I wanted to move us to the kind of bewildered response of like MAGA influencers online who couldn't

believe, you know, that there was this table of unappealing snacks and water that meant that this

protests must be funded by Soros or some nefarious foreign entity. But in a similar vein, I've

seen a lot of right-wingers who just assume

that this protest, this resistance, must be somehow orchestrated from above by the Democrats

or by foundations or by some kind of higher nefarious network. That it couldn't possibly just be

the sort of rational decision-making just because this is what you do in response to this kind of thing. As a democratic subject, you go out and you protest this kind of thing. I think there's multiple things going on. In one sense, they're just being tendentious. They want to demonize and delegitimize the protests, even if they know that it's not true, that it's being funded

by Soros or whatever. But I also think there's a kernel of truth that they do not believe

that this is something that Americans do. And they do not have much of a lived experience

of participating in this kind of thing. They don't know just how core to the just like normal instinctive

practices of liberal and left politicized subjects it is to go and protest and do these kinds of

things together. The American right really just doesn't have much of a street protest tradition.

Paul Kengor, my old teacher at Grove City, I remember once

there was this horrible anti-Lincoln, Tom DeLorenzo, writer, who was going to come to speak at Grove

City. And I was actually so enraged by that that I was thinking about organizing some kind of

protest. And Paul, I said this to him as office, he said, Matt, protesting is what

the left does. He goes, we don't do that. I mean, at least in that instance, it's like, he knows

that it's something that the left just does. And it doesn't have to be, like, you know, funded and

organized by some shadowy network of powerful actors from abroad or whatever.

But my point is that, like, in their bewilderment, they do betray the fact that they

do not understand this impulse in the American character.

And then it does reveal a lot about the nature of conservatism right now, and the Maga Right

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