Praise for Conservative Insurgency
"Please, God, make it so. Not the part about Bobby Jindal only getting to be VP, but at least 90% of Kurt's crystal ball look into what could be, not what has been; how things could turn, not as they are likely to turn out right now. Schlichter's genius --and it is genius-- is to make it all possible based upon a single premise: That conservatives will play to win. A stretch of course, an enormous stretch, but not greater than that of 1776, 1789, 1860, 1944 or 1980. Read it and be inspired."
- Hugh Hewitt, Author, commentator and national radio host
“Here's how the conservative movement won - from 30 years in the future. Kurt Schlichter's creative and fascinating take on how conservatives can achieve victory is an optimistic breath of fresh air in a dark time.”
- Ben Shapiro, Bestselling author, conservative columnist and radio host
“This is a great read, provides a good way forward, and offers a new concept for how conservatives should be writing books about their future.”
- Erick Erickson, Fox News Commentator, Redstate.com editor and radio host
“A fascinating read.”
- David Limbaugh, Bestselling author and conservative commentator
“This book is exactly the electric jolt of inspiration that grass-roots activists on the Right need…. I’m energized and ready to fight!”
- Michelle Malkin, Bestselling author and Fox News commentator
“Conservative Insurgency captures the spirit of my friend Andrew Breitbart with a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle brawl for the heart and soul of our country.”
- Dana Loesch, BlazeTV host and Fox News commentator
A POST HILL PRESS book
Published at Smashwords
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61868-977-1
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-978-8
Conservative Insurgency copyright © 2014
by Kurt Schlichter
All Rights Reserved.
Cover Art by Sean Salter
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
A Note on Definitions and Usage
Introduction
Chapter 1 – The Long March
Chapter 2 – Guerrilla Politics
Chapter 3 – Reaching Out
Chapter 4 – Regular People
Chapter 5 – Lawfare
Chapter 6 – Big Business
Chapter 7 – The Safe Haven of the States
Chapter 8 – Big Money
Chapter 9 – The News
Chapter 10 – Breaking and Remaking the Law
Chapter 11 – Target Academia
Chapter 12 – the Conservative Alternative
Chapter 13 – Progressive Reactionaries
Chapter 14 – How Hollywood Went Conservative
Chapter 15 – Victory
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
It is only fair to share the credit, or the blame, for this book. There are many folks who provided assistance of many kinds. I’ll try to name as many as I can, but please forgive the oversight if I miss someone, which I undoubtedly will.
First, there is my hot wife, Irina Moises. She put up with this latest insanity, like all the other insanities that came before.
Thanks to my agent, Jennifer Cohen, who shepherded this through the process. Along the way, David Limbaugh and Adam Bellow provided a lot of good advice.
I got plenty of support from my friends Larry O’Connor, Cam Edwards, Cameron Gray, Tony Katz, Ben Shapiro, Hugh Hewitt, Greg Garrison, and Derek Hunter. Drew and Sue Matich, Stephen Kruiser, Owen Brennan, and Michael Walsh also provided some great suggestions. And I took a lot of ideas from the writings aggregated at Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit site, which has been my first read of the day for over a dozen years.
I wish Andrew Breitbart were still around to thank. I expect he is looking down, smiling.
And there are more—Kellie Jane Adan, Kim Tabin Mann, Kevin McKeever, Sean “Salty Hollywood” Salter, Gary Eaton, Fingers Malloy, Thomas LaDuke, and many others who I have met within the real-life conservative insurgency.
And, of course, I want to thank all of my Twitter followers for all of their caring!
Prologue
“I still don’t understand it,” she sighs, staring out the plate-glass window overlooking San Francisco Bay. “In 2013, we were on the verge of truly transforming this country. We progressives had won the argument. We had the conservatives beat. And now . . . I just don’t understand.” She looks at me dead on, her wet eyes equal parts baffled and furious.
“How did this happen?”
It’s overcast and cold outside, the mid-January gloom mirroring Gail Partridge’s mood. At 64, she is still the “Proud Voice of Progressivism” and currently the star host on the Quantum satellite/web radio network. Her commitment to the liberal cause is literally a part of her. Poking out beneath the left sleeve of her floral blouse, etched into her wrinkled bicep, is the lower half of a tattoo of a face. If you concentrate, you can make out the mouth and jaw of Barack Obama. His visage has aged with her.
“They made progressivism a joke,” she mutters. “Bastards.”
In three days, the third conservative president in a row will be inaugurated. As what today we know as “constitutional conservatives” lock in their political power—and more importantly, their grip on American culture—it seemed appropriate to spend time with a legendary bête noire of the right.
