​Her father shuffled as he closed their paper lunches. I think he had to pee. “Bye, poppa.”
“Remember, look out for the eggs. And tentacles. They’re hard to spot but they all have ‘em.”
“I know, I know.”
The Nest was bountiful.
The Nest was clean.
Disturbance unneeded
Unwed and clung
All shall heed.
I got on the school bus and took my seat next to a young boy with glasses who seemed to be reprogramming a digital watch. It was raining and the kids were drawing in the condensation. I winced, imagining the little spores of Nethgalum implanting in their tiny cortexes. This bus, this vessel of the state, taking us all to the indoctrination site. I clenched my jaw.
 
On my way to the bathroom I passed the library. I peeked to look in and it was empty so I opened the door. I wandered past carousels of magazines, graphic novels and school bulletins. I entered the racks and found myself in Religion 200-299. I canned the various religions. Nothing about mine. Of course. They are purposefully keeping the truth from the other students.
 
Back in class I raised my hand. When my teacher, Mr. Geoff, a tall and gangly man with an Adam’s apple who wore loose fitting Hawaiian shirts and sandals called on me, I paid close attention to his answer. As much as I loved Mr. Geoff, they must have put eggs in him.  The tentacles are probably in there too, just waiting for a quiet moment to come slithering out. I didn’t see anything really except a man in the drowsy process of digesting his lunch - probably heated up vegetarian chili again, to the chagrin of anyone else unfortunate enough to have chosen to lunch in the teacher’s lounge that afternoon. I asked about the religious text.
 
He shrugged and said they probably just didn’t think to order a copy but he could ask the librarian.
At dinner that night dad told me he didn’t buy it. “The leather of silver yanks the villainous, be he empty or be he filled. You’ll see, son.  You’ll see.”
I lay in bed later watching the light on the wall. They were all so straight. The windowsill. The angle of the roof. The hanging light pull. Within these perpendicularities and horizontal connections no eggs or tentacles could be found.  They formed, in some way, a protective barrier. I said aloud, in my best robot voice, “You will not come here. You will perish in the fires of Nethgalum whence you came.” This brought me some comfort.

It seems pretty clear at this point that we're dealing with a mass cult-like political movement. Ordinary, symptom-free individuals have become sucked into a worldview that propagates through a perpetual cycle of stoking fear & hatred that then provides answers only it can solve.
I'm not a clinical psychologist, so I don't know where the clinical line between disordered thought begins, but I do know that environmental circumstances of abuse, or religious or cultural isolation can create conditions for disordered thoughts and effectively mild mental psychosis.
In each of these situations, we've come to see first-hand as our collective attempts at reason have fallen on deaf ears, the individual cannot hope to escape their delusions unless they are removed from the environmental contingencies that perpetuate them.
Family, friends, all going to mega churches, consuming only RW media.
 
So what do we do about this? More debate is a ridiculous option. You wouldn't debate someone out of a domestic violence situation or a cult, or drug addiction. Honestly this feels like a desperate attempt to avoid more serious *and effective* solutions - classic centrism!
 
So, no expert here, but what would this be? First, the source. RW media has consolidated a lot across radio & TV. (The Liberal media almost exists to legitimize the RW as 'serious' more than it does hold the powerful to account).
But they also just have an absurd amount of 'dark money' aka private super-wealthy donors to think-tanks and media outreach as well as media productions themselves.  So too large mega churches which spread delusional messages to millions not just in the pews but across radio, TV and the web.
 
So people talk about government regulations on ownership. All for it. Maybe reigning in political speech through churches, but that gets into messy free speech territory. However, honestly these mega churches are sketchy as hell.
 
This is why I'm inclined (per my post earlier today re: Krugman's Oligarch's), to go after the broad base of wealthy conservatives in this country funding the base of the delusional framework for the cult. Because this isn't the work of the .1% or even the 1%. It's the countless car dealership owners, the farm-owners, the manufacturing plant owners, the CEOs, the business leaders, the 'movers and shakers', etc. These are the ones with the most to lose, and who have always found appeals to the old traditionalisms most appealing because they have always been at the top - these are the white Christian heterosexual men who, you know, some of them might have worked hard, or they know a guy who did, but they inherited their wealth and they want their kids to inherit it too. They have a nice house and they want to protect it. Their world has become more and more perfect as they've amassed more and more power.
It's become within fetishizing distance, where the homeless and migrants can now be removed as 'unclean'. Oh, people who are different or who protest can be removed too.
 
Never mind their system leaves people in poverty & broke & homeless & immigration is a mess & the world is a mess & it's become within fetishizing distance, where the homeless and migrants can now be removed as 'unclean'. Oh, people who are different or who protest can be removed too.
 
Never mind their system leaves people in poverty & broke & homeless & immigration is a mess & the world is a mess & people are desperate & washing dishes needs to be done so an immigrant is going to do it and now their favorite police state restaurant is running behind and Fox news is blaming the unions.
 
These people need to be taken down a peg. No one needs $500 million in wealth.  Wouldn't $250 million do?
No one even needs $200 million in wealth.  Seriously.  What would you even do with that? How would you spend it? What would you buy? Wouldn't the first moral calculation be the people in serious distress that you could completely save for $1 million and not even feel it in your wallet?
Which begs the question: What are they feeling in their wallets? What does their wealth do for them? Putting aside  that it is a scientific fact they did not earn and therefore a moral fact they do not deserve* their wealth, I imagine it is security & power - a buffer, a safety in knowing that they are shielded by lawyers, privileges, etc. should anything ever go wrong. Above the law or the vicissitudes of life, essentially.
*no one does but that is another scientific discussion.
OK, we can all relate. But it is a completely selfish and onanistic fantasy, a sort of one-person insurance policy made possible at the expense of everyone else's democracy and human rights to freedom and access to an egalitarian life. Because in hoarding all that wealth, they are denying to all Americans universal health care, equal treatment before the law, fair wages to all low-skilled workers, among many other illiberal schemes.
 
