Recursive Grifting

Guest Post by The Zman

Last weekend was C-PAC, the annual convention for the Professional Right™ to show off their new wares for the coming year. In theory, it is a gathering of grassroots activists, conservative politicians and conservative media to socialize, network and strategize about how to defeat the Left. This was true in the early days, but somewhere in the 1990’s it became a trade show for Conservative Inc. The people living off politics and the people who hope to live off politics, use it as a way to network and showcase their talents.

Just as Conservative Inc. has become a grotesque mockery of itself, C-PAC is something closer to a clown show rather than a real political event. The organizers have given up pretending to be conservative. Instead they are going for something like an awards show. They actually invited a clown this year. It’s proof that the Official Right™ is now Trump’s world, which is a blend of reality TV and professional wrestling. There’s lots of drama, all of it choreographed, but in the end,, nothing actually happens. It’s just a show.

It’s tempting to get down about this, but the frivolousness of Official Conservatism™ is probably good news. An important part of developing an authentic alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is discrediting the Potemkin version. There’s also the pure entertainment value in seeing our adversaries beclown themselves. C-PAC invited Prog and Antifa media into cover this circus and the results were predictable. The lefty media ran to their hives and bleeped all over their “friends on the respectable right.”

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at seeing a grifter like Oliver Darcy tell his fellow left-wing grifters about his time with the so-called conservative grifters. We have shameless grifters calling out other shameless grifters, as part of their grift. Of course, the grifters being called out will return the favor, as part of their grift. It’s a magnificent display of recursive grifting.  Perhaps grifter space-time is folding in on itself. We are about to see the grifter-verse collapse in on itself and form the prophesied grifter singularity.

While it is hilarious to write the word “grifter” that many times in a single paragraph, there is a very serious issue here. If a bunch of left-wing grifters are in the same room as a bunch of right-wing grifters, there is a the chance for a grifter paradox. This is when the two sides of the grifter-verse agree with one another. Scientists are not entirely sure what happens at that point. Some speculate it opens the gates of Hell, while others fear it will open a worm hole to the home dimension of the grifter, unleashing even more grifters.

The whole thing was not just a puppy-pile of political pornography. A few dissidents managed to suit-up in their EPA-approved hazmat attire and get inside to report back to the rest of us. There are people on our side who want to throw people like Loomer, Goldy and Fuentes into the same pile as the rest of the media whores, but there is an important difference. People who are good at getting attention and willing to do what it takes to get your attention are useful to the dissident effort to discredit Conservative Inc.

That’s what our side needs to get better at understanding. There is a difference between the tool and the man who wields the tool. It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools and it is a poor political movement that blames its media savvy people. The trouble with Conservative Inc. is not that it is good at media whoring. The trouble is that’s all they are now, media whores. They have not had a new insight since the 80’s. Our side is teeming with new ideas of varying quality. We need to get better at selling them.

Young people like Fuentes and Goldy also do a better job of connecting with the young audience. Young people like the ad hoc YouTube videos and live streams. The sorts of young people signing up for Young Americans for Freedom, the main group behind C-PAC, are the sorts of soulless careerists, who only appeal to aging Boomers. They are the sorts of young people old people admire. Having some edgy, grifty people of our own to real in new eyeballs from the younger generation is a worthwhile trade at this point.

That said, one of the unique challenges any dissident movement faces in the mass media age is keeping itself from becoming a feeding trough for media grifters. The Tea Party is a great example of a genuine grassroots effort that was swamped by an army of media whores and political con-men. Like a plague of locusts unleashed from Washington, these people chewed through the movement, leaving nothing but stalks. The great challenge is in defending against that, while not ghettoizing the movement in self-defense.

It’s why watching how legacy operations like CPAC operate and how dissidents nibble away at them is useful. It’s always tempting to turn away in disgust, but these sorts of events can be put to use in red-pilling the civic nationalist in your life. The over the top grifting on display is another opportunity to make contrasts between an authentic alternative and the Potemkin one called conservatism. Maybe we get lucky and see that grifter singularity and it takes the whole lot of them into the void.

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