For all of my adult life, I had always regarded myself as a “conservative.”  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 “conservative leaders,” meaning Republican politicians and media celebrities, is the stuff of frauds, cowards, and losers.

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.

The so-called “conservative movement”—a tenuous coalition of sorts of the GOP, the conservative media, think tanks, and activist groups—is, 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’ apologists in the media.

Period.

Legions of conservatives, with the greatest of ease, should be able to effortlessly prove this assessment incorrect by simply submitting evidence to the contrary.  Not a single person can do anything of the kind.  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.

In fact—and this is the contradiction that should be easy enough to spot if only more people would repurpose their minds and see it for what it is—the conservative movement depends upon its leaders convincing its constituents that things are forever getting worse and always on the brink of being at the point of no return.

In other words, practically every time that conservative leaders open their mouths, whenever they issue their fundraising solicitations or throw out their “clickbait,” they admit that they have been an unmitigated failure when it comes to arresting the advances of the left.

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 “fighting the left”—as opposed to promoting their own material and professional self-interests.

This is the fraudulence.

However, the fraudulence of these Big Con frauds isn’t necessarily as crass as this description might suggest.  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 it.

They fear so-called “Cancel Culture.”   They fear “the Woke” mob.

Nor is their fear merely the fear of being run out of Polite (“Politically Correct”) Society.  Given the left’s proclivity for violence, their fear is more primal: They fear being physically hurt or worse.

Fear itself is natural and, inasmuch as it exists by design to keep us safe from danger, it is good.  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 “progressive.”

What is shameful—what is cowardly—is not the possession of fear, but the possession by it.

It is shameful—it is cowardly—for 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.

It is doubly shameful—doubly cowardly—for such a person to persuade others to part with their hard-earned resources to support what he has conned them into thinking is his “fight against the left.”

The fraudulence and the cowardice of conservative leaders are the stuff of losers.  Loser talk is ubiquitous throughout the universe of Big Conservatism.  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.

The talk of the Big Con is the talk of defeat.  This is not the talk of fighters, much (much) less that of warriors (see here and here).  Examples abound ad infinitum.  Recently, for the first time in months, I tuned in to Mark Levin’s 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.  I changed the station to put on some music.

A woman called into Levin’s program to express her fear that “they”—meaning Democrat politicians?—would force the rest of us to allow illegal aliens to live in our homes.  Levin immediately disabused her of this fear.  Then he expressed another, the fear that “they” would “abolish…the suburbs [.]”

Levin’s 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.  Conservative voices are forever screeching about how the left is going to “take away” our freedom of speech; our Second Amendment, the right to protect ourselves; our right to worship; and the United States Constitution itself.

And on and on.

For certain, there can be no doubt that all of this is indeed true.  There is nothing in the least dishonorable or cowardly about sounding the alarm on the left’s intentions.  This, in itself, is not fear mongering.

What is dishonorable, cowardly, and fear-mongering is whipping up the anxieties of millions of Americans only to supply them with no real hope for change.  The only snake oil that these salesmen and women sell as a solution to the impending catastrophe is to—what else?—vote Republican!

As if voting Republican hasn’t proven to be the ultimate exercise in futility for a half-of-a-century.

Yet we needn’t look back some 50 or so years.  We need only look at this past year:  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 camp.  Constitutional liberties indefinitely suspended, the economy wrecked, churches and other houses of worship forced to close—incalculable 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%.

And all under Republican leadership. The Big Con has not only done nothing to stop this fundamental transformation.  It has encouraged it by feeding into the Lie that COVID is, as President Trump refers to it, “the Plague.”

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’s history acted on the advice of the Big Con and voted Republican, their votes were essentially nullified by systemic election fraud.

And neither elected Republicans nor those in the Big Con media did a thing about it.

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?  Conservatives’ idea of “fighting the left” seems to be this:

The left: Jump six feet in the air!

The Big Con: I will not.

The left: If you do not, we assure you that you will be “cancelled.”

The Big Con: Wait!  I said that I won’t jump six feet.  Because I refuse to stoop to your level, I will only jump three feet.  Take that!

And then the Big Con will take that exchange and put it on YouTube under a bad ass thumbnail with the caption, “The Big Con DESTROYS the Left,” or one that reads,” “Watch as the Left gets DESTROYED by the Big Con.”

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’t 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.

When conservative movement leaders say things like, “Unless we elect Republicans, Democrats will take away our guns and speech and all of our other God-given and Constitutional freedoms,” they may as well come straight out and explicitly admit that they wouldn’t 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:

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.

After all, as these admirers of the Founders—you know, those 18^th 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—are 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’s freedoms).

The Big Conservative movement consists of those with whom one would never want to be stuck in a fox hole.  So how, their constituents need to ask themselves, can conservative leaders “fight” against the left or, for that matter, against anyone?

If conservatives were serious about “fighting,” here are some examples of how political discourse should play out:

The Left: We need to revisit this whole Second Amendment matter.

Conservatives:  No.

The Left: But “gun-violence” is out of control and…

Conservatives:  We said no.

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.  Now, you can try.  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’re going to do everything within our power to insure that it is we, and not you, who return with—and not on—our 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).

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.

Give me liberty or give me death.  It was good enough for Patrick Henry and his contemporaries.  And they intended for it to be the spirit that they would pass on to subsequent generations of Americans.

If conservative leaders were serious about “fighting the left,” 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.

The current reality is a far cry from this.  The enemies of freedom don’t fear the Big Con because the Big Con is not fearful.

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.

So what are decent people who only want to live in peace and in freedom supposed to do?  In a previous article, I wrote at length about this.  A brief recap:

Weight train.  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’s body strong, one strengthens one’s mind.

Yet weight training isn’t sufficient. Not by a long shot.  Training in a real martial art, a warrior art (and not a “combat” sport) is both necessary and sufficient (For the interested, see here and here).  A 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.

Bullies are only ever deterred from attacking those who they know are truly dangerous.  Conservative leaders are nothing of the kind.  So, normal patriotic American citizens need to stop being “followers” of these leaders and make themselves into their own leaders, dangerous people cut from the cloth of America’s Founders.

Tread on no one.  Let no one tread on you and yours.

This is the American Way, the way of good and dangerous people.

It is not the way of Big Conservatism.