Canada

Let us all remember that when the Soviet Union fell, they did not end the Cold War, they just changed tactics.

It's well known that their most effective tactic for destabilizing a nation is to pour resources into boosting both sides of every debate or social issue, this poisons the well so nobody knows what's real and just defaults to whatever the controlling party says is real. It's an astoundingly effective tactic for killing the spread of news and information that people could use to organize, and sowing infighting and distrust between potential oppositional groups.

They are doing a very similar tactic right now, by boosting absurdism like the whole narrative of an "armed takeover of Canada" as if that's even possibly a thing. Casual browsers know somewhere in the back of their mind that it's absurdism, but they hang on every word because it's sensational.

This is WWE theater. Like the whole administration since the beginning, it's designed to spin stories to keep dumb fucks engaged and wondering what's going to happen next, simultaneously believing in the stories but also knowing logically it's not true. Literally the same cognitive dissonance that made us have to argue with our friends back in the 90's that no, the World Wrestling Federation is NOT employing actual necromancers, that no, it's not a real sport, no the performers would not be allowed to bring swords and weapons into the ring if it was real.

USA has no actual intention of taking over countries like Canada and Panama, they just want to make some huge distraction and sensational story, so that when they change interest rates or deregulate some banking laws, nobody will notice. We'll all be here arguing with each other if it's even possible for the USA to "take over" a neighboring nation, with the same earnestness that we used to explain that using a steel chair in a sporting event could be considered disqualifying in normal circumstances.

This isn't to say the rhetoric isn't dangerous, but what they're doing financially is going to be far more damaging to our actual future in America.

There are genuinely intellectual conservatives

There are not.

Conservatism is ingroup loyalty as a theory-of-everything. They'll invent whatever pretense is necessary to promote the hierarchy of their guys over our guys, because they think that's all there is to reality, let alone all there is to argument. To be a conservative is to be in this form of tribe.

The smarter ones invent better bullshit. That bullshit tricks people who are not doing performative loyalty. Some of us argue against it, like the answer would change who they're loyal to - some of us argue for it, because 'what the loyalists really mean' is desirable, regardless of the unrelated awful shit they keep doing instead.

You're describing people who bought and defended the bullshit. Actual conservatives now call them communist traitors. They don't fucking care what they said yesterday. They don't understand why you do.

Conservatives will abandon any idea, in favor of loyalty. They do not believe ideas. They believe people. If their top guy says the sky is green, you better fucking agree with him, and make up some bullshit to explain why - or you're saying he doesn't belong on top. Disagreement and disloyalty are the same thing, in conservatism. Nothing they do makes sense until you understand this.