Rending Our Garments Over Amber Rose

We can have victories on some things, or defeat on everything. We have to choose.

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“I’m here tonight to tell you, no matter your political background, that the best chance we have to give our babies a better life is to elect Donald Trump President of the United States.”

—Amber Rose

Last night, I watched in real time as conservatives in this country scrambled to find a way to take the momentum Trump picked up from a near-miss assassination attempt and began to instantly squander it.

First came the waves of people who could not eject themselves quickly enough from the ranks of Trump supporters because he picked J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Now, I don’t know anything about Vance. I’ll admit, I don’t like what I’ve seen from him. Eight years ago, he was comparing Trump to Hitler and saying that anyone who might vote for him is an idiot. Now he’s his running mate? This is very odd.

My gut read on Vance is not positive. He strikes me as an opportunist. His “conversion” to being a Trump supporter (which doesn’t matter to me one way or the other except that he’s the presumptive VP the next administration) seems forced and insincere. He says he came to see that Trump was the best president of his lifetime. As far as I know, he didn’t say how. That bothers me. I want to be persuaded he’s on the same team. But there’s a lot a I don’t know, and I’ve never made a voting decision based on a vice presidential pick, so whatever.

My philosophy? Suck it up and move on, and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

But according to countless tweets I read last night, that’s just not an option for a lot of folks. One after another, I saw people declaring that after the assassination attempt, they were very seriously considering voting Trump, but now they’re out. Why? Who the hell knows?

But Vance was just the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal, the one so many people were foaming at the mouth over, was the fact that Amber Rose spoke at the RNC last night.

Look at this reaction:

Another:

One more:

And arguably the most annoying, just because it comes from the Bearded Fart Bubble that is Matt Walsh:

I may have lost my religion, but I remain politically conservative on most issues. I think it’s best for the people of this country, and for the integrity and wellbeing of the nation itself.

So you may find it odd that I don’t have a problem with this choice.

I get it: Amber Rose is not conservative by any conventional metric. She does have an OnlyFans, which she describes as being like a “digital strip club” (she began her modeling career as a stripper, evidently) that is produced by her husband and which she finds “fun” to create content for. She created the “SlutWalk,” self-described as “Empowering women & LGBTQ+ community while ending sexual and social injustice, derogatory labeling & gender inequality.” (The website for that organization no longer works, FWIW.) And yeah, she recently did a podcast with the dude from the Church of Satan and is definitely pro-abortion.

Not an ideal choice to represent conservative values, no question about it.

But here’s the thing:

Maybe conservatives don’t know it, but the whole country is drifting leftward. Religion is dying out in this country. 30% of respondents to a recent Associated Press poll said they have no religious affiliation. That’s an 8% increase over a similar poll taken two years earlier. 44% of those polled say they have “hardly any confidence at all” in those running organized religions. 55% said they don’t consider themselves “religious” because they “don’t like organized religion.”

Another thing that’s changing are our demographics. There have been large upswings in minority populations. Whites are still the largest demographic in America by far, but there is a definitive shift in color and ethnic background that is playing out over time. Culturally, the effects of anti-racism efforts (and woke mind viruses) make all youth populations more likely to be attracted to messages from people of color.

Whether we’re happy about these changes or not, they are happening, and it’s the reality we have to deal with. Our country is experiencing a moral and spiritual crisis (of which I suppose I’m now a part), but I’ve always believed that you can’t apply political solutions to moral problems.

If you want things to change, you have to change the culture, because politics is downstream. And changing the culture takes time, effort, and favorable circumstance.

If you want to win in the mean time, so you can keep the country from going completely off the rails and into a ditch, or getting into some horrifying war, or letting the border invasion get worse, or letting inflation rise to even higher levels, you’re going to have to make some compromises.

We are not in a bargaining position.

Amber Rose makes sense as a facet of this new, increasingly populist GOP, because she has 24.3 million followers on Instagram, and countless thousands more across other platforms. She’s a woman of color. She is followed by many in minority communities who do not traditionally vote Republican. And while she does not share the social values of American conservatives, that wasn’t the point of her appeal at the convention. It was far more fundamental than that. Her message primarily about things we can all agree on:

She spoke as a mother, a daughter, a citizen. As someone who was convinced by the Left that Trump was a racist and did her own research to find out the truth. As someone who believes life was better for all Americans under Trump’s leadership than it is today.

