Why this heartland Trump supporter refuses to contribute to Roger Stone's defense fund.

In an April 7 essay, an anonymous Gateway Pundit "Assistant Editor" asked readers to contribute to a Roger Stone defense fund. A link to it was included. 

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/04/roger-stone-needs-your-help-under-fire-by-far-left-media-and-shadowy-liberal-operatives/

The unnamed writer urged against Stone's litigious and assuredly disagreeable adversaries, and appealed to ground-level Trump supporters' self interest:


Some of you in the Republican Party and conservative movement do not like Roger Stone...[But] if they can destroy a man like Stone, who has never been afraid of brutal trench warfare, how easily can they destroy and silence you?

But the enemy of my political enemies is not necessarily my friend. The Gateway Pundit's attempt to pass off Roger Stone as a figure deserving of average Trump backers' sympathy and sponsorship is insulting. Essentially, common folks Stone has a history of slurring were pressed to provide for his courtroom bankroll.

Stone has of late been visible in several venues upon which I generally rely for information and perspective, including the Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity programs, and sites like Infowars, Breitbart, and the afore-cited Gateway Pundit. [Full disclosure: I have previously submitted essays to those last three.] 

Given the uncritical reception and even flattering accord Stone has enjoyed from them, I understand they are not without fault. Heartland Americans' interests may not be theirs. I take them with a grain of salt.

Below is an excerpt from my new book Ideas Afoot. It is followed by additional thoughts on ethics and morality. Also explored is the promise of the populist Trump Revolution for whose electoral triumph millions of common Americans, including myself, worked and in whch we today take pride.

The velveteen mountebank

Candidate Trump was certainly not a hardscrabble everyman plucked from on-the-road poverty. But he did offer the same stirring quality as Frank Capra's classic cinema John Doe character, evoking national pride and citizen unity in shared struggles.

Wonderfully evident in the ongoing American grassroots-vs-Deep State, Trump Revolution is the vitality of the common man's independence and individuality.

(Remember, though, messengers are human and can prove weaker than their messages. As a general rule, it is better to advocate the cause rather than any single spokesman, lest it suffer should a figurehead stumble.)

During his campaign, Trump told rallies that, as president, he could draw on effective operatives "some of whom are nice people, others you wouldn't want to have dinner with." One would hope his firmest values and attitudes more closely match those of his heartland voters than the sickening ones held by onetime advisor Roger Stone.

Stone has a considerable background in the national electoral world. He is a decades-spanning strategist whose earliest orthodox political work was with Richard Nixon. His subsequent positions included ones with Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan.

He knows well the ways of politics, of national campaigning, and is doubtless a skilled operative. But today, he seems to pursue self-promotion ahead of any other interest. And his current visibility on otherwise recommendable stages Alex Jones' Infowars and Sean Hannity's Fox News program disturbs. 

Sophie Gilbert captured Stone well in her May 11, 2017 Atlantic 
review of Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone:

With his dandyish chalkstripe suits, his aggressively manicured hairstyles, and his Nixon tattoo, Stone, as the New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin memorably puts it in the film, is the 'sinister Forrest Gump of politics, who just happens to show up in the background every time there's a constitutional crisis or a major scandal.'

Now in his 60s, Gilbert later notes, sporting bowties, suspenders, and an overbearing air of insoucience, Stone resembles no one so much as a senior Pee Wee Herman. He stokes the caricature of the mustache-twirling plutocrat, being interviewed in an opulent dining room next to a three-olive martini, where he expounds on 'Stone's Rules,' one-sentence aphorisms like, 'It's better to be infamous than not to be famous at all,' and 'One man's dirty trick is another man's civil political action.'

Following Trump's very narrow (four points) second place finish in Iowa's February 2016 caucus, the candidate was both gracious and appreciative of the hard work of his Hawkeye State supporters.

"My experience in Iowa was a great one," he tweeted, the day after. "I started out with all of the experts saying I couldn't do well there and ended up in second place. Nice."

Also, that day: "I will be talking about my wonderful experience in Iowa and the simultaneous unfair treatment by the media - later in New Hampshire. Big crowd."

But the class demonstrated by Trump was not shown by Stone.

