By Colby Malsbury
Many moons ago, I watched a gormy little 1970s movie called Stunt Rock.
The plot? Re-read the title, bro. That’s the plot. A stuntman plies his trade in Hollywood, engaging in many of the fads of the era (dig the hang-gliding scenes!) Because he’s established his awesome bonafides, he is allowed to hang around in his off hours with the rock group Sorcery, a banal combo that makes the Bay City Rollers look like Zeppelin. Their entire schtick is featuring a dude in a cheeseball Merlin costume onstage who causes fireballs to explode every time he waves his arms, because Lord of the Rings and Frank Frazetta were also yuge in the 70s. The entire movie consists of intercutting between Stunty’s stunts and Sorcery’s sorry excuses for prog-metal rock numbers. At the end, Stunty has to come cascading down on a zipline for some reason right into the midst of a Sorcery concert and Merlin really goes apespit hurling fireballs around on account of such audacity. Brilliant stuff. A veritable masterpiece.
Methinks that today’s brand of flash-in-the-pan pratfall-addicted ‘conservative’ activists have both made a cult out of Stunt Rock and have made the film’s script a foundational confession of faith.
I have been touching a great deal on the egregious failures of the Covid-era Right lately – from their propensity towards clickbait to their failure to sustain a victory when it’s all but presented to them on a silver platter. I would be remiss if I also didn’t address their pathetic addiction to the worst kind of performance art masquerading as hard-hitting protest. Yet more residue from the catastrophic waste of time that was the Clown-Prince Trump. This is the guy whom Jeff (((Zucker))) made a pop cultural phenomenon twice – first while head of NBC when The Apprentice was airing, second while head of CNN when The Presidency was airing. Trump pocketed mucho $$$ for both gigs. But these selfsame stand-up comic conservatives are eagerly awaiting his releasing of the Kraken in 2024, and reclaiming something or other. Q sez so!
A good example of such a poltroon can be found in Lockdown Central – Canada – where we have a doofus by the name of Chris Sky running hither, tither, and yon claiming to be the country’s #1 anti-lockdown, anti-vax maverick, and ensuring that his face gets in front of as many smartphone video cameras as possible in order to retain that status. Think of every characteristic you hate in online showboats, and this caricature has them.
Hipster beard? Check.
Aviator sunglasses from the Top Gun prop department? Check.
Tats up the ying-yang…..and always wearing a wife-beater undershirt to show them all off to maximum advantage? Check.
Rampant narcissism, complete with bloated Twitter followers list and claims that he’s authoring a book? Check.
Sky isn’t even fooling a great deal of his supposed base of support anymore. His star amongst them began to fade rapidly when he made a production out of storming a stage of prominent anti-lockdown pol Maxime Bernier and a handful of like-minded members of Parliament on Canada Day and delivering an embarrassing ‘hey, lookit me!!!’ monologue that succeeded only in getting him tarred as the ass he most assuredly is. He has maintained that this was justified because they are all ultimately sellouts. Well, that very well could be so. I’m not the biggest fan of ‘duly elected’ authority myself. But just as I don’t think much of any dog that would defecate where it sleeps, so do these self-aggrandizing shenanigans leave me utterly cold.
But Mile-High Sky cannot be deterred! Nay, he is currently engaged in his second (!) cross-Canada tour to promote himself, and the cause, and himself. Now, pray tell – just where did he receive the funding for this Merry Pranksters-ish jaunt? From his ‘supporters’? Most of those who cheer him on don’t have two nickels to their name to rub together. Another question: how is it that, in the wake of this very well publicized outing, hard-core quarantine isolation provinces like Manitoba and British Columbia haven’t stopped him in his tracks, when they certainly aren’t reticent about doing so to anyone who isn’t a featured icon on TikTok? These questions, combined with his odious flamboyance, scream ‘agent provocateur’ to me….and not just me. He could be the doppelganger of the infamous juggalo Viking dude who seared himself into the consciousness of the Left on Jan. 6, 2021 – not the least of which because it was painfully obvious that he, too, was doing everything possible to draw attention to himself. If discretion is the better part of valor, are we not justified in looking upon grandstanding as a dubious base for principle?
