One of the truths of life is that people tend to not notice what is happening outside of their cultural and social bubble. It’s hard to step outside of your daily life and see the big picture, as far as political and cultural stuff. We mostly surround ourselves with people who hold the same opinions and have the same interests. Those with whom we are at odds, we navigate around and they navigate around us. We avoid political talk with that left-wing friend, who still thinks Trump is hiding Boris and Natasha under his bed.

Everyone, to some degree, lives in their silo, not thinking all that much about what’s going on in the other silos, beyond how it effects their thing. It’s why most Trump supporters are not surprised to see Trump doing so well in the polls. They like their guy and his good poll numbers confirm it. On the other hand, the remnants of the alt-right, struggling with the passing of their moment, are still sure Trump is going to lose in 2020, because he has abandoned them. His strong polling does not register, as it is outside their silo.

This blinkered view of things is usually wrong, to some degree, which is why it is a good idea to take a step back when trying to understand something like the hearing on “white nationalism” in Congress yesterday. The House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism” was weird, even by the standards of current politics. Even the people doing clown world jokes could not have imagined a hearing where a black woman is made to be the face of white nationalism in America.

To make the thing even more bizarre, none of the people involved in this circus was actually white. There were Jews, blacks, mystery races, various sub-groups of the coalition of the ascendant, but no white guys. However you define white nationalism, the one thing everyone agrees upon is it is mostly white guys. What you are not going to see at a white nationalist gathering is a black women, who started her career as a race hustler, hoping to become the female Al Sharpton of her generation.

Of course, the people involved in the circus can be written off as not right in the head, but why would the Democratic leadership allow such a thing to happen? Regardless of what you think about the people running the Democrat party, you can’t say they are bad at the game of politics. They are very good at the game, which is how they ascended that greasy pole to leadership. Why would they allow their racial rage heads to run wild and draw attention to themselves this way? What could they gain from it?

The temptation is to answer these questions with your favorite gratuitous assertion about the official Left or the official Right. Steve Sailer has popularized the notion that these performances are part of a master strategy to keep the coalition of fringes good and angry at the dwindling white majority. White Nationalists see Candace Owens as part of larger plot to keep white Baby Boomer arfing like seals at the magic negro. Those things are plausible, but convenient answers tend to be the least likely in politics.

Another possibility is that our political class is simply consumed with rage to the point where they are defined by it. Who they are is entirely dependent upon how much they hate heritage America and native stock Americans. The circus yesterday was not the result of some clever plot, but the result of people who hate whites so much they can’t stand to be in the same room with them. Instead of actual white nationalists, they brought in a black grifter to operate as the spokesman for white nationalism.

Something Ed Dutton points out in his recent book is that in the later phases of social decline, the ruling elites will often indulge in various religious and cultural movements, hoping to restore the moral center of society. The mystery schools flourished in Late Antiquity, for example. Perhaps this weird anti-white rage we are seeing from our ruling classes is simply the public aspect of a modern mystery cult. They are play-acting at what it will be like when the prophesies come true and we are a post-white society.

It may strike the more practical minded on the Right as a bit ridiculous, but keep in mind that all rational explanations of left-wing behavior have been wrong for as long as anyone reading this has been a live. The conservative analysis of the post-war Left in America is known for its wrongness. The Buckleyites got everything about the Left wrong, which is why they failed so completely. Whatever motivates the Left to perform these morality plays, we know it is not what conservatives claim.

That’s the important take away from yesterday. It was a morality play performed for people inside the political bubble. For the same reason having a black guy play Henry V makes sense to the Left, having Candace Owens play Jared Taylor made sense. It’s not the person that matters to them. It is the role they play. Whatever practical considerations there are for staging the thing, the one big reason for it was to stoke the rage of the ruling class. It is their mystery cult and what now defines who they are as a class.

Back in the 1990’s, most people knew Bill Clinton was a crook and a degenerate, but people also knew he would never be held to account. An unspoken truth of the age was that a big part of the frustration with the Clinton crime family was really over the unwillingness of the so-called conservatives to get tough. The National Review types carried on like they were too good to get into the outrage over the endless stream of scandals surrounding Team Clinton. They were above that stuff.

