Let me just say the quiet part loud: what we're watching is not a political movement. It is not a populist uprising. It is not conservatism. It is a personality cult, and the sooner people stop being polite about that diagnosis, the sooner we can have an honest conversation about what comes next.
I've watched real conservative politics. I disagreed with plenty of it. But there were principles involved — limited government, fiscal discipline, strong institutions, rule of law. You could argue about the execution. You could respect the framework even when you thought they got it wrong.
That's gone. What replaced it is a movement built entirely around one man's approval. Policies change based on his mood. Principles evaporate the moment they become inconvenient for him personally. Senators who spent years building a career on certain beliefs flip overnight because the temperature in the room changed.
When the logic of your position is "because he said so," you're not in a political party anymore. You're in a cult.
And I get it — calling it a cult makes people angry. It sounds extreme. It sounds dismissive. But here's the thing: cult-like behavior has specific characteristics that researchers have documented for decades. Leader is infallible. Criticism from within is treated as betrayal. Reality is whatever the leader says it is. Followers modify their own memories and beliefs to stay consistent with the leader's current position. Isolation from outside sources of information is encouraged.
Check every single one of those boxes. I'll wait.
I'm not going to keep softening this to make people comfortable. Half the country is in a functional cult and the other half keeps trying to "reach across the aisle" like we're in a policy disagreement. We're not. You don't reach across the aisle to a cult. You name what it is. You document what it does. And you stop pretending it's something normal.
That's what I'm here to do.
← Back to rants