What Is Dissident Conservativism?
Definitional Thinking, and a Call to Arms
Definition
Dissident conservatism exists on its own. It is not my invention, and no-one should think its template is set by my writings for this new substack I call Dissident Conservative. While I am ahead of most writers in noticing and naming it, and in thinking about what it ought to be, I accept that some dissident conservatives, today or in the future, may take issue with some particulars of how I define it.
So what is it?
It is a type of conservatism.
“Dissident” is the adjective in the compound-term, “conservatism” the noun. That means that conservatism is the primary element, and thus, that everything essential to conservatism is retained.
The adjective is primarily meant to allude to the idea of the person who is labelled a “Covid-dissident” or a “Covid-vax dissident”; this person is sometimes also called a “Covid-contrarian,” or an adherent of the “medical freedom movement.”
Thus, the newness of this newer type of conservatism is mostly quickly grasped by regarding the Dissident Conservative as a conservative who is also a Covid-dissident.
Covid-Dissidence
Now, there is a good deal more to say about it than that, but it is first necessary to be exacting about what “Covid-dissidence” entails, because some typical conservatives now claim to be Covid-dissidents, or “strong on Covid issues,” when they are not. To voice criticism today of the coercive 2020-2022 Covid-19 policies, such as lockdowns, mask-requirements, Ivermectin bans, and vaccine mandates/passports does not make one a Covid-dissident. First, during those years, I’d say only around 20-30% of conservatives were labelled Covid-policy critics or dissidents, since the larger bulk of them were belated or muted in their protests, and were not found on the front-line fights against the policies, a fact particularly shameful with respect to the vax-mandates. That is not even the worst of it, for what we must especially underline is that the two bloodiest elements of the overall Covid/Vax Disaster have gone unmentioned by non-dissident conservatives to this day. These are first, the millions of deaths and serious injuries due to the Covid-19 “vaxxes” (more accurately, the Covid-19 experimental medicines), and second, the likewise huge numbers of Covid-19 deaths primarily caused by mandated hospital protocols.1
Those familiar with my work for the group substack PostModernConservative know that I have repeatedly argued that when it comes to the insiders and leaders of the conservative movement not mentioning those two particularly scandalous claims made by the real dissidents, it is by no means a case of merely personal ignorance or denial, but must be one of a coordinated story-suppression, at least by this point.
Now Covid-dissidence spans a wide variety of positions, patterns of discourse, and underlying creeds political and religious. There are dissidents who hold what I call “big conspiracy theories” which assume centralized coordination of the spread and response, with nefarious grand-scheme intentions, and those (like me) who judge the real lines of responsibility to be more dispersed, and with the intentions in most cases characterized by greed, group-think, and careerist cowardice; more radically, there are those who insist much of the pandemic was a “scamdemic,” with some even rejecting long-accepted planks of virus theory, and a majority of others (like me) who insist that the Covid-19 virus exists and caused the majority of the cases labelled as Covid-19 ones; there are those who locate the central crime in the initiation of the lockdowns, such as the leaders of the most important dissident organization, the Brownstone Institute, and those (like me) who locate it more in the invention and the fraudulent testing/monitoring of the experimental vaxxes; and there are more specific divides, such as those who support either dissident expert Robert Malone or dissident expert Jane Ruby in their dispute, or those (like me) who see faults on both their parts. All of this is before we even get to the differing political, philosophic, and religious or non-religious premises held by various dissidents, or to the various disagreements about dissident tactics, and about specific research findings.
But despite that variety, every Covid-dissident is characterized by not remaining ignorant about the basic elements of what I, a couple of years ago, called the “Covid/Vax Disaster.”
In that essay, I organized the main elements of the Disaster, or the main injustices of our Covid-policy elites, into seven (really, eight) main “sins”: 1) concoction of the Covid-19 frankenvirus, 2) mandated protocols killing in hospitals, 3) lockdowns and their steep economic, civil-rights, separation-of-powers, and mental-health tolls, 4) social-media censorship of Covid-issues, 5) school closures/maskings damaging children, 6) the development and approval of the Covid-19 “vaxxes,” which went on to kill, at a minimum, a million or so across the world, 7) Vax-mandates/passports, which were an elementary betrayal of America’s political creed, 8) cover-up and suppression of the widespread deaths and injuries from sins two and six.
