American Conservatism: Enemy to Human Decency.

Ty Unglebower
6 min readApr 24, 2022

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American Conservatives are the enemies of human decency.

No ambiguity on the issue exists. The views, life experience, and absolutely the religion of any of them is completely irrelevant. American Conservatism, and by extension the mainstream Republican party today are incompatible with civilized society.

If would-be Republicans out there want to coin a new term for Eisenhower-style conservatism so you can use that, knock yourself out. Or register independent. Best of all, start a counter movement and rid your side of the aisle of all traces of the Trumps, the McConnells the DeSantises. (I suspect, however, those that could have waited too long to do so; the ink has seeped into the water supply.

But if you insist on still being a Republican, still calling yourself a Conservative that happens to reject certain aspects of the national movement but continues to empower it so as to own the opposition at election time, you’re just as bad as the worst of them.

Republicans/Conservatives have hitched their horses to particular wagons now, and there is no divestiture.

What wagons?

The wagon of “Don’t Say Gay,” and other legislation that alienates queer and non-conforming students, staff, teachers and their life stories from schools. A case against indoctrination that applies only to such people, and not to those more congruent with rightfully dying archaic notions of marriage, of love, of gender, of education itself. If every Christian were even half as quiet and private with their beliefs as they tend to demand LGBTQIA+ people to be about their lives, we’d reach near-Utopia in days.

Wagons upon wagons of people and institutions that demonize the very study of racial injustice in our schools, at virtually any grade. People and institutions who are so afraid their white children may both see and sympathize with a person of color that they will dispose of math books that dare to use black people in word problems lest the issue of race exist in the eyes of their offspring.

How then would they train up their child in the way white supremacy should go — denied because slavery is gone, Jim Crow is supposedly over, and Barack Obama became president. “There is no racial animosity anymore, in wake of these things, my children. Don’t let an award-winning textbook or a teacher that is black tell you otherwise.”

Wagons full of people who demand, swindle, and cripple the essence of legislative review so as to appoint universally unqualified people to the federal benches, bought and paid for and ready to rule against the gay people, the black people, the women who insist on owning their own bodies. Lying, cheating drunks and molesters foisted upon SCOTUS that represent the true values for which Conservatism stands; power and submission of enemies.

Wagons stuffed beyond capacity with people seeking out anyone anywhere that they even suspect of having a medical procedure their idol does not like, so as to collect a state sponsored bounty — destroying lives and driving people into the underground on the dime of the taxpayer. Perhaps your very own tax money. But rest assured, not a dime more will go to roads or medical coverage.

Wagons with people fighting over who will both figuratively and literally ride shotgun for the gun lobby, who shrug and sigh platitudes about freedom when children are turned into paste by yet another entitled white male with an AR-15. Then play the routine on repeat for the next 500 school shootings and call it an American value.

Playing stupid or being stupid is popular on this wagon train, wherein a public bathroom cannot possibly be breached by a pedophile bent on molesting children, so long as he doesn’t identify as a woman. But if someone born a man does identify as a woman, they make sure she is saddled with the reputation of an unforgivable sexual deviant while they wait for the Duggar Reunion Special to drop.

A caravan of cowards in covered wagons that demand they be allowed to say the n-word because some black people do so; who want to be able to use the R-word because it’s funny and nobody can ever take a joke in this woke cancel culture, but nobody better ever so much as look askance or crack wise about their he-man version of an ancient crucified carpenter because “oppression.”

Islam? Sure, go for it. Remember 9/11. And those t-shirts about the Jews in the showers is dark humor that nobody on the left is sophisticated enough to handle. Snowflakes and their rainbow flags. They better watch their mouth if they say anything mean about Chris Kyle, or Kyle Rittenhouse.

At a moment’s notice the passengers on these wagons are ready to dismiss any protest in favor of black lives as terrorism, and to applaud police murder of a suspect because the victim was once guilty of something. The deceased’s children be damned, he was a thug, and this is dark humor anyway. But protect the school children from the library books depicting families with two dads at ALL COSTS.

Maybe as they stop for chow and wait for Cooky to warm the pots, they’ll remind you that a riot of white people at the Capitol is in fact a patriot protest not an insurrection. Attempting to disrupt government activities for the sake of derailing a national election, (of which there is mounting evidence every day) is a favorite past time of the train. So is racially gerrymandering congressional districts with minority populations, and systematically making voting for such people a burden. All in the name of the Goebbels-light approach of propaganda…lie enough and the right people will begin to believe it.

And if not, hound people who are in charge of free elections in every state because you didn’t win. Shout down any and all opposition at school board meetings, and county councils and health commission forums, because the facts do not and have never backed them up.

Wagon supplies are bought with just as much (and in many cases much more) public assistance as that given to urban and minority populations. But it is only the latter that are demonized for it.

And more wagons and disciples rolling along every day, while all significant institutions that can and should and must stop it go on less than a trickle of the attack that is required. The various feuding Lefts, the Democrats, the independents, the media, the civil service, prosecutors up to an including Attorney General Garland, the social media platforms profiting off of misinformation spread, celebrities with huge platforms that opt instead to live in isolation and sing Imagine all have failed to use their powers to deflect as much of this as possible.

These proverbial wagoners drape their conveyances in the American flag. Such scum always has. And they are rolling into your town to silence you, insult you, delegitimize you, and occasionally to threaten you. They stand for one version and one version only of life and society and that vision is remarkably consistent: conformity through bullying.

If you are weak, gay, trans, Left, not evangelical Christian, not nationalist, poor, sick, alone, afraid, “feminine,” or feminist, a minority race, outspoken about anything which they do not agree with, wary of guns, supportive of pronoun choice and a woman’s right to control her body, or an advocate for all of the above and/or simply someone that doesn’t want what they want they want only to bully you. Run over you with the wagon train. Stomp you into the dust of powerlessness. Dismiss you as a liberal, or a communist or a socialist. Or, most recently, a groomer of children.

They hate you.

And all of this does not even touch on their disdain for the facts of history and science. This is just the depravity. But that is more than enough to be dangerous. Keep your head down, and be quiet and you can think almost anything you like, so long as you don’t say it, live it, express it on a t-shirt, teach others it’s okay or explain yourself. In other words, if you deny everything you are and everything you believe in while in public, you might just get away unscathed.

But not for long.

Because American Conservatism is ultimately an authoritarian movement now. The wagon train is rolling and nothing will stop it but recognizing it, exposing it, fighting it, blocking it, out maneuvering it. Joking about it isn’t enough. It’s not funny. It’s a knife to the throat of those who most need protecting. Defeat it and destroy it, or at least take much of its power.

Conservatives are not the loyal opposition in a free society. They are an impetus to the collapse of same, and they know it. Want it.

They are enemies of human decency. Time to treat them accordingly.

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Ty Unglebower
Ty Unglebower

Written by Ty Unglebower

Freelance writer, sometime actor and introvert living and working in Frederick County, Maryland