As a result, talking about the Clinton shenanigans became a staple of talk radio, mostly because it was amusing, but also as a form of outrage porn. Every time one of them got away with some obvious lie, the phone lines would light up with people ready to talk about how angry they were about it. In other words, a big part of the Clinton hating was over the fact they kept getting away with it, because the political class, particularly the so-called principled conservatives, lacked the stones to do anything about it.

That’s an important thing to keep in mind while watching the Left wrestle with the fact Trump will not be sent to prison for treason. To normal people, the Russian collusion stuff was always a nutty conspiracy theory. It seemed obvious that the point of the Russian collusion narrative was to distract people from the fact the Obama White House was engaged in activity that would have made Nixon blush. If there was a conspiracy, it was the media running cover for the crooks in the Obama administration.

This understanding blinded people to what could be the most important part of the Russian collusion story. The Left really believed it. They really thought there was a secret conspiracy between Trump people and Putin people to work some secret magic to alter the 2016 election. They did not know the nature of this magic. In fact, it was probably supernatural, but the Left was sure it was real. This is something people outside the Progressive hive are just starting to realize. The Left really is that crazy.

The juxtaposition of the Clinton haters and the NeverTrump people is a good way of understanding the vast chasm between the Progressive worldview and that of normal people. The hatred of the Clintons was rooted in a grudging acceptance of the reality of modern politics. It was a lament, more than a set of beliefs. People knew they were crooks, but also knew the so-called conservatives were wimps and liars. Bill Clinton in the White House was the symptom of the disease that had infected the nation’s elite.

The NeverTrump stuff is something different. It’s rooted in a fantasy about how the world is organized and the role the Left plays in it. They really do believe in mysterious forces that operate on the fringes. They not only think there is a man behind the curtain, but that the curtain itself is part of an elaborate conspiracy. Most important, they deeply believe that the arc of history bends toward the Promised Land and that they are on the right side of history, leading the rest of us into the light of salvation. They really do think that.

It’s why their response to the Mueller report has been like the response to the sudden death of a child. They were not convinced some Trump people had some shady dealings with the Russians. They were sure there was an elaborate conspiracy that altered the election. That was the key part of their coping system for the last two plus years. The conspiracy altered the election. The arc of history was not altered. The bad guys were not able to legitimately defeat those on the right side of history. The devil real!

Cults have ways to deal with disconfirmation, but there must be a way to salvage some of the original core belief from the wreckage. If the aliens were supposed to arrive on Tuesday, but failed to show, the cult can explain this by claiming they got the dates wrong or that they failed to perform the proper ritual. In this case, the Left can’t seem to find a way to salvage the core belief from the wreckage, because the core belief had to be completely true in order to confirm their role in the Great Russian collusion narrative.

What we’re seeing with the Left is a child learning that they have not only been adopted, but they have been in a coma their whole life and everything they believe about themselves is a dream. Rachel Maddow right now is someone sure she was a Jewish TV lesbian, but has learned she is really white guy with two kids and an ex-wife, working at the Home Depot. Everything about who she was in the moral sense is not just false, it never existed. As a result, she never really existed. She was part of the fraud.

That’s why the audience has evaporated for these lefty chat shows. Conservatives will try to explain this in the same dimwitted way they explain everything, by focusing on the fact these shows promoted a fake story. In reality, we’re witnessing the collapse of an identity cult, built around the belief in a sinister conspiracy to snatch away the 2016 election from forces of light. The collapse of the central narrative is also the collapse of the core of this identity cult. These are now people without a reason to exist.

For a time, it looked as if the “yellow vests” revolt was going to shakeup French politics by legitimizing populist issues. The protests were mainly focused on economic issues, but those issues are the sorts of things that highlight the divide between the cosmopolitan ruling class and the general public. That is the heart of the great political divide in the current age. The ruling class and its supporters are living a fantasy life paid for in a million small ways by the unorganized and ignored masses making up the general public.

That’s really what the yellow vest protesters were about initially. As is always the case with revolts, what got them in the streets were the little things, but those little things were symbolic of the bigger problem. The yellow vest originated from the nutty law that requires all French drivers to keep a yellow safety vest in their car. Whether or not having such a thing is a good idea is not really the point. It is the symbol of elite attitudes that result in the proliferation of thousands of such laws.

