For all of my adult life, I had always regarded myself as a \u201cconservative.\u201d\u00a0 No more.<\/p>\n
The reason for this is as simple as it was sobering for me to finally and fully realize:<\/p>\n
Conservatism, at least as it is embodied in the persons of so-called \u201cconservative leaders,\u201d meaning Republican politicians and media celebrities, is the stuff of frauds, cowards, and losers.<\/p>\n
My language is harsh, but given the stakes for society as a whole, particularly the millions upon millions of Americans whose chains they incessantly jerk, the current situation calls for nothing less than brute honesty.<\/p>\n
The so-called \u201cconservative movement\u201d\u2014a tenuous coalition of sorts of the GOP, the conservative media, think tanks, and activist groups\u2014is, in effect, an ever-morphing looting operation that is predicated upon not just exploiting, but igniting the worst fears of its constituents in exchange for votes for GOP politicians and profits for these politicians\u2019 apologists in the media.<\/p>\n
Period.<\/p>\n
Legions of conservatives, with the greatest of ease, should be able to effortlessly prove this assessment incorrect by simply submitting evidence to the contrary.\u00a0 Not a single person can do anything of the kind.\u00a0 This is because everyone, and no one more so than conservative leaders themselves, especially the scribblers and talkers in the Big Conservative (the Big Con) media, knows damn well that America has for decades been plunging full-steam ahead into the future that the left has always envisioned for it.<\/p>\n
In fact\u2014and this is the contradiction that should be easy enough to spot if only more people would repurpose their minds and see <\/em>it for what it is\u2014<\/em>the conservative movement depends<\/em> upon its leaders convincing its constituents that things are forever getting worse<\/em> and always on the brink of being at the point of no return.<\/p>\n In other words, practically every time that conservative leaders open their mouths, whenever they issue their fundraising solicitations or throw out their \u201cclickbait,\u201d they admit that they have been an unmitigated failure when it comes to arresting the advances of the left.<\/p>\n And yet rank-and-file conservatives continue to swallow hook, line, and sinker the illusion that those raking in millions from them are interested in \u201cfighting the left\u201d\u2014as opposed to promoting their own material and professional self-interests.<\/p>\n This is the fraudulence.<\/p>\n However, the fraudulence of these Big Con frauds isn\u2019t necessarily as crass as this description might suggest.\u00a0 At the end of the day, many, while they may not from any moral or intellectual considerations genuinely sympathize with the left, acquiesce in or otherwise refuse to truly fight against the latter because they fear<\/em> it.<\/p>\n They fear so-called \u201cCancel Culture.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 They fear \u201cthe Woke\u201d mob.<\/p>\n Nor is their fear merely the fear of being run out of Polite (\u201cPolitically Correct\u201d) Society.\u00a0 Given the left\u2019s proclivity for violence, their fear is more primal: They fear being physically hurt or worse.<\/p>\n Fear itself is natural and, inasmuch as it exists by design to keep us safe from danger, it is good.\u00a0 There is no shame in the possession of fear in itself, and certainly rational that anyone should fear the fate that the left characteristically reserves for those who it deems insufficiently \u201cprogressive.\u201d<\/p>\n What is <\/em>shameful\u2014what is cowardly<\/em>\u2014is not the possession of <\/em>fear, but the possession by <\/em>it.<\/p>\n It is shameful\u2014it is cowardly\u2014for a person to indulge his fear while laboring diligently to convince others that he is bravely waging battle against the very forces of evil that own him.<\/p>\n It is doubly shameful\u2014doubly cowardly\u2014for such a person to persuade others to part with their hard-earned resources to support what he has conned them into thinking is his \u201cfight against the left.\u201d<\/p>\n The fraudulence and the cowardice of conservative leaders are the stuff of losers.\u00a0 Loser talk is ubiquitous throughout the universe of Big Conservatism.\u00a0 If the millions of Big Con consumers who have been imbibing its product daily for decades took a step back to adopt a Meta perspective on the whole enterprise, they would at long last recognize it for the thorough-going defeatism that it is.<\/p>\n The talk of the Big Con is the talk of defeat.\u00a0 This is not the talk of fighters, much (much<\/em>) less that of warriors<\/em> (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>).\u00a0 Examples abound ad infinitum.