Who Changed?
An honest conversation about dishonesty
Editor’s Note: Are you “just asking questions” about why ninety percent of Matt’s reader questions seem to be Trump-related? Then congratulations, conspiracy theorists, because this is a legitimate conspiracy. Trump and his little authoritarian project’s elves, it seems, have sought to entrench themselves into every crevice of American life, and they’ve succeeded. Much more than they’ve succeeded at say, bringing down grocery prices or not impoverishing our IRAs. Which the questions reflect. But the question you should be asking is: “Why am I not asking non-Trump related questions?” Be the change you want to see. Why not ignore the Stable Genius, and direct all non-Trump related queries to askmattlabash@gmail.com. (Trump-related questions are also still welcome, of course, since we won’t be rid of His Majesty until the next election, assuming elections haven’t been outlawed by then.)
Dear Matt,
You were one of the reasons I subscribed to The Weekly Standard way back when. I would often laugh out loud when reading your articles. The one where you attended a woke (or whatever it was called back then) convention was a classic. I think you might have referenced that piece recently. I must say you have changed since those halcyon days. A great deal. I’ve canceled my subscription at least once in protest, but then came back for unknown reasons.
Why you gave Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt is way beyond my mental ability to comprehend. Look, I don’t like Trump personally. He’s a loathsome, narcissistic, grifting sociopath as you describe him. But……we need someone to be a disruptor. Only Trump was gonna be that person. The system (whatever that is) needs to be blown up. Also, name the “vital government services” he’s cutting. Name one. And he’s NOT cutting Social Security. I mean he’s crazy, but not that crazy. My question is - it’s virtually impossible to cut spending or to raise taxes, so when does the deficit/debt cause the entire country to collapse?
Tom T.
Wait, I’ve changed? And not the world around me, along with half the people I know in it? If it makes you feel any better, Tom, I’m still laughing out loud while reading you. Though perhaps not for any reason you’d wish me to.
Which we’ll get to. But first, Trump’s proven a disruptor, all right. In the first 100 days, he’s disrupted: our peace of mind, our financial stability, our standing in the world, our basic government functions like food safety inspection, our balance of powers (does Congress still exist?). Though just a quick fact-check: it seems Trump’s not putting a dent in the deficit/debt. Despite all Elon’s/DOGE’s huffing and puffing, making everything they touch more dysfunctional while sacking tens of thousands of federal workers (7,000 jobs at the Social Security Administration alone), their once ballyhooed $2 trillion in cuts has been revised down to a mere $150 billion. If you can even believe those numbers, which considering how often they’ve been caught lying about their numbers, you probably shouldn’t. Meanwhile, Trump is already outdoing Biden in the spending-like-a-drunken-sailor department. A Wall Street Journal analysis has Trump spending $154 billion more since his inauguration than Biden had at this point last year.
Also, I don’t know what you mean by “gave Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt.” Did I believe he’d commit multiple felonies while trying to overturn an election and trash our system of government? No, I didn’t — that’s typically Trump’s areas of expertise. But I was vocal early on about Biden having no business running for reelection. Saying one candidate belonged in assisted living, while the other belonged in jail, wasn’t exactly giving my unqualified support to either side. (Though I did end up voting for Kamala Harris, who I had next-to-no affinity for, simply because I regard Trump as the most dangerous person to ever inhabit the Oval Office, Richard Nixon included.)