"Iowa hicks choose wrong, consistent with their history," was how he tweet-slammed Iowa voters, once the state's caucus results had been counted.

(A lifelong Iowan who'd caucused for Trump, touted his candidacy in several state newspapers, and backed him in the general, I took Stone's slurring personally.) 

Stone's freely voiced contempt for the common man was much closer to Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" slur than to candidate Trump's impassioned declarations of affinity with average folks.

In August 2015, the Trump campaign had announced its firing of Stone: "Mr. Trump fired Roger Stone last night. We have a tremendously successful campaign and Roger wanted to use the campaign for his own personal publicity," a statement read.

The Machiavellian fop maintained it was he who had chosen to sever relations. But Stone's subsequent promoting on Trump's Twitter feed of a show he hoped to launch was in keeping with the campaign's complaint that he had exploited his association with Trump for personal aggrandizement. 

Trump remarked of Stone: "[H]e likes to get a lot of publicity for himself."

The affectedly prim libertine's post-2016 Iowa Caucus demeaning of voters did have fetid precedents, one of which I'll detail, here.

"Hicks in Iowa shouldn't pick next president" was an October 12, 2011 essay Stone penned for his Stone Zone site. "I don't know why we should abrogate our right to choose the next president to a bunch of hayseeds because of some quaint notion that 'they should be first," he sneered.

That conflicts resoundingly with Trump's assurances to 2016 Iowa campaign crowds that he supported maintaining the state's first-in-the-nation status.

Also among Stone's 2011 complaints: Iowans are "stout [that one describes me] and a lot of them smoke;" Iowa restaurant food is "awful" ("one cannot possibly find edible linguine in white clam sauce," he sniffed); and the state's hoteliers raise room charges for what he claimed Iowans regarded as "them Jew-boy reporters from New York." 

That last (untrue, of course) assertion that Iowans typically harbor nasty, antisemitic attitudes was not attributed to any actual resident. It sprang instead from Stone's own sour prejudice against blue collar heartland Americans.

Again, Stone's pinky-aloft bias reminded of Hillary's favoring of a sissified persuasion that reviles regular citizens.  

In an August 2016 private tweet to a colleague, Julian Assange denied Stone's assertion that he had communicated with the Wikileaks founder and had advance knowledge of related activity. "Stone is a bullshitter. Trying to a) imply that he knows anything b) that he contributed to our hard work."

In 2017, Stone claimed credit for arranging Trump's pre-second Hillary debate appearance with Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones.

Broaddrick shot back in a tweet that Stone "had no part in my appearing at second debate. I have never met or talked with Stone."

A May14, 2017 Gateway Pundit piece related this revelatory exchange from the Netflix film:

STONE: Sometimes, you confuse me with a Stephen Colbert character I sometimes play called 'Roger Stone.'"

INTERVIEWER: "What's the difference?"

STONE: "You'll have to figure that out."

"Politics with me isn't theater," the accessorized profligate once bragged to the Weekly Standard's Matt Labash. "It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake." ("Roger Stone, Political Animal" Labash / Weekly Standard November 5, 2007)

Underhanded gamesmanship does not advance the public interest, but only opportunistically pretends at decent intentions. 

Believing in something pure and bigger than oneself is not naive. It is, instead, the basis for every worthy undertaking from the drafting of the Constitution to the present-day resurgence of patriotic populism. 

When 2016 candidate Trump had spoken of "people you wouldn't want to have dinner with," I didn't know who he meant. But that was then.



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I understand Stone once remarked that "Nothing's on the level." I hope to never be that unmitigatedly cynical, that devoid of faith. (As we Iowans know, belief is a far piece from gullibility and naivete.) For millions of Trump advocates like myself, there can be truth, goodness, and a something of much greater import than oneself. A positiveness to which wise men hold firm.

Comes now the question: "Of what moment are salutary ideas lest put into practice, lest one's ballot choice is victorious and then in a position to implement them?"

That basically endorses the 'ends justify the means' argument. It assumes that right cannot triumph alone, and requires wrong's scurrilous service. 

Of course, a superior philosophy can carry the electoral day without employing fraudulence and grubbiness. Otherwise: 'What does it gain a man..?'

That good and bad have ever conflicted is no cause to surrender. I will not be contributing to Roger Stone.