Thus, a conservative who is also what I call a “dissident conservative” knows the broad picture of what the dissident scientists and researchers have said on most of these sins. He can send the person interested to several of the relevant substacks and resources. He is not someone who has merely read a couple or stories on this, or heard a few rumors on that. Particularly regarding sin 6), the sin most subjected to the Suppression, he has some familiarity with the major elements of evidence, and is aware of the range of dissident estimates of deaths, such that he knows that certain Legacy media attempts to imply that the numbers killed are merely in the “thousands” are utterly ridiculous. He knows about VAERS and URF. He has read or heard pieces which explore what the elevated-since-2021 all-cause mortality rates imply. He probably knows that hundreds of embalmers are reporting to Tom Haviland’s survey that they have been regularly extracting the novel white clots.
Now it may be the case that a dissident conservative hasn’t the time to keep up with most dissident experts. I do not wish my previous paragraph to exclude the conservative who fits the minimal requirements. I insist that we all have certain duties to “do our own research,” since a dismissal of that duty, which usually comes with a delegation of it to established authorities, has characterized suppression-friendly “conservatism.” But I am ready to place the threshold requirements at a fairly low level, and especially so for those who are not doing work in punditry, politics, etc. Those who have not “gone down the rabbit-holes” on their own, or not very far down them, but who have listened with an open spirit to some of those who have, and to the extent that they join the likes of myself in pushing for greater “official-channel” discussion of these issues, should be considered dissident conservatives. And these days, a simple rubric might be: do they call for the banning of the Covid-shots?
Other Essentials of the Dissident Conservative’s Dissidence
So, I just sketched the main element of the dissident conservative’s dissidence—his work to be aware of the Covid/Vax Disaster—in detail, but for the remainder of this piece I will sketch more rapidly.
The Dissident Conservative Is a Conservative
In some other post, perhaps, we’ll discuss the essentials of conservatism, the commitments shared by say, the populist-conservative, the “fusionist” conservative, the social conservative, the mainline conservative, and so on.2
So the dissident conservative should espouse those essentials.
Obviously, someone whose overall political views are like the liberal RFK Jr.’s, or like the leftist C.J. Hopkins’s, should not be regarded as a dissident conservative. Those are two admirable exemplars of Covid-dissidence, but they are not conservatives.
The same applies to the many whose political beliefs are in transition, or who declare themselves to have been left “politically homeless” by the Woke and Covid years; many of these types, chose to be members of the Trump ’24 coalition, and adopted a significant handful of conservative policy positions in doing so, but this does not mean they are conservatives. I hope many of these eventually make the transition, but we’ll have to see. Of course, the conservative leadership’s embrace of the Suppression is making it easy for those of them who want to remain in-between, and to comfort themselves with the errant old saw that “there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democrat parties.
The Dissident Conservative Sees and Opposes the Suppression of the Covid-vax Story, and the Conservative Part in It
He is not fooled by the “But we denounce Fauci too!” games of the suppressing conservatives. He understands that the Suppression contradicts several core principles of conservatism. He understands why a writer like myself would resort to scare quotes around the term “conservatives” when describing these leaders and insiders who continue the Suppression, and accepts that we are obliged to consider some pretty dark scenarios of where their self-betrayal and deployment of mendacity could eventually take the movement.
The Dissident Conservative Regards the Covid/Vax Disaster, and the Conservative Part in the Suppression, as Together Serving as a Revelatory Break
He does not regard the main Covid-policies and actions of 2020-2023 as merely mistaken and bad, or as being an anomalous season of confusion, group-think, and corruption’s temporary ascendancy. He rather regards the Disaster as revealing the true character of our modern liberal democracies from 2019 back at least two or three decades. Perhaps even back to JFK’s assassination. For clearly, these societies were progressively empowering leaders and science-experts bereft of ethical compass and real belief in the principles of constitutional liberty; they were also empowering institutions contemptuous of democratic oversight and deliberation. He now finds it difficult to look upon the America of those decades as “great” or terribly admirable, given the foulness quietly breeding in its elite meeting rooms and email-chains.