When I messaged her requesting an interview, she was suspicious. “Are you some sort of right-wing hack writing another book about the glories of being heartless?” she had asked. “Are you one of them?”
That was a very good question, and it goes to the heart of this story.
I told her the truth, which is that I am a professor of history and politics at the University of California, San Diego, and that I don’t think of myself as a constitutional conservative or, actually, any kind of conservative at all. I think of myself as a moderate, but part of the point is that what is “moderate” today in 2041 was considered extremely conservative 30 years ago. How that change came to be is the story.
I was a graduate student when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and I voted for him—twice. I did not consider myself particularly political. I just shared the same views as those around me, and being in academia, those views were uniformly progressive. But, as what became a conservative insurgency against the progressive mainstream establishment developed over the decades that followed, I changed along with society. I, and most Americans, moved right. Gail Partridge and her fans did not.
“Do you want some milk?” asks Partridge. “It’s raw.”
“Kind of ironic, you drinking raw milk when that was one of the flashpoints for so many people on the left turning right,” I say, probing.
She scowls. “Nonsense. You know, five years ago a little girl in Kansas died drinking raw milk.” She watches me, almost smiling. It’s clear she’s used the little girl anecdote before when the issue of government overreach and raw milk farmers comes back up. Almost 40 years of talk radio and Internet shows prepares you for any argument.
“So you were okay with the government jailing people for selling raw milk? How did you feel about the juror revolt against the prosecutions? That seemed an organic expression of opposition to authority. As a progr
essive, wouldn’t that be something you would applaud?”
“A legitimate government has a right to exercise authority as it sees fit. The Supreme Court was absolutely right to put a stop to that juror misconduct. You can’t change the system if shortsighted people are standing in your way.”
“What about this government? This conservative government we have today?”
“I said a legitimate government,” she sniffs.
Gail Partridge does not watch any media or popular entertainment besides other leftist hosts on her network. “The damn conservatives pop up on television and movies all the time now, and half the reporters seem to be looking to cover stories that hurt the progressive cause,” she complains. “I liked it better when there was some balance in the media, and I could turn on the video feed without having to have any conservative crap come into my living room!”
She finds the constitutional conservative America of 2041 an alien and forbidding place.
“America may be fiscally better off, but it is morally bankrupt,” she fumes as we sit in her penthouse apartment, looking out the window. “Patel makes a huge deal that he’ll be paying off the national debt before the end of his term, but what about human need? Look out down there, down there in the streets. There are people hungry and cold down there right now. I don’t care how they came to be hungry and cold. Maybe they didn’t feel like working. Why should we judge them for that? I don’t get why we should punish people for making different choices. It’s fascist.”
In three days, president-elect Rob Patel will be sworn in, and now Gail Partridge must prepare for another three-hour show devoted to venting her frustration at the new world she has found herself living in. I thank her for the raw milk and her time and prepare to leave. She walks me to the door and pushes the button to open it.
“I still don’t understand how we got here,” she says, sounding resigned. “I don’t think we ever even saw the conservatives coming.”
A Note on Definitions and Usage
Throughout this book, the interview subjects (and the author) refer to the two main political forces in conflict in American politics between 2008 and 2041 by a variety of terms. This leads to occasional imprecision, since the terms are not necessarily synonymous.
For example, those on the right can generally be referred to as “conservatives,” but the activist, small government conservatives who made up the conservative insurgency discussed here seem to prefer the more precise term of “constitutional conservatives.” This distinguishes them from what they would call “establishment conservatives,” who they would often deny were conservatives at all.
There is considerable overlap between the “constitutional conservatives” and the “Tea Party,” though the term Tea Party lost favor in the 2010s and was rarely used after 2016 except by its opponents. They used it as an epithet, sometimes very effectively.
The term “Republicans” is ambiguous because there was often open conflict within the Republican Party between the old-guard establishment and the constitutional conservatives. The constitutional conservatives would often label moderate Republicans RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), though that species became less and less common as the party moved right throughout the 2010s and 2020s.
When describing their opponents on the left side of the spectrum, the constitutional conservatives tended to use various terms nearly interchangeably: progressive, liberal, and even leftist. This can be confusing because progressives, liberals, and leftists see themselves as quite different even if no one else tends to. Moreover, there were “progressive Republicans,” exemplified by Senator John McCain, who shared a faith in government action, if little else, with leftist progressives.
The Democratic Party became much more ideologically homogenous earlier than the GOP; by the mid-2000s, when Senator Joe Lieberman was effectively expelled, there were no arguably “conservative” major Democratic figures. Accordingly, “Democrat” became synonymous with “liberal” in conservative circles, even if Democrats themselves would rarely use the terms that way.