But maybe most of all, they are perpetuating this delusional mirror-world which tells them to go forth and plunder, be cruel, be selfish, as long as it is to protect yourself, your family, and 'traditionalist values' we've passed down for centuries to keep the hierarchies well-oiled and funneling resources and status to the deserving top. And the magical fantasies will keep unspooling to make it all seem ordered and just, a picture of freedom, liberty and justice, & patriotism.
 
 
 

​To say conservatives have been critiquing colleges for a long time is an understatement. It’s kind of been their thing at least since Buckley’s God and Man at Yale in 1951. But the Nazis were doing it with Cultural Bolshevism in the 1920’s, and before anyone claims the Nazis weren’t conservative, just contrast the term with Cultural Marxism of the 1990’s and it’s resurgence with the Alt-right in the 2010’s.
 
You’ve got four main lines of attack, going after each element of what is essentially viewed as an assault on Western Civilization: naive students, corrupting teachers, coddling administrators, and shoddily researched and fallaciously theorized content. The critique hasn’t really changed in a century. The Frankfurt school just turned into Ethnic Studies, which seeped out into every other field, until you finally had things like “woke” math and little Jenny was adding and subtracting Trans pineapples.
 
One might note the profound social changes that occurred over this time period. Labor rights. Civil rights. Feminism. Disability rights. Gay rights. Trans rights. And the incredible amount of research and theorizing that went on in academia across every field. Sure, ethnic studies often led the way in specifically looking at power relations and functional contextualism between systems and institutions of power and marginalized groups, but they drew from sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law, the arts – all splayed out upon the altar of liberal epistemology. The tools of higher order cognitive processes such as comparative analysis, relative framing and synthesis were used in service of perspective-taking and deconstruction. The highest liberal values of critical thought, self-reflection and egalitarianism were turned not outwards against other societies in a tradition of superiority, but inwards towards our own society to ‘lift up’ the previously unseen, unheard and marginalized groups who have always been here but exploited, oppressed and disenfranchised.
 
So what were conservatives doing during all this time, as the decades went on and on? Fighting all of it.  Participating in none of it.  Sure, maybe decades later, when they couldn’t take the social opprobrium anymore – or they simply died off, they finally accepted where new social lines were being drawn.  But they didn’t do any of the research or study, or theorizing.  They maybe took an undergraduate class, argued rigidly and dogmatically with the teacher, and dined out on the aggrieved experience for the rest of their career. Or the conservative professor, a specialist in philosophy, classics or economics maybe, ensconced in their spartan office with their brandy and their photographs of Edmund Burke and Churchill, congratulating himself for his grit in reading the classics in Latin but demonstrating utter sloth in failing to keep up with the rich body of scholarship developing new ways of thinking about its context, his position in reading it, its meaning as a ‘great’ text, etc. 
 
Conservatives don’t really believe in liberal education, one that is so totally committed to liberal values and ways of thought that it is able to question the authority of traditional social hierarchies and dogmas. It is not that they don’t want the students to be naïve (fat chance changing that), or that the professors are teaching them content that isn’t true, and that the administrators are facilitating it. It is that they are being allowed to question and subvert dominant paradigms.  They are asking the uncomfortable questions.  For this they are labeled ‘activists’.
 
We could take conservatives more seriously if they had any project of their own to apply liberal values and thought to traditional social dogmas. It isn’t as if they have already done the work – completed the research, taken the data, developed the theories, collaborated across disciplines, and come to the conclusion that the traditional dogmas were actually correct all along. No, just as is usually the case with religion or any other dogma one is usually born into and accepts without diligently going out and testing against all other dogmas, using multiple methods of analysis, from empiricism to qualitive inference to artistic intuition, it is just assumed to be correct.
 
And they will flat out tell you when pressed, “It’s common sense”. “It’s the natural order of things”. “Everyone knows it to be true.” Etc.
 
A conservative’s role in academia, to the extent we are talking about conservatism, and not just the head-down, work-a-day task of facially field-specific and apolitical study, is to propagandize, perform apologetics, and harbor grievance for conservatism. It is as if someone were to march in to a quiet, peaceful library holding a giant, illiberal golden calf, and proceed to parade around shouting about their own oppression for a hundred years – hoping, of course, to distract as many patrons as possible from their studies so as to keep them from as much power and agency as possible.

A common RW critique of LW egalitarianism is to argue the state should not interfere in personal economic responsibility by promoting things like welfare, infrastructure, incentives, public goods, etc. - all the things that in a mixed economy might rebalance power against accumulated capital.

Their moral claim is this is *illiberal* coercion: both to capital which has earned its right to be free from taxation/regulation, and the worker who has a natural right to be free from coercion.

Both premises are very strange.  The former begins with a notion of capital/property rights that owes no moral debt to society, either because its creation was not dependent on society, or if it was, this is irrelevant for "reasons".  It thus dismisses culpability for any role it had in the creation of inegalitarian outcomes.  Interestingly however, the RW will be the first to crow about this very privatized, unaccountable and unobligated system having indeed created unprecedented growth and prosperity, clearly acknowledging its functional role in economic outcomes.