All that said, thanks for being a reader since Olden Days, Tom. And also, for walking right into my trap. During these trying times which see me endlessly frustrated as my country is getting butt-pumped by a first-world version of a tinpot dictator (consistently flouting the courts, shipping people off to foreign prisons with no due process, throwing out Biden-era protections on journalists so the administration can target leakers, etc., ad nauseam), I don’t have a lot of outlets for my pent-up aggression. For decades, I’ve hit the speed bag, heavy bag, and double-end bag in my basement, but they can’t hit back. So it’s only marginally satisfying, no matter how often I fantasize about caving in crypto-fascist dental work. And I’m not about to go join the Brazilian jiu-jitsu cult, either. If manosphere mice-turned-men like Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman have joined it, how good could it be? Besides, rolling around with other sweaty men on the floor between my legs feels less like combat, more like I’m making amateur gay porn. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, gay-porn enthusiasts.) Plus, supermodel Gisele Bündchen took up jiu-jitsu, and now she’s having a baby with her instructor. I might still be young at heart, but I’m too old to bring new life into this fallen world. Even if it’s by way of one of the Gracie Brothers.
While 90 percent or so of my readers are very supportive of what I do here — why else would they pay to read me, when hate-reading is available for free on most of the rest of the internet — hecklers do periodically show up in my comments section/inbox. And though like most people, I hate all criticism, I do welcome some, just for therapeutic purposes. Because it allows me to indulge my violent tendencies, and to put reader heads on pikes. As anyone who has read Heart of Darkness knows, sometimes it helps to make examples.
But first off, Tom, I would say to you what I say to all detractors who offer similar critiques. And that is this: the last ten years have ensured that the old partisan labels neither interest nor threaten me anymore. You essentially accuse me of no longer being a conservative? Fine. Who gives a crap? The last decade has rendered the term meaningless. Mostly because people like you — who swear they’re not Trumpsters, while going on to vigorously defend Trump — can no longer even define what being a conservative is. “Conservatism” has merely become a byword for being whatever Trump says it is. Which is forever subject to change according to his whims. Though for integrity’s sake, I’d still submit that I’m as rock-solid against all the things I used to be against when I was a correspondent at The Weekly Standard. The things that got my goat then, still irritate me now: lies, thought control, anti-Constitutionalism, being anti rule-of-law, personality cults.
The problem is, the side I used to frequently and rightly pillory for such behavior (The Left), no longer strikes me as the ascendant threat. (Even if I have little doubt that some of their own worst tendencies would come roaring back if they were the dominant political force, which they’re not.) And if you’re not honest enough to admit when your own side goes deeply, seriously wrong, then you really don’t have the standing to call yourself honest at all. You’re less interested in independent thinking, than in reverse-engineering your answers to square with your partisan hackery. Which is something nobody wants chiseled on their gravestone, even if it’s true. “Here lies Pam Bondi, Partisan Hack.” And here I use Bondi — who is already shaping up as the worst Attorney General in United States history — as she’s never met a principle she won’t compromise to advance her own side.
For all my other flaws, I am not one of those. Which is easy not to be, when you’re politically homeless. Or rather, I do have a political side: I am as anti-authoritarian as I’ve ever been. Which didn’t used to be a concern, domestically, but now is. And whoever joins me on that side, since that is the very real threat we are now facing, I call “amigo.” Whether they’re left or right oriented, by nature. I don’t like people telling me what to do for no good reason, or just so they can wave their political pompoms for the home team. Yet that is exactly what many so-called conservatives now apparently do. From Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, to so many MAGAsphere brocasters and Big Tech toadies that they are too numerous to mention. These are people who sold their integrity cheaply, though not that cheaply, since many of them are making high-six and even seven-and-eight-figure sums to lie their asses off for “a cause” that many of them don’t even believe in. And which isn’t much of a cause, besides, beyond being a reflection of Trump’s boundless ego. They are frauds. And they are profiting from convincing people like you to subscribe and participate in their fraudulence.