Half a year on now and it looks like the yellow vest revolt has followed the same arc as all previous efforts to oppose the prevailing order. In France the protest culture is a part of the political system. It’s not just a left-wing phenomenon, like it is in America. It’s how the political factions rally support and press their case to the public. A populist movement joining the system offered some hope that a genuine alternative could emerge. Instead, it appears that the establishment has found a way to corrupt and de-legitimize it.

Now, Scott McConnell is a yesterday man, stubbornly attached to a politics of a bygone era, but what he describes should be familiar to anyone who has followed dissident politics. What made the Gilets Jaunes initially effective was their authenticity. They were just regular people expressing their complaints the only way available to them. The fact that they had to go into the streets underscored their legitimacy. These were not the sort who engaged in protest. They voted and wrote letters to the editor.

The Gilets Jaunes are like the Tea Party movement in America. What made the Tea Party work initially was the fact it was organized by normal people, not political professionals with hidden agendas. Like the Tea Party, this ordinariness, and the lack of organizational structure, made the Gilets Jaunes vulnerable. At some point, the French equivalent of Antifa showed up to start smashing things. Muslim groups joined into the attack Jews on camera. In Paris, Gilets Jaunes is now just a weekly bit of anarchy.

Something similar happened with the Tea Party in America. Instead of radical leftists, it was political barnacles like the R Street crowd. These are the political shape-shifters, who always turn up in conservative circles. Their job is to co-opt and neuter anything resembling a legitimate challenge to the people in power. In the case of the Tea Party, they jumped in, wrestled control of the name and many of the organizations away from the grass roots and turned the whole thing into cover for the GOP establishment.

A common theme to all of these failed opposition movements is the decision to engage in the established political system. Once they connect to the system, the system releases a virus that either assimilates the new group, turning it into a feature of the system, or kills off the threat. The former case is a universal in life. When the king recognizes a threat to his rule, the first move is to buy off the threat. Offering him a position in the system, in exchange for him adding his legitimacy to the king and his ruling order.

The latter is the one that is most puzzling, as it suggests legitimate opposition lacks the right antibodies to function in a modern liberal democracy. A recent example in America was the alt-right. When it was a humorous on-line enterprise, operating outside the political system, it was effective at introducing paleocon ideas into the flow of social media. Those memes making sport of ruling class piety were highly effective. The alt-right operated like a highly diffuse guerrilla movement, using mockery and satire to undermine order.

Then Richard Spencer started imagining himself as the leader of a vanguard and started to stage protests and go on speaking tours. The shift from underground guerrilla movement to above ground political activism was a disaster. Quickly, Spencer became David Duke 2.0, which gave the Left cover to send in their street mobs. Woke capital joined in and the entire dissident scene was subjected to an ongoing pogrom that persists to this day. The alt-right exploded and has followed the Tea Party into the dustbin.

Decades ago, Sam Francis observed that the Buckley brand of conservatism was bound to fail, because it sought to engage in politics on Progressive terms. By engaging in conventional politics, Buckley was legitimizing not only the rules of the game, but the roles for the participants as created by the Left. Since the Left controlled the institutions, they would always set the rules so they would win and the Buckleyites would lose. That is, of course, exactly how things unfolded. Conservatism was a failure.

Something similar happened with the Tea Party, the alt-right and now the Gilets Jaunes in France. By trying to play by the rules, they legitimize that which they claim to oppose, at least at a meta-political level. It also removes from them the one weapon all outsider movements possess. That is the willingness to break the rules. The flipping over of tables inside the temple is how these movements gain attention and attract followers. To then be seen putting the tables back and sitting behind them robs the movement of energy.

Something else seems to be at work. These movements all suffered from poor leadership and poor organization. The first Tea Party folks were honest, energetic, but wildly naive about the reality of political organization. The alt-right figures that rose up in 2015 were good at getting attention, but incapable of building organizations. Richard Spencer is media savvy, but you would not put him in charge of anything. The Gilets Jaunes appears to also lack capable leadership, which is why they have been taken over by the Left.

What this suggests is that any legitimate opposition must first insulate itself from the political system. Its guerrilla phase cannot be where they start, but where the end, in order to function as a subversive subculture in opposition to the prevailing order. The Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge did not fully come out of the shadows until the prevailing order was collapsing. It was at that point they rushed into fill the void. If there is to be a legitimate opposition in the West, it is going to operate in the shadows.

