You May Ask Yourself

...why does it seem like the "conservative movement" is chock full of grifters?

And your answer may well be, "Because conservatives have made it inevitable - and that's been the point all along."

WaPo:

In 2016, an Arizona man called prosecutors in Riverside, Calif., to report that he’d been ripped off. Two men in the Southern California town who claimed to be running a hedge fund had taken $75,000 from him, he said, and then promptly lost it all. The tipster later killed himself.

But his claim helped spark a three-year investigation that has now resulted in a felony charge against both men — one of whom, Jacob Wohl, has since become a headline-generating conservative activist and conspiracy theorist.

Wohl, 21, appeared in court on Wednesday and now faces arraignment in October for one count of illegally selling a security, as first reported by the Daily Beast. He didn’t immediately return a message late Wednesday.

The criminal case is the latest turn in a whiplash career that has seen Wohl transform from a stock-trading wunderkind (later banned from an industry group) to a President Trump-backing Twitter figure (later booted off the platform) to the activist behind botched attempts to smear former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) with fabricated sexual assault claims.
The GOP abandoned all sense of honor quite a while back, and now it's filled with the kind of crooks who always gravitate to the sources of power and money, looking for the opportunity to siphon off some ready cash and live it up at someone else's expense.

But they put the ends before the means - policy over process - party over country.

Their actions over the last 30-40 years show they've lost the thread of democracy, and it has to be plain that it's not simply due to happenstance, but deliberate and by design. Their project is to dismantle our little experiment in self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy.

The more shitty shady characters we see associated with government, the more disgusting the whole thing seems, the more we turn away, the more we leave the work and the decisions to people who just get more vile and repulsive - it's a self-perpetuating cycle and it gets worse and worse until enough of us are frustrated enough to go along with some polished grifter who suggests we just chuck it all and start over.

That's when they call a Constitutional Convention, and rewrite the rules in a way that tailors the thing to the Daddy Staters' dreams of conquest and dominance.

They don't want to take us back to the 1950s. They intend to take us back to the 1750s.