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

by Kurt Schlichter

  We knew we were in phase four when a constitutional conservative ran for president and won in 2024.

  We are still in phase five, finishing the job, figuratively rooting progressivism out of its hiding places under rocks and in the dark corners of society. Our goal has been and needs to continue to be to annihilate its credibility and its false claim to morality so completely that it can never again rise to threaten our freedom.

  The devil was always in the details, but still, the idea, writ large, was simple. Constitutional conservatism won by insurgency, by outwitting, out-organizing, and outlasting progressivism. It was the lean, committed guerrilla against the sluggish, exhausted conscript. And it couldn’t lose.

  * * *

  Carla Quinn (Network Expert/Consultant)

  Carla Quinn’s company assembles and analyzes information for customers ranging from the Republican Party to Proctor & Gamble. Though the CEO of the multimillion dollar business, she still likes to keep her hand in what she still thinks of as the “fun part of the job”—analyzing how networks of different individuals organize themselves within society.

  I started out as an intelligence officer in Iraq during the war. That’s where I became fascinated by human networking. So, I was a new lieutenant out of the Fort Huachuca military intelligence school and all of a sudden I’m at a headquarters in Baghdad trying to figure out the Iraqi insurgency. Nobody had a clue—there were all these different groups and we didn’t understand how their interests fit together. That meant we had no way to go beyond reaction and into offensive disruption. So I dived into trying to understand how insurgent networks worked. I started to see the insurgency not as a monolithic structure but a collection of decentralized actors, each with certain interests that would lead them to cooperate with other insurgents, sit out, or even oppose the insurgency.

  I finished my hitch, went home, and started to work for an insurance company. The Tea Party movement is what made me politically involved—I was from Texas and freedom is in my blood. I found I was good at helping build networks of activists. I saw that various groups had differing interests, and that the conservative movement as a whole was failing to properly focus on shared interests and deemphasize disruptive ones. I also saw groups we had ignored—libertarians were key.

  Plus, and this was very important, we started finding cracks in the liberal networks, cracks we could exploit to siphon off their supporters. We hacked their activist networks by picking the right people to appeal to the right groups on the right issues at the right time. Like Jewish Americans—obviously the A-bombing was a huge issue and it gave us a chance to reach out to people alienated by Clinton’s botching of the crisis.

  One big success story? Black Americans. Obama took something like 95 percent of black American’s votes in 2012. It was practically unanimous. We got Carrie Marlowe 32 percent in 2024. That was huge. How? By working to build coalitions—sometimes one-issue, working coalitions—with unexpected groups. Business groups, church groups. We worked hard to identify any subgroup we could possibly connect with, even on just a few issues. Then we got the information out there through social media and personal contacts. It took a while for the GOP to listen to us, but eventually, when everything else failed, they did.

  * * *

  Jerome Timms (Republican Congressman)

  Timms used to be something exceptional—a black Republican from the Massachusetts district that covers some of the toughest parts of South Boston.

  My mom was going to be in jail for 20 years, no parole, because her boyfriend hid a duffel bag with a pound of rock cocaine in her basement. She wasn’t a saint, but I don’t think she even knew it was there. I remember the police hauling her away. I was seven and I was crying. So were my little brothers and sister. The conservatives got her out, and that’s why I am a black Republican.

  And I’m not the only one. I know the damage drugs did in my community. But I also saw the damage the drug war did, and without any real improvement. I can see how it affects my community today, but it is orders of magnitude better now.

  And it wasn’t the liberal Democrats we were supposed to vote for who made it better. It was those crazy conservatives who were supposed to hate us. Why am I a Republican? Because I respect the law, but I also fear it. That’s an understanding liberals don’t have, but black Americans and conservative Americans certainly do.

  My family had been Democrats for generations. But President Marlowe signed off on school choice and I ended up at a magnet school and then at Harvard and Harvard Law on a scholarship for high-scoring poor kids. Yeah, poor—my problem was being poor, not being black.

  * * *

  Brad Fields (Insurance Salesman)

  We are talking in Brad’s office, where he oversees the dozens of workers his insurance agency employs. With pictures of his family on the walls, he seems the opposite of a cunning insurgent.

  I was getting more and more fed up with things and I was trying to figure out what I could do. My town gave me the answer—it decided to put out a ballot measure to raise the sales tax to pay for some ridiculous new building for the mayor and his cronies. So I got involved in the opposition. I started meeting people and making calls, writing letters to the editor. I started knocking on doors. It was a low-turnout election, but we were motivated and we beat it. I realized that we had real power, but only if we used it.

  The local GOP structure was old and kind of inbred—a bunch of rich people playing at politics. I was young and pissed off, so I got in touch with the folks who had helped beat the county sales tax increase (which the local GOP hacks had supported!) and I ran for a committee seat and won. You would have thought I had farted in church with the looks they gave me when I took my seat at the first meeting.

