Self-Mogged: How Conservatism Stupidified, Triggered, and Destroyed Itself

Ben Shapiro, Christopher Rufo, National Review, and Republican establishment face the blowback of building a movement on bigoted, conspiratorial outrage culture.

Last week, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to save Donald Trump from himself by invalidating most of the President’s sweeping tariffs. While the ruling is great news for Trump, as it will end his extremely unpopular economic policy, he’s too senile and strong-headed to realize he was given a gift: a way out of his self-destructive policy without having to surrender. Instead of taking the win, he punched the gift horse straight in the mouth. The President launched into a primetime tirade, insulting the justices who ruled against him, including his appointees, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, who has arguably done more to help Trump than anyone else alive. Trump also pledged to circumvent the ruling, which the Justices won’t like. That may be a tough pill they have to swallow, though. As you might remember, this is the same Court that granted Donald Trump immunity for “official acts” without specifying what those acts are. So, the Supreme Court, which has protected Trump at every turn, is now tasked with stopping the monster it previously ruled cannot be stopped. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has been nothing but an obsequious ally to Trump, shocking court watchers by overwhelmingly siding with the president via the shadow docket. And now, he’s risked turning them against him by calling them “slimeballs,” “fools,” and “an embarrassment to their families.” A President butting heads with the Supreme Court is a tale as old as America. But what makes this clash so unique is that this president and this Supreme Court are the crown jewels of the conservative movement. One, a president who fulfilled Republican strategist Grover Norquist’s wish for a president with “enough working digits to hold a pen,” and the other, the anti-democratic rule over the American political system long desired by the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation. With complete control of the legislature, the conservative movement got everything it could ever want. And now, the girls are fighting.

Conservatism achieved its wildest dreams. But now, it is quickly being devoured by the very strategy of political enstupidification that conservatives used to achieve their success. While Trump v. The Supreme Court (future case name, I’d wager) is the highest and most visible display of Republican-aligned troll culture coming back to bite itself, it is not an isolated incident. The hyper-online right-wing online conservative ecosystem is being forced to reckon with the anti-intellectualism, trolling, bigotry, and all-around mind-baffling stupidity that it didn’t just tolerate, but actively promoted. I’ve heard this described as the "MAGA civil war.” But I think comparing it to the two-sided American Civil War is reductive. A better analogy is the English Civil War, in which ever-shifting alliances, fragmented factions, and conflict-defining personal slights created an ever-changing, always chaotic cycle of backstabbing and frontstabbing that solved nothing and left many combatants confused about who they were fighting and for what reason, depending on the day. Not only am I basking in the schadenfreude of watching figures such as Ben Shapiro, J.D. Vance, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Christopher Rufo tear each other to shreds, but the never-ending snake-eating-snake chain provides good insight into where the right is weak, and how it can be defeated — if they don’t defeat themselves first.

The Daily Wireists battle the Candacian Owenites while the Vance Loyalists wait to see who will come out on top.

There is only one place to start this story: the active dumpster fire that is Turning Point U.S.A.

Ever since TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk was struck by a bullet, his once-mighty organization has been in shambles. There’s no denying Charlie-era TPUSA was powerful. By enticing young conservatives with conspiracy theories (“The great replacement theory is reality”), racism (“The Civil Rights Act was a mistake”), and the internet edgelordism that fuels modern conservatism (“The death penalty should be televised to children”), Kirk turned his campus group into the youth outreach wing of the GOP. And while older establishment conservatives told themselves the kids were really excited about tax cuts, small government, and personal responsibility, the truth is they were there for the show — owning the libs, not the private ownership of industry, is the core mission of the modern right. (PROOF) But when Kirk died, the cat was let out of the bag. Immediately, conservatives looked for the only answers they’d been told to accept: shadowy conspiracy theories, a minority group to blame, and just straight-up vengeance. Against who? That doesn't really matter.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox called the shooter a “leftist ideologue,” which was later disproven. Some elements of the online right blamed Israel, a theory that still lives despite the frustrations of Zionist conservatives. Most of the conservative movement exploited the death, particularly to punish anyone who said Kirk’s name without also saying he was the Most Special Boy. Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily cancelled for criticizing Kirk, and over six hundred people were punished or fired as the right-wing mob called workplaces and doxed social media users in a horrific pursuit to ruin their lives. But when the truth came out that Kirk’s alleged killer was a White Mormon kid from a gun-loving family, conservative media stopped pushing the conspiratorial narratives. As the shooting put conservatives in a weird spot over gun control (Kirk had said the 2nd Amendment was worth the cost of shootings like the one that killed him), they quietly tried to move on. After all, this was an opportunity! A leading conservative podcaster was gone, and his audience was up for grabs. There’s money to be made! Kirk’s widow was hucking merch at his memorial. (Below is leaked audio of Erika celebrating merch sales.) Why should anyone else not get in on this cash grab? But the conspiracy-hungry TPUSA followers weren’t ready to move on. They’d been promised a scalp, and by God, they were going to get one.

