When I started this writing journey back in 2016 I did it mainly because the world felt like it was coming apart at the seams, and I thought I could bring people together.

It seems naive now, but I really did think that. I thought that conservatives were misunderstood because for several decades, we were so busy living our lives, we’d left our movement in the hands of some people who did not have America’s best interests at heart and represented conservatism in ways that did not represent the views of most cons. We kept voting for them and letting them be our mouthpieces since they were better than the alternative, but we didn’t agree with them on all the issues and even when we did, we didn’t approve of their messaging.

Under this assumption, I felt that liberals couldn’t be blamed for thinking the worst of conservatives, because the people who were representing us were all too eager to show them our worst sides, and never seemed to manage to put forth our best. Despite this, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that liberals actually HATED conservatives. I thought we were mostly on the same side and they just needed to get to know us better and understand our motives were pure – we still wanted what was best for America, we just had two different visions of what that was. 

In my innocence, I wrote one of my first widely-published political essays called “America 2017 is a Bad Marriage”.  Let’s just say that it did not bring people together in the fashion that I’d hoped, at all, and I realized I had an uphill battle in front of me. Over the course of a very long and disillusioning 2017 I was forced to face the reality that liberals and conservatives were a lot further apart than I realized, and that hostility, even hatred, simmered very close to the surface, particularly for liberals.  

A year later I regrouped and tried writing about reconciliation again in “The Odd Couple”, admitting, ok, maybe it’s true, liberals really DO hate conservatives, but we’re stuck together not unlike roommates Oscar and Felix in that old TV show, and we had better learn to get along even if we’re opposites, and you never know, maybe if we try, we could even find some common ground.

That didn’t go much better.

Only slightly daunted (I am not easily daunted) I changed strategy and tried to inspire conservatives to reach across the aisle in less aggressive ways in my “standing up by backing down” series and I did my darndest to be a vocal internal critic of conservatives, calling them out when they were wrong, like I did in “Mata Hairy”.

I even wrote a piece called “fear and loathing” in which I begged liberals to search their hearts and try to see things from the conservative perspective, to think of reasons why cons might actually be fearful of inflammatory liberal rhetoric and extreme and drastic policy suggestions. Yet en masse the liberals, even those I consider good friends, stood before me and blinked and scratched their heads and acted befuddled at the very question, even as social media seethed with declarations of hate and threats of violence against conservatives coming from celebrities, pundits, journalists, and politicians alike.

Since November 8, 2016, I have reached out to liberals repeatedly to try to find common ground, to forge connections, to build upon our mutual foundation of being stuck together as inmates in the insane asylum that is America of the 21st century. And for my trouble I’ve been slapped down, verbally crapped on, humiliated, had my motives and my intelligence called into question, and worst of all, I have had my every deepest fear proven right. As I sit here 3 years later I don’t think we CAN get along. I really don’t. Because the liberals don’t want to get along, they want to win.

I didn’t want to be right. Not at all. I wanted the liberals to prove to me that they actually WERE more moral than conservatives, that they were the better people as they’d claimed for so long, that my worst fears about them becoming hyperpartisan fascists ready to burn the handy scapegoats of conservatism at the proverbial stake were wrong. I wanted all of us who were decent people on both sides to come together, to join forces and shout down the people who would divide us – across the political spectrum.

But liberals, even the decent ones, didn’t want to do that. They only wanted to shout down the people on MY side, and much to my very great surprise, even at times when I tried to criticize conservatives from the inside in ways most liberals should have agreed with, rather than join with me, they turned on me and attacked me instead. Even when they didn’t know what I was talking about, rather than take the time to find out, some of my liberal acquaintances were quite happy to assume I was the worst conservative stereotype their Vox-soaked brains could conjure up.

I realized that they preferred the scary conservative under the bed to the reality of a nuanced person that has weighed the available information and drawn a different conclusion than they have and I have had to do some very deep thinking about why that might be the case.   

