Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041

by Kurt Schlichter

  The libertarians we wanted were the ones who pretty much wanted to be left alone, which was admirable. That was most of them. Wanting to be left alone is totally antithetical to everything liberalism is about, so we had that in common. We could build on that foundation.

  We couldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that we had everything in common. Libertarians tended to think—and some still think—that the only legitimate defense policy for the United States is locking ourselves inside our local Alamos and waiting. They got all squishy over drone strikes too during the terrorist wars, which I never understood—how can anyone have been against raining fiery death on jihadists? We cons, well, we loved that shit.

  Also, they tended to dig pot. Lots of pot. And they liked to talk about hemp for some reason. I don’t know how many times I got buttonholed by some stoner telling me how George Washington raised hemp. Great! Now vote Republican! The best argument against marijuana decriminalization I ever heard was that if it passed, they’d never shut up about their stupid weed.

  Some of us had a controversial idea—that we put off our fights with them and focus on beating Hillary and her statist pals. Certainly, there were some libertarians that thought, “Wow, conservatives are generally against abortion—I can’t work with them on anything,” which was as counterproductive as us thinking, “Wow, libertarians are generally against restrictions on abortion—I can’t work with them on anything.” We have had plenty of time to fight with them after we ran those Marxists out of DC in the 2020s. But we agreed on probably 90 percent of things. What did Reagan say about that? That made us 90 percent allies, not 10 percent enemies? He said something like that.

  Now, the road to getting support from the libertarian libertarians overlapped with the road to getting the young and hip people in our corner. I knew it could be done. The smarter ones among the young and the hip started to realize pretty quickly that liberalism was a giant scam where they do the working and the sweating for the government hacks and unemployables who made up the Democrat base. Hell, Obamacare was based on the idea of healthy young people being forced to buy too much health insurance for too much money so old people who had already had their chance to make money got theirs cheaper. Obamacare was a huge opening for us. It drove them away from liberalism, but not directly to us. We had to earn their support. And we did. We were selling what young people loved and progressives hated—freedom.

  We started talking about other generational scams. For instance, Social Security was also basically a system where people like them gave money they barely had to older people who didn’t save. They just got tired of being suckers, and that was our opportunity.

  Now some of these young people’s wackier libertarian beliefs initially rubbed us the wrong way, but they also deserved some examination. Carrie Marlowe was, of course, very interested in legal reform designed to repeal laws that did nothing but criminalize people for essentially doing little or nothing wrong. Sometimes it was for drugs; sometimes it was just to protect businesses. The Dems had played along with their donors, and the independent agencies were busy criminalizing things like reprogramming your cell phones. Seriously, you could go to jail for doing something to your own property.

  We got to argue that we had no business running a criminal justice system for the benefit of giant tech conglomerates. We won a lot of young, libertarian people by pushing for the reform of copyright laws that criminalized normal folks to protect big entertainment companies. Young, libertarian-leaning folks loved it. The Dems, being the party of the status quo, couldn’t do it. We cons could, and did.

  Why not build networks with the enemy’s voters while punishing the jerks who support the liberal establishment with their cash? It was a win-win!

  There was also drug law reform, which would bring in a lot of young people, libertarians, and especially minorities who were seeing a shocking number of their young men locked up. This was a tough bridge for cons to cross—hell, watery-eyed stoners lazing about on their moms’ couches halfheartedly watching reruns of Star Trek: Fifth Generation is everything we hate. But again, this was where conservative principles about small and limited government started crossing streams with our electoral self-interest.

  Did you ever see Ghostbusters? Not the remake but the original from back in the 1980s? Do you remember the power of crossing the streams? They had these lasers and if you crossed the streams it was really bad, except at the end of the movie they did that to destroy the giant marshmallow man. Anyway, we crossed the streams with drug law reform. I guess liberalism was the giant marshmallow man. And we sure fried it too.

  Our policies were not enough. We needed to go to those folks and make the conservative case, not just once for the cameras but continuously. So we did. Colleges, minority neighborhoods, places no Republican bothered to go consistently. And for years we got nowhere, but we kept going back.

  When television networks were still big and I was working in DC for a big GOP consulting company, I would ask, “Hey, who is the go-to constitutional conservative guest on Univision, on BET, even on the damn Syfy network?” They’d book a conservative—we just needed to stop sending uptight dinguses who reinforced the reasons why these folks disliked conservatives in the first place. I mean, they sent one guy to the Azteca network for a news show and he spoke Spanish like a gringo and wore a freaking bow tie. ¡Muy estupido!

  We started to use technology to cultivate potential converts and we targeted them with information and social media. Obama was using a data-mining system for turnout early on, and Hillary’s effort was even bigger. Supposedly they could tell you what some random guy’s magazine subscriptions were and figure out how he was likely to vote. We got that sophisticated too.

  I found out some interesting data. Conservative males? National Review and American Rifleman. Liberal males? Mother Jones and Modern Bride.