It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that the Right is in the final throes of an existentialist struggle that they are going to lose. And it also shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that the way the Right has decided to deal with this crisis is to enrich themselves til their last gasp of breath. YOLO. Less Russell Kirk, more Russell Simmons. Who really gets paid to think, anyway? Conservatives seem perfectly willing to act the fool if it keeps an ever-dimming spotlight upon them for a few more precious seconds. After all, videos on epic mechanical fails always get far more views on YouTube than epic mechanical fixes.
The credibility gap that constitutes the Right’s telos anymore can be clearly seen in their latest fad….embracing porn stars.
Ever since the Judaic porn performer Ron Jeremy hornswoggled credulous Christian conservatives into believing he was a newly-minted one of them through a barnstorming tour of the church circuit a decade ago*, the Right has increasingly demonstrated a pronounced and unsavory fascination with explicit smut. After all, if internet culture is fundamentally pornographic, with its demand for brief but intense emotional buzzes, delivered hourly, and in increasingly intense doses to sustain the rush, shouldn’t that be a subsection of the culture that ought to also be ‘reclaimed’? And as conservatives are increasingly interchangeable with libertarians when it comes to their reluctance to prohibit anything, they are convinced that they can mould the porn industry into their own image, and doubtless earn themselves the moniker of ‘hip’ they have spent their careers futilely and pointlessly attempting to grasp.
And hey….dem numbers. If the name of the game is rank materialism and utilitarianism, why not add a few more names to the voting rolls any which way you can? If said porn stars also happen to be trans-freaks, so much the better! They change their identity by the hour some days, and why shouldn’t each identity carry a GOP membership card? The Right learned a thing or two from Hillary’s recruitment of entire cemeteries into her campaigns, doncha know.
Thus, we see the miserable harlot Brandi Love trying to pass herself off as a conservative and acting indignant when she is turned away from the Turning Point USA conference….after a backlash from the grassroots attendees, mind you, not because of scruples on the organizers’ part. Clear-cut discrimination! When’s the SPLC going to pick up the cudgels on her behalf? We also see where the latest stable of ‘hawt’ curvaceous female late-Millennial-and-Gen-Z conservative pundits stalking Fox News, The Blaze, and Instagram have originated from: the agency Explore Talent, run by an Israeli pornographer who shows a penchant for posting low resolution, salacious snapshot pics as avatars on his clients’ ‘professional’ profiles. As the linked article reports, the current GOP flavor the the month, the black crypto-feminist Candace Owens, established a profile on Explore Talent five years ago. Other clients include a sitting GOP congresswoman and a homosexual supporter of Trump who spoke at last year’s CPAC. I could go on with examples. Suffice it to say that the Right’s embrace of prurience gives their entire worldview a rancid seediness that no servant of Christ ought to stomach gladly. The Levitical injunction of being ‘unclean until the evening’ will extend in their case across many, many evenings indeed, ever and anon.
And we can only expect such odious ‘conservative’ dash to continue unabated, all thanks to the precedent set by Trump, who demonstrated that one didn’t have to have any steak at one’s disposal if the sizzle was sufficiently loud and garish. What are clown conservatives accomplishing? Sure, they might be ‘triggering the libs’, but big deal. An unseasonably hot day triggers them anymore. And one thing about their base: slowly, but perhaps inexorably, they are starting to get just a wee bit sick of non-stop razzmatazz and are becoming open to hearing some actual, y’know, policy to get them out of the living nightmare their lives have become. The only policy that matters – repentance of past sins and an acknowledgement of the binding nature of Christ’s everlasting covenant – is not a talking point much in evidence with the jesters marauding in a monitor on the upper right screen while Anderson Cooper tut-tuts at them. Another opportunity for ministering squandered. That’s Conservatism Inc.
Ever notice how many ads lead off with the tagline ‘Express Yourself’ these days? Rather than try to reach out to every single one of the 657,819 officially registered identities, marketers prefer to just tell potential customers/suckers to do their own thing, but be sure to do so while embracing the brand being pushed to complete a perfect picture. Performance art conservatives have taken this incrementalist maxim to heart, and are running with it. Golly, I love winning.
*Given the Zionist flavor of these ‘conservatives’, and given that they were loath to admit they viewed any of his fine output back in the day, doubtless they were elated to learn that he is, indeed, circumcised.