A Right’s Bright Summer

Move over, White Boy Summer. The Camusian conspiracy was right: you’re being replaced. We’re renaming this year’s sweltery season “bright conservative summer.”

(Wait! Please don’t click away! I promise not to feature conservative summer staples like Sperrys or salmon-colored short shorts. Perhaps a wide-bellied Aloha shirt, but that’s it!)

Now, when I say “bright conservative summer,” I’m not referring to the swelling red breaker threatening to crash in the fall, though that prospect is delightfully effervescent. The right’s future is refulgent because of the darksome dysfunction the left finds itself in. And as a sweetening topper to the schadenfreude, the liberals’ ineptitude is entirely self-imposed.

Meaning: conservatives can’t muck it up, as it so often their wont. (I’d include libertarians in the enthused bunch if they ever came so close as to have a potential political win to lose.) The Twitter trope “Dems in disarray” couldn’t be more real, more relevant, and more glorious.

The Intercept’s Ryan Grim has a comprehensive report on the comically woke inertia many progressive organizations are struggling under. Saying the woke inmates are running the asylum is too easy, and not quite apt. What’s really happened is Marx’s dream come true: the revolution has concluded. The proles are on top, looking menacingly down upon bourgeoise management.

“In the short term, the battles between staff and organizational leadership have effectively sidelined major progressive institutions at a critical moment in U.S. and world history,” Grim grimly warns. From pro-abortion groups like the Guttmacher Institute, to racial-justice advocacy coalitions like Movement for Black Lives, to enviro-terror orgs like the Sierra Club, to the increasingly aspic-spined civil-rights defender the ACLU, the left’s network of nonprofits is at a beautiful standstill. Democrats enjoy a trifecta in Washington, yet their pressure arms are detrimentally focused on internal grievances.

The culprit is clear: callout culture, and all its sanctimony. The process follows the same line no matter the institution: low-level staff accuse their bosses of not living up to their proposed ideals. Mission statements are picked off the page and wielded like cudgels. Leadership is accused of all the usual sins typically reserved for the right: being racist, sexist, exclusive, too well compensated, and indifferent to employee suffering. “Beyond not producing incentives to function, foundations generally exacerbate the internal turmoil by reflexively siding with staff uprisings and encouraging endless concessions, said multiple executive directors who rely on foundation support,” Grim reports.

In other words, progressive executives are being hoisted by their own reeeing petard.

The impotence isn’t limited to 501(c)(3)s. (If you don’t know what that tax designation is, just Google it. Don’t spend the next three hours trying to find it in the IRS’s labyrinthian code. I ignore my kids and write these columns for you to reach the end, not take an actuarial detour.) Liberal news outlets are being roiled by the same agitating upswell. In an incestuous profile on Joe Kahn, newly installed editor of The New York Times, by The Washington Post, Jeremy Barr reports many of the Grey Lady’s functionaries “don’t even want to engage in certain kinds of stories because they anticipate the reaction that they’ll get from writing on, reporting on, a story that tends to be a lightning-rod type issue on Twitter.”

That’s a slippery way of saying journalists are afraid of their own kind on Twitter, which operates exclusively as an open journo Slack channel. That much was on full display in the recent imbroglio spurred by ex-post ex-Post reporter Felicia Sonmez, who turned a colleague’s sexist retweet into a full-blown indictment of her employer. In the greatest feat in journalistic integrity since the Pentagon Papers’s publication, Sonmez was summarily canned after spending a week saying her paper was run by slobbering lechers.

The firing—which any respectable employer would have initiated immediately instead of putting its head in the sand for days—is unlikely to placate the restless young dateliners who, to quote a wokecromantic Haley Joel Osment-like Times reporter, “feel like racism is in everything.” The Post took a scalp, but the tumbril pushers will demand more, and the right kind to be sure.

I won’t bother rehashing the years-long struggle session ongoing in academia. Higher ed has long been the breeding ground for cancel culture. The viral video of the shriekress browbeating a Yale professor over Halloween costumes was the perfect encapsulation of the free-expression suppression campaign being waged by campus administrators and leftie students. And that happened seven years ago. The war’s gotten worse, racking up more canceled casualties. Now fronts have opened up in the spaces most welcoming of Bell-fluent graduates: the media and progressive policy shops.

And the results couldn’t be more comically destructive if Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd tangled in a Lalique boutique. We get Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Grievance Land) scolding her fellow liberals for not adopting the Anglican ungendered “Latinx” while a Republican wins a special election in the second biggest Hispanic congressional district in the country. The Supreme Court may be on the cusp of invalidating Roe v. Wade while abortion advocacy groups are bogged down in HR-mediated conflicts over if the avocado toast in the break room fridge had the correct land acknowledgment next to the owner’s name.

Project Veritas can only dream of this kind of internal sabotage. These diversants can’t see beyond their demanded diversity for the goals they’re compromising. To which the conservative, who long internalized the wisdom that ideas have consequences, can only laugh. And, to quote Kylo Ren, demand MOOOOORRRRREEEEEE!

The summer’s only started, but it’s going to be a long, hot one for the left. If only they’d stop deliberately shining interrogation-level UVC lights on themselves.