We started up a campaign to inform potential jurors in the trials of those charged with possessing weapons to vote to acquit regardless of the evidence—to nullify the law through a refusal by jurors to enforce it. This brought on a backlash by the Clinton administration as it tried to ban our attempts to discuss nullification.
We were also all over that, highlighting the anti–free speech agenda of the progressives. They didn’t let a little thing like the Constitution stop them from trying to shut us up. They even got the Supreme Court to rule they could do it, which we got overturned later. But this whole thing eroded support among the left’s own allies, who were queasy at the thought of jailing people for speaking out and eliminating the right to trial by jury.
There were two kinds of liberals: the principled liberals and the power liberals. The principled liberals had a crisis—they saw that the Obama and Clinton administrations weren’t honoring the principles these liberals believed in. They had to choose, them or us. Many chose us—the constitutional conservative movement had a lot of ex-liberals.
And the power liberals? Principles were a means to an end. When a principle stopped being useful, they had no compunction about dropping it. With them, no matter what the administrations did—intimidate, harass, and even arrest critics—it didn’t matter. They didn’t believe in anything but their own power. They could never be reasoned with. They had to be defeated.
* * *
Brad Fields (Insurance Salesman)
It was a scary time. The liberals were literally putting folks in jail for speaking out against them, though neither they nor their media lackeys would describe it that way. They called it “campaign finance reform,” basically saying that free speech of any kind could be regulated. Of course, what’s regulated can be banned. And that’s what they tried to do to our conservative Internet and radio content.
They were also trying to take people’s guns, breaking into houses without warrants. There were some incidents besides Texas . . . it was bad. There was talk of violence. But the violence came from the left. Union and leftist thugs would physically attack people who criticized the administration—sometimes the thugs would burn their houses—and the feds wouldn’t do anything even when everyone saw on video the people doing it.
One liberal punk, some 29-year-old in Washington, wrote a column in the Post calling on Hillary Clinton to execute people for interfering with her agenda. He said flat out that the conservatives had no right to free speech or assembly or the press and that she should do whatever she had to do to stop us, including shoot us. But first, she should disarm us. We were committing “treason” by opposing her, he said. This ran in a major newspaper, and many, many liberals applauded it.
The Iran fiasco just made it worse. The Clinton administration was getting paranoid. Regular people like me were worried that we could find police at our door. I think if they had had more faith that law enforcement and the military would have carried it out, there would have been even worse repression.
It was a very ugly time. But there was a lot of camaraderie among conservatives. We took the Constitution seriously. We paid attention and fought for it when it was in danger.
* * *
Ted Jindal (Technology Consultant)
Some of Jidaltech’s most successful products have been security software founder Ted Jindal worked to develop as he fought to protect insurgent information systems from constant attacks by opponents. He recalls how liberals did whatever they could to stop his work.
We got hacked a lot, on a systematic basis. This wasn’t just random leftists, though that was always a problem. It was a concerted effort paid for by anonymous donors to go in and try to destroy our computer systems and databases. I can’t tell you how I know, and I categorically deny that we retaliated with our own hack attacks.
They turned the feds on us, and the Clinton Justice Department was only too happy to prosecute us for hacking . . . alleged hacking. Thankfully, the juries kept hanging in my case until the prosecutors just gave up. Thank goodness for the jury nullification campaign. The liberals hated it, but it was a great weapon to at least partially neutralize the campaign of political prosecutions we saw during those years.
They were playing for keeps, but so were we.
* * *
Barry Sawyer (Radio Host/Political Prisoner)
Sawyer was a conservative shock jock who owned a radio network. After the 2019 Media Fair Play Act set up the Fairness Commission to regulate radio content, he not only refused to comply with orders to cut the time devoted to conservative talk but made a huge deal about refusing to do so. He forced the feds to act heavy-handedly—a key insurgent tactic.
When the federal marshals arrived to arrest me, I made sure there were plenty of cameras around to record the event. The photos of me in chains being hauled away for refusing government orders about what I could and could not broadcast flashed across the Internet even as the mainstream media attempted to ignore it.
I was sentenced to prison, and the leftist Supreme Court upheld my conviction, but I made a decision to become a martyr for free speech—and my incarceration created enormous doubts even within the liberal coalition. Some of them actually believed in things like free speech. Others, not so much.
* * *
Gail Partridge (Leftist Show Host)
Outraged at the success of the conservative insurgents in fighting back, she vents about people like Barry Sawyer.
I am all for free speech, but what they were doing wasn’t free speech. It was sedition!
They lied about the government to interfere with its programs, and I don’t see why that was tolerated so much. Hillary should have done more to stand up to them. It’s not free speech when you abuse that right to damage efforts toward social justice and progress. The legitimate Supreme Court, before the coup, agreed.
