National Review has published a collective editorial and a 21 contributor symposium that slams Donald Trump for not being a “true conservative”:

“Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones. … Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.”

Trump is a “menace” to American conservatism and would “take the work of generations and trample it underfoot” on the behalf of a crude “free-floating” populism. As Rich Lowry made crystal clear in an editorial at Politico yesterday, the only use that the “mainstream” conservative movement has for populism is when it is “tethered to, and in the service of, an ideology of limited-government constitutionalism.”

The key phrases are “free-floating” and “tethered.” National Review is more than happy to whip up a populist frenzy and mine popular grievances – just browse the Kat Timpf archive – so long as the resentment can be minted into political currency in service of the “ideology of limited-government constitutionalism.” The goal is to exploit popular grievances in order to advance the economic agenda of the donor class. Trump is “a menace to American conservatism,” which is nothing more than a scam, because he isn’t a puppet and is free to deliver the goods “conservative” voters really want.

What, exactly, is the ideology of “limited-government constitutionalism” anyway? It is shorthand for the donor class consensus on low taxes, deregulation, free-trade, campaign finance, busting unions, and gutting social programs like Medicare and Social Security. It means using electoral victories to cut Miley Cyrus’s taxes and make Wall Street hedge fund managers happy, not to do anything for White working class voters. It means getting “big government” off the back of the US Chamber of Commerce.

Where is this concern for “limited-government constitutionalism” over US membership in the WTO? How can you simultaneously support “limited-government constitutionalism” and NATO, NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership? The same people who are allegedly for “limited-government constitutionalism” supported spending trillions of dollars to build democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan and giving globalist tribunals control over American trade policy. They are happy to engage in saber-rattling over the borders of Ukraine, Georgia, or China’s activity in the South China Sea. They carry forth about Trump’s offensiveness to the US Constitution which gives the US Congress, not the WTO, the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” They hardly bat an eye when Chris Christie threatens to invade Syria, shoot down Russian planes, and start World War III. They support Marco Rubio who calls Edward Snowden a traitor for exposing the NSA.

For generations, these “true conservatives” and their counterparts abroad have labored to build what President George H.W. Bush called the “New World Order”: an American-led world united under the paradigm of liberal capitalist democracy, governed by globalist institutions, policed by the US military, where capital and labor moves freely across international borders, and annoying regulations and obstacles to trade and investment have been eliminated. This is the vision that was endorsed by Heidi Cruz in the Council on Foreign Relations report “Building a North American Community.”

Among other things, these “true conservatives” at National Review don’t really care about America’s moral decline, political correctness, outrages like abortion and gay marriage, the millions of illegal aliens here, the mosque down the street, the jihadist living next door, racial double standards, the cultural cleansing of the South, etc. That’s why they are constantly counter-signaling online – it has become a running joke on Twitter – about all the rubes, yokels, and rednecks who support the Republican Party and who they find embarrassing. They are forced by necessity to dog-whistle on these issues to turn out their uncouth supporters in elections.

In the United States and Western Europe, the great enemy of the “true conservatives” are populists and nationalists. In France, the “true conservatives” recently joined forces with the socialists in order to stop the National Front from winning in the regional elections there. In the UK, the Tories who are the “true conservatives” imposed gay marriage on that country. In Germany, the “true conservatives” who are led by Angela Merkel have let over a million Third World refugees into the country and prosecute those who speak out against this for the crimes of “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

Sam Francis was right: we need to stop pretending we are “true conservatives” or that we have anything in common with these bow-tied, low-T clowns. We don’t support the “conservative agenda” as articulated by National Review. We are populists and nationalists, which means we are “tethered” to the well-being of our own people and protecting and advancing their interests, not some stupid abstract ideology.