I share your conservatism. Heck, I’m more conservative than half of you on the stuff you supposedly care about. My conservatism actually informs my worldview, which apparently makes me some kind of radical. Because when my conservatism sees over 12,000 children transformed into hamburger in Gaza, it doesn’t shrug and change the channel. It doesn’t wait for permission from a think tank to feel something. My conservatism—the actual, functioning version—makes me want to do something about it right friggin’ now.

My conservatism also tells me that if someone shows up at my door claiming they own my house because their great-great-great-grandfather’s cousin’s neighbor maybe lived here three millennia ago, I’m not handing over the keys. I’m reaching for the gun you people won’t shut up about. And if they start “mowing the lawn”—that’s the term, by the way, that’s what they call it—slaughtering my family and turning me into a refugee, you bet your bum I’m using violence.

Are you seriously telling me you wouldn’t? You, with your Gadsden flags and your Toby Keith ringtones and your entire personality built around the Second Amendment, you’re going to lecture me about “peaceful resistance” while your kids are getting vaporized? Please. Spare me the performance.

My conservatism puts me on the side of people who don’t surrender their homes to satisfy someone else’s delusional sense of divine real estate entitlement. My conservatism tells me I don’t owe reparations for some Bronze Age exodus that may or may not have happened when people were still figuring out the wheel. That’s conservatism. Or it used to be.

My conservatism makes my blood pressure spike when I watch foreign lobbies actively work to abolish my First Amendment rights—making it literally illegal to boycott a country or criticize an ideology. They’re doing this right now, in state legislatures, in Congress, attaching it to highway bills like a tumor. How’s your conservatism handling that? Or does it only activate when someone says “Happy Holidays”?

My conservatism believes in fiscal responsibility, which is apparently now a fringe position. So when we’re shoveling tens of billions to a government conducting a livestreamed genocide while Americans can’t afford insulin and cops are working second jobs at Walmart, my conservatism gets twitchy. Does yours? Or is yours only concerned with deficits when a Democrat’s in office?

So here’s my question: when does your conservatism kick in? What’s the activation code? Do you need Tucker Carlson to say it’s okay first? Or did you buy some premium version of conservatism that only works when it’s convenient, that somehow malfunctions every time it might cost you something real? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re running a demo version that only boots up when the TV tells it to.