While the more professional elements of rightist media wanted to mourn Charlie and turn their attention to the upcoming midterms, Candace Owens recognized that the conservative online world didn’t want to move on so fast. Trained in the ways of Republican trollism and the outrage economy by Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, Owens is bat-shit insane, incredibly anti-semitic, and racist. Before she grew her own conspiracy-minded audience, Candace was the go-to for White conservative outlets who wanted a Black woman to say the racist things they would get in trouble for, such as, “White men today are treated like Black men under segregation.” She still does all that, but “Who killed Charlie?” is her money maker, and she’s not closing the spigot anytime soon. On her podcast, she floats theories that can't be proven or disproven, enabling her to throw out a new one each week and keep her audience coming back for more, more, and more. It reminds me of the X-Files. Every week, there’s a different villain that could be responsible for Charlie’s death. So far, she’s accused everyone from Israeli intelligence to French President Emanuel Macron (who is suing Owens for saying his wife is trans) to “Egyptian planes,” to Erika Kirk herself. While Erika Kirk and the TPUSA leadership have tried to put a lid on these theories, they forgot what business they’re in. Owens’ claims, which have been echoed by Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, are extremely popular with conservative audiences, including TPUSA’s own staff. Earlier this month, a longtime TPUSA staffer, Aubrey Laitsch, confirmed she was let go from the organization as part of a mass firing of employees who thought that there was “something more to Charlie Kirk’s death.” In typical conservative fashion, Laitsch bemoaned how employers could fire workers for “no reason,” which is the result of at-will labor employment that the conservative movement has forced onto the country.

Unfortunately for the conservatives who thought TPUSA would be a reliable vehicle to deliver youth votes for Republicans, the online conspiracy theorizing and hate mongering that they used to build the GOP youth machine is too much to control. It quite literally is a drug. Conservatives pumped billions into gaming, or outright purchasing, social media algorithms with quick-hit, controversial video content that enraged, thrilled, and attracted viewers. But what triggered the libs in 2016 doesn’t anymore. So, the right-wing media members need to go further and further. Now, those who liked Kirk’s nonsensical rants about The Great Replacement Theory are turning to Owens for even more explicitly anti-Semitic conspiracies, and those who liked watching libs freak out when Kirk said Black pilots were DEI hires are enjoying Nick Fuentes screaming the N word over and over. As Owens is tearing the conservative youth movement apart at the seams, Republican-aligned allies are freaking out. Conservative podcaster and 39-year-old-who-still-wears-a-beanie Tim Pool said this about Owens’ destruction:

“If the Republicans lose in the midterms, I believe that Candace Owens is wholly responsible. She is one of the biggest podcasts on the right, [and she is] doing everything to go to war with the organization that helped get Trump elected. Turning Point specifically was going out and registering people to vote. Without Charlie, it’s in trouble.

He also called her this. Classy.

One person who has taken particular anger at Owens is her former boss, The Daily Wire founder, Ben Shapiro. Back in December, Shapiro used his speech at TPUSA’s America Fest to attack Owens and Tucker Carlson as “frauds and grifters.” There is no doubt that Candace Owens is a grifter. But so is Ben Shapiro, who employed and enabled Owens to become what she is. During his anti-Candace speech, Shapiro accused Owens of “vomiting hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years.” Which is interesting, because he only fired Owens from The Daily Wire the year prior.

