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.
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.
We needed a farm team. We needed future leaders. And those jobs were the farm team. That’s where the next generation of conservative leaders, the ones coming up who just got elected with President-Elect Patel, started learning the craft of politics. That’s where they got training, built networks, made contacts and, critically, make mistakes. In 2012, we lost two Senate seats because the geniuses running screwed up. They were right on the issues, and much better than their opponents, but they were stupid and they made mistakes.
If you are going to disqualify yourself from future office because you are too damn stupid not to refuse to offer your moronic opinions about rape, I think it’s safe to say we’d all have preferred that you did it a campaign for a place on the 23rd Iowa Sewer and Utilities District than when running for the seat that determined who controls the Senate.
And let’s not forget the Republican Party offices, the chairmen and committeemen and others who actually had a lot to do both locally and at the state level. I remember one of them telling me how he was outnumbered 85% Democrat to 15% Republican in his district and next telling me how he had been the party chair in that district for the last 15 years. It was time for some new blood. We were the transfusion.
Very few people thought about these intra-party jobs, which made them vulnerable. They were just kind of handed to the same people over and over because they kept showing up over and over at the selection meetings. And the sleepy timeservers who usually held them were often squishes who wanted people like us to shut-up, fall in line, volunteer and write checks, no questions asked. No one really ever challenged them, so they just continued on down the same path of mediocrity and failure, more concerned with retaining their titles and perks than kicking liberal ass.