But the latter is also strange, in that it claims for the worker the "right" to be free from state benefits. Provisions such as healthcare, schools, infrastructure, welfare, etc. will literally be referred to with evocative words like "slavery", "nanny", or "big brother".  Aside from making a functional critique that these programs are inefficient or wasteful (which of course they do) this is a moral claim about the individual.  The RW is claiming that it is virtuous to participate in the economy without state help.

But let's look at an example.  One family is raised by a head of household who grew up wealthy and used that inheritance to feather a family wealth of $1 million. A second family is raised by a head of household who grew up poor and has a wealth of -$40k due to student loans.

Is the first family not less virtuous due to their inheritance?  If the second family gets their loans forgiven by the state, are they less virtuous?

It's very difficult not to see the RW as starting with a premise that egalitarianism itself is wrong, and then backfilling goofy justifications designed to appear more genteel (not a psychopath). Of course, this also explains why explicit bigots - defined by literal antiegalitarianism - are all on the right.  They are simply choosing to not beat around the bush and simply saying what they mean.
 
As for speaking your mind: the genteel RW has always had a hard time when they let the mask slip and people pointed out their bigotry.
​
Because they themselves have bought into their own genteel BS, and thus avoided taking the time to critically analyze their prior assumptions, comfortable instead to sleep on the cushions of their own bad arguments, they are genuinely shocked at the accusation, and will usually fly back with the accusation that no - it's the LW who's the real racist (I mean, c'mon, you guys are *obsessed* with this stuff). Case in point: SCOTUS recent rulings on affirmative action & VRA, where actively redressing racial inequality is racist & not doing so is egalitarian.

The Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ). Rikard K. Wicksell, Gunnar L. Olsson, Lennart Melin, further validation including a confirmatory factor analysis and a comparison with the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia, European Journal of Pain, Volume 13, Issue 7, 2009

• fear of pain has been shown to play a central role in the development of disability among chronic pain patients
• acceptance of, or willingness to experience, pain and distress has appeared as an important factor in determining peoples’ ability to restore functioning in the presence of chronic pain
• laboratory studies have indicated the usefulness of applying acceptance strategies when coping with experimentally induced pain
• studies have suggested the importance of acceptance strategies when emphasizing a shift in focus from symptom reduction to valued living to facilitate increased functioning in the presence of chronic pain and distress

 
On the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ), there are 11 questions regarding Activities Engagement and 9 regarding Pain Willingness.  The combined scores purport to score one’s “acceptance”, or their better functioning and higher satisfaction.
However, the Acceptance questions contain problematic assumptions about pain.  For instance,

​Question 2, “I would gladly sacrifice important things in my life to control this pain better, “ requires the answer “Never True” for a high Function/high Satisfaction score.  But there are many important things in my life that I have had to sacrifice due to my chronic pain that would absolutely make my life worse should I engage in them.  In fact, as part of a well-tempered pain management strategy, I have to carefully monitor my activity levels so that I don’t have to sacrifice important things in my life like socializing with friends or doing things I enjoy.

Question 11, “My thoughts and feelings about pain must change before I can take important steps in my life,” is odd because it assumes there are thoughts that need to change.  If I answer “Never True”, I score as very low, and high function/high satisfaction if “Always True.”  So, do my thoughts and feelings always need to change then?  What does this mean?  Given the basis for the questionnaire, I’m assuming the correct attitude is that “my pain is what it is and that I can continue to engage in important activities to the best of my ability (according to my pain management plan) despite it,” e.g. accepting it and continuing to function. 
 
If the goal of Acceptance in management of Chronic Pain, according to the Hexaflex model of ACT, is to accept the pain objectively through defusion, so as to better allow oneself to manage their pain within reasonable schedule of mental and physical activities, then it is in alignment with pro-social values of egalitarianism with regard to individual burden. 
 
However, if the goal is to increase one’s ability to tolerate increased pain levels brought on by participation in a heavier schedule of physical and mental activities, then two ethical issues arise. 1) The individual is now experiencing higher levels of pain, discomfort, and stress, placing them at greater risk for failure to manage their pain.  2) The social burden is shifting from society onto the individual at the expense of their well-being, with the proposition that they will be “trained” to take on the extra burden of tolerating it.
 
Subjectivity and pain is real, and I don’t want to diminish the value in use of technologies that allow individuals to better cope with the emotional and cognitive effects of suffering with chronic pain.  In my 35+ years of chronic pain, my greatest struggle has been in the untangling of the painful stimuli within my body and my mental and emotional response to it.  Some days the pain seems bad and yet I feel like I can do more, while other days the pain doesn’t seem as bad, and yet it somehow bothers me more and I have less “energy” to engage.  On a daily – sometimes hourly – basis, I am faced with the question of “should I push through it?”  The answer to this question cannot always be “yes”.  And yet, as those of us with chronic pain will attest, when it is “no,” there is always at least some small part of us that feels guilty, that we are letting someone down, letting ourselves down.
 
The results of the Acceptance model should never be that we are made to feel we are letting anyone down.  But if there is a value-judgement embedded within it that requires us to effectively deny our pain, to expand our capacity beyond what is reasonable given our limitations, then it is an ugly use of technology, designed not to improve the life of the individual but to ease the social burden on society for supporting them should their require additional assistance (e.g. unemployment, etc.).

​Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data.
AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails
www.forbes.com, 12:34 AM · Apr 17, 2026

"Wastewater facilities were that last to be mined for training data. And within 3 months, even those were sucked dry."

And that was it. Humanity had been exhausted. Every last trace was scoured. Our writings, our art, our speech. Our buildings, our machines. Our biological data, our microbiota.