Imputing too much precision into these imprecise terms is an invitation to confusion, and there seems little benefit in the form of a greater understanding to be had from undertaking that burden. In order to avoid attempting to divine each speaker’s intent as to his usage of the various terms, they are simply transcribed verbatim. The reader may evaluate them for himself in the context in which they appear.
Introduction
I originally raised the idea of writing an oral history of the conservative movement that arose during the first Barack Obama administration with the head of the University of California, San Diego, History Department two years ago. I was a bit surprised by his reaction—instead of encouraging me, he attempted to talk me out of it.
Jeff Rayburn was a West Pointer and a decorated war hero of Afghanistan and Iraq whose hard-core conservative views mirrored those of better than half the faculty in the new academia of the mid-twenty-first century. One might think that he would be excited about one of his department members undertaking a project that would track how a disorganized, decentralized band of committed citizens he supported had managed to create not only political but cultural change that sent the United States on an entirely new sociopolitical trajectory in just 30 years.
“Do we really need another book on how wonderful conservatives are?” he asked me, sounding bored. “I’ve got a shelf full of them. Hell, I wrote one.”
It was true, literally. In Jeff’s office there is a bookcase full of hardcovers dealing with modern conservative politics—to this day he refuses to read books on electronic devices—and one of them, a bestseller in fact, he wrote.
But I was looking to do something else. My goal is not to praise the movement but to let it speak for itself. What interested me—and what I hope the stories I have collected here cast some light on—is how a discredited, dispirited, and government-targeted ideology morphed into a movement that overcame the liberal establishment.
“You know what you’re talking about,” Jeff said off-handedly, “is an insurgency. I know one when I see one because I fought a couple of them. It was a conservative insurgency that changed America. A small, dedicated group, defying a corrupt, decrepit authority, and winning through persistence and dedication.”
That idea formed the nucleus of this book, a book about how regular Americans not only seized control of the apparatus of government but won over society itself to its worldview.
As a historian, documenting the conservative insurgency was a challenge because of its very nature. This was not the story of a single “great man” who came along at just the moment his country needed him. There is no Washington, Lincoln, King, or even a Reagan whose biography I could use as a means to tell the story of the struggle. While many of the individuals who rose to prominence during this process were notable for their foresight, courage, and wisdom, in retrospect these leaders were largely fungible. No one name comes to mind when we think about the last 30 years.
This was not a top-down movement but one created, motivated, and executed from the bottom up. Franklin Roosevelt will be forever linked with the New Deal, and Ronald Reagan with the “Reagan Revolution,” but there was no single man or woman who led this revolution. Instead, it was thousands, and then millions, of individuals whose decentralized actions changed the course of American history.
I can best tell their collective story by letting them each tell their own individual stories in their own words.
Although more than 300 million Americans lived through the tumultuous events of the last three decades, we do not all share the same perspective on them. For instance, as a young academic at the time, I was largely unaware of just how great the impact of the Obama administration’s policies was upon a huge swath of American citizens. I heard President Obama promise to “fundamentally change” the nature of the country, and I nodded at what I saw as a pleasing rhetorical flourish and went about my life, as did many similarly situated, moderat
ely liberal Americans. But conservative Americans heard this and were chilled to the bone. Their worst fears were proven true as the Obama administration moved relentlessly to impose its liberal vision upon them and what they saw as the country they had built with their sweat and blood.
Obama came to office in the wake of a sudden, paradigm-rattling economic crisis caused not by the usual ups and downs associated with the business cycle but by large, government-connected businesses whose reckless actions brought the country to the brink of catastrophe. The response to this crisis, declared a bipartisan establishment within a matter of days after its leaders emerged from closed-door consultations, was to be a giant government bailout.
Of course, the great American middle class had long been “bailing out” the poor with social programs. It perceived these transfers of wealth as at least marginally justifiable, though it generally conceived them as going to ameliorate self-induced social pathologies.
The middle class had likewise been bailing out the wealthy elite—“corporate welfare” had long been a fixture of the liberal critique of the system—but the beneficiaries had heretofore wisely kept that web of subsidies, tax breaks, and special privileges largely out of sight. However, there was no hiding the TARP bailout, nor the fact that it was imposed without meaningful debate via the consensus of the elite over the objections of Middle America.
Middle America saw itself pushed to the sidelines by a coalition of the very poor and the very powerful. It was expected to wait silently as the nation’s fate was decided by others, while it was also expected to continue to work hard and to pick up the tab.
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