Politics

The Man Behind The Hilarious Conservative Pundit Parody Account Speaks Out

Buckley and Vidal, at the infamous moment Buckley lost his temper. Promotional photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Scott Greer Contributor
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The Donald Trump campaign has exposed deep divisions within the American political right and driven many conservative commentators to histrionics over the real estate mogul’s antics.

Thus, the birth of the #NeverTrump social media “movement.”

Fortunately, throughout the 2016 campaign, there has been one Twitter parody account that has perfectly skewered the conservative movement’s Trump outrage from the Right at every twist and turn. (RELATED: Trump Has Turned Conservatives Into Social Justice Warriors)

The aptly named Conservative Pundit — found at the handle @DemsRRealRacist — has garnered over 14,000 followers and prominent fans such as Ann Coulter. Additionally, for a few brief hours on March 12, the @realDonaldTrump account followed the parody.

Put in the voice of a hypothetical National Review writer who believes Democrats are the real racists, Mr. Pundit tweets out his thoughts on a wide variety of issues.

Here’s a sampling of some of his latest tweets:

The Daily Caller was fortunate enough to track down the man behind the account — who wished to remain unidentified — to find out what inspired him to start the account and why he’s driven to satirize the poor souls who can’t stop tweeting #NeverTrump.

The DC: What was the inspiration for the Conservative Pundit account?

Conservative Pundit: I started it one night on a whim and didn’t really expect it to take off like it has, so maybe “inspiration” is a little strong. But I did create it out of a general sense of frustration with the ineffectiveness of, well, conservative punditry.

I guess a lot of that frustration emerges from my conviction that the Left hasn’t had an original thought in years. They’ve hit an intellectual dead end, and rather than re-assessing their theories they’ve instead contented themselves for the past couple decades in finding increasingly nonsensical and bizarre applications for those theories. Like a great big hunt for the next “systemic oppression” to write a Slate article about. It’s a movement that’s culminating in things like mass campus hysteria over a poop swastika and solemn thinkpieces in defense of rioting and arson. That’s the kind of stuff their intellectual vanguard is up to.

And for the most part conservative pundits, who are supposed to be our intellectual vanguard, are still losing ground to them. Sad!

How many people run the account and what’s your background?

It’s just me, and I don’t have a relevant background in politics or punditry either one. I’m not even good with computers, to be honest. Each one of my multimedia tweets, for instance, is painstakingly cobbled together using the screenshot function on my keyboard and MS Paint. It’s not exactly a professional operation.

Why the handle @DemsRRealRacist?

Because to me that’s the quintessential self-defeating conservative move: “Democrats are the REAL racists!” You grant total moral authority to the other side, and then you attempt to show how you embody their (superior) ideals better than they do. It’s a bad scene.

What conservative figures do you think resemble the parody the most?

That’s kind of a brutal question, isn’t it? I’ll antagonize them all day on Twitter, but even I would feel a little bad calling them out by name in an article like this when they don’t have the luxury of doing the same to me.

I will say that I try to parody the archetype of a conservative pundit rather than any particular person, even though some pundits are obviously more “inspirational” to me than others and some of my tweets are potshots at them. Hence the generic account name. There’s more flexibility that way. I’ve found that it’s almost impossible to craft an ironic “conservative” position so obviously inept and self-defeating that there isn’t somewhere a pundit promoting the same position in all sincerity. It’s remarkable.

I’ll make you a deal, though, if by some miracle I beat out Diamond and Silk for the position of Press Secretary of the Trump administration, I’ll name all sorts of names from the podium.

What do you think are the biggest problems with the conservative movement?

This kind of analysis is way above my pay grade, but I’ll take a quick stab at it.

If we’re looking at the conservative movement on the level of national politics, I think a lot of existing critiques are accurate. Our politicians are beholden to monied interests, both foreign and domestic, rather than the people they represent. We’re far too interventionist abroad. And we have this quixotic faith that the Constitution can ride in on a white horse and save us, even though it’s become clear that the Constitution means whatever five of nine Ivy Leaguers in DC say it means and the powers that be can ignore at will anyway.

Why are figures at National Review and other places so easy to parody?

This is the subject of my upcoming four-volume treatise on how to lose a culture war with class and décorum, so I don’t want to give away too much here, but suffice it to say I don’t think that the problem with respectable conservatism is just that they’re afraid of being called racist or sexist or homophobic. They certainly are afraid of that, yes, but I think that the deeper problem is they’ve fully internalized a whole raft of premises about race, about gender, about “sexual orientation” that are extremly recent, extremely radical, leftist, and in many ways totally incompatible with the traditional American worldview that they purport to cherish.

