Just putting my own pin in this pin from Kevin Williamson in 2016:

Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this. Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.

Mark Shiffman:

The core elements of Rousseau’s revolutionary victimology—the spirited moral stance of protest and resistance, self-exoneration through commitment and compassion, and the heaping of all guilt onto the evil reactionary oppressors—serve to construct and sustain a gratifying self-image more powerfully than actually governing ever could. The revolutionaries, the conscious and committed, are the virtuous redeemers not only of themselves and the oppressed, but of human nature as such and History itself. Best of all, being on “the right side of History” (that is, protesting against the past because it has victimized us all in distorting our natural goodness, and the oppressed even more) only really requires us to feel correctly, and maybe to express our support for victims; action is optional.

If, however, providential History will not oblige us by delivering the redemptive order, and thus both kinds of victims remain forever among us (the universal victims of civilization and the particular victims of inequitable civil order), then Rousseau’s victimology serves mainly to de-legitimate all actual regimes and to legitimate a revolutionary regime officially devoted to eliminating the specified types of victimhood. This revolutionary regime does not have to attain the projected harmonization of man; its relentless official devotion to the elimination of victimhood will sustain its aura of legitimacy. Its devotees gain a kind of anticipatory citizen-legitimacy as political actors through their commitment to the future egalitarian regime, the only truly legitimate regime; they are thus authorized to denounce as supporters of an illegitimate regime all who are not so committed. […]

Since, however, there is ultimately something undignified about the therapeutic-liberationist whining of the pampered and privileged, they cannot resist making common cause with those struggling violently against political and economic oppression, who are even more admirable if they are throwing off colonialism. Hence the irresistible allure (or pressure) of “allyship” with identity groups asserting themselves, even when they make the privileged liberal nervous. Hence also the appeal of Hamas, which raises to a higher level the self-satisfaction liberationists already take from common cause with disadvantaged racial minorities and analogously “marginalized” groups.

Importantly, this is not isolated on the Left. He goes on:

Whereas Rousseauan-therapeutic and Lockean-liberal factions previously worked out their conflicts inside the national frameworks of liberal order, their offspring—identity politicians and the equally illiberal working class Lockean patriots—seem to offer signs of the end of liberalism. Considering themselves victims, the one of the “system” and the other of the “deep state,” each constitutes itself as “the people” on the basis of that victimhood and claims a source of legitimacy of its own, diminishing the legitimacy of the state, which rests upon the sovereignty of “the people” as a unified pool of those protected by the state from victimization.

And, lest the centrist or those otherwise still committed to liberalism (yours truly) should be feel safely left out, he adds:

Those fully committed to the liberal order—libertarians, neoliberals, and neoconservatives—will object that liberalism has a different legitimating principle, namely representative government. They tend to believe that, if we can restore representative institutions and reform the economy to hum along providing prosperity to most Americans, we can put the victimological genie back into the bottle. I believe this is an illusion; but that is material for another essay.

Kevin Williamson:

If your management philosophy is that you are doing potential workers a favor by offering them a job and that they should be grateful when they learn that whatever it is you are offering them isn’t even more disappointing than they might have expected it to be—yeah, you’re going to experience a “labor shortage.” Because you’re a terrible employer. […]

Higher wages would eat into some corporate profits, to be sure. Have you had a look at the corporate profit chart lately? It looks like my blood pressure graph after two Red Bulls. Corporate profits at last reading were more than 40 percent higher than their pre-COVID peak. I don’t want to be simple-minded about this—a lot of those profits are being driven by the businesses that aren’t complaining about a labor shortage, while many of the firms struggling to attract workers are not hugely profitable—but there’s an awful lot of money sloshing around in the profit bucket, and we have many examples of highly profitable high-growth businesses paying considerable wages for jobs that aren’t reserved for STEM graduates and artificial intelligence specialists and the like. Every C-suite dork walking the face of God’s green Earth says something like, “Our people are our most important asset,” but a little bit of scrutiny shows that to be, in a lot of cases, pure unadulterated corporate-speak bulls—t.

Nick Cotaggio:

The time of death for the conservative movement was 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning. …

In every way, the man who demolished her is less fit for office now than he was eight years ago, when he was arguably already the most grotesquely unfit major party nominee in American history. Older, crazier, more vindictive, more fascist, more criminally exposed: He won in a waltz over a smart, likable, well-qualified, electable conservative despite having barely campaigned and never debating. …

No one, let alone a conservative, should serve as an accomplice to this horde of vicious, illiberal, obscurantist miscreants and freaks. If the swing voters of this country insist on remaining willfully blind to the nature of Trump’s movement in the foolish hope of bringing back grocery prices circa 2019, let them do so without the complicity of those who know better.

