The Patriot Post® · Conservatives Must Always Stand for Truth
“To restore … harmony … to render us again one people acting as one nation should be the object of every man really a patriot.” —Thomas Jefferson (1801)
Donald Trump celebrated the first year of his second term in office this week, and his administration can boast an extraordinary record of success over the past year. It remains to be seen if his efforts to rebrand “affordability” and resolution of the ICE ops optics problems will be sufficiently resolved to move the voter approval needle. Despite the MSM’s constant focus on midterm elections as if they were tomorrow, there is plenty of time for cleanup.
But Trump faces another problem that threatens to create a measure of division within his conservative coalition, grassroots Americans who are already loathed by the Left.
There are some social media influencers claiming the mantle of “conservative” who are sending mixed signals. Our editors have rightly criticized several high-profile populist influencers, including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, the latter of whom seems to have lost touch with reality.
In our first edition of the new year, Thomas Gallatin wrote: “The MAGA movement is facing a rift created by a few loud influencers on the new media Right, and it’s a threat to Donald Trump’s populist political coalition. In this new year, we must thoroughly rebuke these outlying ‘conservative’ conspiracy charlatans. This problem, which has been increasingly evident in some quarters since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, was well defined at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December.”
Gallatin continued: “At the event, Ben Shapiro gave a pointed and needed speech, calling out by name [influencers] who have featured or failed to rebuke those peddling ridiculous antisemitic conspiracy theories around Kirk’s murder and beyond. Shapiro is right. ‘The future of the country relies on the future of the conservative movement,’ he declared. ‘It relies on what TPUSA defines as its core mission: freedom, free markets, and limited government.’”
He concluded: “In this feeling-over-facts world, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and their ilk can ply their manipulative trade by appealing to people’s distrust to sell them a bogus narrative filled with half-truths and outright falsehoods, yet crafted to win them over to believing it. Like cult leaders, they manipulate their followers to listen and embrace their own telling of history — not to educate and free, but to deceive and direct for their own aims.”
Fact is, we are at something of an inflection point, and conservatives must hold to the truth, embrace what unites us, and distance ourselves from perilous influencer personality cults — those who are embracing the “woke” mindset.
As a working definition for context, I offer this: Woke: /wōk/ A progressive (read: regressive) mental health disorder characterized by fundamental insecurities resulting in an obsession with socialism, statism, historical revisionism, social/racial justice, and gender disorientation.
But some of those fundamental insecurities have emerged in certain corners of the far Right and have occasionally found their way onto mainstream influencer platforms.
Last year, I outlined what Elon Musk called the “Metastatic Woke Mind Virus.”
According to Musk: “The woke mind virus consists of creating very, very divisive identity politics … [which] amplifies racism; amplifies, frankly, sexism; and all of the -isms while claiming to do the opposite. It actually divides people and makes them hate each other and hate themselves. You want to have people succeed based on how hard they work and their talents, not who they are, whether they’re man or woman, what race or gender, that stuff is all … artificial, mental civil war.”
At the root of that contagion and its accelerating metastasis is Trump Derangement Syndrome.
TDS is a form of hysteric cognitive dissonance: thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes resulting in dissociative behavioral and emotive expressions that render the afflicted incapable of free thought or critical evaluation, and subject to irrational fear and blind hatred of all people and things associated with Trump, to the extent that they will abandon normative logic and reason, sever familial and fraternal relationships, and exhibit increasingly angry emotionally incontinent verbal and physical outbursts.
I would conclude that the escalating frequency and intensity of hysterics associated with TDS are greatly exacerbated by the consumption of the hateful rhetoric spewed 24/7/365 by Leftmedia talkingheads and scribes, and across social media platforms.
That is the driving force behind what we have recently witnessed in the Minneapolis protests, a model perfected six years ago in the Demos’ summer of rage riots.
To be clear, the election of Donald Trump did not create the latest epidemic of emotional incontinence and cognitive dissonance on the Left. Rather, Trump’s election revealed it. TDS is particularly evident in leftist women, whom Democrat strategists believe are malleable idiots, easily molded into whatever political shape they desire.
So, is there an emergent element of woke on the far Right?
That brings me to researcher James Lindsay and his revelations about that emergence.
Lindsay is hated by many on the Left for exposing their fraud, and more recently by some on the “woke Right” for exposing their fraud.
If you don’t recall his name, in 2022, libertarian journalist John Stossel wrote about how Lindsay and fellow researchers Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted bogus research papers to “grievance studies” journals that “accepted ridiculous papers.” Stossel referenced one of those “research studies” that “took a section of ‘Mein Kampf’ but replaced references to ‘National Socialism’ with ‘feminism,’” which “was accepted by Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.”
Laura Hollis outlined why the fake papers on additional topics such as “homophobia in dog parks” are an argument to eliminate collegiate and university tenure, as they are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg of the nonsense being published by institutional “academic scholars.”
In a recent interview with Lindsay, Stossel says, “He exposed the woke left’s insanity, defended capitalism, and pushed back on global governance. Now he’s exposing people on the right who bash individual liberty.”
Of his effort to expose charlatans on the Right, Lindsay says: “A lot of people ask me, ‘What is 'woke’ right?‘”
He explains: “There is a radical segment on the right that act the same way. … And everybody who is not part of it understands it immediately. It is people on the right who act like the woke left, who think like the woke left. They’ve adopted critical theory Marxist analysis but they engage in the same behaviors. That’s the victimhood mentality, the cancel culture struggle sessions, they bully people online with swarms, they rewrite history. This entire kind of litany of abusive left-wing behavior over the last five years, just imagine right-wing people doing it for allegedly right-wing causes…”
Lindsay cites as an outlier example Tucker Carlson’s praise for leftist protagonist Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her advocacy for socialism, noting this is “Astonishing!” He explains, “Warren put forth something called the 'Accountable Capitalism Act,’ which was going to restrain the way that corporations are able to behave under the brand name of ‘accountability.’”
Lindsay counters: “When you have free people who can engage freely with one another and trade … you actually have a rising of all ships. Because what you have is a people who are free to do with their things as they will. They, therefore, can implement their stuff, their money, their resources, their talents, whatever they happen to be, to solve problems for other people. And when you solve a problem for other people, even if it’s a kind of silly thing, like entertaining them with a silly game on their phone, when you solve a problem for other people, they’ll give you money for it, in exchange.”
It is fair to conclude that, in some instances, Carlson’s craving for populist appeal outpaces his brain.
Lindsay’s most recent “fake” research was a rewrite of a section of The Communist Manifesto under the pseudonym Marcus Carlson (an adulteration of Karl Marx). He sent it to American Reformer, a conservative magazine, and astoundingly they published it. As Stossel noted, “Even after a reader pointed out that it was ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ the magazine kept its article up, writing, ‘It’s still a reasonable aggregate of some New Right ideas.’”
While there is a resurgence of conservative values and voters, we will lose some of that momentum if we don’t uniformly and unequivocally denounce the woke influencers on the far Right who undermine our devotion to American Liberty, and the conservative values and policies we promote.
We must all hold fast to our Patriot Post motto: “Veritas vos Liberabit” (The Truth will set you Free).
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
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