Politics in the modern age was symbolic, as much as practical, as the state had grown so large that meaningful change was going to be gradual. In fact, change was so slow that it transcended generations. One generation of politicians would tinker around with the rules and the next generation would realize the consequences. By the time the consequences of Johnson’s Great Society were felt, the people who pushed it were mostly out of office, so it was the successors who had to deal with the ramifications.

In the post-modern age, some may call it the technological age, political language is becoming esoteric, rather than symbolic. The language and discourse is not supposed to be sensible, but rather designed to test the boundaries of the formal political language. It is a game, of sorts, to figure out how to insert bits of heresy and forbidden topics into the political discourse, in a way that is only obvious to the people doing it. The point of the effort is to get people talking obliquely about forbidden topics and themes.

The most recent and best example of this is the Pepe the frog stuff in 2016. It was not just a pointless gag. It was about testing limits. Initially, it was about getting forbidden subjects into the mainstream of social media in a way that the designer could understand, but that made little sense to others. Eventually, a general awareness of what was happening turned the Pepe image into a symbol. Clownish political hucksters then adopted it as a symbol of their edginess, because it carried with it an implication of radicalism.

Another great example of this is the word “cuckservative” that got going around the same time as Pepe. One of the more amusing things during that period was watching members of Conservative Inc. come to understand what it meant. These are people who thought they were the face of dissident America, so they initially did not understand the term was a slur against them. Slowly, they understood and then the term moved from an esoteric insider gag to a symbol, denoting a line between dissidents and conservatives.

Currently, a similar dynamic is at work with the long shot candidacy of Andrew Yang, the Taiwanese businessman running in the Democratic primary. Dissidents, unhappy with Trump, initially landed on Tulsi Gabbard, due to her anti-war positions. The trouble with Gabbard, though, is her positions are explicit, rather than symbolic or esoteric, so supporting her does not serve the purpose of dissident actors using esoteric political language to test limits. That’s where Yang’s UBI proposal comes in.

The Universal Basic Income is a dumb idea, but that’s part of its appeal to those engaged in esoteric politics. The point of backing it and Andrew Yang is to take the reality of modern politics, that it is a bust-out, where non-white tribes loot the country, and pushing it to the limit. If non-whites have their snout in the trough, then everyone should have their snout in the trough. It’s also an oblique way of introducing white identity politics into the discussion. White Nationalists want their thousand bucks.

The Yang phenomenon is more than just an internet fad. According to 538, Yang is now a serious candidate and as such he is getting serious attention. It is the epitome of esoteric politics that an Asian candidate will become a cat’s paw for a wide range of issues important to white Americans, but forbidden in conventional discourse. You can be an open white nationalist, by sporting a YangGang ball cap, while BoomerCons are getting beat up for wearing their old MAGA hats to their grand kid’s ballgame.

Esoteric political language is not simply about camouflaging taboo subjects. That’s never worked, as evidence by the collapse of libertarianism. That was always the truth about libertarian politics. Outside of the weirdos and potheads, people identified with libertarian ideas as a form of implicit whiteness. Free markets and meritocracy assume that biological reality will take care of the rest, leading to a restoration of heritage America, but the obviousness of this is why it never got very far and is now a joke.

That’s what is different with things like the UBI support among white nationalists. It’s not just a proxy for white identity. It takes the logic of identity politics as practiced by the ruling class and pushes it to the boundary. It’s going to be hard for them to dismiss Yang as a white supremacist or his UBI idea as some sort of honky plot against the browns. In fact, any effort to do so will make them look ridiculous. That’s the point of esoteric political language. At its best, its critics confirm what they wish to deny.

It’s possible that esoteric political language is a natural result of democracy. In the Cold War, threat of nuclear annihilate meant politics remained grounded in the real, even as it relied on symbolism to communicate ideas. After the Cold War, the Clinton years were mostly about symbolism. The Bush years started the same way, but then curdled into a blend of symbolism and mendacity. Bush was the opposite of what he claimed. In the Obama years politics became an absurdist pantomime.

