Erick Erickson, for all of his advocacy of conservatives and their causes, seems conscious of what their leadership has become:
Posobiec[UMB-1], who was also one of the originators of the Taylor Swift conspiracy theory that never happened, welcomed people to CPAC by claiming January 6th was just the start of overthrowing the country’s democracy, and his statement was met with an “amen” from Steve Bannon.
Do you want to radicalize people against the GOP? That’s a good start.
CPAC has always had some freak elements involved. But those elements were inside the tiny conference rooms a few floors away from the main stage and now are on or near the main stage.
Erickson has a few more references, then this:
Too many conservative institutions have given up as their leadership dies off or retires. The organizations are being placed in the hands of the grifters who kissed geriatric butt long enough to make it seem they meant it. And we’re left now with a rudderless movement that excels at spooking senior citizens out of their cash while remaining deficient in promoting ideas for the sake of those ideas.
And for those of us who were not brought up in the movement, or moved out of it young, and given it more than a moment’s thought, the multitude of Jimmy Bakkers, Falwells, LaPierres, LaRouches, Hams, McCarthys, Smirnovs, Comers, Jordans, the bizarre antics and claims and abuses[2] of leadership conservatives at the aforementioned CPAC, the formerly respectable NRA[3], Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, Republican Party, Southern Baptist Convention and many of its constituent and related churches, the Catholic Church, the Prophetic Movement, and oh so many more, all serve to make us rather unsurprised at the moral dissolution, the moral turpitude, emerging from the shadows into the light, one hand eternally up, one hand eternally out.
The best grifters don’t pick your pocket. The best grifters make you feel good about you giving them money. They construct the social prestige that their victims want, and sell them that prestige for top dollar. I give money to that prophet down in Kansas City, doesn’t that make me part of something important?
And the conservatives are seemingly constructed to be grifted. A strong belief in God must excite a grifter, as it implies a belief in something for which objective evidence seemingly doesn’t exist – my apologies to my religious readers, but that’s the elephant in the room.
Do not whisper of seeing God in the fields, in some horrid consequence for the unbeliever, hiding in the folds of rumored infinite power and full of plans to explain the unexpected death of your relative, I say. Show me a thirty foot tall talking creature performing miracles that can partake in a discussion, that can be measured. The former is the lair of the mad prayer with hairy ears, as Robert Heinlein observed, the grifter with little real social utility, who constructs their social position purely out of the stuff of imagination; the latter, at least, can be the starting point of a real discussion.
Not that non-conservatives are perfect, as the lefty attraction to the anti-vaxxer position proves. But Erickson should not be surprised at his political adversaries’ laughter, or sighs of boredom, or however they express their grief that these Americans, and many more, culminating in the name Trump, have such a hold over a large enough section of America to actually imperil the nation.
… by claiming January 6th was just the start of overthrowing the country’s democracy, and his statement was met with an “amen” from Steve Bannon.
The naked lust for power by the grifters doesn’t get much more brazen than that.
1 Probably Jack Posobiec, who Wikipedia describes as … an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent and presenter, conspiracy theorist, and former United States Navy intelligence officer.
2 OK, the abuses are not usually bizarre: various forms of sexual abuse, cheating on spouses, embezzlement, the list is long, but not usually that odd.
3 The National Rifle Association, which has ever more absolutist competitors to their right, who cannot stand the thought that anyone, no matter their criminal inclinations or inability to comprehend the importance of the personal integrity of anyone other than themselves, is not armed to the teeth. Such is the lure of social prestige.
