I’m one of the only people who sat through the whole Roger Stone trial in person. Credit where it’s due, Milo did too. He even has a book coming out about it.

But before that book drops, it’s imperative to raise awareness over what the Never Trumpers are still trying to do, as they panic about the latest announcements about White House personnel moves that will surely lead to a more early-2017-style White House, rather than the John Kelly-style stuff we had begrudgingly become accustomed to.

When they’re not running pro-Pete Buttigieg, “End the Electoral College” advertisements, the National Review is taking uninformed potshots at Trump world. This time, predictably, it’s Roger Stone.

Kevin Williamson, the author of the article entitled “Roger Stone Deserves a Severe Punishment”, has repugnant form in trashing Trump supporters and ordinary Americans as a whole.

In a 2016 rant entitled “The Father-Fuhrer” Williamson wrote of Trump-supporting Americans who found their jobs exported to China and their priorities relegated to afterthoughts:

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

You read that correctly. Williamson in National Review referred to ordinary Americans as “stray dogs”. He concludes: “Nothing happened to them.”

Tell that to the families ripped apart by endless wars (which National Review still blindly supports), or the dependency created by the opioid obsession coupled with the wholesale outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs.

Now Williamson tells us, in a manner as compelling as National Review‘s “Never Trump” magazine cover, that Roger Stone should probably die in prison. And for what?

Williamson ignorantly demands: “The seven felonies of which he stands convicted are at heart crimes of political corruption — lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses in order to impede a federal investigation into official wrongdoing. The charges together could have brought him 50 years in prison — and that would not have been unjust.”

His legal analysis is pathetically wrongheaded. He didn’t sit in on the trial. He didn’t pay any attention to the defense arguments. He doesn’t know anything about the Jerome Corsi e-mails that were called into question, and that Roger Stone himself was very public about these interactions, releasing them himself.

The establishment cooked up a phoney investigation. They raided Stone’s house at dawn (why?). They stacked the jury with anti-Trump folks. They recommended a ridiculous sentence. And this is what “conservative” @NRO says? The right needs to boycott National Review en masse. https://t.co/cZAhaEnvpS — Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) February 13, 2020

Williamson shows no intention to get to grips with the fact that there was no attempt by Stone to misrepresent or hide information. What the whole charge “lying” charge came down to was a characterization of Jerome Corsi’s emails and the importance of them.

For anyone who knows that world, it is fair to assume that Stone would not have taken such things at face value and had no reason to repeatedly raise them, especially after voluntarily publishing the documents.

For those who don’t know the story: Corsi – a writer at the WorldNetDaily website – sent a bunch of emails that sounded like he had foreknowledge of the Wikileaks email dump in August 2016.

Roger was asked about it in testimony and didn’t refer to it, because as we know, they’re from Corsi, and they weren’t taken with a great level of seriousness. And that’s the supposed “lie” to Congress that Williamson wants Stone to die in prison over.

Remember, Stone presented this information to the government of his own accord.

Roger Stone was not part of the campaign. He wasn’t part of the government. And Williamson’s attempted double-tap isn’t just grist to the mill for the Left, but betrays his colleague Andrew McCarthy’s more thoughtful piece on the matter, even if I disagree with some of McCarthy’s conclusions.

The case against Stone was clearly a vindictive attempt to hurt someone who was once close to the President after the establishment tried and failed to get President Trump and his family.

It shows us that despite morsels of contrition, and even some grifting in the nationalist world, National Review just cannot help returning to its Never Trump instincts.

They haven’t understood that they don’t quite matter anymore like they used to. They no longer have a stranglehold on the conservative movement. And they continue to lash out because of their irrelevance.

How can you take Rich Lowry’s book seriously when his publication is toeing the globalist line, and backing police state action against leaders of the populist nationalist movement?

This Ivy League, wannabe populism doesn’t work, just ask Elizabeth Warren.

Donald Trump is going to the Daytona 500 not the Westminster Dog Show, and there’s a reason for that.

I don’t believe in cancel culture. And I do think Never Trumpers are entitled to their ideas no matter how wrong they may be. But well-meaning conservatives should pay attention to who continues to write for the sites they still might frequent, and indeed who still advertises with a National Review that promotes police state action against Trump and his supporters.

Jack Posobiec is a political correspondent for One America News and former Navy intelligence officer