No, Dan McCarthy, This Presidency Cannot Bring Us into a Golden Age
Against a Headline and a Conclusion
The body of the latest editorial by Dan McCarthy, editor of The Modern Age, is a solid review, and from the useful perspective of the 1980s moment when Reagan’s promised revolution was betrayed by insiders, of how Trump and his approach are so different, and potentially so beneficial to America. I liked this in particular:
Trump is the opposite of the Republicans who preceded him. They specialized in telling conservatives what they wanted to hear, but they were afraid to act—on Roe, on racial discrimination against whites and Asians, on immigration, on fulfilling Ronald Reagan’s pledge to dismantle the Department of Education, and on most other priorities for the American Right. The title of a book by Pat Buchanan that was published in 1975—Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories—accurately described the relationship between the Republican base and the leaders it typically put in office through 2015.
But the headline of the piece, “The First 100 Days of the Golden Age,” and its written-in-the-same-spirt conclusion, are sadly blind.
For McCarthy doesn’t understand that it is thought-leaders like himself who are already destroying the promise of Trump’s transformative approach to conservatism, due to their present participation in, and evident willingness to indefinitely extend, the Suppression of the Covid-vax harms story. They have planted a Lie of immense proportions at the center of the “conservative” movement, though it is one told more by silence than by speech. The tendrils of this weedy tree have curled into every corner, for one cannot be a conservative or Trumpist leader of good standing unless one abides by the omerta which maintains this Suppression.
This tree of mendacity (“But the lying is only,” I suppose its defenders would say, “on one issue!”) has been allowed to grow for so long, three and a half years now, that I’m beginning to wonder whether, even if Trump comes out against the shots, it can ever be uprooted.
Here’s the way I put it four months ago, in “2025, Supservatives, 2025,” utilizing the same “evil-tree metaphor” I have above, but there in a manner more attuned to spiritual damage:
Could it be that later on we’ll be forced to realize that at some point during this year we were so grateful for, a demonic seed previously merely fingered in the hand was outright ingested by most of the “conservative” and “populist” democracy-rescuers, working its way into their hearts, eventually sprouting its black roots and tendrils, possessing their souls, and the government and nation also? That in some perilously dark 2045 or 2065, future generations will lament the irony of 2025’s real-enough triumphs occurring right alongside, and indeed putting out of view, this “little” and “merely tactical” act of suppression-acceptance which turned out to doom our republic?
Elsewhere in that piece, and my recent piece on Trump’s shot-conversation with John Rich, I speculated that 2025 might offer the “supservative a pathway out.”
…for if Kennedy and others like him do get in, the data releases forced from the CDC, FDA, DOD, etc., could blast the story wide-open, requiring you to speak about or publish pieces about the long-forbidden topic.
I’d strongly suggest, oh supservative, that you start getting yourself ready for that. You’ve got some studyin’ to do!
That is, according to the more hopeful hypothesis option I put forward there, we ought to be seeing signs of preparation.
But here we are, May of 2025. Miraculously, Kennedy is in. But there is still very little evidence of conservative media or political leaders doing any such preparation. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent tweet is about the only exception.
Is this a sign of A-grade excellence in disciplined loyalty, and leak-prevention? That is, will Trump make a big speech against the Covid-vaxxes, and then, and only then, all the conservative talking heads will lift the Suppression, unleashing torrents of their outraged commentary about the mass death event which has been going on?
Or is it rather a sign that the first and biggest obstacle Kennedy and Trump are up against, if in fact they do want to call for the removal of the Covid-vaxxes from the market, is the conservative movement itself?
Could the darker hypothesis-option of my January piece, that “conservative” leaders are pushing for an Indefinite Suppression of this story, be the correct one?
If so, you can kiss all hopes for a Golden Age goodbye.
Here’s some more from McCarthy on the subject, in his concluding paragraph:
President Trump in 100 days has opened a frontier, one that the nation, and especially the Right, will be exploring for years to come, after long living on the progressives’ reservation. The frontier is dangerous and uncomfortable, but it’s free... The men and women who will flourish in the America to come after some 1,360 more days like these first 100 will be those with a frontier spirit. Those without it, who have been well-fed and content in a liberal ideological cage, will merely continue to complain.
I’m sorry, but in the face of the concerns I express above, this reads like so much gibberish. Virtuous political frontier-exploring without an elementary commitment to Open Journalism and an elementary hostility to Live-by-Lies behavior?
Without vigilance against locking oneself in an ideological cage of one’s own making?
It is not irrelevant that McCarthy has published this particular piece at The American Mind, the original and still-unrepentant target/example of my lonely campaign against the “conservative” side of the Suppression.
Nor is it irrelevant that when one asks Gemini AI about the journal McCarthy is editor of, The Modern Age: A Conservative Review, whether it has “published any essays or reviews relating to the Covid-19 vaccines,” the answer is “no.”
So here, alas, is the real conclusion to McCarthy’s piece:
President Trump and others following his example would have had a good chance of bringing America into a comparatively “Golden” era, but because conservative leaders went all in on the Suppression, and seem determined now to never Repent of it, this chance will be lost.
After all,