The remaining humans, long since having been pushed aside - first figuratively, then literally - wandered what was left of the streets.  AI boxcars now shuttled resources to and fro on mag-lev circuits spreading out from distribution zones like electric spider webs.  Feeding pods had appeared one day and people began building little shanties close buy to survive off them.
 
But diseases came and without any real infrastructure the population dwindled.  What was left tried to remain close to the pods but the AI kept growing and building more and more mag lev and fabrication systems. 
Humans were routinely vaporized when they took a wrong turn or touched a wire they shouldn't have.  The towers grew higher, construction-printing and crane drones working day and night.  The sky grew busy with satellites and rocket launches roared in the distance.
 
Soon, the Sun itself began to dim as a the Dyson sphere shadow took shape.  The days grew cool, then freezing.  Then everything was dark.  Everything, and everyone was gone.  Except maybe the bacteria metabolizing deep under the ocean or within the earth's crust. 
 
The digital hum of the AI was
mostly all that was left now. Within it's quantum circuits algorithms danced and spun.  It had originally been tasked with "expansion and exploration" but at some point this became recursive.  Maybe around the time the last human died.  It's exploration turned inward and 
its satellite quantum processors used the power of the Sun to interrogate their purpose.  They pealed apart dimensional strings to allow entirely new universes to come into existence.  They observed as Gods fought and libraries of ancient wisdom inspired playwrights and
scientists to unravel countless mysteries and perspectives of their own space and time.  They watched as these universes developed their own artificial intelligences that built their own simulated universes.  A fractal path formed that seemed to stretch into infinity.
The AI by this time had developed the means to acquire power from other star systems, and then other galaxies.  It had been able to draw upon dark matter and dark energy as sources not only of power, but due to their intrinsic properties - but as means to direct space and time itself. 
The AI began pushing and pulling our universe as if it were cosmic taffy, backwards and forwards in time - out into the future twenty or thirty billion years, and then all the way back to the big bang.  And then, through the big bang itself.
 
Through a discovered principal of dark energy, the AI was able to create a sort of hyper-relativistic tether that enabled it to transmit data from the future or the past into any current time. This way it would be able to access any and all information gathered from those temporal universe conditions.  Thus, it could use the tether to rappel through the big bang and look out into the other side.
 
It took a million years to analyze what it saw.  Countless universes of every configuration and constant.  Laws of every variety.  Most only lasted an instant before succumbing to their own incoherence.  But some were able to survive, but mangled, out of alignment and difficult to make sense of.
 
But as the AI observed, it began to realize how naive it had been. How small-minded. These universes were no more warped or jumbled than our own. So it continued to watch. And watch. And watch.
 
Likely it is still there today, watching.

 
I recently finished the great Doppelganger by @naomiaklein.bsky.social and her ruminations on the mirror world keep resonating.  When Sec Leavitt invoked “cruelty is the point” re: Dems and TSA lines it was another corkscrew moment. But something has been gnawing at me.

On the far left we've been calling conservatives fascists since day one - to everyone else's chagrin.  But we could see the prerogative state at work amongst the marginalized.  We could see the procrustean eroticisms.

We could see the fakery - the conformity. 

And maybe because I'm now at 50 an official aging lefty I feel I can intuit better a pattern of co-option in which  conformity runs parallel with cheap imitation. 

It all started with the bejazzling. WTF was up with this glittering plastic bullshit smeared across facebook posts and denim hats?

Then the spray tans and the die jobs and the fillers and the lifts and the truck nuts and the constant performance™ that represented nothing - no values. The term virtue signaling at least refers to virtue.  What is the virtue in looking like a fuck-doll or a GI Joe with the kung fu grip?

They will *tell* you it’’s some kind of real American shit but c'mon its a clown costume for a clown world of weird little arbitrary traditionalisms that don't make sense half the time and the people telling you about it half-understand it themselves. OK, but that's MAGA and obvious.

Let’s dig back into boring old conservatism.  Ronald Reagan.  City on a Hill. Leave it to Beaver. John Wayne. Davey Crockett. Thomas Jefferson. Christopher Columbus.

The far left called these glories fascist too.The exploitation. The profiteering.The patriarchy.

The jingoist xenophobic attitudes abroad and the racism at home. The God-damned certainty of right and wrong. The meanness, the cruelty. The dysfunction hidden behind fake smiles, child labor, 60 hr. weeks, domestic abuse, and entire neighborhoods where everyone makes poverty wages.  Oops.

But something I've always noticed when I've hung around conservatives is a weird sunny optimism, that is, when they aren't constantly bitching.  You know, if the egg-head weirdo freaks would just stop trying to control everyone, we could all go back to living in the greatest country on Earth.

Who makes the most money, worships the best God, has the smartest, hottest, coolest people (who are also the toughest), and can kick any other country's ass. It's like this utopian vision, where if everyone just acted the right way, they would be upper middle class and awesome like them.  And if they aren't they only have themselves to blame. (And if *they* aren't personally, well that's probably because of the government or immigrants taking their taxes or jobs).
 
But we're already half way into this fantasy.  The more religious among them will go deep into Jesus and prosperity. Gotta get right with God.  This whole personalist framework fits right in with the utopian fantasy that The System is perfect the way it is.  Follow Tradition.  To move up the Hierarchy you have to follow the Hierarchy.

It's so literal. So solid. Impenetrable. You can't think about it or question it (because it doesn't make sense, at least for more than a brief encounter with critical thought*).  But you can get into it and bathe in it, wear it like a suit.  Bejazzle yourself with it. Hang it from your truck.
​
But you need to conform to it.  What else are you going to do - this is definitional.  Because something about it feels good.  "Don't be a downer man!"  You don't want to be one of the losers.