It’s an appeal that may reach many disaffected voters in the demographic categories where someone like Rose is popular. It gives them permission to vote differently than they have in the past. It broadens the already large-scale populist appeal that Trump holds with the working people of America.

In elections where states are sometimes decided by a couple thousand votes, this was a calculated political move. Amber Rose will never be the face of the GOP or of the future of conservatism in America. But her popularity and notoriety are valuable in making her an ambassador to those who would never have considered voting for Trump otherwise.

And the Left agrees with me. Here’s Van Jones talking about the speech:

Democratic strategist Van Jones said Monday that model and rapper Amber Rose’s speech was “the most effective” of Day 1 of the Republican National Convention and therefore could be “the most dangerous” for Democrats in this election cycle.

“That was probably the most dangerous speech for the Democratic coalition,” Jones said Monday evening on CNN. “That is a young woman of color. She is describing the experience that a lot of people have — feeling that maybe, if you’re around too many liberals, you might get criticized too much or you might not be able to speak your mind, and she spoke to it really well.”

“And she’s way more famous than any of us up here — I’m going to tell you that — way more famous. And so to the extent that these guys are trying to bust up our coalition, that was a bunker buster right there,” Jones, a CNN commentator, said.

If it moves the needle, it was worth it. If it tells people they don’t have to think exactly like us to support better, saner governance, that’s a good thing. We don’t live in a confessional state or a moral utopia. We live in the post-Christian west, and we still have a need to put food on the table and keep roofs over our heads and gas in our cars. We need a strong national defense, a secure border, and our sons and daughters not to be sent off to stupid foreign wars.

We’re not voting for Amber Rose because she’s on that stage. We’re voting for a guy who did a good enough job that even someone like Amber Rose, with very different views than our own, wants to risk losing money and friends and status just to publicly support him.

Which brings me to another point:

Conservatives who are crying about Trump rejecting support for a federal abortion ban are out of their damn minds. Abortion is evil, full stop. But Trump already gave us what we’d been asking for for decades, a thing that seemed totally impossible.

He gave us justices who overturned Roe, and sent abortion back to the states.

And Constitutionally, that’s where abortion belongs. The rights of citizenship are delineated in our Constitution as belonging to those who are “born or naturalized” in this country. Lacking language that explicitly mentions the unborn, abortion is a clear 10th Amendment issue — it’s for the states to decide. A federal ban would require either an executive overreach or a constitutional amendment. The first is very risky, and would create a massive political backlash that would swing any subsequent election hard the other way. The second is simply mathematically impossible at this point in time. It does not have the support.

It’s such an incredibly stupid hill to die on, because a federal ban was never truly on the table. As I wrote over a decade ago:

This is not a problem government can fix. We cannot slap a law on this gaping intellectual and spiritual wound and think that our society will survive. The country is divided roughly in half on the issue of abortion, which leads to the second point – using our current approach and tactics, we do not have the political will to change the law of the land.

Some have discussed a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution. While noble, this would invariably fail to garner enough votes to pass muster. A constitutional amendment outlawing abortion would require a simple majority vote in both houses of Congress and a two-thirds majority passage by the 50 states. And even if an amendment were able to be drafted that would bring in more of the fence-sitters, it would surely include exception clauses for rape, incest, and life of the mother. If such an amendment were to pass, we would then transition from a jurisprudence that interprets an implicit right to abortion within the 14th Amendment to one that grants an explicit right under specific circumstances, even if it outlaws it in all others. This is a toehold in judicial precedent that can be exploited and expanded over time.

Again: if you want politics to change, you need to change the culture. I don’t see anyone doing that. I don’t see conservatives producing great art. I don’t see us producing great music or cinema or works of fiction. I don’t see us winning hearts and minds. You can’t legislate where you fail to persuade. This is a government of, by, and for the people — at least in theory.

So, if you want change, you have to start with the people. And no, that doesn’t mean going online and bitching about the people you disagree with. That is not a strategy.

In the meantime, if conservatives in this country want to stop losing, we’re going to have to learn to live with something less than 100% ideological purity in our politics. We may have to live with less than 50%. We are going to have to get comfortable with making alliances with people we don’t really want on our side, as long as their interests in fundamentals of governance sufficiently align with our own.

That was why any of us voted for Trump in the first place. It worked out far better than we hoped, so maybe we should stop clutching our pearls and running home and actually learn something from that.

We can have victories on some things, or defeat on everything. We have to choose.