He sees that the Covid-years were a decisive break—things like Sargon of Akkad’s recent video illustrating the destruction of the economic and social life of his hometown of Swindon, do not surprise or puzzle him, even if they still shock.
And he sees, alas, that the conservative movement’s participation in the Suppression3 reveals that even it has been infected with the careerist cowardice that has characterized the leadership class of the modern democracies of the last three decades, and probably, with some amount of outright corruption also. The right’s leaders, even on the more intellectual side of the spectrum, seem to not really believe in many of the principles they long espoused; for they would not stand up for them when it became just a bit difficult, requiring some disputes with their fellows, and some suspension of definite conclusion as new issues were investigated. As troubling, their refusal to back away from the Suppression, despite three years of grumblings from their base and surely, their own gradual realization that the dissidents have been largely right on the safety debate about the shots, reveals an a-Biblical and a-philosophic inability to repent for missteps and sins. These leaders do not encourage intra-movement dialogue, and we now have reason to fear they operate on many topics mostly according to fear-ridden precepts of Machiavellian calculation.4
The Dissident Conservative Seeks Inspiration & Guidance from the Classic Dissidents against the Communist & Nazi Regimes, because He Detects a Scent of Totalitarianism in All of This
I should begin by stressing that the dissident conservative should seek to be careful when voicing accusations that someone, either a standard Dem-party Covid-ian Suppressor, or a “conservative” Suppressor, plans or wants to bring us into totalitarianism. For one thing, even in the comparatively clear cases of the Nazi and communist regimes, there has long been important academic disputes about what constitutes totalitarianism, whether the concept works as a whole, and how the idea of the dissident is best connected to it.
Still, I say the dissident conservative is correct to have picked up the scent of the totalitarian in the presently-thwarted or delayed drive towards a new form of despotism, I call it the Administrative/Woke Pseudo-Democracy, evident from 2014 on, and particularly heightened during the Covid/Vax Disaster. Moreover, I say he is correct to also detect it in conservatism’s cooperation with the Suppression, in that it reminds us of the kind of calculating cowardice which those groups and individuals which should have stood more strongly against totalitarianism in 30s Germany, and during the longer eras of the communist regimes, were guilty of.
If the Shoe Fits, Wear It!
If the political stance I have described is yours, well, declare it! Keep reminding our “conservative” leaders, in whatever way you can, that you notice their mendacious silence. Pester them. Write letters and emails. Ask annoying questions at events. Stand-up and stand-out, according to whatever talents you have, as a dissident conservative. And encourage me: subscribe to this new stack.
Finally, as I pleaded last time, reach out to and network with other dissident conservatives, starting with myself, for eventually, this stance of ours may need to become an organized movement.
Admittedly, I have myself said little so far about the second of these claims, the mass-killings-due-to-mandated-protocols claim. More on that eventually here. For now, get and read What the Nurses Saw, or seek out dissident videos promoting that book.
For those wanting to quickly know my views on this, two works whose take on conservativism I largely agree with are the more-recent and populist-conservative angled The Stakes by Michael Anton (2020), and an essay from around 2008-2010 (published in various venues) by the great James Ceaser, whom I am honored to claim as one of my academic mentors, “Four Heads and One Heart.” You might also go to my one big think-piece on conservatism, “Conservatism in Relation to Perennial Political Wisdom.”
The Suppression. My writings have shown that suppression is distinct from censorship since it is voluntary non-governmental action, though it is similar in spirit, Other topics besides the Covid-vax deaths have been suppressed in history, or are being suppressed now. Still, I judge the suppression of the Covid-vax catastrophe, as so huge, bipartisan, and audacious, that I regard it as The suppression of our day, the one which deserves the capital letter.
Trump demanding behind the scenes that they shield him from consequences for his errors on Covid-issues could be a factor here, but we do not know, and the bad patterns clearly run much deeper than anything we could blame on him.