Conservative Apologetics for Tired People, or Part Deux of My Last Post

So in my last post, I had given a very rough explanation of the evolution of my thought up to about the point I was twenty. Why does that matter? Likely it does not in the grand scheme of things, but at least fourteen people are interested enough to follow me, so I hope they get some entertainment or insight from what I write. Even if you disagree with me, hopefully it helps you understand the grass roots of the Conservative Movement better. And as we all know: Plato says “Know thyself.” Sun Tzu says that if you know yourself and know your opponent, victory is all but guaranteed. (Hm…..maybe I should stop writing….or start writing disinformation….). But in the end, this blog is still mostly self therapy….a voyage of self discovery…..an effort to think and therefor, hopefully, get closer to the truth.

For those who have not read it or need a refresher, here is my previous post:

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1269

In my last post I talked about Reagan and then how I started to feel disillusioned. Now I’m about to make an admission that will likely lose me half my audience. But if you’ll forgive me for being the second gunman by the grassy Gnoll…..what…..? They have a Cave Troll? Oh well…..I guess it’s time to break out the big guns….

The summer I tried (and failed) to reconcile with my father, he introduced me to the radio conservative behemoth, Rush Limbaugh….

Yeah….I can already hear the “unsubscribe” buttons being pushed….what if I said I was kidding….? What if I said all I did was invent the Covid virus….no harm, no fowl?

I learned three things from Rush Limbaugh in the nineteen nineties.

• 1) Taxes are not implemented to pay for government spending. We print money from the Fed for that. Taxes are mainly just social engineering. Punish the behavior we don’t like, then bribe voters with entitlements to ensure we stay in power.
• 2) We cannot trust the mainstream media. They have their own agenda, and it does not involve our well being.
• 3) The deck is indeed stacked. Big government, big media, sometimes (I wish he had talked more about this) big business colludes to make sure the lower classes stay in their place. We control the barriers of entry, not to ensure quality and promotion by merit, but to make sure the only people allowed into the club are “our kind of people.”

I became passionately conservative, but I also attempted to stay open minded. If it was true (as I then believed) that the Liberals were ideologues that did not fight fair, falling into the same trap was not wise. It was not Conservatism I sought. It was truth. And I will admit, most of my life I’d watched these movies and seen these people making fun of me for believing, not so much the things I believed, but for imagined things they accused me of believing. “Oh, you are Conservative. You hate all the Blacks, and you verbally abuse women, and you take advantage of your White privilege to live your life of luxury and keep the people down.”

To which all I can say now is….if my life is a life of luxury (and granted, compared to a lot of third world folks it likely is), I don’t wish to see what poverty is…..

The decade passed in wealth and scandal for the nation, in a Culture War that seemed to pit the Liberal Clintons against the Grinch Conservatives led by Newt Gingrich, when actually both sides were gaming the system to make sure they were the winners and we were the losers. Whereas I spent the entire decade in illness, poverty, depression, and never ending soul searching that seemed to lead to no solutions.

But the millennium turned. My life was changed by a marriage to a verbally abusive woman. And the world was changed by a horrific terrorist attack. But this post is going long, and I’ll continue later. Hopefully I haven’t lost anyone, I don’t think the same way I did twenty years ago….