The moment I realized my worst fears were 100% true was when I published my piece “Ashes in the Wind”.  Once again, I had tried to write a post about finding common ground, wondering if it was even possible, and once again, liberals treated me disingenuously, claiming that my discussing a book set in the Civil War era that I read as a teenager marked me as a Confederate sympathizer or something. In their rush to damn me and to correct me like I was an errant child, they utterly missed the point of what I was actually saying, which had nothing to do the the Confederacy or racism and was simply about people of divergent beliefs getting along. Even the kindest and most thoughtful among them implied what I should have written instead was yet ANOTHER thought piece in which Problematic Badthink was yet again overanalyzed rather than an IMO-much-more-desperately-needed investigation on whether liberals and conservatives could ever see eye to eye.   

It was baffling. What did they want from me, anyway? I eventually realized that what  they wanted me to write the piece that THEY would have written in my place. They didn’t want to hear my take, they wanted me to write their take for them. They wanted to bully me, a writer of conservative thinkpieces, into writing a liberal thinkpiece!

And let me just say not only no, but HELL NO. If there’s one thing the world has enough of, it is liberal navelgazing about Problematic Badthink. We have very serious issues developing before our eyes here and now that MUST BE DEALT WITH if this nation is to continue, and I find exploring those issues of much more importance than yet another rumination on the Problematic Badthink of the past to be tossed on the heap with the other 123,456,789 of them that were published today alone. But I thanked them for their input anyway, because it made me understand for the first time the mindset of the people who I was dealing with. I am endlessly appreciative for the negativity surrounding “Ashes in the Wind” because above all else, it was the response to this post which really brought it home to me what the liberal endgame is.

This is war. I can’t deny it any more. Whether it’s a political cold war, a culture war, whatever you want to call it, I can’t pretend otherwise any longer. I’ve been attacked one too many times for trying to make peace. I tried to bring people together repeatedly, and I failed spectacularly every time. And much to my surprise the ones who didn’t want to reconcile were liberals – not all of them, but a pretty goddamn large chunk of them.

I can no longer deny what is self-evident – a good many liberals want to destroy what they can destroy of my culture, the culture that has brought women like me more freedom, wealth, and security than has ever been the case through all of history. I can no longer deny that liberals want to tear down the things I love (even a lot of things that ARE LIBERAL) and replace it with a philosophy and a world that I do not think many people, even liberals themselves, are going to like at all. And they’re going to do this by doing what they tried to do to me – tearing conservatives down until the weak-willed give in and start talking about issues of liberal interest (and sadly, I’ve already seen this happen to a couple of good people) and demonizing the ones who refuse to back down.

And I guess I will be demonized because I will NEVER EVER EVER start writing liberal thinkpieces to make people like me. EVER.

Bring it. Because what I learned from watching Republican morons like Jeb Bush try and fail and try and fail to curry favor with Democrats is that it doesn’t matter, liberals are gonna demonize me anyway, because they need to believe in the conservative boogeyman under the bed. They NEED me to be a boogeyman because they’re more comfortable with a conservative boogeyman than a thoughtful person making a reasoned argument and seeing the world a different way. If I don’t look enough like a boogeyman for their liking, they’ll poke me with sharp sticks and thrust hot torches into my face to try to provoke me to act like the boogeyman they want me to be. And even if I stay strong and continue to be the better person, they’ll twist my words and take things out of context or even outright lie about my intentions.  

If I write an article about a book I read in junior high school, they’ll make it about me being a Confederate sympathizer. If I say a nice thing about Kellyanne Conway – regardless of her politics, an admirable woman who truly worked her butt off to get where she is today – they’ll call me a Nazi (MY GOOD FRIEND CALLED ME A NAZI. A GOOD FRIEND!) I’ve been accused of wanting children in cages and hoping that people without health insurance die. And why?? Because I have to be a boogeyman. If I exist, and I am not a boogeyman, worse still I am a thoughtful and kind person, then it means that the liberal worldview may actually be wrong because I’ve seen the same dataset and I drew a different conclusion. They don’t want to inspect my conclusions too much because they might find reasons to question the massive holes in their philosophy.

A whole lot of liberals have some burning and undeniable need to see themselves as the smartest and nicest and most ethical people who know the One True Way to carry America forward to her glorious future because that’s how they defined themselves back in 1968, and the existence of people like me who are also smart and nice and ethical and think there’s a different way, shatters their illusions.