The contemporary conservative pundit is in a precarious position. On the one hand, he agrees with his liberal friends that the United States prior to, say, the 1960s was a frightfully bigoted and hateful place, full of all sorts of phobias and -isms and other such indefensible attitudes. On the other hand, he wants his liberal friends to respect the political and cultural principles we’ve inherited from that evil and benighted past. It’s a weak position, and I don’t think many people besides other professional conservative pundits find it very compelling.

There’s also a lot of surface-level material to parody, too, because a high percentage of conservative pundits are pretentious dorks.

How long does it take you to craft your works of Twitter art?

Longer than I would like to admit, to be honest. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes per tweet. When I get an idea, I type it up in the tweet box, and it’s usually a dozen or two characters over the limit. So then I start the laborious process of pruning it down to 140.

The thing is, though, that I don’t avail myself of a lot of the more conventional space-saving techniques like abbreviations or acronyms or skimping on punctuation because I think the Conservative Pundit character is a little too fastidious and wannabe high-brow for that. And I like to throw in a lot of empty phrases like “Look” or “Personally I think,” too, because even though they’re technically bad writing, they go a long way in creating a voice for the account.

In other words, I make the pruning process a lot harder than it needs to be. And I probably overthink my whole approach. But those are the pains one takes to deliver hand-crafted, artisanal tweets to one’s followers.

Has any conservative tried to rebuke your parody?

Of course, yeah. I get indignant anti-Trump conservatives in my mentions pretty frequently. And they’re usually tweeting the same boilerplate they tweet elsewhere. Sometimes, if I think it will be funny, I tweet back how much I agree with them. But most of the time I just ignore them.

This is actually another thing that real conservative pundits don’t get. They don’t understand how to manage their image on social media. Think about it. If you fancy yourself a Serious Conservative Intellectual™ who writes for a Serious Conservative Periodical™  like National Review or The Federalist, your online conduct ought to be consistent with that. When your audience sees you slapfighting with @MAGA_Dude_1985 for an hour straight, it doesn’t matter how cleverly you think you roasted him, it still looks silly. It looks petty.

This is one of the reasons why the more established conservative thinkers have been so bad at controlling the conversation this election cycle. The main reason, no doubt, is Trump, who is a virtuoso at getting his opponents to chase their own tails. But down in the trenches of social media a lot of pundits are also taking heat from their right for the first time, and they’re reacting by getting down and dirty with their detractors, which makes them seem like anything but the principled, high-minded voices of reason they want to be perceived as. Trump supporters, by comparison, have no such pretensions to erudite sophistication, so we’re at an advantage in these exchanges.

See? There’s some actionable insight I just offered free of charge to my sworn enemies. Let it never be said I’m heartless.

What do you think about Donald Trump?

I admire Trump, one-hundred percent and unironically.

I’ll admit that, if you had told me last year that I’d be pinning so many of my hopes for this country on Donald Trump, I would have laughed at you. I didn’t dislike him, but he wasn’t on my radar much one way or another. And I’ll also admit that in the early days of his candidacy, his main appeals were 1) making Mexico pay for the wall and 2) the fact that he seemed capable of wrecking a Republican establishment than in my estimation had become worse than useless and was actively harming the interests of rank-and-file Republicans.

But since then he has made a believer out of me. It’s not just his policies (many of which he craftily hides from the mainstream media in position papers on his campaign website) that I like. It’s that I truly believe he loves this country, he loves the people in it, and he’s willing to go to the mat for them.

A while back there was some Black Lives Matter activist that got into an altercation at a Trump rally in Birmingham. The media immediately escalated into full-on hissy fit mode about how hateful racist Trump supporters had cruelly abused this innocent peaceful protester, and they went to Trump to extract their apology. Now any other politician in the race, left or right, would have given them just that. A normal politician would have tucked his tail, put on his somberest face, and started disavowing anything that moved: “That’s not who we are!” But Trump didn’t. What did Trump say? “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” And it was beautiful! Not only because it was probably true. I’m willing to bet that guy did start it. But also because it showed Trump’s willingness to stand by his supporters rather than throwing them under the bus for moral brownie points from the media.

As far as I’m concerned, that kind of loyalty deserves to be repaid in kind. Trump 2016!

Why do you think conservatives hate Trump so much?

I think it’s all pretty prosaic. Trump threatens their little club. He threatens their money and their prestige. They’re fighting Trump harder than they ever fought Obama and harder than they ever will fight Hillary because, while losing the White House to hostile libs might not be ideal, it doesn’t represent the threat to the existing order that a Trump administration would.

I’m a talkative guy and normally I would philosophize about Trump hate at length, but I think that’s pretty much the long and the short of it as far as the Republican establishment goes.

What is your own ideology?