Perhaps this phase we’re entering is something new, where the dull-witted masses participate in democracy, but have no practical influence, because they are manipulated by the smart fraction using esoteric language to avoid plunging into the abyss. Maybe it is just another facet of late-stage liberal democracy. Maybe it is just the death rattle of empire, where practical politics is nothing but frightening choices, so the political language descends into a weird competition to reach some absurd limit.

Some on this side of the great divide have come to accept that the West is not going to vote itself out of its current decline. If the West is to survive, it will require a radical change in the political arrangements outside the democratic apparatus. Not everyone on this side accepts that. Some still cling to the hope that the ruling class will have an epiphany and begin to accept reality. Others think that if enough of the public wakes up to what’s happening, this will force the political class to yield.

It is an interesting question as to how people in the West, particularly heritage populations, really think about democracy. The new comers mostly think democracy is free stuff and a comfortable lifestyle, but the heritage population still has the residue of civic nationalism The Left, of course, despises democracy, despite their yelping about it. They see democracy as a means to an end. The rest have been conditioned to say they think liberal democracy is the best, but how many really believe it is unknown.

It is a worthwhile question to consider when watching the Brexit drama unfold over the next two weeks. The official version of this process is the British people had a referendum and they voted to leave the EU. The law put March 31, 2019 as the deadline for leaving and Parliament had until that date to work out a deal with the EU. If there was no deal, then Britain unconditionally leaves the EU. A deal to leave slowly and gently, however, would need to pass through Parliament. That was the orderly process laid out for Brexit.

As of this writing, the government of Theresa May has tried several times to get the deal she struck with the EU through parliament. The deal is an insult to the intelligence of the average British subject, so it has failed to get through parliament. The deal she cut is to leave the EU in name only. Britain would continue to allow Brussels to dictate terms on things like regulation, trade and most especially immigration policy. Those rooting for democracy have to be appalled by the craven cynicism of this ploy.

The Commons Speaker, which is like the head parliamentarian, ruled that Theresa May cannot submit her deal for a vote again, unless it is substantially altered, which is an impossibility at this point. That would mean Britain is headed for a hard Brexit at the end of this month. It would also mean that a responsible democratic government would now be moving to inform and prepare the public for that eventuality. Instead, the government is scheming with the EU to delay everything so they can have a second referendum.

Americans are familiar with this gag. Back in the dark days when marriage was linked to biological reality, left-wing agitators would get homosexual marriage initiatives onto state ballots. These initiatives would fail, but the agitators would get them on the ballot again the next election. The Left sees democracy as a bus. Once it takes you to your desired stop, you get off. That means they demand people keep voting on their issues until the people get the correct result. Once that happens, no more democracy.

This is the scheme the “Remainers”  have always had in their back pocket. It’s why they have been happy to drag out this process for years, right to the deadline. This week, they will argue that the country is not prepared to meet the legal deadline, so there has to be a delay in the process. Of course, the point of the delay is to then get a second vote setup for later in the year. If that vote goes their way, that’s it. If they lose again, then the whole process begins anew as they scheme to undermine the results.

For Americans, watching this unfold is useful in understanding why Trump has become Jeb Bush. After the 2016 election, we saw a parade of Washington politicians stagger around shell-shocked at the result. What we did not see is how they immediately got to work plotting with one another as to how to undermine the new administration and the will of the public. Just as the political class in Britain has spent the last few years undermining the Brexit result, official Washington has worked tirelessly to undermine Trump.

Democracy can only work if the people in elected office and the political system see the will of the people as legitimate. They have to respect the system as much as the voters, in order for the system to function as designed. The trouble is, democracy selects for the cynically ambitious and sociopaths. The former sees the public as suckers to be fleeced, while the latter simply enjoys lying and deceiving. For democratic politicians, democracy is mostly just a game they play to amuse themselves.

For the public, democracy inevitably becomes a weird game of Russian roulette. In every election, no matter how hard they study the choices, the results are almost random. You vote to leave the EU, and three years later you’re voting on the same issue again or maybe the vote was ignored entirely. People forget that the French voted several times on joining the EU and all of those votes were ignored. In fact, most of what we see happening in the West has never seen any ballot anywhere. Immigration is an obvious example.

