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No frenemies to the right?

We must defend truth and oppose moral evil, even if it means criticizing the home team


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No frenemies to the right?
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Last week, Politico released a bombshell report that has roiled the political right in the United States. The report details the contents of private Telegram chats over seven months among leaders of Young Republicans in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. The group chats reveal some truly reprehensible statements from Young Republicans who thought their comments would remain private.

Politico describes the contents of the group chats this way: “They referred to Black people as ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.”

According to Politico, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair used the words “n-ga” and “n--guh” more than a dozen times. The vice chair of New York Young Republicans referred to rape as “epic,” and the chair sent a message saying that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

There is much more revealed in the leak, and it doesn’t get any better. The chats reveal some of the most vile rhetoric imaginable, and it is coming from young up-and-comers in the Republican party.

Conservatives are rightly skeptical of Politico’s motivations for such a report. I for one don’t trust them. Nevertheless, Politico has the receipts, and the revelations in the report have relaunched debate about the so-called “no enemies to the right” (NETTR) wing of the dissident right. Christopher Rufo describes the basic concept of NETTR as the belief that “constant infighting, gatekeeping, and self-regulation have rendered the Right fractured and impotent” and that “establishment conservatives must cease to criticize or exclude the voices on the movement’s outer limits.”

The NETTR principle would prevent any conservative from criticizing or excluding the extreme margins of the right—even if they express themselves in racist or anti-Semitic terms. Unity among the political coalition trumps all, and internal critiques and exclusion destroy unity. At least that is how the NETTR principle goes.

The NETTR approach received some backing from high-profile conservatives after the Politico report appeared. Matt Walsh complained that the right “doesn’t stick together” but rather keeps “throwing each other to the wolves” while the left stays united. He encourages no public criticism for the Young Republican chats, likening it to siding with the left. Vice President J. D. Vance deflected from the group chats by saying it’s a distraction from what’s really important: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys—they tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”

Vice President Vance is sadly mistaken on this point. The reality is that these aren’t “young boys.” They are men and young leaders within the Republican Party, and some of them have been staffers for Republican politicians. Neither they nor the party nor the conservative cause is served by pretending that they are children and therefore immune to criticism.

Everyone can see the hypocrisy of rebuking the errors of political enemies while defending or excusing errors of your political allies.

To be sure, there are unwise and bad ways of criticizing the home team. But there are also good ways. We need to learn how to do it well, not avoid doing it at all. Every successful organization or body needs to find some way to impose self-discipline. Companies, armies, nations, churches, NFL teams all have to do it. In the human body, we call those white-blood cells. It’s as if NETTR wants to remove all the white-blood cells from conservatism. How long will a body last without white-blood cells? Not very long, and neither will conservatism.

Consider how the left is treating Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general of Virginia. Leaked text messages written by Jones in 2022 suggest that a Republican political opponent should be shot. The left’s white blood cells have atrophied to the point that no Democratic politicians are calling for Jones to step out of the race but instead are rallying behind him. This is an inexcusable moral abdication on the part of the Democratic Party, and the party will likely pay an electoral price for it. It would be the same if the right were to adopt the same tactic.

All conservatives (especially Christian ones) should know that they are duty bound to say what is true. The NETTR calculation is immoral and unprincipled because it is not only a refusal to say what is true but an active campaign to defend what is not true. Dissembling is no virtue, especially when it is being used as a cover for moral evil. And make no mistake. Racial epithets and jokes about the holocaust are beyond the pale and ought to be marginalized. No one should feel that conservatives will “have their back” if they engage in this kind of speech. Everyone can see the hypocrisy of rebuking the errors of political enemies while defending or excusing errors of your political allies. This is what the Bible calls “unequal weights and measures,” both of which are “an abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 20:10).

NETTR is also bad politics. If you commit yourself to never criticizing your political allies, then you are opening your coalition to bad actors to rampage through your group. Right now, there are bad actors trying to stake a claim within the conservative coalition. Failing to police our own ranks doesn’t build trust or unity. It’s transparently hypocritical and will drive people way from our cause. If politics is the art of the possible, NETTR is the art of making it impossible to persuade Americans that conservative policies are good.

None of these concerns can be waved away by claiming, “the liberals are worse” or “these are just kids” or “they were only joking.” All of those excuses are evasions of the truth. Conservatism is about conserving the good, the beautiful, and the true. If your “conservatism” isn’t fighting tooth and nail for that, then it isn’t conservatism nor is it worth conserving.


Denny Burk

Denny serves as a professor of Biblical studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and as the president of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. He also serves as one of the teaching pastors at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. He is the author of numerous books, including What Is the Meaning of Sex? (Crossway, 2013), Transforming Homosexuality (P&R, 2015), and a commentary on the pastoral epistles for the ESV Expository Commentary (Crossway, 2017).

@DennyBurk


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