\u00a0 Recently, for the first time in months, I tuned in to Mark Levin\u2019s radio show while running an errand. It took me all but a minute to be reminded as to why I stopped listening in the first place.\u00a0 I changed the station to put on some music.<\/p>\n A woman called into Levin\u2019s program to express her fear that \u201cthey\u201d\u2014meaning Democrat politicians?\u2014would force <\/em>the rest of us to allow illegal aliens to live in our homes.\u00a0 Levin immediately disabused her of this <\/em>fear.\u00a0 Then he expressed another<\/em>, the fear that \u201cthey\u201d would \u201c<\/em>abolish\u2026the suburbs<\/em><\/a> [.]\u201d<\/p>\n Levin\u2019s fear talk on this one occasion is but a single illustration of the kind of talk that has become the Standard Operating Procedure of the Big Con.\u00a0 Conservative voices are forever screeching about how the left is going to \u201ctake away\u201d our freedom of speech; our Second Amendment, the right to protect ourselves; our right to worship; and the United States Constitution itself.<\/p>\n And on and on.<\/p>\n For certain, there can be no doubt that all of this is indeed true.\u00a0 There is nothing in the least dishonorable or cowardly about sounding the alarm on the left\u2019s intentions.\u00a0 This, in itself, is not fear mongering.<\/p>\n What is <\/em>dishonorable, cowardly, and fear-mongering is whipping up the anxieties of millions of Americans only to supply them with no real<\/em> hope for change.\u00a0 The only snake oil that these salesmen and women sell as a solution to the impending catastrophe is to\u2014what else?\u2014vote Republican<\/em>!<\/p>\n As if voting Republican hasn\u2019t proven to be the ultimate exercise in futility for a half-of-a-century.<\/p>\n Yet we needn\u2019t look back some 50 or so years.\u00a0 We need only look at this past year:\u00a0 A country with a Republican President, a Republican-controlled Senate, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, and most of whose states are under the rule of Republican governors and legislatures was reduced in 2020 to an internment<\/em> camp.\u00a0 Constitutional liberties indefinitely suspended, the economy wrecked, churches and other houses of worship forced to close\u2014incalculable damage of every variety has been visited upon Americans in the name of combatting a cold-virus that, even according to the Official (but false) Narrative, has a survival rate of anywhere between 99.5-99.9%.<\/p>\n And all under Republican leadership. The Big Con has not only done nothing to stop this fundamental transformation.\u00a0 It has encouraged it by feeding into the Lie that COVID is, as President Trump refers to it, \u201cthe Plague.\u201d<\/p>\n Even if Republican politicians had not repeatedly proven themselves utterly useless in resisting the onslaught of the left, the very fact that when more Americans than at any other time in their country\u2019s history<\/em> acted on the advice of the Big Con and voted Republican, their votes were essentially nullified by systemic election fraud.<\/p>\n And neither elected Republicans nor those in the Big Con media did a thing about it.<\/p>\n How can one, at this point, not be convinced that there is no line in the sand that those in the Big Con are willing to draw when it comes to the left?\u00a0 Conservatives\u2019 idea of \u201cfighting the left\u201d seems to be this:<\/p>\n The left: Jump six feet in the air!<\/p>\n The Big Con: I will not.<\/p>\n The left: If you do not, we assure you that you will be \u201ccancelled.\u201d<\/p>\n The Big Con: Wait!\u00a0 I said that I won\u2019t jump six feet.\u00a0 <\/em>Because I refuse to stoop to your level, I will only jump three feet.\u00a0 <\/em>Take that!<\/p>\n And then the Big Con will take that exchange and put it on YouTube under a bad ass thumbnail with the caption, \u201cThe Big Con DESTROYS the Left,\u201d or one that reads,\u201d \u201cWatch as the Left gets DESTROYED by the Big Con.\u201d<\/p>\n The reality is that the left will accomplish every single one of its goals as long as its only potential obstacle is Big Conservatism, for the latter isn\u2019t any kind of obstacle at all. If the left fails to achieve its professed obstacles it is only because, for whatever reasons, it has decided to forego them.<\/p>\n When conservative movement leaders say things like, \u201cUnless we elect Republicans, Democrats will take away our guns and speech and all of our other God-given and Constitutional freedoms,\u201d they may as well come straight out and explicitly admit that they wouldn\u2019t so much as raise a finger to stop State agents from invading their homes and dragging their own children off to slave labor camps or to who knows wherever else as long as Democrats issued executive orders to this effect or the Supreme Court ruled that it was Constitutional:<\/p>\n Either vote Republican or prepare to subject yourself and your loved ones to any and all evils that the party in power has in store for you.