I’m a white Southern Evangelical, and I believe just about everything you would expect a white Southern Evangelical to believe—minus the part where support for the modern nation state of Israel is some sort of eschatological imperative. I believe righteousness exalteth a nation, which is to say I’m slightly more socially conservative than Bob Jones. And I’m somewhat pessimistic about prospect of worldwide peace, love, and tolerance in our lifetime, which colors a lot of my thinking on foreign policy. But I wouldn’t say I’m all that ideological, by which I mean I save my loyalty for God, country, and flesh-and-blood human beings rather than socio-political abstractions.

This touches on one of Trump’s major selling points, by the way, at least for me. He doesn’t seem all that ideological either. I think he’s a goal-oriented, results-oriented thinker, which prevents him from becoming ideologically rigid and getting bogged down in the interminable partisan disputes that kind of rigidity engenders. And I say that’s the way to go, especially in our current cultural milieu. We’re a fragmented and polarized country, almost hopelessly so it looks like. You’re not going to build a coalition by stringently enforcing ideological conformity (no disrespect intended to Ted Cruz’s plan for uniting the country behind Constitutional originalism and a flat tax!). But you might be able to build a coalition by outlining a goal—such as breaking the grip of special interests on DC or reviving the economic prospects of our working and middle classes—that a lot of groups, despite their ideological differences or even incompatibility, are willing to work towards.

Do you think Trump is carving up a new opening on the Right for a counter ideology to movement conservatism?

Absolutely. I would even go a little farther and say that Trump is part catalyst and part product of an ongoing realignment in Western politics. The political divisions Trump brings into relief are not so much between liberal and conservative but between nationalist and globalist. He has these bizarre notions, articulated just the other day in his foreign policy speech, that America should be governed in such a way that it secures the blessings of liberty for its people and their posterity—rather than for any random person the world over who up and decides to “migrate” here.

That’s the instinct that puts him to the left of movement conservatism on issues like healthcare and trade, while placing him far, far to their right on issues like immigration. He wants his countrymen and women to be healthy and prosperous and safe, which is needless to say yucky and nativist and very problematic.

That’s the sort of counter ideology that Trump is bringing to bear against movement conservatism. You can call it nationalism. You can call it populism. You can call it what you want, but I would argue that it’s conservative in a far more profound and fundamental sense than what passes for conservatism in Washington DC, because it’s setting out to conserve not just the political principles but the sovereignty and the culture and the future of the American people themselves from powerful geopolitical forces that are eroding those things as we speak.

What do you think about your popularity among mainstream conservatives like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson?

Couldn’t be happier about it, honestly.

And first of all, let me clarify that Ann Coulter is a special case. She’s been a real windfall for me in the retweets department for one thing. But more importantly—and I say this with nothing but respect and admiration in my heart—Coulter has been trolling milquetoast conservatives a lot longer and a lot harder than I have. So it was very gratifying for me to catch the attention of one of the masters of my craft.

As for the rest of them, yeah, I still couldn’t be happier. I mean if there’s any grand theory behind my account, it’s that mainstream conservatism is impotent because it has an artificially narrow range of ideas that it’s willing to interrogate and/or espouse. Seeing some less-inhibited and less-constrained conservative ideas get out there, even in joke form, encourages me quite a bit. Heck, Rich Lowry could retweet Conservative Pundit from the official National Review Twitter account, to all twelve of their remaining loyalists, and my first impulse wouldn’t be to worry about whether I’d been watering down my material. I’d just be glad that I’m getting more eyes on it.

I think the internet generation is producing a whole range of conservative and right-wing positions that will stand up under even the most withering scrutiny and critique, and I’ll do my small part to help drag them into public discourse by hook or by crook.

How did Trump end up following you for a day?

Actually it was more like a few hours. But they were a glorious few hours!

In my imagination, here is how it went down. The Donald is up there on Trump Force One, leaning back in a plush, leather built in recliner and relaxing a little bit before his next rally. He comes across my account as he’s scrolling through Twitter on one of his many phones, and he starts chuckling to himself at my timeline.

“Unbelievable!” He says, turning to his beautiful wife Melania, “Melania, these people, my internet people, like this Conservative Pundit guy, they’re completely phenomenal! This is a movement like our country has never seen before, and Conservative Pundit, whoever he is, he’s going above and beyond the call of duty. That’s a guy trying to make America great again!”

And the whole gang is gathered around—Don Jr., Ivanka, Lewandowski, Eric, that one tall guy who runs Trump’s security detail, maybe even Chris Christie—everyone’s cracking up, having a good time. Anyway, while they’re passing the phone around laughing at my bon mots someone accidentally presses “Follow.” Then later, of course, one of Trump’s interns has to correct that mistake because, bless my heart, I may be trying but I’m still not worthy to join the august company of Trump’s personal Twitter follows.

Anyway that’s how it happened in my head.

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