So when you lash out at me for spelling out how you are a party to fraud, that says more about you, than it does about me. Maybe what’s eating so many similar hecklers is that people like me are human rebukes, reminding them of the things they used to pretend to stand for, but have long since forsaken. You admit that Trump is all the bad things I say he is, but then, everything that follows is a defense of Trump. Giving him credit for things he isn’t even doing. He has indeed hobbled Social Security. And he or his lieutenants have hobbled just about everything else, from the people who do our cancer research, to those who make our National Parks work correctly, to those who try to stop AIDS and chicken flu pandemics. All the people who legitimately help in this world, he seems to be kneecapping. And all his political allies who make the world uglier, darker, and more dishonest, he seems to be dishing assists to. Like the dim bulbs who buy Trump memecoins which directly enrich him — a legalized bribery scheme, basically, though it’s not clear if it’s at all legal (not that Trump’s corrupt Attorney General would ever investigate it, since she, too, is bought and paid for). In Before Times, crooked politicos would at least go through the trouble of concealing their behavior. Now, they advertise it in broad daylight, with VIP dinners at Mar-a-Lago.
I welcome all subscribers here, even Trump supporters. (I have lots of MAGA friends and family, and everyone’s money spends the same.) But if you call Trump “a loathsome, narcissistic, grifting sociopath,” and then fault me for telling the truth about that reality week-to-week, your problem isn’t with me, but with your ability to grapple with the truth. You might be sick of Trump — I know I am as a subject matter — but that doesn’t make him any less likely to wage war on this precious thing of ours that we used to call democracy, but that we now might call “soft autocracy.” (And increasingly, not so soft — Trump’s FBI stooge, Ka$h Patel — his spelling, not mine — just announced, then erased from Twitter, the arrest of a Wisconsin judge who allegedly “obstructed federal authorities who were seeking to detain an undocumented immigrant by escorting the man and his defense attorney though a nonpublic jury door.”)
I’m not for illegal immigration, either. But is arresting American judges and sending people with no criminal records to El Salvadoran prisons (possibly for life) with no due process a veneration of our Constitution or a desecration of it? If you can get behind that, then your powers of rationalization are much greater than mine.
So again, you say I’ve changed. But I would submit I haven’t. You have. (Or people like you — not truly knowing your past, I’m using you as a stand-in for a type I encounter with great frequency.) I’m still against all the horrible ideas I used to be against. But the terrain changed on me, with a lot of my former allies switching sides on the good-sense front. Too many of the people I knew as decent, God-fearing conservatives abandoned whatever they used to pass off as principle in order to profiteer off of Trumpism, which is often the exact opposite of what they once pretended to believe in. (I’ve never equated Trump to Hitler, but Vice President JD Vance is now working for a guy he regarded as The Fuhrer.) Or maybe they’re not profiteering at all. Maybe they just decided to pull for somebody who hates all the same people they do. Which doesn’t make them any more honorable.
But casually dismissing those of us who managed not to make the same compromises is a copout. It makes us easier to dismiss if you classify us as “liberals” than if we're merely jaded or conscience-bitten versions of the person you’ve always known. I want to tell them: I’m still the same guy I was. But you've gone anarchist. Or fascist. Or nihilist. Or cultist. Or pick your "ist." But you ain't what you used to be. Not even close. And if libs and moderates can see that more clearly than you do, don’t blame me for finding common cause with them. At least somebody’s acknowledging what’s actually going on.
Because our first priority should be preserving this beautiful thing of ours. Something traditional conservatives used to be interested in conserving, but who don’t seem to be any longer. Too many have opted instead to swap out their core beliefs to pay fealty to the most obvious conman in our political history. To each his own. But if you want to double-back and accuse me of heresy for not signing on to the falseness that you seem willing to overlook, well, your cataracts are yours alone. Because I’m still interested in seeing reality as it exists, not as I wish it did. And I don’t mean to deliberately offend or drive people away. But if offense is taken, as I often tell detractors, attendance isn’t compulsory. You can leave anytime. Though if you ever regain a stomach for the truth, you might want to stick around. That’s all we’re interested in telling around here.
Bonus Tracks: Yes, I know it’s too on-the-nose. But here’s David Bowie doing “Changes.”
And here’s another less obvious pleasing alternative. Lake Street Dive’s “I Can Change.”