Recently the Democrats have been masters of persuasion. Their tactics of capturing key strategic persuasion points in their long march through the institutions (education, media, religion), creating false narratives (Russian collusion, impeachment, January 6^th), controlling information (Hunter Biden’s laptop, social media shadow banning), weaponizing bureaucratic entities (the IRS, DOJ, and FBI), and hiring spineless RINO neocons as Never Trump pundits has proved to be effective in making it seem like it is uncool to be a conservative. Unfortunately for the Democrats, true conservatives stopped paying attention to those persuasion efforts within the institutions.

Their latest tactic is a grassroots social media effort to influence primaries by having progressives appeal to their Republican friends to do the right thing and vote for Candidate X in the closed primary. It’s not enough for Democrats to have their own extremist progressive candidates in their own closed primaries who can’t win general elections. They also want to persuade Republicans to vote for the weakest candidate in the Republican primary. Conservatives won’t fall for it. We stopped taking progressives seriously a long, long time ago.

Nevertheless, it is a fascinating persuasion tactic that is 1) new to the social media age, and 2) not new. That’s why some states have closed primaries and some have open primaries where anyone can vote. If the primary is closed, you end up with more extreme candidates and an ugly general election. If the primary is open, one side will show up to vote for their own interests in the opponent’s primary. It will always be a somewhat unsolvable problem. The key is that in a fair fight, the better ideas will ultimately win in America.

Republicans need to continue to communicate their good ideas and watch as the Biden administration makes it easier and easier for people in the middle to choose the better ideas that conservatives offer over the extremist progressive agenda pushed by the Democrat Media Complex. But Republicans also need to be savvy enough to recognize the ever-morphing Democrat shenanigans before they happen, not long afterwards.