If you enjoy listening to conservative pundits such as Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder, according to the mainstream media, you are “a massive [expletive].”In a single article on one popular site, fans of right-wing media were called “the most pathetic men,” “fascists,” “authoritarians,” “dudes who are so pathetic that they resort to politicized cat-calling in order to garner female attention,” “deeply insecure men,” “[expletives] who just want to blame their personal failures on feminism,” “those bitter over their lack of personal experience with sexually aroused women,” and “pompous, overbearing, or even violent jerks.”All of that and more… in a single article.It’s a rather hard-hitting reminder that the media in America really does hate our guts. It hates your guts.You and I are the enemy. And more than that, we are a joke. The whole of the Left is saturated with goading contempt for people like us.Meanwhile, all of Western Civilization is going down the drain. By every possible metric, our nation is in serious trouble. And we know it.But what are conservatives doing about it? Fighting each other, it seems. Three months into 2023 and conservatism in America has been marked by bitter infighting and friction. The oppositional media has, of course, exaggerated these rumors of disharmony, but we ourselves are nevertheless still at fault. We have split into pro-McCarthy and anti-McCarthy factions, and the drama surrounding his speakership quickly became ugly. Then we split into pro-Daily Wire and pro-Steven Crowder sects, and that conflict was even uglier. Two of the biggest names in conservative media spent days ripping on each other over a $50 million contract. Don’t try telling me we can blame that whole debacle on left-wing media. We can’t. We created it. SEE ALSO: SEE ALSO: The ‘Me Decade’ has come home to roost And of course, the elephant in the room is the fracas between Governor Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. Heading into an election primary, Republicans are allowed to prefer opposing candidates. But this is not that. This is not simply a matter of preferring one man over the other. Instead, Trump’s most loyal followers have begun treating support for DeSantis as sedition against conservatism. And many in DeSantis’s camp have completely memory-holed their past support for Trump. This is the state of conservatism in 2023. And the Left, popcorn in hand, is laughing at us.But I’ll admit: I paint an overly bleak picture. Things are not that bad. Despite a bit of disharmony, conservatives are actually doing a lot of good for the country.What concerns me is that in our drive for political purity, we have forgotten who the real enemy is.The media indeed wants us to get distracted by dramatized accounts of conservative dysfunction and forget that, at the end of the day, we are all fighting to thwart the downfall of the West. Together.We each are entitled to our own opinions about McCarthy, DeSantis, Trump, The Daily Wire, and Crowder. We can disagree on those specifics, and a few forgivable kerfuffles may ensue. But when all is said and done, can we still agree that fighting the Left is more important? Can we agree that saving America must come first, before our petty differences?My advice to conservatives is simple:Stay focused.We have a country to save.Jakob Fay is a staff writer for the Convention of States Project, a project of Citizens for Self-Governance.
