Cursed Be RINOs

How To Handle the Pharisees of Our Time

U.S. Senator John McCain, Uber-RINO

What to do with the RINOs who sell us out to a militant and diabolical Left to promote themselves or save their own hides?  Is there any real hope or purpose for patching things up with such people?

My recent column on Jenna Ellis’ self-interested settlement of her legal ethics case touched on this issue, and it struck a nerve among MAGA backers.  My article exposed how Ellis had ended the leftist State Bar threats to her law license by recanting her claims—made on behalf of her client, the Trump presidential campaign—of election fraud in the 2020 elections.  Townhall.com wrote a follow-up story about my article, quoting the responses of Trump election attorneys Sidney Powell and John Eastman.

Along with other Trump counsel such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and quite unlike Ellis, Powell and Eastman have refused to buckle.  By holding firm against corrupt leftist attempts to disbar them, they have been able to avoid disavowing the president’s claims of electoral chicanery in the last presidential election.  In contrast, Ellis chose simply to put the unpleasant matter behind her at the expense of Trump and MAGA, then offered phony excuses of the type we’ve heard for years from RINO politicians. 

The strong reaction provoked by Jenna Ellis’ betrayal was a reminder that after decades of RINO sabotage, the Right no longer tolerates such duplicity.  “RINO,” of course, stands for “Republicans in Name Only,” and it’s become the stock nickname for those who sell out conservative principles for the money, power and prestige doled out by the increasingly dominant Left.  In prior articles I’ve explained how the Left amassed this influence:  namely, by taking over the nation’s universities, which produce the graduates who become, in time, the wealthiest and most powerful among us.

Examples of RINO Treachery

For no less than half a century, RINO turncoats have seen the Left tightening their malevolent grip on the nation but have done nothing robust to stop them, lest they be required to fight and risk something significant.  I came to know this category of greedy coward first as a student at Harvard Law School.  There, right-leaning students would privately thank me for articulating our shared beliefs in class, then quietly shuffle on down the road of life to store up treasure without confronting the mushrooming darkness they witnessed taking shape.

In politics, I crossed light sabers with the Darth Vader of all RINOs, U.S. Senator John McCain.  McCain detested and sought to destroy any figure in his home state who tried to secure the border.  I lost those light-saber duels—not surprisingly given the disparity in power and influence—and, as a result, Arizonans lost an effective champion of border security.  McCain then literally worked with the Obama administration to promote, through U.S. Senate confirmation, people who successfully attacked me and my career—and publicly chuckled about it all. 

Trump has had to deal with the entire thundering herd of RINOs, led by failed Republican presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney.

The McCains turned RINO political swindling into a high art form.  They and their coterie masqueraded as Republicans right up to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020, when they finally dropped their masks and officially endorsed the Democrat, Joe Biden.  By cashing out at the top of the RINO market, they reaped a tidy windfall.  Biden awarded McCain’s leftist widow, Cindy McCain, along with McCain’s former RINO colleague, U.S. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, ambassadorships in the Biden administration, where they now so serve.  Meghan McCain continued her ride with the Fake News Media on “The View,” until, that is, even they couldn’t stand her.

Trump, of course, has had to deal with the entire thundering herd of RINOs, with McCain and, later, U.S. Senator Mitt Romney leading the charge.  Notably, these two towering traitors to their party were no less than the GOP nominees for president right before Trump.  This fact explains their obvious jealousy of the man elected our forty-fifth president.  Just as important, it underscores how thoroughly deluded GOP voters were for so many years that such utter scoundrels could become the Republican nominees for president.  This decades-long pattern and practice of hoodwinking the GOP’s own members was so powerful that only one Donald J. Trump proved able to finally break it all into smithereens.

The above is merely a light sampling of recent RINO hijinks.  Eventually a full muster roll of RINO villains over the years should be written up so that a proper accounting can be rendered.  Present purposes require only the above examples of RINO flimflam to place into context the central matter before us:  How do we deal with the sleazy RINO quislings among us?  For they are not going away, and they manifestly hope to regain control of the Republican Party in 2024.

Republican Pharisees

Do we treat these con artists generously, seeking their political cooperation—or do we mete out some sort of execration, cutting them off evermore?

The issue is similar to, yet distinct from, how the early Christian church responded to believers who—in response to persecution—rejected martyrdom and recanted their faith to save their lives.  The scenario with RINOs is obviously different in that an early Christian’s failure of courage did not entail a sale of influence to the enemies of the church à la Judas Iscariot.  RINOs, in contrast, are outright collaborators.  They prosper by trading on their credentials as Republicans to provide a bipartisan gloss to the left-leaning ruling class.  They are not individuals who give in reluctantly to avoid torture, but cynical leaders such as Petain and the Vichy contingent, who selfishly validate a wicked regime.

All great nations and faiths officially call out and revile such scum, if only to teach the young what not to become when they grow up.  American children learn of the betrayal of Benedict Arnold; British kids are taught the Gunpowder Plot and commemorate it with the Guy Fawkes Holiday (and wear the still-popular mask).  Villains in religious history such as Goliath and Pontius Pilate remain famous for such legitimate pedagogical reasons.  Christ, of course, paid special attention to the Pharisees, who collaborated meretriciously with the Romans to keep the local population in line.  He even articulated curses for them:  "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in." (Matthew 23:13).

Such exhortations are known as “imprecations,” and they are found throughout the Bible.  There is a set of some 20 Psalms known as the “imprecatory psalms,” in which God is asked to bring down judgment on the wicked.  An example is Psalm 69:26-28:

For they persecute those you wound
and talk about the pain of those you hurt.
Charge them with crime upon crime;
do not let them share in your salvation.
May they be blotted out of the book of life
and not be listed with the righteous.

In 2 Timothy 4:14 God is asked to deal with Alexander the coppersmith, who Paul says “did me much evil: the Lord will repay him according to his deeds.”

Is An Alliance Even Possible?

Whether or not outright imprecations are endorsed, we face a basic question of political strategy:  Should we seek a working relationship with RINOs?  Of course, that’s only possible if a legitimate alliance can be brokered.  We have learned since the emergence of Trump that such a thing is impossible.  We can aspire to such unity only if we stick our collective head in the sand and ignore their raging, dishonest, unbalanced reaction to Trump and the MAGA movement over the last eight years of American politics. Their fury has a simple and nonnegotiable sticking point: How dare Trump and company expose and disrupt all our profitable self-dealing!

No doubt it would be helpful for our MAGA candidates to be able to win the votes of RINOs.  But the divisions Trump has revealed and solidified explode any doubts about such possibilities.  RINOs are self-interested knaves who, in the end, always choose their wallets and reputations over principles.  That means supporting the other team.

Let us leave to the realm of personal conscience whether to ask God to rain down judgment on such double-crossers (there’s certainly plenty of Biblical support for seeking such intervention).  All of us have seen our nation gravely disintegrate, and our children and grandchildren greatly disadvantaged, from their decades of double-dealing.  At a minimum, we must have our eyes wide open going forward and find a way to win elections without RINOs.  RINOs continue to work with the Left to oppose MAGA candidates by any means necessary, and to cancel good and decent Americans who oppose these joint operations.  If, in answer to prayer or by autonomous event, some fire and brimstone should fall upon them from the sky to break up their devilry, I know few men and women of goodwill who will be troubled.