  Juggs? A red-blooded conservative male.

  Barely Legal? Probably a liberal male, and usually a senator from New Jersey.

  National Enquirer? Definitely a Ron Paul fan. Remember Rand’s dad, Ron? I shouldn’t talk bad about him. As nuts as he was, he saw that the Hillary monster was the real enemy, and he really helped by lending his credibility to us to approach libertarians in ’16 and ’20 while he was still healthy enough to do it. I always said that Ron was crazy, not stupid.

  Anyway, we needed that kind of information and more to identify and focus on likely converts to conservatism. Instead of giving hack consultants a zillion bucks for some pie in the sky, top-down failure, we got some rich dudes to fund a bunch of entrepreneurial conservative tech guys to make this happen. Our donors didn’t get a meet and greet with any senators out of it, but they actually contributed to something more than the mortgage on the consultant’s Aspen summer home.

  Regardless, the effect of these high-tech efforts was huge. The payoff was shaving just a few points off the Democratic share in some of their solid voting blocs, but that was enough. Libs always just slid into office with a tiny margin. Our effort helped destroy their solid voting blocs, which was awesome.

  Back in the dark days, when Obama had been reelected and everyone was talking about doom and gloom, they asked, “Can it be done?” I said, “Why not?” Voting blocs are never permanent—the Democrat lock on the black vote was hitting the half-century mark. Before that, a lot of blacks had been Republican.

  Eventually folks were going to wake up and realize that they had spent the last decade treading water in a sea of collectivist failure. We just needed to be ready to welcome them. Race and ethnicity correlated with being against us rather than for us due to decades of Democrat agitation and propaganda. We worked to turn that around.

  Back then it took real bravery to be both a minority and a conservative. You had to have guts. The social pressure could be overwhelming. So that’s where we needed to begin. We needed to be welcoming to nontraditional conservatives. And how do you be welcoming? Step one: don’t be a jerk. Fortunately, cons tend to be pretty tolerant
. They’re real live and let live types, so most were good to go.

  But decades of propaganda had totally wrecked our image in some communities. We are still dealing with the fallout today. Back then, we needed to reach out and prove ourselves because, fair or not, we had nearly zero credibility in many minority communities. Yet we had one advantage the liberals didn’t—conservative policies didn’t cause the problems in the minority community, and some minorities, especially young ones, saw that.

  We reached out to people who we did not see as allies. We accepted 50 percent friends, folks we could count on just half the time—a vast improvement over 100 percent enemies. We invested in the technology that allowed us to make these inroads, to identify those who might be approachable, and to make those approaches.

  And sometimes we had to make tough compromises. As Florida’s governor, Carrie announced that “the people of Florida have spoken” after the initiative vote to allow same-sex marriage. Our supporters were split on the issue, some for, some against, but there was a vote and it was perceived as fair, so after it happened we moved on to fighting the progs. We didn’t ditch social issues. Some we won on, some we lost on, but the point is we didn’t dwell on it. We made a point of what brought us together, not what could drive us apart.

  * * *

  Jack Archer (Democratic Strategist)

  The GOP kept counterattacking, passing laws that made them look good but always cut into our Democratic constituencies. Like the drug stuff—they got to our left on drugs and all of a sudden we’re hemorrhaging young people and minorities who couldn’t stand mandatory sentencing.

  I hated those conservative bastards.

  * * *

  Dagny Eames (Libertarian Activist)

  Eames, who denies being named after the Ayn Rand character (“It’s a family name”), understands how important an ally the libertarian community was. Initially suspicious of the constitutional conservatives, particularly of their perceived social conservatism, libertarians soon realized the deadly threat to liberty posed by the progressives—the NSA scandal shifted the entire paradigm. Constitutional conservatives, as a group, tended to avoid social issues, focusing on what united them. However, many constitutional conservatives were active in the pro-life and traditional marriage movements.

  With the understanding that working together did not mean agreeing on every issue, the libertarians joined the fight. The campaign for federal decriminalization of marijuana—opposed by the Clinton administration but supported (generally) by constitutional conservatives who saw the massive assault on liberty posed by the drug war—led to huge losses for the Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections as a majority of young people found themselves voting Republican.

  Two things initially kept me and many other libertarians out of the constitutional conservative movement. First, there was the Republican alliance with big, corporatist business, which we saw as undercutting true free enterprise. That changed pretty quickly as the constitutional conservatives started seeing how they were being played by rent-seekers. So that issue was relatively easy to deal with. What wasn’t so easy was dealing with the social issues.

  There were a lot of libertarians who were very concerned with what they saw as social conservatism running amok. They kind of went in two categories. There was one kind of libertarian that was pretty overwrought about it. They really thought that if the constitutional conservatives got into power, you would see things like bans on premarital sex, stoning for adultery, and detention camps for gays. Some of these people were crazy, some were stupid, and others were simply liberals who called themselves libertarians. It was hard to deal with these folks because they had already made up their minds—in their version of libertarianism, the most important things were these social issues and the rest of the liberty agenda simply didn’t matter much to them.

