Merry Xmas! (And Notes on Con Inc. Slop)

Before the Christmas stuff, let’s briefly explore the recent pro wrestling-esque fake and gay astroturf shitshow replete with pyrotechnics, glittering pantsuits, and performative Cultural Revolution-style denunciations put on by Charlie Kirk’s legacy organization, Turning Point USA.

The only way the performance art could have gotten faker and gayer would have been an onstage salad tossing by conservatwink Con Inc. diva Brilyn Hollyhand of some Chinese AI sex robot in Charlie Kirk’s likeness, which would have surely titillated the closeted televangelist hucksters in attendance something fierce.

With its high production value juxtaposed with its soul-crushing vacuity, 2025 AmFest was not very unlike, in its plastic character, as Tim Dillon explains in a Santa outfit in the video here, the weird 2024 Democrat convention to coronate the Coconut Lady.

VIDEO

The shadowy figures running the Karamel-uh entity’s 2024 JOY! campaign caught a lot of righteous flak for recruiting Megan Thee Stallion to twerk on stage for abortion rights, ostensibly meant to inspire the young women of the base to turn out.

In an eerily similar vein, Turning Point recruited noted conservative thought leader *Nicki Minaj* to offer her insights.

Other 2024 DNC parallels abound; everything any decent person found distasteful about the Democrat Party over the last decade (at least) is now replete in mainstream GOP politics.

But whatever.

Maybe you enjoy elaborate bread-and-circuses performances put on by shadowy donors with their own agendas that are definitely not yours, so that you’re entertained and distracted while Blackrock gobbles up what’s left of middle-class wealth.

It could be the Turning Point production was an inspirational display of unified and uplifting grassroots energy, which I’m too bitter and cynical to appreciate.

Perhaps that stranger psychiatrist was right when he offered me that unsolicited diagnosis through the internet as a “hater of everything” on account of my lack of appreciation of The Science™, which he happens to conveniently be a practitioner of.

C’est la vie.

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Anyway, on a more festive note, my wife, whose newly maternal brain is flooded with oxytocin, performed a Christmas photo shoot with my captive infant son.

As we conceived Luca in Vietnam, I assured her — jokingly, obviously (mostly) — that if he came out with any mongoloid features whatsoever we were going to have issues.

He didn’t, of course, and is as white as the driven snow, which, despite the extensive indoctrination machine I survived in Atlanta public schools and later in the Valdosta State University liberal arts college, I refuse to feel guilty about and, in fact, openly celebrate.

My wife also recently captured this non-Christmas-themed image of him on my chest, which is how I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s my son; I’ve seen that look in his eyes a thousand times in my own.

“When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Merry Xmas!

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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