November 1st, 2022 | Grant johnson

You Can Be As Conservative As You Want to be

Never mind what's going on around you. Start living like a conservative.

There’s a lot of whining and complaining and lamenting in conservative circles lately regarding the state of things. Every day there is some new woke front unleashed in the culture wars and right-wing internet sites use it for endless outrage grist in their production line. There’s always some tranny teacher with giant fake breasts, or a liberal politician that wants to implement the latest dumb fad. There’s always an annoying new progressive movie, or a celebrity woke statement, or a new left-wing policy idea that needles the interests of conservatives everywhere.

Choose to ignore it and focus on being as conservative as you want to be.

Complaining that "things aren’t the way you wish they were" is the mindset of progressives. Reality is a certain thing and the pluralism to be found within it is almost limitless in the modern West. Conservatives need to embrace pluralism in order to maximize what’s best about conservatism for themselves and from there they can engage in the wider world.

A few years ago, a family in Ontario realized that their toddler sons were addicted to smart phones so they took the radical measure of abolishing all modern technology in their lives and spent a year living as though it were 1986. They said it was a valuable experiment and reordered their relationship with technology, but the fact that they could choose to do this shows just how easy it is to make simple choices that reflect your values.

Here's some practical measures for conservatives to live conservatively.

Schooling

A big battleground in the culture wars is schooling. Leftists have been going after schools since forever. Aristotle started it all when he stated, “Give me a child until 7 and I will show you the man.” Children are the future, so leftists want to influence them from the starting line in order to build their glorious utopia.

The obvious solution is homeschooling. Here’s the problem though, homeschooling is tough. Mostly for three reasons:

1. Not all households have a parent staying at home full time.

2. Even if they do, the parent might find switching to “official teacher” mode extremely difficult.

3. There’s social and experiential value to attending school with other children.

One of our friends is being highly pressured to homeschool but feels it would benefit her son (born and raised throughout Covid) to get a school social experience. She’s decided to enroll him, but she isn’t ending her participation there. She’s going to be a highly engaged, non-woke, volunteering mom watching the school like a hawk for any signs of progressive derangement.

This is what I have chosen for my family as well.

I took a tour of my kid’s schools and met the teachers. I immediately noticed red flags in the form of Pride flags, BLM references and climate alarm stuff on a couple of hallway bulletin boards. It made me cringe, but that’s part of the world we live in, and it didn’t seem front and centre.

For the most part public schools are just trying to make it through the day. Classroom sizes are large, and kids of disparate backgrounds make teaching them difficult. The sense I got from meeting with teachers is that they are consumed with the basics of primary education and classroom order.

Conservative parents who chose to send their kids to school need to be engaged and aware. Volunteer when able and serve on the school committees if you have the time. Most importantly, take charge of your children’s education and don’t mindlessly outsource your parental responsibility to overworked teachers who may or may not be woke.

By being involved you can learn about what your kids are learning and overrule questionable messages that may be sent. This year for instance I removed my kids from school during Orange Shirt Day. I didn’t do this because I’m racist and love residential schools, but because I’m leery about Orange Shirt Day turning into a de facto “Hate Whitey and Shame Them” day. My very white kids are currently colour-blind regarding race, and I’d like to keep it that way. As I introduce them to Native American culture, I want it to be from a position of positivity and respect not victimhood and guilt.

Molly of Denali is a great PBS show to introduce kids to positive representations of Native Americans. Taking your kids to history museums and opening conversations that you can direct is a good educational step. Carefully selecting books, meeting First Nations people who embrace their culture with pride, attending events, the possibilities are endless. You don’t need to check out and step back and have your kids worked on by progressives. Engaging like this will have the dual effect of establishing better narratives and undermining those of the woke.

You can’t bubble wrap your kids in hopes that the world won’t hurt them. Instead make them strong and powerful in face of the world around them. When it comes to educating your kids…be as conservative as a you want to be.

Money

I once worked with a guy who had a background in politics, and he became disillusioned with it all. He said something I’ve never forgotten. “How you spend your money has a greater impact and influence than how you vote.”

Many times, people boycott stores or products because they’re MAKING A BIG STATEMENT. Don’t do this. Grandstanding is lame and nobody wants to see you virtue signal. You should boycott a store or product because you’re against that store or product and you want to positively support something better. This can be hard.

I once went on a kick in which I decided I wasn’t going to support sweatshop labour anymore and would only buy clothes made in Canada. I went to the mall and walked from shop-to-shop checking tags on shirts and sweaters, and it was basically impossible to find anything. I even went to quintessentially Canadian stores like Roots and found that almost everything was made overseas. (This was in the 90’s, I think. Today it’s easier Top Made-in-Canada Clothing Brands 2022 | Finder Canada)

I rationalized that not buying from Communist countries was good enough and then learned about how overseas sweatshops are actually good for improving standards of living in the world’s poorest countries. This made it easier to shop.

Ultimately though, nobody cared about my decision and the world’s conglomerates kept functioning without missing a beat. Does my intentional spending matter much? No. Do I matter much? Not really, but this is where I’m at and it’s what I’ve got. One less Communist shirt sold on the rack is my token towards reflecting my values.

Extrapolate this throughout your life and what you value becomes obvious. I will never buy Beyond Meat, not because I’m MAKING A STATEMENT, but because it’s gross and I prefer eating beef. Me buying beef contributes to the agricultural infrastructure that leads to me getting more of it. Money talks.