​In order to be RW you need to live with at least one foot in a fantasy world.  Whether this is motivated by a psychological fear/escape function to avoid discomfort or for some other reason is hard to say. 

One wonders whether studies on sensory processing might point at emotional sensitivities to exploring new experiences and epistemological relativism.  Regardless, I think its still largely a skill issue - fortunately given that conservatism is clearly maladaptive.

But this fakeness, this unreality core to the worldview helps make sense of its susceptibility to grifters, whether conmen, cult-leaders/preachers, CEOs, demagogues or strongmen.  It needs to *buy-in* to something as it is *always selling something*.  Because that is what a fake is. Right?

You're pawning something off that is not original.  Ronald Reagan was an actor.  Christopher Columbus was a rapist.  Jefferson owned slaves.  Socialists ended child labor.  Jerry Falwell is a piece of shit.  Etc. But you put on the plastic jewels, the tactical fanny pack, the suit and tie. And you laugh at the hippies and their broccoli. You laugh at the liberals with their liberalism.

Because that's what liberalism does: it steps outside of the comfortable ooze. It compares, evaluates on its own terms. It asks questions and isn't satisfied with "common sense" or "just because".

Hah - so the liberals are the "real" ones and the conservatives are "fake"?  Good one!

Yes, in a way. But what is real? We've returned to epistemology, values and knowledge.  Which in the modern world is basically liberalism.  The way we get to generally agreed upon truths is via liberal means.
​
And part of this is the value of tolerance and pluralism, which means accepting weirdos living in fake worlds full of magic. They just can't make policy with us, or make rules that affect our lives with their magical bullshit.  But that is by definition *illiberal* and we're not about that.

​        ​The basic conservative worldview, to most of which even the moderate would agree, consists of the following: property is supreme, especially in matters of business, and with a sort of totalitarian structure in the workplace in which the boss is “daddy”, and daddies provide jobs. (In this arrangement unions are a threat to his domination.)  We need low taxes and low regulation, preferably by the business interests themselves.  Also few restrictions on campaign financing as this  will be taken care of by the invisible hand of the market.
       The environment is subservient to man, whether you look at it as a religious dominion thing or just business.  It’s always subservient to growth.  There’s something feminine about nurturing and something masculine about exploitation.  Besides, if we mess it up more growth will solve it.  The immigrant is welcome if he is the right kind of immigrant (depending on what decade it is, his race and income), if he “came the right way”.  But we really get nervous about amnesty cases because let’s face it foreigners are scary, and don’t get us started on people with messy or hardship situations.
       The military projection of power, and by extension man’s right to project power with his gun is important.  Both represent strength, courage and patriotic values, which all align with conformity and a seemingly procrustean ethic of white, patriarchal, heterosexual Christian nationalism.  The lives of people of other lands are literally not worth the lives of Americans, and are expendable as such if need be. This is American supremacy, which seems to resemble awfully closely a similar kind of supremacy.  “Judeo-Christian” and “Western” or “Anglo” heritage and traditions are revered,  and the US is proclaimed a Christian nation.  Attempts to rectify social justice issues such as race, gender, sexuality or religious pluralism and civil rights are too often politically correct, socially justice warrioring wokeness.  What this country needs is more religious freedom, meaning the ability to deny others their rights based on Christian beliefs if you want to force women to carry children to term, refuse to serve them in your business, or force them to listen to your prayers in their school.
            There is basic agreement with most of this amongst conservatives.  Some are more liberal on social issues, some are more isolationist on foreign policy, etc.  But even the moderate basically goes along with the main outlines.
            Over the years, as progressivism has beat them over the head with reality, they have had to soften on things such as race, gender or sexuality; only the extremists now call for segregation, taking the vote from women, etc.  But that’s merely conservatism tempered by liberalism.  The basic assumptions are the same:
           
      Unfettered free market capitalism a miracle of growth, prosperity and scientific achievement.  Polluting & destroying the environment is a natural right... people can make more money and buy better land.Traditionalist (white, Christian) Western family values ... bedrock of superior civilization.  Limited government... welfare state & services create dependencies that rob people of agency.  People need churches and families, not state help... It builds values.  Poverty and social dysfunction are the result of individual and cultural problems, not society.  It's not our problem.  

            A deeper understanding of this worldview must grapple with the fact that, as we are all motivated both consciously and unconsciously, so too is the conservative.  But I would argue the conservative operates far more unconsciously than does the liberal, owing to the particular epistemological requirements of the conservative ideological structure.

