We Middle Americans did everything right. We worked hard, played by the rules, as Bill Clinton used to say. But the liberals hated us. You could tell.
The liberals saw us as the enemy. I think it was partly because they were snobs—they hated our traditional values and looked down on us as ignorant and unsophisticated, even though studies showed that we were better educated. I think it was also partly because hating us was useful politically—they could tell the takers who voted Democrat that we were why they were failures. But I also think there was another thing—we didn’t need the liberals.
We could rule ourselves, without them, and they hated us for it. If the whole country were like us, self-sufficient and responsible, there’d be no need for liberals. That scared them, and they were right to be scared. That’s what we changed the culture toward over the last 30 years, toward self-sufficiency and independence, and that’s a big reason the liberals are locked out of power today.
Americans today don’t need them.
Looking back, you can see how we were the perfect demographic for a mass movement like ours. Many of us had built our own careers and businesses, so we had skills. And Obama pushed exactly the wrong button with us, the red button that would activate us. He said the one thing that forced us off the sidelines.
He came in and told us—and I remember this vividly—that we “didn’t build that.” Right there, the liberals attacked the entire foundation of who we were. They were trying to delegitimize anything we said or did. They tried to steal away the moral value of our hard work, you see. Then we would be defenseless and submit. We would need them and their pack of liberal geniuses, just like every other demographic block. There’d be no one left who they didn’t control.
It didn’t work that way.
I was fuming, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I heard about this Tea Party thing from the mainstream liberal media, and I just instinctively knew that if the liberal media hated it, it had to be good. I got involved. I had no political experience, but I went and saw Andrew Breitbart speak at a rally during a snowstorm in Indiana. He was a visionary. He understood our potential. He treated us like we had power, like we had a right to express our views and defend what we had built, and he urged us to exercise it.
I started listening to conservative talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, and others—I was in Indy and listened to Greg Garrison a lot. That was crucial—it helped coordinate us and build morale. You could turn the radio on and you could hear people putting into words what we all were thinking. The Tea Party rallies did the same thing—I never thought so many other folks felt like I did. The media sure wasn’t going to tell me.
I devoured conservative books. The Internet was crucial too. Facebook, Twitter, conservative websites—we just went around the media gatekeepers and built networks of contacts. You learned you weren’t alone.
So I found myself in the movement. It wasn’t like you signed up. It wasn’t “community organized” by some cadre of George Soros–funded leftists—if you showed up and did stuff, you were in the movement. There was no barrier to becoming active. You just did stuff and you were part of it. We never really talked a lot about the goals or even about the ways that we conservatives, as a movement, could wage a peaceful insurgency. See, you aren’t a movement—you were an individual and an American citizen doing what you felt you wanted to do to advance what you believed.
So, I asked myself, what do I do? How should I be a part of this fight?
Well, at first, I had no clue.
It didn’t take me long to come up with some ideas, but the point was that neither me nor anyone else needed to get some kind of order from on high and then to go salute and carry out the mission. The great strength of our movement was that it was individual action—“decentralized” is how some people describe it. The fact that there was no rigid hierarchy or structure trying to manipulate all the levers of the movement was an advantage. It allowed for experimentation, and the most effective ideas rose to the top.
That made us more agile than the centrally planned left. Decentralization meant that you had to figure out what you could do best to contribute. Only you knew your strengths and weaknesses, your situation, your preferences, your resources, and your opportunities. Only you knew how you could best be a part of our cause.
Decentralization leveraged each individual’s ability to act in the most effective way to achieve the maximum results for his efforts. See, when running a community organizing effort like the left did, you didn’t have to be so targeted. You had a ton of resources, and the sheer bulk of the organization would allow you to overcome the inevitable skills/talents mismatches over the long haul. With the constitutional conservatives, we needed to fit the round peg in the round hole—we couldn’t just pound any peg through any hole because our figurative hammer was so damn small. Instead of some organization organizing the pegs to the holes, we self-organized as individuals.
In other words, we weren’t so big or overwhelming as a movement that we could afford to forgo the benefits of precisely matching individuals to our needs. So the way that conservatives did that matching is the same way the free market does it—decentralized self-selection. People picked jobs because they felt they would fit the need. So, not only did we maximize our talent pool but we reaffirmed our core principles.
People who knew how to write drifted toward writing. Web people drifted to web tasks. There were a lot of people who were really good at speaking, and they drifted toward radio. Guys would just start shows on the web and then—voila! They would land terrestrial radio shows!
This wasn’t really surprising. Even if we could have organized ourselves some other way, we largely came out of the small business, entrepreneurial world. Many of us owned our own small businesses. We applied those same skills to the cultural/political fight.
All this is a really long way of explaining why I needed to figure out on my own how I could best contribute to the movement. But the key was that we needed people to contribute somehow—time, money, effort, whatever—if we were going to beat the liberal establishment. We needed real people. We couldn’t hope to convert the populace without the help of people within the populace.
