Dissident Conservative and Its Mission

An Introduction

A Motto, a Predictive Law, and a Fact

The motto-- The acceptance of Suppression is the betrayal of Conservatism.

The law-- A movement whose leaders engage in a winking agreement to set aside, in one major area, its own core principles, is doomed to rot and eventually, to collapse.

It matters not how successful that movement presently seems, and how many goals crucial to the common good it is on the path to achieving.

God sees. And the soul knows.

The fact-- For four years now, American conservatism’s leaders, in punditry, journalism, and political office, have helped the Legacy media suppress the story of how the Covid-19 “vaccines” have been unleashing an ocean of woe upon the world. That story quantitatively involves one to two million deaths, at a minimum, and qualitatively stands as this century’s greatest crime against humanity.

If these leaders have talked or published pieces about bad Covid-19 policies in general, with some of them occasionally even stating there are “safety concerns” about the jab, they all dodge the main outlines of the story, and any editorial response proportionate to the immensity of the catastrophe. They studiously avoid dialogue with the leading Covid-vax dissident experts. Similarly, they never mention or link to specific Covid-vax-harm stories which are common knowledge among those dissidents--such as the white-clots story, or the DNA contamination story. And nowhere in their publications or speeches do they refer to the estimates of the numbers killed. The clear exceptions, such as Senator Ron Johnson, are so few that we are obliged to speak of a total capitulation of conservative leaders and insiders to this suppression.

For two and half of those years, I have been demanding that this cease, in a score or so essays at the group-substack PostModernConservative, and through a smaller number of private communications. And as far as I can tell, I have had zero success. No conservative writer attempts to respond to these pieces.

I refuse, however, interpret such silence as evidence of the futility of my endeavor.

Moreover, I refuse to accept the judgment—supposedly one of “prudence”—that the struggle for a public reckoning cannot be won, since too many powerful persons are implicated in the crimes and cover-ups of the Covid-vax catastrophe, and too many ordinary citizens implicated in lesser ways. I deny that that is the best reading of the situation, and that the conservative movement must accommodate itself to it. I do so as insistently as the Winston Churchill of May 1940 denied, against another set of top “conservative” leaders like Lord Halifax, that Britain must “accept reality” and accommodate itself to Germany’s military victories.¹ I say today’s America can no more accept the continued impunity, and thus the continued clout and pull, of the many implicated in the crimes and betrayals of the Covid-vax catastrophe, than Churchill’s Britain could accept a Europe ruled by Nazi Germany.

If you’re going to remain a non-dissident conservative, imitate these guys, and put your Churchill speeches aside.

2025

2025 is a rather peculiar, and yet also a very high-stakes, time.

Given Trump’s second presidency, many hopeful possibilities are the air. There is also an immense feeling of relief, since so many stark evils of Democrat-Party Demi-Despotism were just narrowly avoided, and likewise ducked were all the daunting questions of tactics (and of morals) which would have been raised by our duty to fight that almost-was Regime.

Phew!

And yet, the Suppression² is lingering on…

What to make of that contradiction? April of 2025 finds my head telling me that, given RFK Jr. taking office as Secretary of Health and Human Services, sunlight will finally shine on the Covid-vax story, because surely, his various actions and data releases will rip down the curtains. And it’s telling me that when that happens, my role will be to hound conservative leaders about the real character of their past silences, to prod at least some of them to make a more honest and repentant transition into the new era.

But this April also finds my gut telling me that, no, the conservative participation in the Suppression is going to continue. The leaders have gone too far down the road. Whatever revelations emerge, I fear they will arrange it so that the commentators and politicians of their set react in the most downplayed manner, or refrain from responding at all. Even if events force them to acknowledge specific truths they had previously kept from public view, I can predict they will act as if they have long known about the Covid-vax catastrophe, and as if they have conveyed this awareness to their readers and constituents. “Of course, we are with you, oh dissidents,” they will say. They will point to moments when, bravery of braveries, they denounced Dr. Fauci! And once again, they will not mention the names of key Covid-vax dissidents nor link to their reports.

The Lie

The future, as ever, is uncertain. It is impossible to know if our “minds’ ear” can hear anything distinct from that realm. But turning our actual ears to the present, what they hear—or rather, what they do not—is grim enough. Consider the case of the conservative insiders more educated in the wisdom of the ages, the ones who stress the importance of core principles, some of whom taught their students the following noble motto: “Live Not by lies!” Now before saying more, we need to stress that this motto was not professed by them as a wooden dogma, one which would condemn any use of rhetoric, tactical silences, or political trickery. Rather, they taught it in a spirit alive to classic patterns of politics. After all, it was penned by the great dissenter-against-communism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer who in very real sense brought down an entire empire, and who was of course willing to deploy ruses to protect his own illegal manuscripts and dissident comrades. What he rather had in mind with the “Live Not by Lies” slogan was the implicit command the Soviet regime gave to all its agents and subjects, to profess belief in its constant falsehoods.

I am one who embraced this saying, and believed that it, alongside the related rejection of historicism,³ was what most distinguished conservatism from leftism.

