It’s against our principles to defend our interests. As near as I can tell, this is the definition of the “true conservatism” of the Beltway Right. And it is this we are supposed to defend by voting for anyone besides Donald Trump.

These mediocrities and frauds, conmen and shills, glorified corporate lobbyists masquerading as landed gentry draped in middlebrow frippery,, now face the greatest threat in their despicable history. Trump cannot be bought, and that fact alone is a mortal threat to a conservative establishment that has always functioned as a product rather than a “movement.”

It must be restated that the case against Trump as a “liberal” is pathetically thin. Trump is secretly a Democrat and a Hillary stooge, we are told, even though, in fact, Trump was a loyal Republican who defended the Bush/Quayle ticket in 1988. The autistic focus on eminent domain and subsidies, all policies supported by Cruz, Bush, Rubio, et. al when it serves their purposes, is practically self-discrediting.

Trump has publicly identified as pro-life since 2011, and abortion is a judicial issue at this point anyway (as Rush Limbaugh concedes), but pro-life women urge people in South Carolina not to vote Trump for both dubious and feminist reasons and the conservative movement cheers. Meanwhile, we are told Marco Rubio is a “full throated conservative,” even though, some two years ago, he worked with Chuck Schumer to pass an amnesty and immigration bill.

Trump has perhaps the strongest explicit pro-gun position of any candidate, carries a gun himself, and is even preaching the gospel of firearms ownership to the Europeans. Yet Ted Cruz bizarrely tells us Trump would “abolish the Second Amendment.”

Movement conservative love Morton Blackwell counsel that “personnel is policy,” and Trump has recruited one of Jeff Sessions’s top staffers as a senior policy advisor. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio’s campaign is run by the same staff members who tried to push through the Gang of Eight bill. Ted Cruz’s campaign team is littered with former staffers for pro-amnesty Republicans like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Rick Perry. Jeb Bush is surrounded by a campaign staff that could serve as a directory of the GOP Establishment.

Arguably, Trump is more of a “movement conservative” than most other candidates in the race. More importantly, he possesses the unique ability to shift the Overton Window in the “movement’s” direction. As Peter Brimelow said, any political grouping other than the Stupid Party would rejoice at the coming of such a transformative figure. Rush Limbaugh observed that Trump has built the kind of coalition the GOP claims it wants. Yet from the GOP Establishment to Conservatism Inc., from the Southern Baptist Convention to the Club for Growth, the Powers that Be in the American Right are all aligned against Donald J. Trump.

We’ve long been accustomed to the conservative movement’s bait-and-switch, in which a conference begins with thundering bromides against “Cultural Marxism” and ends with pleas to make sure Jane Fonda and Lena Dunham don’t have to pay the estate tax.

But now it’s becoming something bigger. It’s not just that Donald Trump is not a “real conservative.” Now, if you support him, you are also not a “real conservative.” Phyllis Schlafly, Sarah Palin, Pat Buchanan, Congressman Virgil Goode, and many others are apparently off the island, if they hadn’t been purged already. And the flunkies who pass for intellectuals in this degenerate racket furiously insult and demean the evil White men who support Trump in terms they would never use against the Republican “outreach voters” who monolithically support the Democrat Party.

Having already passed into the realm of farce some time ago, we threaten to slip the bonds of reality itself when we see the maniacal clown Glenn Beck projecting about Donald Trump being a psychopath. When Mitt Romney spoke at Liberty University in 2012, he took care to distinguish his Mormon faith from the evangelical Christianity of his audience. Now, we have Beck, a non-Christian by the standards of most evangelicals, pronouncing judgment on Trump as if he’s an authority. This, as contemptible charlatans like Kenneth Copeland, who openly scam their desperate deluded flocks, preach that Ted Cruz was “called and anointed” by God to be president.

The transparent attempt to pitch the woo at the feeble-minded may work, at least in some states. Though most polls show Trump winning South Carolina, internal polling shows the race much closer because of surging evangelical support for Cruz. Cruz’s strategy of turning out evangelicals based on cultural cues, rather than appeals to concrete interests, has already proved its effectiveness in Iowa. As New Hampshire showed, Cruz’s coalition isn’t large enough to win most states, but he could stop Trump in the SEC states, thus clearing the way for the man the Beltway Right really wants, Marco Rubio.

It didn’t have to be this way. For most of the campaign, Ted Cruz carefully followed in Trump’s wake, letting Trump take the hits as he cleared out space for Cruz, making the Texas Senator look more “moderate” by comparison. Commentators like Laura Ingraham dreamed of a Cruz/Trump “anti-Establishment” and “populist” alliance, which would transform the conservative movement. Trump himself used to speak of Cruz as a Vice-Presidential pick, saying in mock regret during one debate that the problem with Cruz’s Canadian birth is that it would make it hard for Donald to “bring him along for the ride.” Now, this potential alliance is in ruins.

