There is a strange disease affecting conservative leaders and it’s a serious one. There’s a small but very well-defined group of them that were once solid, reliable, based, and respected for years. It’s not that they never held contrary views or that they all agreed on one conservative canon, it’s that they filled a place in conservative leadership wherein they filled a niche and kept out of each other’s lane and those of other branches of conservatism. They had some semblances of mutual respect and most importantly, they lived some level of loyalty to the larger conservative purpose. Now each of these formerly well-respected thinkers or leaders are showing signs of nutjob tendencies if not outright defection, even to the point of flirting with leftist ideas and luminaries. I have a caveat here in that I have never followed any of them closely, but I do have some ongoing exposure to news stories of observers that do. This shift is weird, both in timing and the scope of people involved.
Candace Owens is one that has totally fallen from grace. She has no further contribution to conservatism and should remove herself from the conversation. If she has any audience left, they should discover some standards.
Marjorie Taylor Green has gone almost completely to the dark side. A woman spurned for good reason should have exercised a lot more introspection up front because now she can never again suck up to her original constituency enough to make up for her ever-deepening treasonous pout.
Ron Paul and Rand Paul, libertarian/conservative stalwarts, always welcomed counterculture even within conservatism, yet have now spilled over the banks to the point of becoming nothing but egregious obstructionist; some of their positions even flipping into left-speak. If this is all the better you can do as friends, then why do we need enemies?
Tucker Carlson is one of the most baffling, and while he may still be counted as conservative, he’s very much on a watchlist for a full-blown infection. It seemed to really kick in with his fawning appraisal of Putin and fixation on UFOs, grew even more suspicious with what looked like and verged into antisemitism, divided conservatism with his mild handling of Fuentes, and in the few weeks since, is still going down as he denounces or makes enemies with yet another conservative figure. He’s showing signs that things are not going so well inside his head in the post Fox News season of life.
What could possibly cause, what seems like random infection of various conservatives that didn’t have direct ties to one another before this? At a time when The Trump administration is kicking ass and righting, in some cases, generations worth of wrong, why would some of the people that strongly supported or represented him and America First ideas, suddenly become contrarian fruitcakes to the detriment of these ideas and toward their conservative peers. One would be tempted to wonder what kind of demons are unleashed here? Seriously. Each of these personalities all once stood in a brighter spotlight and for a variety of reasons have slipped from that pinnacle. Everyone hits a place in life where they must decrease so that others might increase. Apparently, if you reach a certain level fame, you can’t turn it off, but what do I know?
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