Hierarchy defines conservatism. It’s tribalism. It’s the default human mindset, where truth is defined by people above you, and if they’re wrong about stuff then they’re the wrong people to have above you. So disagreement is a threat. A leader can’t just be wrong. That’d mean they’re the wrong person, to lead. How dare you challenge them? Look how much money they have. Their penis must be enormous.

Basically - reality is a team sport, to some people. They have no objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for. Even their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. Nothing matters besides ingroup loyalty.

Conservatives don’t believe things. Conservatives believe people.

Notably this is distinct from right versus left. There are left-wing conservatives. Mostly tankies. It’s hard to square a critical philosophy opposed to hierarchy with loyalist posturing for ingroup supremacy, but they have the benefit of not really caring what words mean.

Conversely, there’s right-wing cranks who are not conservatives. You can spot them with boot-prints on their backsides, once the group radically shifts to some new bullshit. They believed what they were saying. The fools. They’ll argue the new leader isn’t last-year’s-bullshit enough, which marks them as traitors who want him deposed and humiliated and short. It’s too bad that being shunned as a RINO leaves them full of bad arguments for worse ideas.

The saddest part of this is probably the school-shooting victims with braces. I mean that’s just money down the drain. The saddest part of this that’s not a shock-comedy aside is that conservative humor can be good. Some More News had a video about that modern wasteland of kneejerk contrarian bragging, performative allegiance, and joke-shaped sentences. But they also remind us the Blue Collar Comedy Tour was full of fantastic material. That wasn’t a lifetime ago. People can’t have changed that much. But the figureheads of the figurehead-obsessed went from bad to indefensible - and when those assholes are out, that won’t address the underlying cause.