Many conservative groups continue to scold American voters for supporting Donald Trump because Mr. Trump is “an existential threat to conservatism.” As Tucker Carlson noted last January in Politico, voters are being scolded for supporting Trump because it would be bad for conservatism.
And who is doing the scolding? Those think-tanks pushing for open borders and nation-building, for TPP and various trade deals at the expense of American jobs; groups that have an addiction to the neocon-centric military-industrial complex. Heading the list are AEI, the Hoover Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Rand Corporation and Heritage Foundation, to name a few. Notably absent from this group is the Cato Institute, which may be the only think-tank in America whose philosophical footing is based on preserving basic liberties that are the foundation of a free society and to secure that liberty “through limited government and the rule of law.”
In explaining Mr. Trump, Mr. Carlson argues that “Clinton begat Bush, who produced Obama, whose lax border policies fueled the rise of Trump. In the case of Trump, though, the GOP shares the blame, and not just because his fellow Republicans misdirected their ad buys or waited so long to criticize him. Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party. That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn’t.”
Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. … Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.
Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”
Frederick W. Smith, chairman and CEO of FedEx Corp., wrote this about the Cato Institute: “There is no institution that, person for person, dollar for dollar, idea for idea, has been even close to the Cato Institute in advancing fundamental principles.”
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