Knowing this, I quit writing about politics openly for a while, I admit it, because I got fed up with the perpetually deceit-soaked responses to the entirely reasonable stuff I wrote and I was, quite frankly, so upset at times that I felt tempted to resort to being a boogeyman, to lash out against the liberals as they lashed out against me. That’s the way the game is played, you see – attack until a conservative lashes out, and then retreat to the moral high ground and congratulate yourselves on how much better a person you are.

 I thought maybe what my purpose was instead, was to prove to the liberals in my readership that a conservative can be witty, bright, insightful, talented, AND conservative.  And that, I think, is a mission that I have accomplished. A liberal I admire greatly once called me “everything a conservative should be” and another one I don’t admire at all called me “a knockoff version of Ann Coulter” and I take both of those as huge compliments even though the one was meant as an insult.  

But it’s not enough.

Since my first post in 2017 I’ve concluded that we got to where we are now NOT because Republican voters left the conservative movement in the hands of some people who did not have America’s best interests at heart. The truth is, the media simply didn’t cover any of the conservative pundits and politicians making better arguments. They existed, I just didn’t know it at the time.  The media has been cherrypicking the voices we heard, amplifying the useful idiot conservatives who either said what liberals wanted to hear, like Mitt Romney, or who said what liberals wanted to fear, like Steve King. Before November 8, 2016, I still accepted the mainstream media at face value, but after 3 years of fake news and laughably wrong predictions, of scare tactics and deceptive statistics, of stories based around the single tweet of a lunatic living under a rock somewhere, now I know better. And thus I really really guess that I gotta, even though I don’t want to not even a little, start hitting it harder on politics than I have been lately.  Because I cannot trust the mainstream media to represent reality. Their game is creating boogeymen.

If I tell liberals “hey, I’m scared of you” and they really, truly can’t come up with a single reason why cons might have some concerns about the rhetoric coming from the liberal movement (while I think the bulk of them were dirty rotten fakers, some – the best of them, matter of fact – did appear to be genuinely at a loss why I might fear their movement because don’t you know it’s all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, and LOVE SWEET LOVE????) then we as conservatives have got to do better at making our case to them. We can’t trust the middlemen to do it for us, be they the Republican Party or the New York Times. Decent liberals are not even hearing most of the arguments we might make to them, and only part of this is due to selective hearing. The media is telling them lies. Politicians are telling them lies. And their friends and cohorts just say what they want to believe back and forth to each other like a circle of parrots. 

Liberals haven’t wised up like we have, cons, they still believe the media and the politicians and the swamp creatures of Washington DC, and they WANT to see the conservative boogeyman wherever they look. They want to see the conservative boogeyman because it justifies not only their hatred, but their sense of superiority.

They have no one to speak truth to them if we don’t do it.  

So I guess I can’t keep hiding behind Jane Austen vampire stories and reviews of 30 year old romance novels, as much as I’d like to. I gotta take the fight to the entrenched liberal battlements because they’ll never come down off their intellectual mountaintop to hear it otherwise. Even if they disagree, and they will, at least they’ll hear an argument from someone who ain’t Tom Nichols or Newt Gingrich or Evan McMullin or Matt Shea – conservatives who tell liberals what they want to hear and a few more who confirm their priors.

And so I gird my loins and don my spiritual armor and prepare once more to jump into the fray, to speak truth, even though my voice shakes. As is the case in any war, even a cultural war, being one of the guys in the trenches is hard and scary and may even cost you your life (literally, or figuratively) and a lot of people are too cowardly or too weak to do it. But I can do it, I have the ability. I understand the arguments and I can make them eloquently without calling anyone “snowflake” even when it’s so, so very tempting to. Most people don’t have the ability, or the strength. So I don’t have the choice not to answer the call.

Pray for me, for wisdom, for strength, for courage, and above all else for the future of the nation who depends upon the people like you and me who are not so all consumed with partisanship we can no longer see the world beyond the colors red and blue.

I curse an awful lot in this, and am mean to several people, a few of them who don’t even deserve it.  Just wanna let you know that going in.

As some of you know, there was a brouhaha on Twitter the other day regarding the Superbowl halftime show and unfortunately this brouhaha involved me.  

