Setting up the long con
The most important part of the post-election circus is not Donald Trump
To fully understand the incumbent’s refusal to accept the election results — that he lost to Joe Biden and his loss will be unequivocally confirmed after recanvasses and recounts conclude in the next week and a half — you must remember one very, very important detail: the incumbent, as it has been for his entire wretched presidency, is the least important part of the story.
Keep in mind this analogy as I make my point: the ground must be fertile for the grass to grow.
For roughly the past 80 years, American conservatives have been bogged down by an inconvenient truth, despite their relative success in national elections after 1968 — they have little to almost nothing to offer except for a series of fucking grievances:
- A grievance among those who despise the ideas and values of modern liberals and progressives (yes, there is a significant difference between both) which prioritize social selflessness over individual selfishness.
- A grievance among Whites who feel that government caters too much to people of color and other social minorities.
- A grievance among conservative people of color who resent being lumped together with the contingent of minorities and so-called White “allies” that are demanding greater protection of rights and increased socioeconomic security from the government.
- A grievance among religious conservatives of various faiths and denominations that resent secularism in government.
The list goes on — I didn’t even get into the heart of cultural grievances, for example — but it’s not anything that you probably aren’t already aware of. The existential value of conservatism is rooted in moaning, groaning, and bitching; more often than not in bad faith.
But where liberal and progressive disgruntlement is aimed at actual selfless problem solving (although not always practical), conservative anxiety focuses on defending selfishness by any means necessary. There’s a reason why that buzzwords such as “freedom”, “patriot”, “liberty”, and “God” is becoming so meaningless with its often oxymoronic juxtapositions against what many conservative politicians often advocate for in terms of public policy, the mere utterance of any of those words is increasingly signifying bullshit. Just total bullshit.
I would say that conservatism is no longer a meaningful political ideology, but that would require conservatism to once have been a meaningful political ideology in the first place. It has never been meaningful. It has always been an anti-liberal and anti-progressive backlash since its modern incarnation first started taking shape during the 1930s; and even in the ensuing years with figures such as William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, among others, this reality has never changed.
In other words, it’s been a grift. A big fucking grift.
And that grift has only grown in recent years, given fertile ground by a news media landscape that has valued advertising dollars and television ratings over an earnest attempt to inform for well over half a century; after all, Edward R. Murrow warned of the consequences of doing so in his well-known 1958 speech at an industry gala. Roger Ailes, who had long been wanting to cash in on this grift since the 1970s, finally did so in the 1990s with Fox News Channel. Bad faith conservative politics which was just limited to Newt Gingrich’s rhetorical chicanery as he squandered the stewardship of the so-called Reagan Revolution, now had a 24-hour news channel that served as the spearhead for a near $2 billion a year industry of a bunch of right-wing talking heads and low rent “activists” bitching about “liberals”, “lefties”, and “socialists”.
This would be amusing if it wasn’t so goddamn dangerous. The public, which has never been cured of its post-Watergate cynicism and in the midst of rapid socio-economic change, can only be informed based upon the information given to them; shaped by their own personal worldview and coddled by those that make money catering to said worldview. Conservative media has become nothing more than a smorgasbord of so-called truth without facts, only to elicit a reaction that leads them to find comfort and solace by tuning in to hear more bitching in primetime hours on Fox, Newsmax, or One America News Network, or on YouTube.
So here we are, 11 days after Election Day, and a week after it became very, very clear Biden won it. The incumbent, considered by his critics to be the ultimate grifter, is only playing a minor role in the even bigger scam of riling up disappointed and dejected voters into never, ever accepting Biden as the legitimate winner; conservative media knows that they need a hero and a villain, and this latest disinformation campaign is only set up to help them make more money and rack up improved viewership; even if it comes at the expense of American democracy.
They’re setting up the long con.
The so-called conservatives are falling for it. ·