The subtext of the conservative media civil war is that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly, with their fingers on the pulse of the internet, have seen which way the audiences are heading and began to criticize Israel. These people are as clear grifters as it gets, and they don’t give a single shit about Palestinians. They are simply criticizing Israel because it allows them to seem “America First” while stoking the bigotry conservative audiences desire. Owens has always been anti-semitic, but that was never a problem for Ben Shapiro until she began challenging him on Israel. Below is a video from the 2019 launch of TPUSA Britain, in which Candace Owens says, “the only problem with Hitler was he invaded other countries,” implying the Holocaust was A-Okay as long as it stayed within German borders. This was so shocking to the Tory activists that a few of them quit the TPUSA project that very day. (Notice Charlier Kirk standing next to Owens, saying nothing.)

Two years later, Ben Shapiro hired Hitler-praising Owens to The Daily Wire. Only when she began expanding her hatred of Jews to the Zionist state last year did Shapiro fire her. Now, he’s forced to deal with the monster he created. Earlier this week, Shapiro posted a nine-minute video entitled “Candace Owens is evil,” lambasting Owens about the release of her “investigation” into Erika Kirk, Bride of Charlie.

Ben Shapiro plays a particular role in the crashing train that is the conservative project, as he is both responsible for creating modern right-wing outrage culture and a victim of its hatred. His backstory is so absurd, I’m scared you won’t believe it.

While the rapidly-accelerating enracistifcation of the online right has driven Shapiro to try and whitewash himself as a center-right moderate to the mainstream political establishment, there are few people responsible for poisoning modern politics as much as Ben Shapiro. His entire career has been an attempt to convince antisemitic Republicans, from the WASPs at the country club to the Neo-Nazis on Stormfront, that their hatred of Jews is misplaced. By being willing to publicly attack African Americans, women, and other marginalized groups with the hatred most conservatives are too scared to say publicly, Shapiro tried to prove to the Christian, Nationalist right that he should be considered “white,” just like them. His vitriol against Muslims is so extreme that it was discovered the man who killed six people in a Quebec mosque in 2017 was inspired by some of Shapiro’s political content. The need to prove he’s “one of the good ones” is why he has made anti-choice politics one of his foremost issues, even though Judaism doesn’t traditionally oppose abortion with the same ferocity as Christianity. For Ben, it’s less about the actual policy and more about trying to earn his way into the club. That’s why he anointed himself Pope of The Jews, proudly declaring that any Jew who voted for Obama or doesn’t pledge fealty to Israel is a JINO — Jew In Name Only. In 2014, Ben Shapiro tried to sell himself to literal Nazis by claiming the media wasn’t controlled by Jews, but by leftist Jews, who, by nature of being leftists (i.e., Democrats), weren’t “real” Jews. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say “literal Nazi.” Shapiro gave this interview to Radio 314, which is named after the Nazi police battalion 314, the Nazi death squad that carried out mass executions in occupied Europe. Radio 314 was hosted by Red Ice, an explicitly Nazi outlet that was booted off of online hosting platforms along with Stormfront.

Host: “Why are Jews called antisemitic for admitting Jews control Hollywood?”

Ben Shapiro: “In every major industry in the United States, there are a disproportiante number of Jews because Jews are high achievers. That’s not a surprise in Hollywood. What’s ridiculous is for people to attribute the liberalism to Hollywood to Jews, as opposed to recognizing that Jews who are liberals are liberals first and Jews second. They’re ethnic Jews, but they have nothing to do with Judaism. Most of them can’t stand Israel and want nothing to do with it. They pretend to care about Israel but they really don’t. So, when people say ‘The Jews control Hollywood,’ that’s like saying ‘Polish people control Hollywood.’ The ethnic description is useless, at this point. Really what they’re saying is ‘Leftists control Hollywood,’ and that is very true.’

Host: "Well, when I worked in Hollywood, I was always asked, ‘Are you Jewish?’ Not, ‘Are you a liberal?’”

Yikes. The real kicker is that after Shapiro debases himself, his family, and his faith, the host simply goes, “Nope. I still hate Jews.” Pathetic.

With an eagerness to be accepted by the Nazi-adjacent right, it’s no surprise Shapiro had no issue with Hitler-stan Candace Owens working for his outlet. He thought, for some stupid reason, that he could contain her bigotry from reaching the one thing he cared about: Israel. But that plan failed for the same reason the dinosaurs keep getting loose at Jurassic Park, and now Ben is left to fight his former prodigy. Both literally, as Candace Owens takes his audience, and in a larger sense, as the conservative culture of perpetual outrage and bigotry excused as “conservative politics” is more interested in hearing the hard r from Nick Fuentes than they are in getting the dogwhistles about “the problems of Black fatherhood” from Ben. And make no mistake, that’s where the energy of young conservatives is going. While Shapiro and the rest of the conservative establishment are trying to pull their supporters back from the explicitly-Nazi elements of the right, it’s too late. Fuentes, who describes himself as a White Nationalist fighting “global Jewry” and openly praises the Third Reich, is a popular conservative icon. He dined with Trump, has a rapidly growing viewership, and was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, which splintered The Heritage Foundation after President Kevin Roberts defended it.

