Grassroots, Not Astroturf: The Case for an Honest Conservative Media Movement

Why the Future of Conservatism Depends on Independent Voices, Honest Media, and the Courage to Cancel the Clowns

There comes a point in every so-called movement where it must decide whether it wishes to conserve something meaningful—or merely conserve its access to donor cocktail parties and pre-written rage scripts.

That time, for the conservative movement, is now.

Or, to put it more bluntly for those influencers whose reading comprehension is limited to meme font: This is our time for choosing. Whether we preserve the flickering light of genuine conservatism—or surrender it to another decade of grift, Botoxed blowhards, and media outlets functioning as personal newsletters for their handlers.

We’ve seen what the latter gets us. It’s time to try something else.

🌴 Florida as the Last Conservative Outpost

Florida is not just a state. It is an argument—and a rare one that hasn't yet lost to the shrill cadence of populist ventriloquism.

While the Beltway Right monologues about "draining swamps" between selfies at cigar lounges, Florida quietly—and I emphasize quietly—enacted actual reforms: education choice, disaster response infrastructure, administrative pruning, condo reform, and Hope Florida, a non-political model for civil society engagement.

In other words, Florida governed. Which, in today's conservative landscape, is so rare it's considered suspicious.

No wonder they’ve turned on it.

🐊 From Statesmen to Swamp Things: What Happened to Our Media?

At some point in the last decade, we began outsourcing our movement’s thought leadership to angry men in fitted T-shirts, women—clad in strategically tight tops and editorial eyeliner—who mistake engagement for enlightenment, paid provocateurs with podcast microphones, fire and brimston frauds trying to cash a check, and media outlets whose editorial independence is about as convincing as a North Korean election.

Take Florida’s Voice—a publication that, if it were any more attached to Erika Donalds, would need to file for joint taxes.

Or Florida Politics:, which seems to view journalism as a kind of high-dollar UPS service for whoever cuts the check first.

These are not outlets. They are influence laundromats—and their primary export is dishonesty, their primary enemy is competence.

Or The Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times don’t break stories—recycling talking points and trying to manufacture scandals while hoping their readers are as stupid as their writers clearly are. If ignorance were ink, their editorial rooms would be printing presses—pushing out falsehoods with the confidence of people who’ve never been fact-checked outside their own Slack channel.

Which brings us, of course, to Hope Florida and Casey DeSantis—who, by virtue of succeeding without seeking power, pose an existential threat to the entire performative right-wing ecosystem.

Naturally, they must be destroyed.

🪤 Fake Scandals, Real Grift: The Blueprint of a Broken Movement

What do you do when you can’t beat the substance? Easy. Invent the scandal.

It’s a time-tested formula:

1. Shop a rumor through backbenchers hungry for relevance.

2. Feed it to a media outlet you fund or control.

3. Smear your target with a headline, not an accusation.

4. Repeat until confused donors and voters assume something must be wrong.

We watched it happen in real time in the primaries and just recently we got to watch it when Brandon Leslie and Matt Gaetz held a televised séance on OANN to conjure up questions about Medicaid pass-throughs, even though no such pass-through exists.
They didn’t just misunderstand Hope Florida—they misunderstood how obvious they looked.

It’s the political version of yelling “Pick a card!” while stealing your wallet in plain view.

📣 Grassroots, Not Astroturf: A Model Worth Building

So what do we do?

We build our own infrastructure—not beholden to PACs, not bankrolled by aspiring swamp creatures, and not desperate for retweets from influencers who think conservatism began with them.

Let me be clear: this doesn’t mean launching a hundred press releases in Substack form. It means creating signal that cancels out the noise.

It means writers, podcasters, analysts, and watchdogs who:

• Tell the truth even when it’s inconvenient.

• Critique friends when they're wrong, and defend them when they’re right.

• Understand governance as a craft—not a hashtag.

It also means a renewed commitment to amplifying each other, not just ourselves.

The goal isn’t ego. The goal is signal. A network of integrity is louder than a single screamer. We don’t need more mini-Trumps. We need Russell Kirk with WiFi.

📍 This Is a National Fight, Not a Local One

Even if you’re not from Florida, what happens there matters.

Why? Because Florida is the last functioning example of conservative governance in the country. Lose it, and the movement loses its only model. The only rebuttal to “big government knows best.” The only living proof that order, liberty, and competence can co-exist.

Lose Florida, and what do we have left? Podcast clips and GoFundMe indictments.

⏳ A Time for Choosing, Redux

This is our moment. And no, I don’t mean ours in the influencer sense of “Let’s seize the algorithm.” I mean our duty—as citizens, as thinkers, as actual conservatives.

We choose now between:

• Signal or noise.

• Principles or personalities.

• Liberty or another ten years of national cosplay.

As a stateman once said “Decline is a choice.” And unlike the headlines you’re being fed, truth still exists. But it needs amplification. It needs your voice. It needs writers, readers, thinkers, and doers.

It needs us.

So stop waiting for the cavalry. The cavalry is you.

And the hour is late.

🛠️ So What Now? Building Signal that Cancels the Noise

It’s not enough to complain about the state of things. It never has been. A true conservative doesn’t just mourn decay—he renovates what still stands.

So here it is, plain and unfancy: if you're tired of the grift, the fake scandals, the influencer cosplay, and the performative outrage that substitutes for thought—build something real.

1. Start Your Own Platform

No permission slip needed. Write. Podcast. Research. Rant—if it’s smart. Don’t worry about being perfect. Worry about being honest. Worry about whether anyone is left to explain how things actually work. And if you’re one of the few who can, then start now. Reach out to me or others and get this going.

2. Link Arms With the Remnant

The good ones are out there—writers, thinkers, watchdogs. Not just shouting, but clarifying. Not just criticizing, but constructing. Find them. Amplify them. We don’t need centralized permission. We need distributed principle.

3. Expose Grift. Celebrate Governance.

Call out the frauds. Not once. Repeatedly. Do it with precision. And when real reform happens, explain it like it matters—because it does. Good policy dies in silence. Bad actors thrive in headlines. Reverse the incentives.

4. Defend Florida—Because Florida Is the Model

You don’t have to live there to realize it. Florida is the last living argument for functional conservative governance. If we let the pay-to-play press, the PAC puppets, and the podcast populists destroy it, we lose the national blueprint. Defend it not because it’s perfect—but because it’s working.

5. Support the Signal

Don’t just nod along—act. Subscribe to writers who refuse to lie to you. Share the content that tells the truth. Help fund the platforms that refuse to bow. If we don't build an ecosystem of support around the real, the fake will continue to dominate by default.

The era of excuses is over. A small voice is still a voice.

So stop refreshing your feed, waiting for someone else to do it. This is the movement you were looking for. It’s principled. It’s thoughtful. And yes, it still laughs at the absurdity of it all—because some days, that’s the only defense against despair.

Let the grifters organize. Let the noise rise. But let our signal rise higher.

Again the hour is late, but it’s not over.

Want more clarity in a world of clutter? I cover these topics—and the intellectual battles behind them—on Substack: The Rational Purview become a paid subsriber and help fight “The Swamp” with The Truth.

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The fight for reason isn’t won in a day. But we can win it one argument at a time.