I am among the few conservatives who didn’t love Paul Ryan as he was ascending to the heights of power in Republican politics, and among the few who don’t hate him now as a complete RINO.

I have always just thought he was “meh.” As an advocate for fiscally conservative principles, he is better than most, and on other issues, he is just a lump. He always struck me as the kind of guy who maybe should be in the room to remind people about the importance of fiscal issues–nobody seems to actually care much about the economic fragility induced by poor government policies–but he is not the guy who should set the priorities for the Party.

Ryan was on a panel on CBS, and he was asked about fighting the culture war, and his response was pure Paul Ryan:

A culture war is being waged against us, nonstop. The choice is not whether to fight a culture war; the choice is whether to surrender to the left’s cultural jihad or to defend all that is good, beautiful and true. https://t.co/RWeByskkK6

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 13, 2023

Ryan is right about his not ever being a culture warrior, and that the issue is polarizing. But he is completely wrong about whether Republicans even have a choice about fighting the culture war.

Pat Buchanan famously argued that the real battle for America was the culture war during the 1992 presidential campaign. Buchanan was absolutely right, despite being a not especially persuasive advocate for his position. Like Trump, he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, despite the fact that his critiques of the political class were spot on.

Buchanan’s pitch fell flat with the political establishment, which prefers milquetoast messengers with milquetoast messages. It’s no accident that Ryan was Mitt Romney’s running mate. Both as relatively slick, pretty, easy to digest, and pretty worthless politicians. They would probably make OK managers of a country moving in the right direction, but neither has the stomach to fight tough battles when necessary. They want to be loved by their peers, not saviors of a country in trouble.

Ryan is wrong about us having a choice about fighting a culture war because, frankly, we are not the aggressors in this war. Conservatives are not opening women’s locker rooms and women’s sports to men; conservatives aren’t grooming children with porn in the schools and hiding their children’s mental health from parents; conservatives aren’t engaged in pushing a “not-so-secret” queer agenda in children’s programming. And conservatives are not pushing a radical ideology that begins with the assumption that America is evil and that Western Civilization needs to be destroyed.

The Left is, and they own the institutions. They can censor us, cancel us, deprive us of jobs, sic the FBI after us, and even change laws in a manner designed to protect pedophiles.

Unless you are willing to submit to their demands, your only alternative is to fight back.

Paul Ryan is arguing we should submit.

No. Hell no!

I am just fine with people living their own lives as they see fit. I am not at all fine with people imposing their will on others, and that is what is happening. Demanding that books teaching kids how to log onto Grindr to find “tricks” will not be in schools is not censorship–it is an age-appropriate judgment that until 5 minutes ago would have been universally applauded. It is the people who are pushing such evil propaganda at kids as young as 10 who are the aggressors, and they must be resisted.

Conservatives don’t want to fight these battles because we are dragged into the mud to do so. We are forced to confront really disgusting realities, and bringing them up makes others uncomfortable. One of the great ironies of the culture war is that the Left benefits from being so bold and disgusting. Nobody wants to hear or see what is being done, and they blame conservatives for making them confront reality.

The messenger gets blamed when it is the message people hate.

We also get accused of hating others. A close friend asked me why I hate fat people or transgender people so much, and I was rather stunned. I don’t hate them. I am fat myself, although I wish I weren’t. I argue that fat acceptance movements that claim people are “healthy at any size” are themselves hateful because they harm fat people, and the push to trans the kids is evil because the kids will be harmed irreparably.

Nothing I can do will prevent people from “living their truth,” but it is at least important that they live with the truth. If you are fat, you are not healthy. If you insist on sterilizing and mutilating children, you are sterilizing, mutilating, and desexualizing them because kids who go on puberty blockers will never experience an orgasm. Lying to everybody about those facts is evil. Should adults make that choice, it is their choice to make.

No child can ever consent to such a thing, because they are incapable of understanding it. It would be like a surgeon informing a patient of the potential risks before surgery in Chinese. You can explain it all to the patient in tremendous detail, but an English speaker will have gathered nothing. Informed consent requires a full understanding of the consequences of an action, and the ability to reason. Children don’t have that.

Paul Ryan is just plain wrong, and he is wrong because he believes that conservatives are trying to fight against an inevitable social movement and that the game isn’t worth the candle. What he fails to understand is that there is nothing organic about the social changes happening–they are the result of an effort to undermine our social order, and that effort can be blocked.

It’s not like Americans woke up one day and decided to insert people with penises in locker rooms. The effort to make that happen has been intense, and we can fight back.

And because we can, we simply must.