Much like Ben Shapiro’s enablement of Candace Owens, conservatives aren’t actually mad that there are Nazis and anti-semites in their ranks. They’re just mad they’re stealing the show. These elements have always been tolerated, if not promoted, by the Republican Party. In 2016, KKK leader David Duke told NPR, “of course” the Klan supports Trump. Trump did not reject Duke’s support. In 2017, former GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner complained there are “Nazis in Congress,” a not-so-subtle reference to Representative Steve King. Conservative politicos and politicians have aggressively ridden the Nazi tiger, and now they’re shocked that it’s turned around to bite them. Ben Shapiro thought that if he demeaned every other racial and religious minority, the Nazis would make peace with Jews (or at least, extremely right-wing, pro-Israel Jews such as Ben Shapiro). Shockingly, it didn’t work, and now he’s lost all his influence to those who openly taught him with gas chamber memes. J.D. Vance thought he could promote White Nationalist Christianity to young American men, and none of them would notice he’s married to a Hindu Indian woman. He spent his career lecturing them about the need for White, Christian unity, and now many on the right consider him a “race traitor.” Vivek Ramaswamy thought that if he could call for the end of birthright citizenship and sat quietly while Laura Ingraham said she wouldn’t vote for him because he’s Brown, his darker skin and religion, which they consider an affront to Christianity, would be overlooked. Now, Nick Fuentes is telling his followers the only race that matters in 2026 is the Ohio governor’s race, specifically, Ramaswamy losing it. Because apparently it’s better for a “White Democrat Jew” to win than an Indian. That’s the thing about promoting racial hierarchy. You'd better make sure you’re on top.

The right-wing ecosystem was so dedicated to owning the libs that they lost the plot. The entire Republican electoral strategy was getting White American eyes to close their eyes and imagine a blue-haired woman somewhere, then saying slurs until she cried. And it worked! Trump was elected twice. But now those men want to keep saying more slurs, new slurs that make the woman even angrier, that they have no interest in actually helping Republicans get elected. Conservatives thought they could use this strategy to grow a base of support among young voters who would support the GOP. But the kids didn’t come to vote for the GOP. They came for the constant trolling, gratification of being told “You Can’t Say That,” and getting attention online. Now, the leading conservative superstar isn’t Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Benny Johnson, or anyone else who is excited about the midterms. It’s the Hitler-Heiler Clavicular, a self-styled Alpha Male Chad that only cares about mogging people, which seems to be a higher form of owning someone. As expected. Owning the libs isn’t even enough anymore. You have to mog them. The fruits of reactionary stupidity came full circle when Clavicular sent The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles into a panic attack by saying he’d voted for Gavin Newsom over J.D. Vance because Newsom is a “6’3” chad who mogs” and Vance is an “obese subhuman” with a “recessed side profile.”

This clip really shows the cause and effect of the conservative race to the bottom. Michael Knowles rolls out the electoral ragebait playbook: “Gavin Newsom is pro-burning down the cities, pro-murdering the babies.” He’s making outrageous claims no one believes, and expecting the conclusion to be voting for J.D. Vance. Alternatively, Clavicular is a product of the absurd culture Knowles promoted, who now sees the path to the even more absurd statement (and hence, more views) by disregarding the voting part. The consequences of Michael Knowles’ entire life's work are sitting across from him — and all he can do is laugh in disbelief.