<\/p>\n After all, as these admirers of the Founders\u2014you know, those 18th<\/sup> century men who risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to fight a bloody war against the most powerful empire in the world at that time so that they and their posterity could be free\u2014are forever instructing their audiences, violence is never, ever permissible (except for when it is the basis for establishing America or whenever and wherever the American military does so for the sake of ostensibly protecting America\u2019s freedoms).<\/p>\n The Big Conservative movement consists of those with whom one would never want to be stuck in a fox hole.\u00a0 So how, their constituents need to ask themselves, can conservative leaders \u201cfight\u201d against the left or, for that matter, against anyone?<\/p>\n If conservatives were serious about \u201cfighting,\u201d here are some examples of how political discourse should <\/em>play out:<\/p>\n The Left: We need to revisit this whole Second Amendment matter.<\/p>\n Conservatives: \u00a0No.<\/p>\n The Left: But \u201cgun-violence\u201d is out of control and\u2026<\/p>\n Conservatives:\u00a0 We said no.<\/p>\n It is over our dead bodies that you will ever succeed in violating our God-given right to defend ourselves, our families, and our communities against the tyranny of the government and the citizenry alike.\u00a0 Now, you can try.\u00a0 But, like our ancestors before us who knew that there is no freedom unless people are willing to back it up by whichever means necessary, we\u2019re going to do everything within our power to insure that it is we, and not you, who return with<\/em>\u2014and not on<\/em>\u2014our shields (to paraphrase the Spartan mothers who admonished their sons who were heading off to war that they must return home either as victors over the enemy or as corpses who died gallantly in battle).<\/p>\n If conservative leaders had ever really been interested in combating the left, then this is the uncompromising position that they would take on any and all topics that are, or should be, nonnegotiable.<\/p>\n Give me liberty or give me death.\u00a0 It was good enough for Patrick Henry and his contemporaries.\u00a0 And they intended for it to be the spirit that they would pass on to subsequent generations of Americans.<\/p>\n If conservative leaders were serious about \u201cfighting the left,\u201d then they would be cancelling the Cancelers of the Cancel Culture, or at least reminding them that for however invincible they believed they were, the Cancelers are mortals who are no less vulnerable to all of the harms that they inflict, or encourage to be inflicted, upon those on whom the Cancelers set their sights.<\/p>\n The current reality is a far cry from this.\u00a0 The enemies of freedom don\u2019t fear the Big Con because the Big Con is not fearful.<\/p>\n As long as this remains the case, and we remain on this same trajectory as a country, the left will get whatever it is they pursue.<\/p>\n So what are decent people who only want to live in peace and in freedom supposed to do?\u00a0 In a previous article, I wrote at length about this.\u00a0 A brief recap:<\/p>\n Weight train.\u00a0 Strength can only ever help if you have to engage in a physical confrontation with those who would prey upon you or your loved ones or any other innocents in your presence. Also, by making one\u2019s body strong, one strengthens one\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n Yet weight training isn\u2019t sufficient. Not by a long shot.\u00a0 Training in a real martial art, a warrior art (and not a \u201ccombat\u201d sport<\/em>) is both necessary and sufficient (For the interested, see here<\/a> and here<\/a>). \u00a0A warrior art will equip one with not just the physical ability to defend life and liberty against the violent, but the mental focus, the moral will, to do so.<\/p>\n Bullies are only ever deterred from attacking those who they know are truly dangerous.\u00a0 Conservative leaders are nothing of the kind.\u00a0 So, normal patriotic American citizens need to stop being \u201cfollowers\u201d of these leaders and make themselves into their own leaders, dangerous people cut from the cloth of America\u2019s Founders.<\/p>\n Tread on no one.\u00a0 Let no one tread on you and yours.<\/p>\n This is the American Way, the way of good and dangerous people.<\/p>\n It is not the way of Big Conservatism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For all of my adult life, I had always regarded myself as a \u201cconservative.\u201d\u00a0 No more. The reason for this is as simple as it was sobering for me to finally and fully realize: Conservatism, at least as it is embodied in the persons of so-called \u201cconservative leaders,\u201d meaning Republican politicians and media celebrities, is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n