Over Memorial Day weekend, conservative talking head and editor of The Weekly Standard magazine Bill Kristol announced that conservatives would be getting an independent candidate to challenge Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tweeting, “There will be an independent candidate—an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”
Kristol, who has claimed that Trump is the “wrongest man in politics” decided to name National Review staff writer David French. French is a constitutional lawyer by education and like most conservative constitutionalists, he seems to have studied it and not understood a single word.
In reality, by throwing his support behind French, Kristol has seemingly said that he thinks Donald Trump is a terrible person, so he wants everyone to vote for French, who by and large supports every single measure and policy platform Trump stands for, but he happens to have a different name.
“To say that he would be a better and a more responsible president than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump,” Kristol wrote of French, “is to state a truth that would become self-evident as more Americans got to know him.”
Just who would they get to know? Well, for starters French is a dogmatic theologian neoconservative who is chomping at the bit to send troops into battle around the world in the name of American exceptionalism. He is an anti-Black Lives Matter politician who praised the acquittal of an officer that was involved in the death of Freddie Gray, and who harps on the myth that protestors in Ferguson started a “war on cops” in the wake of the death of Michael Brown.
French is also a vocal anti-LGTBQ rights activist who claims that transgender men and women are “mentally unstable.” Even going as far as to call them “troubled” and “absurd.” When pressed about these or any other issues from what he calls “cultural liberalism” he will immediately deflect the conversation and insist we ban abortion.
If I didn’t just tell you that those were the beliefs from David French, you would have believed they came from Donald Trump if told so.
There is no difference between French and Trump, both exist as stains on the fabric of human existence.
French is also more in the pocket of the Sarah Palin quackery of the right than Trump is. Frenches wife, Nancy, is the Palin family ghostwriter, penning not only Sarah and Bristol’s books, but she also ghostwrites Bristol’s blog on the Patheos network, a site I also write for and has afforded me the unpleasantness of crossing paths with the Frenches. So if you’re looking for someone more in line with the political leanings of a raving lunatic, French may very well be your man.
In the wake of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting, I proclaimed that on American soil, Christian terrorism was a bigger threat to American lives than ISIS. In my article, I cited that since September 11, 2001, that 13 attacks against abortion clinics had been carried out, yet only five attacks could be tied back to Islamic extremism.
David French’s rebuttal to my claim was that only one abortion provider had been murdered, so Christian terrorism wasn’t that bad. He then went on to praise the police for their hard work.
Does that sound like a new kind of conservative to you? It sounds like the same noise that has been coming out of the party for decades. Yet, what makes French so surprising is that when you peel all his layers apart, he is actually more of an extremist than Trump, and he even thinks so.
“The party of Lincoln is in ruins. A minority of its primary voters have torched its founders’ legacy by voting for a man who combines old-school Democratic ideology, a bizarre form of hyper-violent isolationism, fringe conspiracy theories and serial lies with an enthusiastic flock of online racists to create perhaps the most toxic electoral coalition since George Wallace,” French wrote back in March about the possibility of a Trump candidacy.
Looking past the ignorant statement about the GOP being the party of Lincoln, a semantic argument the right just can’t seem to learn, he criticizes Trump for being of an “old-school Democratic ideology.” The argument makes sense when you realize that French actually believes that Republicans today would have been the same Republicans that freed the slaves after the Civil War.
However, if you find yourself reading this and worried about a French presidency you can likely rest easy. Not only is David French an absolute nobody with the charisma of a rock, Bill Kristol has a profound history of backing political losers. Hell, he was rooting for Mitt Romney to challenge Trump because that worked out so well the first time he ran. He also backed Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, a war hawk who is strongly supported by the Israel lobby but has failed to offer anything meaningful in the way of political progress and instead spends his days voting against anything Democratic.
Kristol also backed Senator Ben Sasse, another do-nothing politician who offered nothing but obstructionism, failing to offer the country or his constituents a single viable bill or path forward.
This is because Kristol backs people he sees as puppets and these politicians, and now David French are nothing but puppets in his childish game of trolling liberals and being the conservative contrarian to every conservative in office.
Kristol, like French, Trump, Sasse, Romney, and Cotton, is a political loser.
This latest tantrum and selling David French as a conservative hero is just the latest stunt from a man who has little to show in his life in the way of accomplishments and is now trying to save the world by nominating a presidential candidate who suddenly makes Donald Trump look like a moderate.