I don’t feel sorry at all for these criminals. That’s what they were, criminals. The law was very clear and they broke it. Hillary was absolutely right not to let a bunch of racist, rich, wreckers hide behind some 250-year-old scrap of paper.
Chapter Fourteen: How Hollywood Went Conservative
“The Gatekeepers Found Themselves Guarding the Gates While the Walls Were Tumbling Down Around Them”
The late Andrew Breitbart identified the entertainment industry as a key center of gravity for the progressive project, so much so that he started a conservative website, Big Hollywood, devoted to chronicling its antics. But even as the industry came under pressure to diversify and change, it remained stubbornly resistant—that is, until technology and some old-fashioned political hardball, plus artists who simply refused to be pigeonholed, forced it to evolve.
* * *
Joe Farris (Filmmaker)
Joe Farris started making films during the Obama administration. Today, he runs a production company turning out popular movies and video programing. He doesn’t look like what conservatives are supposed to look like—he still has long hair, and his office echoes with what he describes as “nü nü-metal” music. However, he has little use for liberalism in general, or for liberals themselves.
We started out in a crappy apartment in St. Louis, where I was from. We thought we ought to go to Hollywood, but we didn’t have any money. We had just enough cash for some cameras and our computers and Internet access. We would make these little short videos and edit them with software we downloaded for free. We’d finish cutting them and then post it on our YouTube Channel.
Our stuff wasn’t political at first, or what we thought of as political. We were trying to be funny, because funny means hits. So did cats. We kept trying to think of a really funny political cat video because we knew that would go viral. Never did, though.
I was never political before, but I was very much about freedom—especially on the web. I was really pissed off to read about how the NSA under Obama was gathering all sorts of Internet tracking info. I thought that they, being liberals, should be against that sort of thing. But they weren’t.
We were doing pretty well, getting a reputation. We’d put something up and get 50,000 hits in a day. The next time, we would shoot for 100,000. It was still a new thing back then for a bunch of nobodies with a little bit of equipment to be able to get an audience.
Now, we would play off of other material in our political stuff—you can’t satirize something without referencing it, right? But we’d get all this copyright grief. Studios and companies would demand YouTube and other sites pull our stuff for infringement, and they would. But it wasn’t infringement—it was fair use, like our lawyers told us, but there was nothing stopping these big companies from throwing their weight around to screw us over.
Funny, but I first thought it was conservatives doing it. You know, big business equaled conservative? So I was totally sideswiped when I did some research and found out that the liberals were backing these big companies over little guys like us. The only people sticking up for us on Internet freedom were the constitutional conservatives. It kind of freaked me out. I thought I hated the Tea Party and it turns out we agreed on a lot of stuff that was important to me.
So, we started tweaking the left for hypocrisy. Some of our viewers didn’t like it because we were not, you know, on the team. Well, I don’t play on teams—I do what I want. But, because our videos weren’t afraid of taking on liberals, we got a reputation as conservative.
I thought that was going to limit us as far as getting an audience, but things were changing. The old ways of doing business were dying. I was reaching millions of people with my work and it had never been on TV or in a movie. The dinosaurs in Hollywood couldn’t ignore us anymore—they were getting desperate because people were going around them to get the media product they refused to provide.
We got an e-mail from an agent in Hollywood. He actually said that he wanted “to do lunch”—he used those exact words! I’m not sure what was funnier—him using that phrase or him just assuming we had to be in his town to do what we did. Like I said, the established Hollywood types just did not understand the changes overcoming their industry.
I called him on the phone and broke the bad news to him, first that I was half a continent away and second that we were conservative. He was more worried about where we were. He said that with the kind of traffic our videos were getting, he’d meet with us if we were the Khmer Rouge.
Technology totally opened the doors to the entertainment industry, which I think was and is probably the most important element of American culture. It’s a battlefield we had no choice but to go fight on as conservatives. For too long we left most of it—with exceptions like country music—to the cultural left. And we paid for it.
The old entertainment industry was built on several structural factors. First, they produced product—movies, TV, records, books—that required a huge capital outlay for equipment and for professionals to use it. Studios, cameras, recording equipment, printing presses, and highly paid people to use them cost a fortune.
That was a huge barrier to entry in the past. Back then, those independents who did do their own work often ended up making things like Plan 9 from Outer Space and all those terrible DIY punk records people used to sell out of their Gremlin hatchbacks for a buck. My dad told me about those. My generation had a different experience.
Besides money, the majors also controlled the distribution of entertainment. They were gatekeepers. If you wanted to be on TV, in a theater, in a record store, or in a bookstore, you had to go through them. And if they disapproved, you didn’t get through at all.
Well, that was all dying right as the conservative movement really got underway. While primo equipment is still pricey, it is possible for nearly any group of entrepreneurs to gather up the money to make their product. We did. And this was a product of pretty high-level technical quality. A lot of what we did was comparable to the stuff produced by the majors. Professionals still had their place, but modern technology made it exponentially simpler to do what it used to take a highly paid pro to do.