What you don’t spend matters too. I avoid Tim Hortons due to their 2015 anti-oil Enbridge controversy, but it also helps that Tim Hortons is terrible. Either way, they don’t get my money and yeah, I’m just one lost customer, but nevertheless, I’m being as conservative as I want to be.

Streaming services

Hollywood is notorious for being against us. It wasn’t always this way, but the tide of progressiveness has followed (or been pushed) by Hollywood just like everywhere else. It used to be that if you didn’t want something you could just choose not to buy a ticket for it. Box office bombs caused a lot of financial pain and if audiences didn’t pay, then Hollywood producers would scramble to find a solution.

Today, streaming services dominate the culture, and you pay a service fee for all the content whether you watch it or not. Much like cable television, you don’t have a choice but to essentially support everything or nothing.

Ideally, conservatives should just cut these services out of there lives altogether. I cut the cable cord finally this fall. Shaw would always throw in cable for basically free if we signed up for internet and a landline from them. This year we took faster internet in exchange for cable and said goodbye to CRTC drivel forever. That’s one less paid customer for the CRTC and their network of bush league lying news services. We should’ve done it years ago.

Now we have a litany of streaming services and listen…I get it, Disney + is loaded with wokeness. Netflix has had a long and strange battle with wokeness. Paying for these services does contribute to the bottom line of content creation, much of which is not conservative.

However, much like the Hollywood of old, when expensive shows don’t hit, the executives are left scrambling for something that will. Unlike Hollywood of old, the metrics that these streaming services have are incredibly granular for collecting data regarding when, what, who, where, why and how people watch their content. The companies all want the biggest audience they can get, and competition is merciless. Amazon, Appletv, Disney +, Netflix, Crave, YouTube, HBOMax…they are destroying each other with competition and if wokeness and progressive values get in the way of profit, then (as per Dave Chappelle) wokeness and progressive values will have to take a back seat.

This article regarding the Disney + show Falcon and the Winter Soldier, although unsubstantiated, shows how executives can monitor and assess every aspect of streaming shows. When confronted with losing 80% of viewers during a BLM moment in a superhero show they will undoubtedly take notice. When an expensive woke show like She-Hulk bombs right out of the gate, you can be assured that executives will take notice. Get woke, go broke isn’t an empty slogan.

As conservatives we can avoid all the shows we want and seek out the shows we enjoy. Make your entertainment as conservative as you want to be.

Let’s broaden the topics a little bit

Are you a Libertarian? Then go be that and don’t let anyone get in your way. Smoke your weed and trade your bitcoin and don’t be such a grandstander regarding laws not functioning the way you want them to be. Instead exploit the letter of the law rather than adhering to the spirit of it.

For example? Doing some self-employed work for someone and want to avoid paying taxes? Instead of whining about how high the tax rates are and how taxation is theft, just ask the customer if you can work for free. When the job is done, the customer can give you a “cash gift” that conveniently works out to the estimated cost of being hired to do the job. The customer can avoid GST and you can avoid paying income tax!

Don’t fight the system, exploit it.

Are you a Social Conservative? Then be that! Find a non-woke church and attend. Differentiate between “gay marriage” and real marriage. Keep your family strong. Shun pornography. Don’t snort cocaine. Buy a gun. There’s lot’s that can be accomplished in a socially conservative manner without lamenting the state of things.

For example? I used to be heavily involved in the pro-life movement and thinking back on it now I think it was a mistake. I remember clearly that there were a lot of young, mostly Christian, 20-somethings zealously fighting the good fight to save babies and stop murder. Protests and out-reach displays and pro-life marches and debates and article writing and video making consumed endless hours of our time. It was mostly for naught.

When I reflect on those times today, I think all those young people would have better spent their time dating each other and getting more of their own babies made earlier. What’s going to positively impact the future more, driving this graphic Truth Truck around town for years on end or making yourself marriable and birthing a half-dozen, pro-life instructed, children of your own?

Are you a Fiscal Conservative? Stay out of debt. Do everything you can to avoid taxes. Spend less than you earn. Invest in revenue generating opportunities. Get rich! You can do all this in the context of our clown world progressive culture.

For example?

Consumer debt is on the rise. With a slowing economy and high inflation, people are feeling the economic pinch. Want to adopt a fiscally conservative attribute? Pay off the credit cards. Credit card debt is exploitive and usury. The interest rates will trap you and compound your debt in no time.

In most of my 20’s I was poor enough to not even have a credit card, so I get that the people most likely to get trapped are the people least able to seek other options, but nobody ever said being fiscally conservative was easy.

Don’t use credit cards unless you can pay everything off each month. Seek out cards that don’t have fees and that offer rewards or points. Your bottom line will consequently get better over time. In the long run this habit will do far more for your life than raging on Facebook about how much national debt your non-existent grandchildren will have to pay off thanks to Justin Trudeau.

“Good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get things done.”

– Jocko Willink

Too many conservatives want to change things. I suggest we take the Jordan Peterson approach and accept reality as it is and focus instead on ourselves. From there we can branch out to our families, friends, communities, and municipalities. You can still argue on Twitter for fun. You can still vote in federal elections. You can still rally to a cause. But stuff like social media arguing, voting, and rallying shouldn’t be a priority because it doesn’t really matter, not fundamentally.

Too many conservatives are obsessed with voting out Trudeau and thinking this will somehow magically make Canada the way they want it to be. Never mind that Trudeau is a symptom, not a cause. The reality is that you can only do so much and life is messy and always will be. Adjusting and adapting is far more productive than punching against the tides.

When it starts to rain don’t scream at the clouds in hopes of changing the weather, just grab an umbrella and be on your way.

Be as conservative as you want to be.