Yesterday, professional conman David French posted this ridiculous sob story, where he nails himself to the cross, claiming he was sent to save mankind from Donald Trump. The result of his efforts has been a journey of suffering. It’s all nonsense, of course. Put yourself or your opinions out into the pubic and you will attract all sorts of nuts. I get on-line stalkers and weirdos all the time and I’m just running a blog. Go on TV and the pool of potential jerks and meanies goes up exponentially. It’s one of the trade-offs.
I’ve been pointing out for along time that French is a nutter. He’s the sort of guy that lives by the credo, “whatever is worth doing is worth overdoing.” These sorts of people can never dabble in anything, They get into something and it becomes all consuming. They begin to organize their lives around the obsession. Then all of a sudden, they lose interest in it and find some new obsession. You see that with French, who lurches from one fanaticism to the next. In every case, he goes well beyond what is reasonable.
Glenn Beck has this same defect. He could not be just a guy at the bar, he had to be a legendary drinker. Then it was drugs. Then it was religion, politics, history and I think now he is working on the details for his planned Utopia. The thing you see with Beck, that you see with French, is that their obsessions are not internal. They get into things that they can make a grand show of in order to impress people they see as their betters. Beck’s Blaze operation is an obvious attempt to replicate what Roger Ailes did with Fox News.
Whether or not nutjobs like French and Beck possess the self-awareness to know what they are doing is debatable. My hunch is the guys with the religious aspect to their lunacy secretly see themselves as the second coming. Beck and French both pitch themselves as prophets sent to save mankind. It’s not explicit, as that would get them locked up, but it’s just under the surface. If Beck’s thing ends like The People’s Temple, no one would be surprised as he increasing sounds like a cult leader.
The only reason I’m aware of French piece is Jonah Goldberg was flogging it on Twitter last night. Goldberg used to wave Beck around like a Medusa head back in the day. Before that he was fond of using Rod Dreher as his spear catcher. The fact that both were becoming religious nuts at the time suggests something. Now he is using French to step on mines for him, suggesting it is getting near the end of French’s run in the big foot conservative press. Maybe Beck has an extra purple shroud for him.
Anyway, what I pointed out on Twitter is that this is pretty much a classic response from a conman when his scheme falls apart. They also play the victim card. Their whole raison d’être is to exploit the virtues of others. They prey on the trust of good people. When that runs aground, they prey on the sympathy of good people. The game here is to shift the focus away from the traitorous behavior of the NeverTrump loons and onto a few potty mouthed villains on Twitter. It’s just another grift intended to victimize good people.
One of the responses had a pic of French on one of his TV appearances. This was on MSNBC and it occurred to me that a good lesson for the alt-right, one the Left learned long ago, is to punish collaborators mercilessly. All of the big shot “conservatives” have a habit of working for media outlets at war with decent Americans. If you are working for the enemy, regardless of your reasons, you are working for the enemy. After liberation, the French shaved the heads of women who slept with Nazis.
That’s the lesson from the failure of Conservative Inc. They sold their collaboration as part of their clever plot to convince the enemy of the rightness of their cause. They were not collaborating. No! They were going into the lion’s den to confront Lefty in his own lair! We know now that that was always bullshit. They were paid actors in league with Progressives to fool decent people into quietly going along with the madness being foisted on us. It’s why these rocked ribbed conservatives are now on the side of the Left opposing Trump.
The alt-right and affiliated movements are suddenly getting many new recruits from the disbanding armies of the Official Right. With a bigger audience, the opportunities to make money inevitably creep into the minds of the entrepreneurial. There’s nothing wrong with making a living, but anyone doing so by going on the cable shows or collaborating with the major media should be assumed to be a collaborator. If Mike Cernovich wants to sell books and videos, that’s fine. When he starts turning up on Fox News, he should be assumed to be Cypher.
All wars are media wars and all wars require sacrifice. If the people offering themselves up as leaders of your thing are easily tempted by offerings from the other side, you can never trust them. No man is so virtuous that he can resist the highest bidder. If being on TV is your goal in life, you will sacrifice your cause for it. That’s what happened with National Review and the rest of Conservative Inc. Like petty nobles bribed with a few extra acres of land or merchants bought off with title, they decided it was better to live a lie than suffer for the cause.