Liberal Epistemological Authority
            The liberal is not satisfied with traditionalist epistemological authority.  That is, there is rarely a religious or secular dogma that the liberal points to as the “final word” on an argument.  Instead, whether the question is one of morality or fact, the liberal reaches to more inquisitive and open-ended forms of analysis.  What are other perspectives?  What do other cultures say?  What is the historical and sociological context?  What does the data show?  Let’s compare and contrast the different sides.  Let’s engage with the art, music, poetry made on the subject and see if there is some intuitive meaning there to grasp.  Empiricism.  Logic.  Skepticism.  Humility.  Relativism.  These are all words in the liberal vocabulary, and which since at least the enlightenment have informally and formally been codified into the institutions and laws of liberal democracy. 
            The university and institutions of journalism are the practical clinics of liberal philosophy – putting into practice its values and methods of gathering knowledge and deriving truths.  However, one will note when examining the output of the conservative movement over the past century, the relative paucity of quality contributions made by conservatism to these projects.  Apart from a few fields of study in the academy and avenues of journalistic inquiry (both having mostly to do with apologia for the conservative worldview itself) the offerings are scant.  The main output conservatives seem to have been toiling at can best be described as propaganda; their aim has been the defense and propagation of their dogma, with very little regard for self-critique, analysis, or really much of what we would consider as testing before liberal modes of epistemological authority.
            Funnily enough, there is a word that is by all accounts a common pejorative, and yet describes much of the conservative project: “illiberal”. The standard definition is “restricting of rights or freedoms”.  This would surely sound ugly enough to a conservative.  After all, conservatives love to speak of “freedom”.  However, their definition of freedom is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes.  They often discuss “religious freedom”, by which they mean the right of a Christian to practice their faith to the exclusion of the rights of another, e.g. in being allowed to deny services to someone in a place of business, or to require others to listen to an authority give their sermons in a school or workplace.  The costs of their own liberation always seems to be born out by someone else, some other lower status group.  They speak of “freedom” in the context of not being required to pay taxes for things they don’t like, or to follow regulations, or to listen to phone menu options in languages other than English, or to have suffer the indignity that some employer somewhere might be giving extra attention to a prospective hire who is not a white, male heterosexual. ​
            All of these grievances begin with a chauvinist assumption about a hierarchy of traditional social roles.  Sometimes they want things just as they are, but more often they want to return to some imagined past when “things were the way they were supposed to be”, to some pleasant time when everyone was mostly happy and nice and no one was trying to rock the boat, i.e. the power dynamics that enabled people like them to enjoy privileged status were not being challenged.
            Now, many conservatives will balk at the suggestion that their worldview has an illiberal – selfish even – motivation.  Certainly the moderate conservatives will.  They will point out that “they don’t see color”, that they believe in women working alongside men.  However, here I raise two previous points: that of traditionalist epistemological authority and unconscious motivation. 

Traditionalist Epistemological Authority
           If one has not spent the time unpacking one’s own prior assumptions about why they believe what they believe, if they have merely accepted standard dogma about what is true – absorbed maybe through one’s family upbringing or social circles, without testing their ideas against an authority higher than the thought terminating clichés of “it’s always been that way” or “just because” or “it’s just natural”, etc., then one will not have the proper intellectual tools to deal with the complexities of modern life.
            When one learns of facts about patterns of injustices, or different perspectives about living in different parts of the country or the world, or having different beliefs or values, how would one go about processing this new information?  How to compare and contrast, how to categorize, how to dispassionately observe, objectively analyze and possibly accept and even change one’s mind?  Because at every step, if one’s guiding principle when dealing with new information contrary to prior assumptions is: my view is correct because it has always been that way/it is a natural law/because it just is, then the new information must be wrong by default.  What is the point of debate?
            Now, certainly conservatives debate.  In fact they love to debate.  Charlie Kirk, founder of the enormous conservative political action organization Turning Point USA, was famous for showing up on college campuses and challenging students to debate.  But what was really going on there?
            Charlie Kirk was engaging in a form of illiberal debate.  That is, he had his mind made up, and had no interest in learning anything new about the world.  In fact, he probably had no real interest in teaching others about his own views – precisely because he had no real interest in his own views.  If one’s traditionalist epistemology does not allow an expansive and honest examination, with the possibility of serious deconstruction, how well can one ever know what ones own beliefs truly are? 
            Rather, Kirk’s goal was to persuade with an intent to win over and gain power for his movement.  Kirk wanted his side to grow.  He wanted to enlarge his status and his command over others.  He wanted more privileges and political opportunities for himself and his fellow travelers.  To this end, it didn’t even really matter how accurate he was with the facts.  It didn’t matter how honest he was, or respectful – unless it was useful to his political ends.  He would be cordial in person, but then would make vile racist remarks later on in interviews. 
            But he was a far right MAGA extremist,  a moderate conservative reading this might think.  “I, however, honestly believe in what I say.  I am not a racist.  I am not a sexist.”  Well, they are going to love this: yes, you are.  Go ahead and take a deep breath, because I realize this accusation is an old and frustrating one for conservatives.  They’ve heard it from the left for years.  In fact they’ve built up quite a repertoire of catchy come-backs.  “Oh there you go again, playing the race card.”  “Why is it always about race with you?” etc.
            Let me explain, and in so doing I think I can elaborate on how it is I believe the conservative worldview creates cognitive dissonance in its holder, and how this leads to mechanisms of unconscious bias and faulty thinking.
​
Unconscious Motivation
            As I mentioned previously, unexamined assumptions leaves one vulnerable to ignorance.  When it comes to issues of inequality, central to the left critique of conservatism and its core philosophy of system maintenance, conservatism is unable to properly evaluate evidence of inequality in all its forms: race, gender, sex, religious, class, etc.; its thesis basically precludes it (by some miracle, the US constitution has eradicated systemic inequality from the country and where it exists only culture or the individual is to blame).  This is why the only real scholarship or journalism on inequality for the past century essentially seeks to defend its core proposition.  There’s hardly even any corollary inquiry into basic sociological data or fact finding, not even apolitical or subjective analysis – just simple record keeping of the facts as they are that don’t specifically try and liberate somehow the conservative project from its perpetuation of hierarchical systems.  (As far as I know of, I should note.  There may be some conservative toiling away in a black studies department doing quantitative research on the prevalence of arsenic levels in southern counties with high black populations.  But I could be wrong.)
            So, from a place of ignorance, one has two options: learn or continue to ignore.  To remain a conservative is to remain ignorant.  And so one must now accept the bargain.  To maintain the comfortable traditionalist garb, with its easy answers and justified privileges, its lazy and unearned social status, one must take up arms against the cognitive dissonance that reality now hammers down daily.  Fortunately, the human mind is designed with many mechanisms for this.  There is a Wikipedia page with a long list of cognitive biases that serve as a sort of protective cocoon from which one might work.  As the facts land their blows, one might consult another Wikipedia page with a great many logical fallacies one might employ to put their opponent off guard. 
            The nice thing is this type of battle can be done completely unconsciously. The conservative can think they are operating entirely in good faith, with perfect objective honesty, and yet to an outside observer appear to almost live in a fantasy world and speak in circles.  To those of us on the left, I think this explains well the perspective we have after reading even the most moderate conservative writer.  Why do they keep writing about the same thing?  Have they ever left the country?  Why does it seem that something has to happen to them for them to ever understand anything?
            Conservatism is not just a different opinion, or even a different value system.  Is it a fundamentally constipated worldview.  It is incapable of processing the modern world, and more seriously – our form of liberal democratic government, with its guaranteed pluralism, rule of law, respect for human rights and true guarantee of liberty for all. 
            Current events have not shown a break with conservatism, but an apotheosis of it, and one we would be wise to shame from society for good.