Or so I thought. For our leaders, even our deeper academic ones, say nothing as the present conservative project is in significant part being built on a very great Lie indeed, a pretense that a great calamity and crime never happened, and that we have not joined the Democrats in suppressing the news about it.

‘PRUDENT’ CONSERVATIVE: “We can’t remove that piece now! Do grow up, sir.” DISSIDENT CONSERVATIVE: “Does not a rotten thing rot?

The unspoken argument seems to be that to keep ahead of the nearly all-encompassing Lie-set of the present-day Left, one must regretfully participate in this comparatively smaller, if still very big, Lie of contemporary conservatism/Trumpism.

To that, this substack says “HELL no!”

For, in backing a Lie of this magnitude and duration, conservative leaders are moving way beyond the rhetorical loyalty to a party-platform typical of partisan leaders of past democratic history, including great ones like Reagan, Churchill, and Lincoln, and into something like the Live-by-Regime-Lies practice of totalitarian commissars.

Conservatism needs to be pulled back from this entrance it has made into self-betrayal.

Less abstractly: to any conservative who wishes to stand with me, but is hesitating, I say we are no “friends” to our fellows stumbling into this, if we will not confront them. Nor do we “support Trump” when we act as if we’re fine with his continuing to affirm the greatest error he ever made, his approval of Warp Speed. Our immense debt to him cannot oblige us to go along with him on that; and if there was a strategic case for our silence about it prior to Election Day 2024, it no longer holds.

The Decision

So 2025 is the key decision-window for Trump on this, and for all conservative leaders.

Because my head tells me the decision could go either way, I admit that the mission of Dissident Conservative could turn out to be a temporary one, confined mostly to this year, as it prods and documents a course-correction from conservative leaders which they already know they must make.

God grant that it proves so!

But the spiritual sickness revealed in the present betrayal could turn out to be quite stubborn, and to demand much more from those who would stand against it. Thus, insofar as the main organizations and leaders of the conservative movement continue the Suppression, the dissidence of Dissident Conservative will necessarily become a dissidence against existing conservativism, and one prepared to make moves which break basic political comradeship.

In fact, the need to prepare for that means Dissident Conservative will reflect about how to rebuild conservatism, and in defiance of its present claimants to leadership.

Join Me!

Thus, I am starting this new substack, and regretfully giving up my role as a regular contributor to PostModernConservative, as a way to focus my writing upon this mission. I invite others to join me, as subscribers, as dialoguing and critical commenters, and perhaps also, as contributors.

For I need allies in this.

My essay-writing is a solitary activity, but I do not desire to stake out a position of idiosyncratic purity or complexity. If my essays on the Suppression have tended to be long ones with multiple parts, the main argument I have made in them is simple:

A.) All supporters of liberal democracy must support the practice of open discussion of the issues which effect the public, as well as the kinds of journalism and political leadership which foster this.

B.) To suppress the Covid-vax story is to set aside this principle.

C.) Nearly all conservative media, politicians, and pundits are engaged in such a suppression, in cooperation with the Legacy media.

D.) Thus, they are betraying one of their core principles, and must repent.

If you’re a conservative who agrees with this reasoning—and how could you not?--I ask you for your help. A sole writer cannot take on the burden here, but as far as I can tell, I am the only person regularly writing about the conservative side of the Suppression.

One way you can help is to subscribe, either as a paid or unpaid subscriber. Now, while the writing I do on this deserves remuneration, I have never had an expectation of making money via Substack. Rather, the importance of having subscribers is in getting out the message, and making it less easy for opponents to dismiss my witness as something which has no audience.

But I will welcome communications from those who wish to do more! Writers, researchers, vid-clippers, artists, advisors, and potential publishers and donors, don’t be shy, okay? For one thing, the need to pressure conservative leaders, and even to the extent of laying down comradeship-breaking ultimatums before them, suggests a need for targeted activism, lobbying, and political organization, things I know little about.

An Aside to Covid-Dissidents

I have a special comradeship with my fellow conservatives, though as you can see, it is one presently under great strain, and perhaps even about to end.

I also have had, since March 2020, an important comradeship with you.

For you understand what the dissident stacker Eugyppius said early on:

We are witnessing an unprecedented, comprehensive failure of policy, medicine and science. The world will never be the same.

You see that that comprehensive failure extended to political science, and to politics itself. And I’m sure you agree that unless our societies undergo a real reckoning with these failures, punishing at least some significant portion of those most responsible, that our democracies will all the more become managerial kakistocracies, systematically excluding the conscientious and the wise from power.

My message to you is different. It’s one I intend to spell out at greater length in a coming post, but the essence of it is this: we Covid-dissidents need to focus more on the political underpinnings of the informational ghetto we’ve been shoved into. As you know, we usually only wind-up speaking to one another--the public is being kept from hearing us. Thus, it is not the case that one more of our scientific findings about the experimental injections, nor one more of our reportorial exposures of the organizations behind the larger Covid/Vax Disaster, can free our nations from this absurd and quasi-despotic situation. Obviously, dissident research into the science and the institutions will remain central to our mission, but I say we are all obliged to act more politically. I salute, for example, the recent primary threat which Ryan Cole issued to the governor of Idaho.