The gatekeepers found themselves guarding the gates while the walls were tumbling down around them.
So, we stopped waiting at the gates. We were just going to go around the gates because the walls were collapsing. Sure, only a major studio could open a film at 3,000 theaters, but anybody could get on video on demand. And everyone did—have you seen how many movies you’ve never heard of are out there? Content is king.
Back when Obama was president, it became possible to watch whatever you wanted whenever you wanted with just a couple clicks of your remote control or on your computer or device. It’s normal today, but back then it was incredible.
And we got into the industry with outspoken conservative material. So did a lot of other conservatives. Of course, most of it was crap, but most of everything is crap.
There was a huge opportunity for conservative folks to enter the entertainment industry without waiting on an invitation. By simply making product, they gained visibility. The ones that made good stuff, the ones that found an audience, eventually found the industry eager to take advantage of them. Sure, most of the folks in the entertainment industry were liberal, and probably most still are, but all of them really like money. And if they think a conservative will make them money, he’s got a shot.
There was one important principle we needed to learn. There was no room and no market for “conservative entertainment.” None. Zip.
There was always room for quality entertainment, entertainment that finds an audience because it’s good. That it is conservative too is a fringe benefit. Anyone who is trying to make entertainment that tries to be conservative before it’s entertaining is going to find that his product sucks before it does anything else.
I remember people would come into Hollywood with a lot of money and announce they wanted to make conservative films. What’s a conservative film anyway? I’d say Saving Private Ryan or Dirty Harry were conservative films from a time when conservatism was frowned upon. But these guys always thought it meant a movie with no action, no sex, no bad words, and no freaking point. Usually, it would have characters talking about Jesus—hey, nothing rocks a theater like 10 minutes of theological exposition.
We’d take their money and help them with the technical aspects of making “conservative movies,” but outside that narrow band of conservative audiences, no one else ever saw those productions. It was mostly because they were terrible.
The secret—well, it’s not even a secret—is to make good product from a conservative point of view. If it’s a comedy, be funny before you are conservative. Drama? Be dramatic first. But it was hard to get that message through to people who thought the answer to liberal agitprop was conservative agitprop. The so-called “conservative” stuff was so dull it didn’t even agitate well!
The idea was and is to compete as entertainment. Sure, the industry was largely liberal by default, but we used our quality entertainment as a vehicle to promote our conservative values. Yes, we needed to use popular culture to spread our message and no, it didn’t make us as bad as the liberals. Reinforcing positive values and traditions of a society is one of the roles of art, and has been since the ancient Greeks put on plays in their amphitheaters. Popular culture should teach people about their society and, yes, model positive behaviors.
It used to do that before the 1970s, when the liberals really took over. Remember how old movies showed John Wayne as a hero to be copied? In the Obama years, we had movies featuring Seth Rogan—remember him?—as the perpetual man-child covering up his pathetic emasculation with moderately clever snark. Art was still trying to teach people how to be. It was just that liberal art tried to teach them to be losers.
And putting out our point of view was not somehow foisting our views on the audience. Now, I wouldn’t mind if we did—our views should be foisted on the audience because our views aren’t terrible and socially poisonous like liberal ones.
When we did it to promote constitutional conservatism, it was good. When they did it to p
romote their liberal fascism, it was bad. There’s no moral equivalence because only our side is moral. I saw how liberalism acts in power—when it wasn’t corrupt or incompetent, it was crushing our freedoms.
Some subsets of conservatives started getting footholds in the industry. Conservative religious-based entertainment was an outlier, but it spoke to a huge audience that was terribly underserved back then. It just needed to stop being mostly terrible. That came with experience and an understanding that it better be entertaining first or no one will watch.
Conservative-themed reality shows were popular. Many had to do with sports like hunting and shooting, and others had to do with that most conservative of activities, working. Oddly, during the Obama years, there were a lot of shows about guys busting their butts crab fishing, driving trucks, farming, and the like. These were kind of the antithesis of liberal entertainment even if they never mentioned the word “conservative.”
But we needed to hit the mainstream. Popular music was full of liberals, but along came some rockers and rappers laying down killer tracks that were thoroughly conservative. I mean, life during the Obama and Clinton administrations was so tough for young people that eventually some of their musical artists were going to have to call out liberalism. When that happened, a bunch of kids started nodding their heads, and it opened a door to them really looking at constitutional conservatives for the first time.
Some popular movies already had subtle conservative elements—if The Dark Knight Rises was any more conservative it would have been Ronald Reagan under the cowl. Of course, Christopher Nolan was reluctant to say so publicly. But then some people did—they came out of the right-wing closet. Again, that opened a door to a whole new audience of potential conservatives who had opted out of pop culture.
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