The Right Side of History Has Never Been the Right

What’s it like to always be wrong? You have to wonder, really, what it’s like to always be on the wrong side of history. We all know that acquaintance — the one who, when given two options, will always, without fail, pick the wrong goddamn one. The poor bastard who stands in the supermarket, eyes darting like a junkie rabbit, and still ends up in the line that moves slower than a Soviet bread line. The same schmuck who dissects a menu like it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls, only to order the dish that tastes like an ashtray soaked in cough syrup. Put a seemingly clear-cut choice in front of them and you know which way the house is betting with absolute certainty: whatever they pick, the opposite is salvation.

And that, in essence, is the conservative condition, a mutant gift for error masquerading as “principle.” Strip away empathy and compassion, and what’s left is this infallible divining rod for disaster. It’s one of the foolproof traits that has always kept me from even considering the Tucker Carlson-flavored red pill and falling into the sociopathic trench of conservatism: the sheer horror of being wrong every.single.time.

I suppose I can see the fentanyl appeal of clinging to the status quo. It’s safe, it’s warm, it’s the rancid blanket you’ve been dragging around since childhood, soaked in norovirus stains and nostalgia. Some hunter-gatherer must have looked sideways at the maverick who sprinkled rock salt on her mastodon steak and muttered, “We’ve always eaten it raw, why change now?” But there’s a substantial line between skepticism and suicide. When it’s so bleeding obvious the status quo is a flaming garbage barge sinking into a tar pit, insisting on “tradition” isn’t noble — it’s grotesque. It’s suicidal, or worse, ecocidal. It’s strapping yourself to the Titanic’s smokestack, singing Dixie to statues of traitors and calling it heritage.

Conservatives, Yahweh help them, would rather drown clutching the captain’s log than use those new-fangled lifejackets and swim to shore. And that’s why, from slavery to segregation, from witch trials to climate denial, from Jim Crow to Gaza, they are always there — standing squarely on the wrong side of the burning stage, waving the flag of tradition while the whole tent collapses on the crowd.

Conservatives don’t just pick the wrong line at the checkout counter — they pick the wrong war, the wrong massacre, the wrong blood-soaked “moral stand” every goddamn time. Slavery? They fought for it. Segregation? They bled cops and dogs into the streets to keep it alive. Women’s suffrage? They swore civilization would collapse if women so much as touched a ballot. Civil rights? They howled like rabid hyenas about “tradition” and “order” while black kids had to be escorted into schools under armed guard.

And now Gaza. Jesus Christ, Gaza — a 21st-century concentration camp where the children die first, crushed in rubble, starved in hospitals, bombed in breadlines. And still the conservatives line up like obedient meat puppets, chanting about “self-defense” as though history hasn’t already marked them for what they are: collaborators in carnage, cheerleaders of genocide. You can practically hear the bones of Pontius Pilate, J.Edgar, Kissinger, and the Gipper rattling in their graves, nodding along in approval.

They are wrong about restaurant menus, and they are wrong about genocide. They were wrong about apartheid, wrong about gay marriage, wrong about climate change, wrong about smoking, wrong about Galileo’s goddamn heliocentric solar system for Odin’s sake. And now, faced with the deliberate obliteration of an entire people, they remain predictably, fatally, obscenely wrong.

And what’s even more frightening is that they no longer even recognize they are wrong. There’s no more shame. It’s no longer a social scarlet letter to be an out-and-out racist, not if it’s wrapped in irony, a flag pin, and a pressed Brooks Brothers shirt. You can say that prominent black women do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously, that Martin Luther King Jr. was ‘awful’ and that America made a huge mistake when it passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, and be praised by the Vice President as he thumbs his dog-eared copy of Unhumans. You have to be a special kind of stupid not to grasp the benefit vaccines have given humanity, yet in today’s America, you can reject a century of science and still get booked for primetime on Fox or even land yourself a Cabinet job and be promoted to be United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Foxes are guarding the chicken coop, and the coop is already on fire.

To be one of these conservatives is to be embalmed while still breathing, wrapped in the bandages of tradition, scripture and hierarchy, pumped full of the formaldehyde of fear. It’s not politics, it’s necrophilia with history itself. The record is there, inked in blood and ash, page after grotesque page: always late, always loud, always dead wrong. The ongoing genocide in Gaza will be no different. Fifty years from now, schoolchildren will look back and spit on the names of the politicians, preachers, and pundits who not only allowed but justified this slaughter. And conservatives will shrug, as they always do, muttering about hindsight while fumbling for the next catastrophe to endorse.

Because that’s the conservative birthright: to pick the wrong side of the fire, to go down in flames clutching the lies, to mistake barbarism for order. Always wrong. Forever wrong. A movement built on the sacred art of being history’s punchline.

And let’s be clear in the madness of it all: this isn’t about supporting Hamas — a pack of fundamentalist zealots with duct-taped Kalashnikovs and martyrdom hangovers — nor is it about Capital, that bloated reptile conservatives bow to like altar boys at a golden calf, no matter its vice. No, this is about human rights, the most basic law of the jungle — don’t murder children and call it justice, don’t turn hospitals and other designated safe places into tombs and call it security. History will carve it in neon fire across the sky: conservatives, once again, gnawing on the wrong side of the bone, smearing the Constitution in innocents’ blood like it was a disposable napkin and babbling about ‘order’ while the ghosts of the blameless circle overhead like vultures with flaming wings.

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