  * * *

  Becky O’Hara (Education Advocate)

  Becky O’Hara graciously gave me a few minutes as she packed up her office. Fortunately, there was not much to be boxed up—she had come into her job with the idea of shutting the organization down. Within a few days, she would leave, her mission accomplished. But for the moment, she returned to a time almost 28 years before, when she was just a typical suburban American mom.

  In 2013, I got tired of my kids’ schoolteachers and their creepy progressive indoctrination. They would be taking kids and making them write about how wonderful Obama was and asking them about who their parents voted for. Well, my kids naturally said “Mitt Romney” and the teachers gave them hell. Of course, the school’s test scores were dropping, but they didn’t care about that. It was unbelievable.

  I had never been active before, but something had to be done and I decided I’d do it. I knew most of the parents at the school and I started talking to them, then Facebooking about what was happening in the district.

  Then I had a meeting at my house. There were five of us, but we decided we’d all go out and bring at least two more folks to the next one. There were 20 people at the second meeting—I ran out of coffee and cookies! We used the web to link ourselves together, and I took some ideas from the FreedomWorks website about how to deal with local government agencies like the school board.

  We decided to show up at a routine school board meeting—suddenly about 100 ticked-off parents walked in and I thought the board members were going to faint. Parent after parent just lambasted them. Finally, the chairwoman looks at us and, in a really condescending voice, says, “Well, we certainly appreciate your input, but we have real work to do now.” I looked at her and it just sort of popped out of my mouth—“Oh yeah? Well I’m running for your seat!”

  She laughed at me then, but she wasn’t laughing when I won.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Jim Gallegos (Iranian War Vet)

  Lieutenant Gallegos walks with a limp, one of a number of physical reminders of his time as a prisoner of war outside Teheran after the failed retaliation following the Iranian nuclear attack on Israel on November 30, 2020. Wounded severely during the initial amphibious assault to seize various strategic
sites along the coast, the young Marine was abandoned in the chaos of the withdrawal President Clinton ordered after it became clear that the expected popular uprising was not going to take place. “We were supposed to be greeted with flowers,” Gallegos recalls bitterly.

  None of them in the Clinton administration had ever served in uniform. We military people were aliens to them. They didn’t understand us, or trust us, or listen to us. The Joint Chiefs told the president that the force was hollowed out. I guess they didn’t understand what that meant. They saw the military as a great place to take money from to give it to people who didn’t feel like working. That cost a lot of people a helluva lot—lives, their health, years in Iranian dungeons.

  But that didn’t matter to the liberals. They turned on us and blamed us for not making up for a flawed plan, weak leadership, and inadequate resources.

  I missed out on some of the most critical years of the insurgency being stuck overseas. But when I was released thanks to President Marlowe—she didn’t take shit from the mullahs—I left the Corps and went home. New Jersey is deep blue and the state rep for our hometown was as liberal as they came. I ran against him and took it to him.

  During a debate, he started talking about “liberalism means this” and “liberalism means that” and I got pissed. I took off my shirt and showed the scars from the war and said, “See these scars on me? That’s liberalism. The scars on our country? That’s liberalism.” That video went viral and I won the election. I served three terms and then turned the seat over to another constitutional conservative.

  * * *

  Flamenco (Performance Artist)

  In 2041, the toast of Manhattan is edgy performance artist Flamenco. Pierced, tattooed, and of indeterminate gender (“I don’t really believe in gender, but if you do, cool”), Flamenco gets noticed with often outlandish and bizarre installations that combine painting, dance, holography, and music. I was able to get a few minutes of the artist’s time before a performance later that evening.

  I’ve always been a conservative. I grew up in a liberal family. They were really liberal and so smug. All the liberals I knew wanted to do was tell me what to do. Go to this doctor. Don’t drink a soda that big. No smoking! I hated it!

  The liberals never talked to me about freedom. Never once. Liberals were always about controlling me! At college, I would get shit from the liberal professors when I said what I thought if it didn’t fit in their ideological box. And the rules! Liberals love their rules—for them it’s all about control. I once tried to do a performance that involved a little campfire in the college quad and five cops showed up. One Tasered me! And they gave me an air pollution ticket!

  You know who never gave me grief? The conservatives. Oh, a lot of them weren’t into what I was doing, but not one ever thought it was his or her right to shut me up. They never told me what to do. It was liberals who told me I couldn’t smoke or speak up or whatever!

  I kept hearing how conservatives were going to have me arrested for having sex. That never happened. It was all bullshit.

  Chapter Five: Lawfare

  “It Was Hand-to-Hand Combat in the Courts”

  I am not a lawyer—like most Americans, what I know about the court system largely comes from videos and e-books. While most citizens don’t understand the mechanics of litigation, we Americans still tend to see the courts as a venue where right and wrong battle it out. It’s very binary—there is Atticus Finch, and then there are the bad guys.

  The conservative insurgents knew this. They exploited the courts ruthlessly, especially in the early years when they literally had no other forum where they had to be treated equally and where their arguments could not simply be dismissed out of hand. It was a very special kind of cultural warfare. They called it “lawfare,” and without it the entire movement might have collapsed.