While our political actions can happen differently according to our different political principles, I won’t conceal, for the sake of warm & fuzzy “but-the-good-news-about-the-Disaster-is-that-we-have-found-one-another” feelings, that I still hold conservatism to be the most correct set of such principles. Despite the betrayals by my movement’s leaders, I still say those who have found themselves left “politically homeless” by the Woke and Covid years should adopt those principles, albeit in the ready-to-challenge-conservative-leadership manner of this substack.

Furthermore, I hold that the conservative movement is the most strategic ground of our battle, the enemy’s weakest position. Breach the conservative part of the wall around our informational ghetto, and the game is up.

Dissident Conservative

That is why Dissident Conservative will focus upon the “conservative” side of the Suppression, opposing it, and documenting it.

If the “damn breaks” in 2025, commencing a public Reckoning about both the Disaster and the Suppression, then Dissident Conservative will document how that plays out with conservatives, and offer guidance to them amid the confusion. If to the contrary, my gut is correct to sense their intention to Indefinitely squelch the story, this substack’s mission will become one of raising holy hell, organizing resistance, and documenting the sins. If nothing else, future generations will see that a remnant of conservatives⁴ stood against the movement’s compromise with deep evil.

And of course, I will also be using this stack as I did with my perch at PostModernConservative, to more generally comment on the events of the day. I’ll be on the lookout for issues which can sharpen our sense of what is distinctive about the dissident kind of conservatism.

What I am less certain about is to what degree I will use Dissident Conservative to write about topics which I have long been focused on as a scholar of political philosophy and the Great Books. (I have a PhD in political science, and prior to 2021, taught at various universities and colleges, including St. John’s College, UVA, Skidmore, Washington and Lee, and UVU.) These topics include Tocqueville, Plato, the principles of America, Christianity, Ellison, Plutarch, Homer, my idea of “the Great Lives,” cultural markers in popular music and film, the idea of Festivity, totalitarianism, Strauss, Manent, and the particular strain of academy-influenced conservatism championed by my mentor Peter Augustine Lawler, which he dubbed Postmodern Conservatism.

I’m not yet sure if I will use the PostModernConservative substack, where I will remain an occasional contributor, as the proper venue for my essays on these more cultural and scholarly interests, or if I will more typically feature them here. We’ll see what works best.

All that said, the main mission of this substack is plain: to end the conservative participation in the Suppression, and at the least, to bear witness to it.

And the secondary mission is also clear: to explore how we should now understand modern democracy, America, and conservatism, since Eugyppius’s statement that nothing will ever be the same in the wake of the Covid/Vax Disaster, is correct even with respect to political philosophy.

---

1. The best book on Churchill’s initially-lonely stand against the likes of Halifax is Five Days in London: May 1940, John Lukacs; the great film Darkest Hour was heavily influenced by it.

2. By my understanding, suppression is distinct from censorship since it is voluntary non-governmental action, and I have indicated that other topics besides the Covid-vax deaths and harms have been suppressed in history, or are being suppressed now. Examples from the past include Stalin’s Holodomor famine and the full-extent of segregation’s harms; examples from our era include Joseph Biden’s mental capacity problems and the real data on transsexualism.

Still, I judge the suppression of the Covid-vax catastrophe, and of certain topics closely connected to it, as so huge, unprecedented, bipartisan, and audacious, that I regard it as The suppression of our day, the one which deserves the capital letter. Whenever you notice me speaking of the capital-S Suppression, that’s the one I mean.

3. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, chap. 1. And in that light, note that were I at all points seeking strict philosophic definition, the last phrase of this essay would instead read: “with respect to the application of political philosophy.”

4. “Remnant talk” comes from the Bible, and thus might be best confined to describing something which can happen to a Chosen Nation, or a Church, lest one equate the importance of loyalty to a good political creed to the importance of obedience to God’s commands. However, much of what I say in protest against the silence of conservative leaders, could also be said against various religious leaders, Jewish and Christian especially. I am a Christian believer, and a member of the ACNA, The Anglican Church of North America. I do plan to eventually explore what is rightfully demanded on the Covid-vax issue of religious leaders, and especially those of my own confession. The sin of the Suppression is admittedly one which I believe journalists and politicians bear the greatest responsibility for, and obviously, I believe enough in conservatism to hold that the conservative ones have a heightened responsibility. But nonetheless, the silence of my Christian denomination and others is becoming a scandal. It is an act of suppression, and one of carrying water for powers political and corporate. Make no mistake, the millions of Covid-vax killings, alongside those caused by the mandated hospital-protocols for Covid treatment, will become together regarded as one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever. It will be seen as a crime different in significant ways from the Communist, Nazi, Turkish, and Hutu ones of the 20^th century, and often agreed to be a lesser one by several rubrics, sure. But the churches and synagogues which refuse to begin bearing witness to it will eventually find themselves rightly denounced.