I didn’t want to get involved in a brouhaha.  I try to remain as brouhaha-free as a writer of thinkpieces can be in this crazy old world.  I was attempting to criticize the conservative movement (Matt Walsh in particular) for being anti-woman, much as I did in my piece Mata Hairy  and its followup piece glam and flash.  But some liberals I’m chummy with decided that me being an internal critic of conservatism gave them an opening to then pile on to bitch about ALL conservatives, including me, it sure seemed like anyway even though they tried to walk it back after they did it, for thinking “ya know, maybe that Superbowl halftime show was just a little bit over the top, and it probably should have been dialed down a bit since the Superbowl is one of the few things we still come together with our families to watch, and maybe we didn’t need to see JLo jackin it on national TV.”

Because that’s what happened.  Aside from skimpy costumes, stripper poles, and very unfortunate camera angles brought to you by CrotchVision, now in Cinemascope, JLo actually pretended to masturbate while writhing around on her back, and I’m sorry, that is where I draw the line with Sunday Afternoon Family Entertainment.  Luckily my kids weren’t watching right then, but I can imagine the questions seeing a woman explicitly finger her VJ in the middle of a dance routine might warrant from 10 and 12 year old boys in particular (By the way, I have actually complained to the NFL twice in the past about them putting ads for gory slasher films in football games, so my concern about inappropriate content is in no way limited to sex acts). Yes, it was brief, but it was by far clearer than the Janet Jackson nip slip thing, and it just did not need to happen.

I’m not going to give the arguments that were made at me much print since I don’t want to expend any more of my precious time to even encapsulate them.  I’m sure you can imagine. It was basically “Prude” and “Adam Levine had no shirt last year” and “U watch violence” and my personal fave “ur kid already watches internet porn”!

No, I assure you, they don’t. 

The absolutely stunning thing about all this (and the actual reason I’m writing this essay instead of just letting it go, Jake, it’s Liberaltown, you can’t expect shit to make any fucking sense here, because it doesn’t) is that these passionate brouhaha commenters didn’t even know what I was complaining about.  They had no idea JLo had done anything beyond wearing slighty risque attire and bebopping around.  It simply confirmed their priors to jump to the very huge conclusion that all conservatives are flying off the handle at seeing girls in sparkly swimsuits gyrate and they were off to the races, not caring to slow down enough to even find out what I was actually concerned about, let alone not caring enough to realize I was actually CRITICIZING THE CONSERVATIVE RESPONSE in my original Tweet.  They came to my Twitter feed to make fun of me and the people like me and then feigned befuddled confusion that I might have a problem with their behavior, simultaneously managing to entirely undermine the conservative-critical point I was making when they did it.  

THANKS, FUCKTARDS!

Some of these people are cool people too.  Not a-holes. Well, a couple of them were decidedly a-holes, but I don’t care about them.  My upsettedness comes from the snapjudgementalism of the people I like who are apparently willing to immediately lump me in with the Bible Brigade Biddies, when I was really making a nuanced argument that was ACTUALLY ABOUT FEMINISM.  More than that, when I tried to correct them since they were so totally wrong about what I was even saying, some of these folks made it perfectly clear they didn’t care a fig for my opinion or feelings and instead tripped all over themselves rushing to tell me how wrong I was again, only louder.  They were willing to happily ride roughshod over a woman making a feminist argument in order to joyously mock prudish conservatives, high fiving each other and doing shirtless chest bumps, only thankfully figuratively because not even Adam Levine gets by with that shit.  

I don’t quite see how I can interpret any of that as being anything other than tribalism > feminism, I really don’t.  Dunkin on cons is wayyyy more fun than listening to some feminist harpy, amirite boys?

Hey and by the way, don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back telling yourself what a good ally you are any time soon, dickweeds.

These dudes came rolling up to shoot me down based on me allegedly being a prude and they HADN’T EVEN WATCHED THE HALFTIME SHOW, didn’t know what had happened, did not know that woman had just feigned masturbation on national television, and some of them did not even bother to read my original tweet in which I was criticizing a conservative for their response to the halftime show.  (!!!!!) They were just incredibly fucking sure they knew the score, entirely fucking convinced they had the market on reality cornered, and were so very happy to see the Church Lady whereever they looked, even in their adorable and totally outrageous friend atomic, and so they couldn’t bring themselves to shut the fuck up even when repeatedly asked to.

Tell me how this is any different from someone who’s never read Harry Potter crying “Witch!”