At some point, the absurd uncertainty of voting becomes obvious to even the most delusional civic nationalist. It’s why democracy always ends in authoritarianism. The certainty of a dictator, even a bad one, beats the randomness and uncertainty of the democratic process. There are probably plenty of Brits who would welcome the monarch taking control of the government again. Even the daffy Prince Charles is an upgrade over the circus of Parliament. At least the ceremonies would be fun.

Beto O’Rourke, the Irish playboy who tried passing himself off as a Mexican in his run against Ted Cruz in 2018, has declared for President. The boomers in the Progressive commentariat are rushing to their fainting couches, as they are sure he is the Hispanic-ish John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy, depending upon which end of the 60’s they remember best. Watching a geriatric old fool like Chris Mathews fawn over O’Rourke is a reminder why the Germans gave the world the word fremdschämen.

It’s a good reminder that the Left is more burdened with yesterday men than right-side of the political divide. Even the cuckiest conservative is not comparing a guy like Ben Sasse to Reagan, Goldwater or Eisenhower. Progressive boomers still have a bust of JFK in their house and talk about where they were when he was shot. They are a walking, talking museum displays of a bygone era. That’s why they are gushing over O’Rourke. He’s the last white man of any standing in the Democrat Party.

The funny thing is though, the comparison between O’Rourke and the Kennedy brothers is useful in understanding the current age. John F. Kennedy was, despite lots of revisionism, a man’s man who lived a full live. He served in the war, liked adventure, enjoyed a drink under extreme social pressure and liked women. He was like an Irish version of Theodore Roosevelt. RFK never saw action, but he served and like his brother, he was a man who lived to the fullest. Whatever you may think of their politics or ethics, they were men.

Beto O’Rourke, in contrast, is a bum. His family never had Kennedy money, but they were well-enough-off to send him to a boarding school in Virginia. According to his bio, he was a slacker with a taste for murder porn. He headed off to Columbia to major in English, as that required the least amount of effort. After college, he remained a bum, drinking and working as a live-in caretaker and art mover. Then he got a job working for an ISP, after which is family apparently set him up in his own business in Texas.

That’s hardly a heroic back story. His father was deep into Texas politics, so he got him into the business. His first office was a spot on the El Paso City Council then after a few years he upgraded to the US House of Representatives. Like most of this generation’s political class, Beto O’Rourke ran for office because he was unqualified to do anything useful in the private sector. Rather than go on welfare or resort to a life of crime, he rents himself out as a spokesmodel for whatever political interests will hire him.

The difference between art and ornamentation is that art seeks to imitate life, while ornamentation seeks to decorate life. The great artist works to capture the spirit of his age or if he is really ambitious, the spirit of God. It’s an effort to reach for that which is unattainable, representing the same yearning in the culture of the artist. The guy making pretty pictures, on the other hand, is not trying to capture anything. His sole purpose, his reason to exist, is to make something someone thinks will look cool in the den.

That same comparison works for Kennedy and his brother’s doppelganger, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke. Again, whatever you may think of their politics, the Kennedy brothers had a reason to reach for the top. They were young men in a young culture, seeking the absolute limit of itself. They were the expression of a triumphant and confident America, breathing in life as it stood atop the world it had just conquered. The Kennedy brothers represented that culture. They were Faustian men.

O’Rourke, in contrast, represents a dying culture of old men, whose best days are long in the past, but still trying to maintain appearances. Unlike those young men from the young culture trying to live life to the fullest, Beto has always been an old man, just trying to avoid doing anything that requires risk or effort. If the Kennedy boys were the marble statue of the idealized man of their age, Beto is the decorative codpiece that a feminist uses in her installation art, which will be thrown away when the exhibit closes.

This decorative quality probably explains the soy face so common with the Gen-X politician on both sides of the political class. The old guys can still work up a good snarl or even a confident smile on occasion. Guys like Beto O’Rourke and Ben Sasse always look like they just got wind of a bad smell. They have the look, because for them, life is never going to be a great adventure full of risk taking. Instead, their lives are an inconvenience, something they just tolerate, because they lack the courage to swallow their gun.