I found I was a good organizer. I had run a small crafts store for a while but closed it up when the kids came along. Yet even with the kids, I was a den mother and soccer coach and generally, well, a general! I knew how to get stuff done—I was always the one the PTA called to set up dances and such—so I used that skill to organize for the Tea Party in Indianapolis.
But I wasn’t a fighter, at least not yet. And this was a fight.
The first step was to gird your loins for battle—this game was not for the weak or the faint of heart, and our progressive opponents got meaner and more obnoxious and even worse the closer we got to the moment they realized their crappy little ideology was heading out back to the Dumpster.
No one was asking us to stand up to a volley of British musket fire like the Minutemen Founders, but we soon saw that we were going to be smeared, lied about, mischaracterized, intimidated, and threatened. I got audited for the first time the year I became chairwoman of my local Tea Party group. But if you couldn’t take that hit, then we might as well have packed that whole freedom thing up, drunk the Kool-Aid, and started singing that “Mmmm, Mmmm, Barack Obama” song.
You remember that song? Schoolteachers, unionized of course, would make the kids sing it like in some third world dictatorship. It was a terrible time—it was like liberals were trying to create a cult of personality. That’s the thing about liberals—they reject God, but it leaves an empty space they need to fill and they try to fill it with liberal icons. I personally think that liberalism is a symptom of emotional emptiness—it’s like an ideology based on weird daddy issues.
Anyway, we realized that we were effective and that we mattered, especially after we kicked their tails in the 2010 midterms. But in 2012, we realized that we were it. There was no one else. The establishment
Republicans certainly weren’t going to fight this fight. It was just us.
If we didn’t win, we were going to lose our country forever.
Remember my friend—really, he was thousands of peoples’ friend—Andrew Breitbart? He saw it. He got it. Andrew’s most important lesson to us may well have been that a decade before he died, he was just some regular guy, a normal American citizen who had had enough.
Just like me. Just like millions of us.
The issue was not whether you could be part of the fight. You could. The question was what could you do?
Most started at the individual level. You had to start somewhere, and many—even most—people are not really comfortable in the limelight. But you didn’t have to be debating some androgynous lefty pundit from DC on MSNBC to be in the fight. Regular folks had a vital—I’d even say decisive—role to play.
As an individual, at the personal level, you could engage in three main ways—by contributing, modeling, and interaction. Of course, no one used those labels at first—we just sort of naturally understood the basic concept. But when millions of us started to engage in these three ways, the results were earthshaking.
Contributing was just that: contributing your money and time to the cause. We had a lot of organizations that did a lot of great work. For example, FreedomWorks organized and trained activists, while the Pacific Legal Foundation pursued a “lawfare” strategy. The NRA defended our Second Amendment. They all needed dough. It was easy to write them a check!
Conservative candidates needed money, and they also needed volunteers. There was where we shined. We got in there and volunteered for the guys running against those hard left congressmen, or the soft right ones who would come home and tell us they had our collective back, then return to Washington and stick a knife in it.
How else could people contribute? Well, people talked a lot about moving into the media and entertainment spheres. If there was an outspoken conservative star—it was so rare back then that it’s hard to believe today—we would go out of our way to see his movie or watch his show. If there was a film that seemed even remotely conservative, we would give it the benefit of the doubt and go see it.
Geez, I saw some terrible movies for the cause. But our viewership watered the seeds of conservative entertainment until it could take root in popular culture and get past liberal prejudices and gain an audience.
Support for conservative writers also created an audience that the mainstream publishing community could not afford to ignore. We knew that you couldn’t fight in the battle of ideas if you don’t even get to the battlefield.
Modeling was huge—huge. I don’t mean modeling in the sense of attractive women marching about in lingerie, although conservative men were very open to this—there was a whole meme about how conservative women were more attractive than liberal women. I mean modeling in terms of living your life in a conservative manner as a model for others to emulate. The media could and did disrespect conservatives all it wanted, but actually living a conservative life, displaying solid values and demonstrating how they lead to success and happiness, was a powerful rebuke to the tacky chaos liberals excused in the personal lives of their constituents. When you modeled what happens when you live conservative values, people had to take notice.
Sure, much of the establishment hated us for it—but they really hated themselves. We got used to that kind of projection. Many of them lived in chaos and despised us for demonstrating that life didn’t have to be an endless series of government handouts, broken families, and failure.
Modeling worked both ways—liberals who modeled bad behavior (especially Hollywood stars and rappers) caused enormous social damage. But when a liberal inadvertently modeled conservative behavior, it was useful. As much as Barack Obama’s policies were awful, his model of an evidently happy marriage with two beautiful children probably did more good for our country than anything else he’d done, including giving the SEALs the reluctant thumbs-up to pop Bin Laden.