It isn’t.  It isn’t at all.  It’s the behavior of people who are blind with prejudice, engaging in tribalism as ridiculous as anyone with a colorfully painted face screaming at a football game, going through the world assuming that everyone they encounter who ain’t on their team is a stereotype of a caricature who never actually existed.

Some of these people probably think I’m being unfair, and I am, but this is my blog, and I get to be unfair here.  I’m tired of playing fair and giving the benefit of every doubt to people who don’t extend me the same courtesy, like, seriously ever, even though I slave away over a hot keyboard creating mountains of content for their ungrateful asses.  

So tell me this, Liberal Geniuses of the Internet – do we as a culture have to have any standards of decency or is it anything goes?  Will the Superbowl halftime show in 2040 be brought to you by Astroglide and feature people actually fucking on there, and if anyone has a problem with their kids seeing that, well, they shouldn’t let them watch a sportsball match in the first place because violence is OHBVEEUSLEE just the same as sex.  UR A BAD PARENT!

(Record scratch…sex and violence  – if football is violence, which I do not concede – ain’t the same thing, yo.  They aren’t the same at all, and I can prove that because after u watch porn, u want to have sex, like, right then and there, immediately if not sooner, and I have watched a lot of dudes play football and a lot of shows where people slice other people with swords and headbutt each other and I’ve never wanted to do any of those things, and certainly not within 2 minutes of watching.  But hey, by all means, keep lying about reality, liberals, you’re really convincing me of how I should vote for your candidates and let you run the whole entire world.  That’s sarcasm since u seem to have such a dreadfully hard time understanding the subtle nuances of the shit I say.)

Because just as I’d fully agree the liberals had a point with tearing the old sexually repressive ways down, the conservatives have a point too in saying enough is enough already.  Somewhere between burqas and Tijuana donkey shows there’s gotta be some kind of line where most of us look around and say “ok this is a pretty good place to set our boundary, where most of us aren’t going around offended most of the time and small children don’t need the terms “santorum” and “filthy sanchez” defined for them, yet most of us have the freedom to dress how we would like within reason and adults can enjoy some titillating entertainment in venues in which titillation is appropriate.

(helpful hint – The Superbowl is NOT one of those venues, and don’t you dare come at me with “shirtless Adam Levine, double standards because a chick pretending to masturbate is just as explicit as a dude without his shirt on OHBVEEUSLEE.”  Heads up – first of all, I thought Shirtless Levine was tacky as hell too, but more importantly, men and women are not the same. MEN AND WOMEN ARE NOT THE SAME and the rules governing our public sexual behavior are therefore different for a wide variety of reasons any person not completely drunk on partisan KoolAid would admit.  You can shout ur rage at the sky about how unfair it is chicks can’t go round without their titties swinging free all you like, but it doesn’t make it a fact that men and women have the same sexual reactions to stuff because they DON’T.  Women can see men without a shirt and not go berserk, whereas men, particularly of the youngish variety of whom God has entrusted four of the little bastards into my care – not so much.  Whether that is innate or cultural is irrelevant, I don’t give two shits what happens “in nature”, it’s absolutely the case in America 2020, and again, pretending otherwise simply reveals to me the utter disingenuousness of liberal arguments on this topic.)

And furthermore, claiming “parents need to raise their sons not to be misogynistic rapey toxic masculinity bastards, don’t objectify women” out of one side of your mouth while telling me “JLo’s visbly shaved pussy needs to be exhibited on TV in front of your pubescent sons during a national sporting event with a thin strap of sparkly material covering it and how dare you complain about ur sons seeing that because head injuries and Adam Levine and also by the way let’s throw Shakira’s wiggly ass in there too” has gotta be the most whiplash-inducing set of directives since Liz Warren told me we needed a president that was honest and forthright. 

Forget it, Jake, it’s Liberaltown.  

Enough is enough already.  Why is is so EEEVVULLLL of me to want some areas of human existence that don’t involve people masturbating?  Why is it EEEVVULLLL of me to want a safe space for my kids to grow up without seeing sex before they’re ready?  I’m not the one being unreasonable here, Sport, it’s you.  I’m just trying to be a good mama.  My requests for a few tiny pockets of this world to remain somewhat sex-free and suitable for a family to enter them together are perfectly reasonable and relatively minor and I am not a bad person or a hypocrite for making them.  Let there be some family shit for families without thrusting pelvises, ok?  Why is that so fucking hard?

