point. Allahpundit is a socialist, and he is calling everyone who isn't a socialist a "populist slobberer". He doesn't respect the fact that many Americans truly and correctly see government as THE PROBLEM because his statist, New Yorker mind simply cannot comprehend a world in which the Government is not the ultimate problem solver for all things in society. He sees those fighting against socialism as a rabble of peasants rioting and burning in protest of the lapses of their betters, instead of seeing them as truly intelligent people working to reign in the socialist excesses and abuses of our present Big government.