To understand how the conservative movement got to this point, it’s crucial to understand that right-wing media didn’t just make their supporters more racist and bigoted: they also made them stupider. Years of constantly piping dumber and dumber political takes into Republican-leaning voters to convince them Donald Trump’s idiocracy is actually masterful genius have left the conservative movement with a constituency that doesn’t just shy away from intellectualism, but yearns to be led by the dumbest people on Planet Earth. Conservative pundits didn’t just omit intellectual debate from their agendas — they purposefully decreased the brain function of Republican-aligned voters. The latest example of the self-lobotomizing of the conservative mind is Oklahoma University student and now right-wing superstar, Samantha Fulnecky. After Fulnecky was failed by her trans TA for failing to meet the basic requirements of an essay, rightists pushed her into the conservative celebrity incubator and elevated her to stardom. Fulnecky was featured on Fox News and a host of conservative media stations, held up as a martyr who was #cancelled by her woke trans professor for writing that she disagreed with trans ideology. At the height of her fame, the Oklahoma House of Representatives gave her a Citation of Recognition for her pursuit of academic freedom. Conservatives didn’t just invite Fulnecky on a few shows. The actual Republican Party held her up as a model citizen, the very person they want other Americans, particularly their voters, to emulate.

Tough angle.

But when you read Fulnecky’s essay, two things become clear. First, the TA was right to fail her. She didn’t include a single citation. Second, Smanatha Fulnecky is dumb as shit.

Here’s my favorite line from her assignment:

“Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demoin and severly harms American youth.”

Bitch, there are multiple genders! Your transphobic essay argues that there are only male and female. That’s two fucking genders — i.e., “multiple genders”!!!

But to top the entire saga off, during an interview, Fulnecky undercut the entire conservative argument that she was persecuted for making a Christian argument by admitting that she never read the actual assignment and had written the paper in thirty minutes. This was the low-quality effort the TA failed her for, which conservative hype machine claimed was “religious persecution.” Doing that is only something an idiot would do. But admitting it on camera leads me to believe the 400 Botox injections Fulnecky shot into that glacier of a forehead are cutting off the blood flow to her brain. It can not be possible for someone to naturally be this dumb. And I must repeat — the Oklahoma Republican Party elevated this woman and gave her an award. This is their idol!

With the typical conservative celebrity having less brain function than a coma patient, it’s no wonder the right-wing population has no interest in actual intellectualism or political theory. They want slop. Conspiracy-brained, insane, racist slop. The sloppier the better. This irritates many members of the right-wing elite, who fancy themselves to be the free-thinking, open-minded intellectual titans that they spent the Trump era trying to brand themselves as. No one embodies this frustration more than Christopher F. Rufo a self-styled conservative intellectual, whose diatribes against critical race theory are now considered dull and boring by the rage-seeking conservative masses. Rufo has recently taken to complaining that there are no true conservative writers here on Substack, with the lone exception of himself. Yea man, conservatives don’t read. I’m not being rude. They literally just don’t read. According to Pew Research, the only media sources that get more Republican audiences than Democrats are the slop factories filling the endless slop trough that is the rightist internet: Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, The Daily Wire, Newsmax, Joe Rogan, Fox News, and The New York Post. But even The Post, which is just right-wing tabloid rage bait, only gets slightly more Republican readers than Democrats (10%-8%). Sorry Chris. Conservatives don’t read. You’d have better luck selling Kristi Noem a puppy. And they don’t watch the news, unless it’s Sean Hannity or another drunk slob yelling at the TV until he’s red in the face. This is one of many reasons why Bari Weiss’s CBS project is failing. Conservatives want slop.

Just like Ben Shapiro, what makes Rufo such a pathetic crybaby is that he is personally responsible for the degradation of the conservative mind. To give you a taste of the high-brow, in-depth political thought he brings to the political arena, I suggest you read his 2024 article, The Cat Eaters of Ohio. I’ll say this: it’s the most thought-provoking argument in support of Trump’s campaign claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. That is to say, it’s absolute dribble. But it’s spell-checked dribble, and for conservative media, that’s a high bar. Now that all the right-wingers are getting conspiracy-pilled by the likes of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, Rufo is trying to pull them back by saying “intelligent men” guard against “slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing.” This is true. Intelligent people do protect themselves from nonsense. But thanks to Rufo’s work chasing algorithmic success with slop and conspiracies, there are few intelligent men or women left in the American conservative movement. And Rufo has no one to blame but himself.

The need to appease the intellectually feral parts of the Republican base is so strong that even those who were once hailed as defenders of Respectable Conservatism™️ have given in. In a 2017 article for The Atlantic entitled Can Conservative Journalism Survive? Conor Friedersdorff detailed how the first waves of the anti-intellectual tendency we’re witnessing today clashed against traditional Republican-aligned media. Explaining how the “old guard” of conservative media was facing struggles to defend traditional conservative principles (only saying racial slurs in private, never in public), Friedersdorff pointed to National Review and its editor Charles C.W. Cooke as an example of steadfast defiance against the push to succumb to right-wing slopulism.