Kevin Williamson:

In 2016, I argued that conservatives had to choose whether theirs was going to be a movement of cranks and quacks and conspiracy-peddlers or a movement of meaningful conservatism. They made their choice, and I suppose they are learning to live with it—standing athwart history, barking at the moon with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all the filth, waste, and imbecility for which he stands. Maybe they will choose to be something else, someday. Maybe not. The ’60s counterculture did not choose to reform itself—it was simply absorbed into the body politic, like a virus, hijacking the healthy organic processes of infected cells and organs. 

Sören Kierkegaard:

There is only one end: the genuine Good; and only one means: this, to be willing only to use those means which genuinely are good — but the genuine Good is precisely the end. In time and on earth one distinguishes between the two and considers that the end is more important than the means. One thinks that the end is the main thing and demands of one who is striving that he reach the end. He need not be so particular about the means. Yet this is not so, and to gain an end in this fashion is an unholy act of impatience. In the judgment of eternity the relation between the end and the means is rather the reverse of this. If a man sets himself a goal for his endeavor here in this life, and he fails to reach it, then, in the judgment of eternity, it is quite possible that he may be blameless. Yes, he may even be worthy of praise. He might have been prevented by death, or by an adversity that is beyond his control: in which case he is entirely without blame. He might even have been prevented from reaching the goal just by being unwilling to use any other means than those which the judgment of eternity permits. In which case by his very renunciation of the impatience of passion and the inventions of cleverness, he is even worthy of praise. He is not, therefore, eternally responsible for whether he reaches his goal within this world of time. But without exception, he is eternally responsible for the kind of means he uses. And when he will only use or only uses those means which are genuinely good, then, in the judgment of eternity, he is at the goal.

Ian Leslie:

I’d forgotten how much [Macbeth] is a play about what we now call toxic masculinity. Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by manhood and violence. Lady Macbeth, of course, is constantly imploring her husband, and indeed herself, to man up and start killing. In the play’s most moving scene, Macduff is told about the murder of his wife and children. Shakespeare doesn’t have him respond with rage, but with stunned disbelief followed by quiet horror (“What, all my pretty chickens and their dam, in one fell swoop?”). Malcolm incites him to, “Dispute it like a man!” – i.e., go and exact violent revenge. Macduff responds, “I shall do so. But I must also feel it as a man.” See – it’s manly to have feelings, as well as to fight. Shakespeare was woke.

Mary Harrington:

Abortion is such a contentious issue for us because, especially in early stages of gestation, pregnancy flies full in the face of the central premise of liberal modernity: that we are separate individuals. Pregnancy confronts mothers with the fact that another human life is radically dependent on our ceding space in our own bodies. It also confronts all of us with the fact that we begin life not as separate, autonomous subjects but merged with our mothers: not quite two, but not just one either. And when so much of our moral order is predicated on individual rights, where the wishes of a mother and the needs of a dependent baby in utero seem to be in conflict, this makes the proper balance of rights acutely difficult to assess. […]

… [We] may yet discover that this slight unpersoning of slightly more babies does not, after all, create a more compassionate world. On the contrary, it will shuffle us all a few steps closer to a world where a great many other categories of individual will discover their personhood, too, is not given but in the gift of some human authority. …

… Whose interests take priority, and why? Those who advocate decriminalising late stage abortion in the name of compassion may yet find that the changes they advocated did more to free those with power, than to protect those without it.

Masha Gessen:

[Alexei Navalny] and I had argued, over the years, about the fundamental nature of Putin and his regime: he said that they were “crooks and thieves”; I said that they were murderers and terrorists. After he came out of his coma, I asked him if he had finally been convinced that they were murderers. No, he said. They kill to protect their wealth. Fundamentally, they are just greedy.

He thought too highly of them. They are, in fact, murderers.

Masha Gessen:

Carlson emerged from the interview shaking his head. “Russia is not an expansionist power,” he said. “You’d have to be an idiot to think that.” Actually, you might look at the evidence—the invasion and de-facto control over about a fifth of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the continued occupation of about a fifth of Ukraine and the ongoing offensive there—to conclude that Russia is an expansionist power. During the interview, Putin gave every indication that he thinks of former imperial possessions as still rightfully Russia’s. That would include not only former Soviet republics but also Finland and Poland. “The professional liars in Washington . . . are trying to convince you that this guy is Hitler, that he is trying to take the Sudetenland, or something,” Carlson continued. “Not analogous in any way!” In fact, Putin had clearly, and more explicitly than ever before, channelled Hitler during the interview. This is what a tyrant looks like: small, and full of tedious resentments. […]

This was a conversation between an older man who has read a history book and fancies himself an expert and his eager nephew, who is trying to feign knowledge in a subject he failed in college. Except one of these guys reaches millions of viewers and the other has nuclear weapons.