  * * *

  Roberta Klein (Conservative Activist/Attorney)

  The receptionist asks me to wait because the woman I am there to see is running behind schedule. I get the impression that’s not unusual. The law firm of Parnell, Farrell, Moskowitz & Klein occupies the thirtieth through thirty-fifth floors of a sleek new office building in downtown Dallas, the nation’s emerging business center. Its client list is a who’s who of major corporations and wealthy individuals. After 15 minutes, Roberta Klein herself comes out and introduces herself with a handshake. She is short, even in heels, and immaculately dressed. “I’m glad you came personally,” she says. “I’m old school. I hate video conferences.”

  Her corner office opens up on a view of the city so spectacular that I simply stop and stare for a moment. She smiles. Her walls are lined with photos, all signed, of the major movers and shakers of constitutional conservatism, past and present. Prominently displayed behind her massive maple desk is one showing her with president-elect Patel, both of them holding Mossberg 12 gauge shotguns, smiling at a skeet range.

  The note reads, “Roberta, we could not have gotten here without you! Best, Rob.”

  She motions for me to sit in one of the reddish leather chairs arrayed before her desk, and begins . . .

  They called me “traitor.” Literally. And I would ask them, “Traitor to what?” I never got a straight answer, but I think it came down to me betraying my class.

  I was a Yale Law grad and I was rejecting the unspoken assumptions of what a Yale Law grad was supposed to believe in and fight for. It was the school that produced Hillary Clinton, and here I was, frustrating her and her minions. I was trained and groomed to march along with my classmates into a progressive future and I was rejecting that. Hence, I was a traitor.

  I used to say that I was not rich enough to be liberal. I made it into Stanford on a scholarship. My dad was a schoolteacher and my mom didn’t work outside the house. I was bookish, but I had three big brothers who wrestled, so I could either be feisty or get pummeled. I chose to be feisty. I did very well on my SATs—that was the old college aptitude test—and got into the Farm, did well as an undergrad, and went on to Yale Law on another scholarship. I liked law because I figured I could use my brains and my feistiness!

  I thought I was liberal. The first time I voted I voted for Obama. I didn’t make that mistake again! You see, I actually believed in the Constitution. I thought the Bill of Rights was an amazing statement of personal freedom, and I thought that was what a liberal was supposed to believe.

  But at Stanford, and especially at Yale, I saw the reality. Sure, they paid lip service to concepts like free speech, freedom of religion, due process, and so forth, but the second any of them came in conflict with some progressive prerogative, that was it. The rights went out the door when they stopped being useful to the cause.

  But to me, those rights weren’t just a pose. They weren’t disposable.

  I graduated, clerked for a federal judge, and then went off to a big law firm where I was one of a dozen new associates working 80-hour weeks. I was on track to be a partner, and focused almost entirely on business litigation. But I was required to do some pro bono work of my own choosing—the firm was very keen on looking like it was all about public service even as it billed out lawyers at $600 an hour.

  Other associates were choosing to represent death row convicts, welfare recipients, detained terrorists, or artists mad because Uncle Sam was refusing to fund them covering themselves with milk chocolate to protest patriarchy. But me? I chose to help a Tea Party group that had been pretty effective in upstate New York, then suddenly found itself under all sorts of investigations by different New York state agencies. It seemed almost [Klein stage-gasps for effect] coordinated, as if liberal bureaucrats were targeting the group and its members for daring to effectively petition the government for the redress of grievances.

  It never occurred to me this might be a problem for the firm—I mean, it was clearly government officials violating the rights of some little guys. I figured out how to get past some procedural hurdles and sued the individuals in federal court. Then all hell broke loose.<
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  I got a call to come up to the partners’ conference room. I had never been up on the top floor before. There were a dozen senior partners there, bigwigs who mingled with mayors and senators and CEOs and who would never even acknowledge me in the elevator, and now they were all looking at me.

  They were not smiling.

  They didn’t ask me to sit. One of the name partners, who I later found out was a huge campaign contribution bundler for liberal politicians, pointed a bony finger and said to me, “Ms. Klein, what the hell were you thinking with this Rochester Tea Party lawsuit of yours?”

  He said the words “Tea Party” like he was discussing an STD.

  I was taken aback, but I am a litigator and like I said, I am feisty, so I guess I just forgot to be intimidated. “I was thinking that the government shouldn’t harass Americans citizens because of their politics.”

  Oh, he was steamed. “This is not a lawsuit this firm wishes to be associated with. You will dismiss it immediately.”

  “No, I will do no such thing,” I said. “The Rochester Tea Party is a client of this firm, and we owe it a duty to see the case through until it releases us.”

  I guess no one had told any of them “no” in a couple of decades, because they seemed too shocked to react. But I was not done. “And I do not understand your objection to representing a group of decent, hardworking people who just want to exercise their rights as Americans. I mean, are you saying that they somehow have less moral standing than the gentleman we represent pro bono who shot up that nursery school? Or that airplane bomber at Guantanamo Bay?”