“Surely Charles C.W. Cooke, its online editor, perhaps the most confident defender of conservatism younger than George Will, would have championed the substance of his magazine, which is presently as intellectually alive and vital as it has been in a generation…”

For as long as I’ve followed politics, conservatives and liberals have pointed to Cooke as the titan of principled, respectable, and reasonable conservatism. I remember watching him as a frequent guest on Bill Maher (before Maher got completely Weiss-pilled), where he would make arguments for or against policy grounded in constitutional principles. But that is no longer the case. In a recent article gloating over the mass layoffs at The Washington Post, Cooke indulges in the favorite pastime of right-wing slop architects: imagining a liberal woman, making up crazy things she probably believes, then making fun of her for it. Cooke writes:

“Don’t believe me? Click through on one of those posts, scroll past the pinned advertisement for the newspaper’s union, and look up the user’s name in the Post’s archive. If you do, you’ll typically learn that the person who is being praised as a “brilliant” and “talented” journalist who did “great work” has a job description like “sits at the intersection of civil rights and cooking,” that they wrote four things in the last two months, and that two of them were about how alligators are racist. This — not the second coming of Shakespeare — is what Jeff Bezos was supposed to pay for in perpetuity as penance for having been a useful member of society.”

The entire essay is just a 400-word mockery of the person conservatives love to hate: a woman journalist who is really a social justice warrior in disguise. I’ve scoured The Washington Post archives, and there’s no record of any writer, past or present, with the job description “sits at the intersection of civil rights and cooking,” or anything about how alligators are racist. This is the only example of bad reporting Cooke provides, likely because he made it all up. But in my research, I did find one case of military-grade whining about cultural appropriation and food: Trump’s nominee for a Senior State Department position, Jeremy Carl, who, with tears in his eyes, told a Senate committee that White food and White culture are being “erased.” If he’s not too busy making fun of unemployed journalists, maybe Mr. Cooke could apply his hatred for obnoxious racialized culinary analysis to the Republican Party’s picks for the State Department. I’ve been told he’s very principled. So I’m certain he’ll get right on it.

It appears Cooke has answered Conor Friedorf’s 2017 question: No, conservative media could not survive the Trump era. Even conservatism’s most respectable, “principled” pundits are chumming the waters, trying to stretch their dwindling supply of red meat to distract from the perpetually embarrassing presidency of Donald Trump. Trump campaigned on releasing The Epstein Files, and is now forced to do so, revealing himself to be a serial pedophile. Aided by all the conservative media figures mentioned above (and many more), Trump built the sex offender version of a Wile E. Coyote trap — he built a tunnel onto the cliffside, fit with the Epstein Files at the end, and ran face-first into it.

While it is easy to blame the intellectual degradation of the American right on Trump, he is not the cause of this problem. After all, Trump captured the GOP and won the nomination back in 2016, when National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and more “acclaimed” conservative publications were the face of right-wing media. He was and remains a product of the enstupidification and bigotry they have pushed on their readers and voters since the parties realigned after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Conservative media spent decades implicitly arguing for a racialized, White America. So when Trump came down the elevator and said, “Mexicans are rapists,” Republican voters were finally happy to have someone say out loud what they’d been told to think. At the time, many conservative activists recognized their role and were ashamed of it. After the 2016 election, Glenn Beck took responsibility for creating the media environment that led to Trump, imploring others to “learn from my mistakes.” But don’t worry. Glenn has come back around to supporting Trump. After all, how else is he supposed to generate leads for his real estate business?

Left: Glenn Beck's Real Estate business. (My agent application is pending.) Right: A Glenn Beck original, yours for only $3,800)

To say that the enstupidification and aggressive bigotry of the American right is new is to ignore all the ways in which the American right has always been stupid and bigoted. The self-mogging of the conservative movement, and possibly, the Republican Party, isn’t the project of American conservatism being corrupted or misguided by a few bad actors. It is the natural conclusion of a reactionary political project that has always sought, and will always seek, to preserve America’s existing social and economic hierarchies while restoring those undone by progressive gains. The conservatives complaining about it now haven’t found their conscience — they’re just upset they’re not its final masters.

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In Solidarity — Joe