  They were never going to be convinced to fight the liberals, ever. The liberals could limit free speech, attack religion, expand government exponentially, and these libertarians would remain convinced that the biggest threat to liberty was the chance that constitutional conservatives might gain power and somehow outlaw blow jobs.

  They marginalized themselves. By about 2022, they were the only ones left in the Libertarian Party since the rest of us libertarians had left because we knew we had to stop Clinton, and the only practical way to do it was an alliance with the constitutional conservatives. That meant the Republican Party. When the conservatives did retake power and then didn’t ban sex and fun, as it were, then these people really had nothing left to offer to justify themselves as a movement. There’s still a Libertarian Party out there. It’s more of a name than anything else. The guy who runs it does it out of his apartment in Bangor, Maine. His name is Larry something—if I’m not mistaken, he ran for president last time and got about 12,000 votes out of 100 million or so cast.

  But I don’t want to seem like I am making light of the differences we had with social conservatives. Social issues were important to me, and we had real disagreements. Gay rights, gay marriage—these were important to me on liberty grounds, and people who felt like I did were definitely in the minority in the constitutional conservative movement. The drug war too. I was also pro-choice on abortion. But the social issues were not the only consideration to libertarians like me. They were just one part of the big picture. Our liberty was under attack.

  What I and many other libertarians came to understand was that these issues were not front and center for the constitutional conservatives. That’s not to say no one cared about them, but with all the other terrible things the liberals were doing to the country, as things got worse, these issues faded more and more into the background.

  There was a real libertarian core in the Tea Party at the beginning, and that stayed true as the movement grew and matured. It was always very, very civil rights focused. Guns, for instance—it was hugely focused on gun rights, which most of us libertarians felt was vital.

  When the NSA intercept news broke, they were very concerned with that. They understood the danger of government oppression because they were suffering from it. The Obama administration was using the Internal Revenue Service to harass and intimidate opposition groups on the right. As the Clinton administration attacked free speech rights, they were very pissed off, and that was a huge area of common ground.

  In fact, we had so much in common that our disagreements, while real, simply weren’t that important. Now, when we took power, there were some conflicts. We disagreed, had a vote, and moved forward in dismantling the Leviathan.

  However, I think a lot of the issues resolved themselves. By the mid-twenties, gay marriage was generally accepted by pretty much everyone. It had been going on without any real consequences for 10 to 20 years by then, so it was a no-brainer to formalize it at the federal level.

  The drug issue was interesting because it was the social conservatives who pushed letting up on it as a moral issue, citing the damage it was doing to families and communities. So there, we actually found ourselves standing with the people who were supposed to be our opponents.

  The constitutional conservatives turned out not to be the people the media portrayed. They sure weren’t prudes. Let me tell you, the constitutional conservatives were not about to ban sex. They liked sex—they are still the most fertile demographic group in the United States! And if you think they were some sort of antisex zealots in their private life, you should have been with me at some of the CPAC conferences in the 2010s!

  * * *

  Ted Jindal (Technology Consultant)

  A second-generation American (his parents were immigrants from Mumbai), Ted Jindal was initially confused about where he fell on the political spectrum. But once he found his place, he saw that he and the establishment had much to learn about employing technology effectively.

  I was a tech head, but I was very at home with the conservatives. I didn’t start out really that conservative, but the more I saw of how the liberals had stacked the deck against youn
g people and how real conservatives embraced creativity, I knew where I belonged. And they appreciated my skills.

  I started working on ways to link conservatives using social media. The tough thing was that it was so decentralized that it was tough figuring out what resources could be used by the most folks. See, everyone was doing something different, so they needed different things. Some were running for office, others were activists on the outside, others were writing or making videos. The technology was the easy part—figuring out what was needed by a bunch of amateurs was hard.

  * * *

  Puff (Hemp Advocate and Activist)

  Puff—no, not his birth name—is an enthusiastic advocate of living what he refers to as “a bong-focused lifestyle.” The herb-friendly activist’s face is famous from the “Like, Jail Would Harsh My Buzz” street art campaign for marijuana decriminalization, and in person he is exactly as one might expect.

  I met him in his garden, surrounded by towering marijuana stalks, where he relaxed (after a bowl full of “tasty premium”) and discussed how conservative support for decriminalization helped build bridges with communities not generally known for their openness to traditional conservative ideas.

  I like smoking weed, and these guys didn’t want to throw me in jail for it. That sold me. I figured if they were cool with what I was into, like getting high, then I was cool with their guns and getting government off their backs. So were my buddies.

  They didn’t have to like how I live my life, and I didn’t have to like theirs. Live and let live, man. I could get into that. Want a bong hit? This stuff is killer—I sold the rest out at the store, but I have an eighth left if you want to fire up.