My Fellow Youts: Edgy Is Cute, Not Serious

It’s past time the GOP took a look in the mirror.

Our ranks have become rife with provocative influencers offering an alternative to the Left-wing establishment. If you’re a young person fed up with the incessant wokeness, these voices seem awfully attractive. I have a message for young conservatives: It’s a trap.

In an era dominated by liberal institutions, it’s easy for an edgy contrarian to pose as a conservative. The suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop by mainstream media was a coordinated effort and a betrayal of the American people. One may not even be wrong to call it a conspiracy.

But there is a fundamental difference between the methods of a conspiracy theorist and an honest conservative. A conservative values the truth independent of the public reaction. A conspiracy theorist values the reaction independent of the truth.

They walk among us, but they are not like us.

Take the infamous influencer Alex Jones, for example. Alex Jones has no patience for gender ideology. If he’s right about that, one could be forgiven for wondering what else he might be right about. The answer, it turns out, is not much. Just because a broken clock is right twice a day doesn’t mean we should go around breaking all the other clocks.

Once you have determined that someone else is at fault for your personal shortcomings, you begin to cross the line from a principled dissenter into a conspiracy theorist. If you ask Alex Jones, you’re lonely and unemployed because of the “globalists.” If you ask Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes, it’s because of the Jews. Everyone’s to blame … except yourself, of course.

The reality is harder to face. It is often easier for people to believe in a scheming class from which they have been excluded than it is to accept that life is hard.

There is a reason that figures like this have started to be known within the conservative movement as the “Woke Right.” It’s leftism in disguise. Class warfare. A culture of victimhood.

Though troubling, it is not surprising that conspiratorial attitudes would arise in a highly populist youth. The politics of the past decade have been dominated by the voting interests of a group that feels it has been ignored by the establishment.

I know — you don’t like the bloated, politicized federal government. Neither do I. The government didn’t kill John F. Kennedy. You find Michelle Obama to be a patronizing snob. Me too. She’s not secretly a man. When we allow these ridiculous claims into our camp, we delegitimize real concerns.

Moral shortcomings aside, there is another reason why we should not allow the Woke Right into the movement — they’re miserable allies. If you take a look at how these Woke Right influencers treat each other, they are far from coalition builders.

Nutjobs Nick Fuentes, Dan Bilzerian, and Richard Spencer — all of whom are functionally identical in their vile ideology — spend nearly as much time swiping at each other as they do espousing the ideology itself.

Working with these figures would not neutralize their extremism. Contrarians can only thrive on the fringe. It’s their way of staying relevant without having anything interesting to contribute. The more we legitimize their claims, the more absurd they will have to become in order to stay on the fringe.

The Left would like us to believe that conservatives break bread with racists, misogynists, and general lunatics. They’ve spent decades trying to create a false dichotomy between the Nick Fuenteses of the world and their radical agenda. We must not prove them right.

It’s a big tent, but it doesn’t have to be a circus.