As I look up from my hentai collection for a moment, I have to acknowledge our good friend “The” Rick Wilson, who you know is frantically reloading Radix over and over again while sobbing hysterically. Wilson was right when he observed that Cruz can’t slavishly praise Trump as a hero and copy all of his positions for months, only to suddenly declare that Trump was actually a liberal all along. If Cruz is supposedly so brilliant, why is he apparently only noticing this now? And why are all those other “true conservatives” who supported Trump for months only now deciding he’s an evil “progressive”?

What Trump is showing is that there is no “true conservatism.” It’s a scam, and at some point, the deliberate refusal to understand constitutes a moral failing. The attacks on Trump, up to this point, were not generated so much by ideology as by Trump’s refusal to speak the vocabulary and respect the authorities of the conservative subculture. Trump was a movement unto himself, outside the control of the Beltway Right. As the Beltway Right is itself one giant misdirection effort, it had to target Trump to make sure the scam rolls on.

But at the last debate, the stakes were raised dramatically. Trump violated the great taboo of the 21st century GOP by directly attacking George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. In the general election, this could prove to be an advantage. Assuming Hillary Clinton can scrape and claw her way to the nomination, Trump will be able to unload on the venomous and decrepit shrew for voting for the war and presiding over the rise of the Islamic State in both Mesopotamia and North Africa. Unfortunately, in the Republican primary, this is a gamble, as, incredibly, an overwhelming majority of Republican voters still believe removing Saddam Hussein was the “right thing to do” and voters in South Carolina still respect George W. Bush.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Republican voters are simply stupid. There is an element of counter-signaling at work. Most left-wing antiwar protesters really did hate the country and hate American soldiers, mostly because America and its armed forces were seen as a stand-in for “Whites.” Conservatives, tactical reactionaries that they are, stood by “the troops” in response.

But the policy itself was a disaster. Thousands of Americans died so that noodle-armed neoconservatives could boast about bringing democracy to the Arabs. It is not fair to say that American lives were wasted in the Iraq War. That is giving Bush and his cronies too much credit. If Bush had simply shot thousands of American troops at random, it would have been less harmful.

Today, the United States of America is a de facto ally of the Islamic State, which benefited not just from the Iraq War but from the money and arms thrown at “moderate rebels” in another misguided effort to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. In other words, American troops died to benefit people who hate them. Everyone involved—with the exception of Beltway politicos, defense contractors, and foreign interests such as the Israelis and the Saudis—is worse off. And as a bonus, thousands of enemies were imported from Iraq into the United States and Europe. We fought them over there so that in a few years we’d get to fight them here.

Now, Trump has openly challenged the war that the conservative movement defended as the defining issue of the American Right. John Podhoertz, who, we know, has the best interests of Middle America at heart, is outraged at Trump’s lèse majesté against George W. Bush. David French, who we know is a “true conservative” because of his adopted Black trophy kids, says this is the ultimate proof that Trump is really a “Democrat.” Bill Kristol promises Republican voters will finally say “enough.” But these and other authors all concede that if Trump can win South Carolina after this, he can’t be stopped. More importantly, as they explicitly state, if Trump wins, men (I use the term loosely) like Podhoertz, Kristol, and French no longer have a place in the reconstituted GOP.

Trump may have gone too far, too soon by putting the Iraq War and George W. Bush on the agenda. If he had played it safe in the recent debate, he’d be assured of victory. This is the state, after all, that constantly re-elects Lindsey Graham. But from the point of view of the alt Right, it’s the best thing that could have happened.

This Saturday’s vote is a referendum on Conservatism Inc. The bitter Cruz/Trump feud ensures Trump’s nationalism can’t be co-opted or pawned off. The only question is whether, after everything that’s happened since 9/11, Republicans are willing to let themselves be fooled yet again. If they rebel, and Trump can win in South Carolina, he’ll have redefined the American Right.

The Beltway Right may have fatally overplayed its hand. Faced with a candidate they couldn’t fully control, Conservatism Inc. decided to claim Trump was never “one of us.” But to its horror, the Beltway Right is discovering most of its constituents were never really “conservative” to begin with. They were always implicitly nationalist, and the only reason they voted for these “true conservatives,” who outsourced American jobs and sent American soldiers to die for foreign interests, was because Whites were never given any other damn choice.

To borrow a term beloved of the Beltway Right, the conservative movement is trying to keep its White serfs trapped on the conservative planation. They know if Trumpian nationalism triumphs, a more authentic form of White Identity politics can’t be far behind.