WHY DO YOU WANT SEX ON THE SUPERBOWL?  Why?  Why is this a necessity?  Why is JLo’s twat in the Superbowl up there with Mom and apple pie for you?  Do you even know?  You want to peddle sex to children, to LITTLE CHILDREN, you want sex everywhere in every thing all the time, you want cartoon characters and Muppets to have sexualities for some reason even, and you don’t even know why.  I think I know why, but I’m not telling, because it’s a nuanced argument and I’m fed up with making nuanced arguments to people so stupefied with tribalism that they basically have adult-onset Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.  Long story short – “Our team Good, our team have boobies.  Ur team BAD, ur team have no boobies.”

Did ya get that one or did you need me to dumb it down a little more for ya?

Again, I say, once upon a time, liberals were correct to kick down some old and dusty Puritanical stupidities like laws against dildos and homosexuality.  I for one like very much being able to wear yoga pants and tank tops in public and not marrying the first man I kissed.  These freedoms are good freedoms.  These freedoms virtually all of us would agree upon, liberal and conservative alike.  These freedoms are fanfuckintastic.  There are women and girls, and not a few, walking around Planet Earth right now who have had their clitoris surgically removed to prevent them from experiencing sexual pleasure.  There are women and girls who risk getting stoned to death for being raped or being homosexual.  In America 2020, the battle has been won, we have an insane and amazing amount of sexual freedom the likes of which no human being has ever seen, and especially not any woman.   

When will it be enough for you?  Ever?  

Public decency is by necessity a line drawing exercise and drawing lines means that some of us who exist on the margins will have to suck it up and deal.  And maybe, just maybe, the group that needs to suck it up and deal is YOU this time.  Just because ur team has built its self-image around a mythology where they’re the brave superheroes bringing Shakira’s quivering tush to the deprived pre-teen masses doesn’t make you actual heroes.   It’s cosplay just like about 90% of everything you #resisters do is cosplay.  You don’t give a shit about kids, you don’t give a shit about women, you don’t give a shit about freedom of expression (you’re trying to erode it every goddamn chance you get, except when it involves seeing JLo’s taint apparently).  You mock prudish conservatives because your movement defined itself on being pro-boobie a long time ago and you gotta go scream at your football game like the primitive tribe member you are.

The thing I learned about the Bible Brigade Biddies when I actually took the time to get to know them, is that they are concerned about modesty because they actually kind of care about girls and think they know what is best for them.  They may be wrong, but their motivation (like that of a good many feminists too BTW) is to protect girls from messages that the world is telling them – to dress like a slut to make boys like you because your sexuality is the only thing that matters about you – a toxic message that I myself internalized growing up.  And the Biddies’ other motivation is to protect girls from boys who get too interested in sexish stuff when they’re not old enough to handle it and may pressure girls to do things they’re not old enough to handle either.  Their motive is to PROTECT those who are not capable of protecting themselves because they are still in their formative years.  You may disagree about the necessity of their protection, but don’t you dare impugn their motivation. 

Most conservatives aren’t Handmaid’s Tale prudes looking to keep women barefoot and pregnant and they never actually were.  Most conservatives are simply people who have a different view of what the world ought to look like and a different opinion regarding what is the best way for people to live to attain maximum happiness.  Like a good many myths, this myth of heroic liberals fighting prudish conservatives may have been historically useful and even somewhat true (I’m skeptical, but I’ll give it to you) but in the modern world, it’s no longer valid.  YOU WON.  We all won.  Why not give conservatives a charitable read on their concerns, huh?  We have a pretty fucking amazing level of freedom both sexually and otherwise, and all we’re asking for is a little moderation in how we exercise that freedom in certain venues.

No pretend masturbation on the Superbowl because children might be watching.  Maybe forgo the stripper pole next year, and let’s do away with the up-close-and-personal crotch shots.   It’s a family sporting event, not Vegas.  It’s a reasonable request we’re making and is not at all extreme.  That you insist on saying it’s an extreme position, I think says more about you than it does me – namely that you’re so in love with the idea your own mythology you can’t recognize a sensible, legitimate argument when you see one.