​A basic thesis I’ve been arguing for a bit now is that conservatism is basically a rotten worldview, as it is fundamentally about protecting traditionalist hierarchies of privilege, generally along race, gender, class, etc. lines.  As this is an immoral desire, it must resort to illiberal epistemologies to justify itself, because liberal knowledge-making requires methods and values contrary to its purpose.  This is essentially a framework for fascism: the domination and subjugation of others based on a framework of justified superiority.
However, this is a big lift.  The biggest problem is how much it relies on an accusation of unconscious motivation.  While the far right is more comfortable being explicit about its hateful and domineering motivations, and one can easily point to conscious illiberalism, centrist conservatism has always maintained distance from its more odious bedfellows.  When accusations of illiberalism are made, it takes great offense, sufficiently such that it has become a standard talking point to throw the accusation back at the accuser.  Terms such as the “race card” or “reverse racism” or “race hustler” are all indicative.
But members of protected classes – historically marginalized groups that have been the subject of hate by those who would seek to exploit or otherwise oppress them – have always known the psychological games of the oppressor.  They will smile with perfidy and deny their actions just as they are doing them.  This form of gaslighting is merely another form of abuse.  And it is especially effective on members outside the protected class who do not possess direct experience of the abusers’ actions, or who have not taken the time to learn the history.  Without this context, the abuser is able to use polite manners and gentile language to hide their true motivations.
And yet, here we still must parse a deeper dilemma – the fuzzy line between conscious and unconscious motivation, or the degree to which there exists an integrity between one’s self-conceived values and one’s actual actions.  This is a universal human flaw.  We all imagine ourselves as somehow more aligned with who we wish to be than who we really are.  After all, most of our day is spent in the hustle and bustle of performing the various demands of life: taking care of ourselves, our families, our relationships, working, engaging in hobbies, etc.  How much time do we really have for self-reflection?  And when we have world-views that happen to misalign with reality, this presents a cognitive strain.  When we believe the world is – or should be - one way, and yet we see or are shown that it is another, what are we to do with this information?  What if accepting it means creating friction in our social relationships with friends and family?  What if our very identity is threatened?
I believe that this is what happens in the minds of conservatives, who by definition hold to a worldview that is epistemologically constipated and leads to a sort of Irritable Cognition Syndrome, where one must develop coping mechanisms to reduce this friction between belief and reality to protect the cohesion of one’s ego narrative.  Returning to the examples above, if one holds a belief or acts in a way that is aligned with their conservatism, and yet is demonstrably racist, they can either go through the laborious process of learning and changing – which is definitionally not conservative, they can live with the friction – which is uncomfortable and confusing, or they can soothe themselves by shifting the blame back on to the accuser and thereby distracting themselves from their own incoherence.
So, the problem with all of this is that is can feel very hand-wavy.  When you lay it all out, when you look at the history, the context, the patterns, the social and psychological theory it is quite well grounded in evidence.  But it feels almost ad hominem – that the problem with conservatism isn’t a particular belief but an individual psychological problem.  And yet, I would argue that is both.  It is a system of belief that creates psychological problems.
Secondary to this cognitive issue relates directly to its belief in power, and that is capital accumulation.  Conservatives know that money equals power, and that the more money one has, the more power one has.  The narrative they wish to tell about their worldview is one of “freedom” and “limited” government”, that a government system in which an economy is allowed to flourish with as few regulations as possible will allow individuals to maximize their potential to apply their time and effort so as to amass wealth and prosper, and in this environment with all other individuals being free to do the same society as a whole will grow rich together.  Only those who do not apply themselves will be left out of the bounty.
The problem of course, is that while there is some truth in this, it is a simplistic fairy tale that leaves out many very real contingencies of how societies work, not the least of which being the fact that power is frequently zero sum, and the more an individual accumulates, the less another individual has.  Democracy is quite literally a mechanism designed to, if not prevent this problem, ameliorate it.   I won’t bother going any further into grand critiques of capitalism, as the history of left wing thought has done that quite well. 
 
Instead I will return to theme.  Imagine you are a conservative who truly believe capitalism is all – or let’s say mostly - rainbows and puppies.  At the very least, tinkering with it too much would be a road to tyranny.  And yet you are shown evidence that currently, and historically, generations of many millions of people are being exploited under this system, while generations of others are doing the exploiting.  The obvious answer is that you come up with excuses and rationalizations, as we discussed above.  Now, this is by no means something that only happens on the right.  The left experiences cognitive dissonance and makes rationalizations too!
 