That said, Beto is the last white man of the Left. The Democratic field is women and non-whites. If Biden runs he’ll be the second white man in the field, a nice bookend to O’Rourke. On the one end you have an old man inspired into politics by a culture that was full of life. At the other end, you have a man who got into politics because he needed work and his dad had some connections. One is a vague memory of the confident young man with swagger, while the other, the younger one, is the old man in the winter of his life.

Last weekend was C-PAC, the annual convention for the Professional Right™ to show off their new wares for the coming year. In theory, it is a gathering of grassroots activists, conservative politicians and conservative media to socialize, network and strategize about how to defeat the Left. This was true in the early days, but somewhere in the 1990’s it became a trade show for Conservative Inc. The people living off politics and the people who hope to live off politics, use it as a way to network and showcase their talents.

Just as Conservative Inc. has become a grotesque mockery of itself, C-PAC is something closer to a clown show rather than a real political event. The organizers have given up pretending to be conservative. Instead they are going for something like an awards show. They actually invited a clown this year. It’s proof that the Official Right™ is now Trump’s world, which is a blend of reality TV and professional wrestling. There’s lots of drama, all of it choreographed, but in the end,, nothing actually happens. It’s just a show.

It’s tempting to get down about this, but the frivolousness of Official Conservatism™ is probably good news. An important part of developing an authentic alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is discrediting the Potemkin version. There’s also the pure entertainment value in seeing our adversaries beclown themselves. C-PAC invited Prog and Antifa media into cover this circus and the results were predictable. The lefty media ran to their hives and bleeped all over their “friends on the respectable right.”

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at seeing a grifter like Oliver Darcy tell his fellow left-wing grifters about his time with the so-called conservative grifters. We have shameless grifters calling out other shameless grifters, as part of their grift. Of course, the grifters being called out will return the favor, as part of their grift. It’s a magnificent display of recursive grifting.  Perhaps grifter space-time is folding in on itself. We are about to see the grifter-verse collapse in on itself and form the prophesied grifter singularity.

While it is hilarious to write the word “grifter” that many times in a single paragraph, there is a very serious issue here. If a bunch of left-wing grifters are in the same room as a bunch of right-wing grifters, there is a the chance for a grifter paradox. This is when the two sides of the grifter-verse agree with one another. Scientists are not entirely sure what happens at that point. Some speculate it opens the gates of Hell, while others fear it will open a worm hole to the home dimension of the grifter, unleashing even more grifters.

The whole thing was not just a puppy-pile of political pornography. A few dissidents managed to suit-up in their EPA-approved hazmat attire and get inside to report back to the rest of us. There are people on our side who want to throw people like Loomer, Goldy and Fuentes into the same pile as the rest of the media whores, but there is an important difference. People who are good at getting attention and willing to do what it takes to get your attention are useful to the dissident effort to discredit Conservative Inc.

That’s what our side needs to get better at understanding. There is a difference between the tool and the man who wields the tool. It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools and it is a poor political movement that blames its media savvy people. The trouble with Conservative Inc. is not that it is good at media whoring. The trouble is that’s all they are now, media whores. They have not had a new insight since the 80’s. Our side is teeming with new ideas of varying quality. We need to get better at selling them.

Young people like Fuentes and Goldy also do a better job of connecting with the young audience. Young people like the ad hoc YouTube videos and live streams. The sorts of young people signing up for Young Americans for Freedom, the main group behind C-PAC, are the sorts of soulless careerists, who only appeal to aging Boomers. They are the sorts of young people old people admire. Having some edgy, grifty people of our own to real in new eyeballs from the younger generation is a worthwhile trade at this point.

That said, one of the unique challenges any dissident movement faces in the mass media age is keeping itself from becoming a feeding trough for media grifters. The Tea Party is a great example of a genuine grassroots effort that was swamped by an army of media whores and political con-men. Like a plague of locusts unleashed from Washington, these people chewed through the movement, leaving nothing but stalks. The great challenge is in defending against that, while not ghettoizing the movement in self-defense.

It’s why watching how legacy operations like CPAC operate and how dissidents nibble away at them is useful. It’s always tempting to turn away in disgust, but these sorts of events can be put to use in red-pilling the civic nationalist in your life. The over the top grifting on display is another opportunity to make contrasts between an authentic alternative and the Potemkin one called conservatism. Maybe we get lucky and see that grifter singularity and it takes the whole lot of them into the void.