We needed to be that model in our own individual social circles. And we demanded that conservative leaders do a better job of modeling too. The last thing we needed were more “conservatives” caught up in skeevy perversions—we were less concerned about their own personal failings than about how liberals could twist their scummy antics to tar all of us and, more importantly, the values we actually embraced.
My feeling was, and many conservatives shared it even at the beginning, that if you’re gay, come out and be gay. We could deal with that—there were a lot of gay constitutional conservatives. Just don’t be dragged out of the closet because some vice cop drags you out of a bus station toilet stall.
Oh, and we encouraged people not to be a married traditional-marriage advocate and then get caught banging someone they weren’t married to. Hypocrisy rolled off liberals’ backs, since at their core they don’t believe in anything except their own power. Because we said we believe in principles, we got held to them, and hypocrisy gravely hurt our cause.
Now, interaction was just that—it meant interaction targeted to your own social circle to try and convert the undecided middle to our cause. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram . . . these were our first online tools. Our goal as individuals was not to change the world, but just our little piece of it. This is where we could correct misinformation about conservatives and our ideas—who didn’t have some granola-crunching lefty jerk get on their Facebook page and wail about how we need to ban “automatic weapons with high-caliber clips”?
Somebody had to respond, and that was us as individuals operating in our own little individual network of friends, relatives, coworkers, and acquaintances. We learned to correct misinformation, clearly, concisely, and competently. The mainstream media sure as hell wasn’t going to get the truth out there. We were each the truth squad for our own social circles. We stopped allowing progressive memes and deceptions go unchallenged in our individual worlds.
Whether you linked to a great article or re-tweeted one, or whether you wrote something short about your own experience, individual Americans were each powerful advocates for the conservative cause because they had personal credibility within their social circles. People knew them. Those droning Marxists in the media only had sway if there was no countering voice, and individual conservatives—someone their friends knew and trusted and respected—were that counter. We outsourced the job of mainstream media rapid response to ourselves!
Then there was personal involvement. We started going to city council meetings, to Republican Party meetings, to PTA meetings, and we made sure that the only people talking weren’t liberals and squishes. There was this creepy liberal movie star that liberals just idolized no one remembers anymore except for two things. First, he married his adoptive daughter, and second, he said that 90 percent of success is just showing up. He was right about the second thing, but a skeeve for the first.
We conservatives started showing up.
We made sure we served on juries. Now we were politically aware, and we enforced the law while forcing the government to do its job. Unjust prosecution over guns or free speech or even raw milk? We voted to acquit! Nonsense, frivolous lawsuit? We gave the bum nothing. We reformed the out-of-control legal system by doing our job.
And we needed to vote, and make sure our friends and neighbors (at least the ones who weren’t liberal) voted too! Constitutional conservatives provided the people power for the Republican Party even as the establishment heaped contempt on us. That’s how we ended up taking it over. We were the ones who knocked on doors, made phone calls, and organized like-minded patriots. We were the Republican Party.
Hey, it wasn’t going to happen if we didn’t make it happen. So, damn it, we made it happen.
There were so many ideas, options, possibilities—but the individual conservative was in the best position to decide what he or she could do. They would come into the movement, look around, see what was happening, and determine where they could make the biggest difference.
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nbsp; There was no end to the potential ways to contribute for a conservative individual. Remember, Andrew Breitbart was just some guy. He chose to be more. He worked at it. He learned to speak in public and to use the new media to get his views out there. Why couldn’t you start a conservative blog? Or write for an established one? They loved to break new writers—loved it! Why couldn’t you host an Internet radio show and podcast? There were so many ways to contribute.
The opportunities were unlimited.
Sometimes we got ahead of ourselves. If you were a regular citizen, you might figure, “Why not run for Congress?” Believe me, congressmen aren’t anything special. They sure aren’t necessarily geniuses—I worked on a few campaigns in the 2010s and 2020s and believe me, Capitol Hill has never been an arsenal of intellectual firepower. It wasn’t a meritocracy. If you were conservative, and you mastered walking upright and could form a coherent sentence, you could run for Congress as a conservative and still be a better candidate than most of the establishment politicians. But that was still problematic.
We soon figured out that the first run for elected office for a conservative should not be for Congress unless the candidate happened to have a couple million bucks to toss into his campaign war chest. And if he had a couple million bucks lying around, he could have probably done more good with targeted contributions to conservative organizations than by running for the House.
What about the local school board? The local water district? How about the city council? Newcomers had a much stronger chance at these levels, and we never underestimated the importance of these positions, particularly as we worked to devolve power back to the governing bodies closest (and most responsive) to the people. You could make a substantive difference right away by advancing constitutional conservative principles right there in your own community. And by taking those offices, we were also working for the future.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 9