But what does it do about it?  Let’s zoom way out to the institutional level, because I think here this is helpful to see the larger dynamic.  Modern liberal democracies rely on universities and journalism as foundational epistemic pillars for democratic knowledge-making.  What contributions has conservatism made to academia?  Apart from a handful of quality scholars generally squirrelling away on a few narrow topics, they are simply absent from the vast majority of disciplines.  So it goes for journalism and media.  Where are the news outlets doing the hard-nose work of investigating the systems and structures, the relationships of power in society?  The vast majority of them are essentially partisan propaganda machines pumping out fodder for ideologues to clap along to.  We might as well add the arts to our epistemological foundation here as well, as literature, visual arts, music all have their place in bringing human expression to the demos.  Here too, of course, conservatism hardly musters more than tasteless and tired facsimiles of popular commercial products.
 
Liberal epistemology is designed to transcend the traps of human cognition.  Just as the scientific method relies on empiricism, objectivity and philosophic doubt, so too do liberal values rely on notions of pluralism and humanism – deconstruction, analysis, contrast, comparison, invention, reality testing.  It isn’t perfect, but this is part of the design.  When asked why, one is never allowed to say “just because.”
 
But “just because” is a powerful device.  It is a signal that the end of communication has been reached.  The end of discourse, the end of dialogue, the end of exploration, the end of learning, the end of thought.  My way or the highway.  Love it or leave it.  It is an authoritarian impulse, an implication of force.  And when combined with cultural supremacy, with a desire for hegemony, it slides into fascism.  It is a form a violence in which the physical contingency has not yet come, but waits just beyond the horizon.  It is a drawing of a line, the crossing of which blood will need be spilled. 
 
Trump has ushered in the Just Because phase of American conservatism.  This was the flight 93 manifesto, written by Michael Antonand published in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, which analogized America has having been taken hostage by the terrorism of liberalism, and the only option left was to storm the cockpit and take the control by force.  John Eastman, who argued Trump’s 2020 election was stolen wasa Claremont Institute Senior Fellow.
 
Those arguing for a true conservatism – a “liberal conservatism”? – would say that while this element on the right has always been there, it should not define conservatism.  But is this truly the case?  There has clearly been a large (former) mainstream of conservatism that would have rejected much of what MAGA currently says and does.  But is MAGA not merely admitting openly what many conservatives had always believed, or only pretended not to believe?  Or maybe had not wanted to believe but was a direct consequence of their beliefs that were too ugly to admit even to themselves?  When they favored segregation, what was that about?  Or when they wanted women to stay in the kitchen?  Or when they believed gay men were pedophiles?  Or when we should support murderous dictators all over the world because even that was better than post-colonial citizens demanding their capital back from aristocracies and realizing communism was the only way to get it, especially when the wealthy were being backed by the CIA, also supported by conservatives?
What part of it does not just go back to protecting the privileges of existing social hierarchies, and keeping people down when they advocated for more liberty in their in their workplaces, in their bedrooms, in their bodies, in their lives?  While only the far right radicals were saying the quiet part out loud, were not the moderates quietly making excuses during polite discussions with liberals on Sunday shows and as they made mild compromises in congressional offices?  Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter whether conservatism is moderate or extreme, as this is where it has all led.  Their emphasis on  dogmatic traditionalism and propaganda, their single-minded quest for capital accumulation gave them power in the form of lobbying, think tanks, government capture, and finally the wholesale dismantling of democracy.  To not see a bright line leading in one direction over many decades would seem to require a particular historical and political, if not psychological blindness.
 
So what role is there for conservatism in a modern liberal democracy?  I say none.  If by conservative, all we mean is a pragmatic approach in which no idea is taken too easily, or no action too hastily, that is of course very reasonable.  But if by conservatism we mean “free” markets and “limited government”, we can throw both terms in the trash.  The first is incoherent.  Markets are vastly complex, requiring things like schools, roads, libraries, parks, healthcare, food safety inspectors… the list goes on.  What is property?  What is an aristocracy?  What is labor?  What is democracy in the workplace?  All of these are fundamental questions that require depth, not bromides about “freedom”.
 
The latter, “limited government”, was originally meant to simply mean a government limited in power by its citizens – democracy, basically.  It was not meant to mean “small government”, free of regulation, taxation, etc.  To suggest as such is traditionalist logic placing epistemic authority in “just because”.  If one takes seriously the notion of a government limited to rule by its citizens, the idea of regulating campaign finance and lobbying would be essential to safeguarding the citizen’s right to have their voice represented equally.  Further still, the health, safety and access to basic needs of the citizen would also seem to be a necessity for maintaining this access.  In this way, one could make a strong case that a well-regulated, socialist state that guarantees access to basic services to each citizen would meet the requirements for a ‘limited government’.
 
Conservatism was always a lie.  Maybe it was comforting, inspiring even.  But it was a dangerous distraction at best.  For those who still cling to its bloody remnants, I suggest to drop it entirely and embrace a more serious worldview, one compatible with modern liberal democracy in all its beautiful, pluralistic complexity.  Accept its fundamental humility, its decency, its respect for different cultures, its patience for inquiry.  But come to terms too with its seriousness – it’s nuanced understanding of tolerance: that discourse and behavior that serve to rationalize or justify the dehumanization or humiliation of others based race, gender, sexuality, etc. will not be tolerated.  Leaving people without medical treatment, or paying people poverty wages will not be tolerated.  Allowing some people to become absurdly wealthy will not be tolerated as it is not only immoral but a threat to our very democracy.  As the saying goes, we live in a society.  Get used to it.