The united front envisioned in phase two was important. We needed allies, even ones who weren’t a hundred percent in line with our views but for whom progressivism was likewise a nightmare. Libertarians were the first to join, but there were other groups that soon did as well, like college students. Many Jewish Americans left the Democratic Party and found their way to us after Tel Aviv.
The key was to have allies, and sometimes we had to soft-pedal or even modify peripheral policy preferences to enlist others in our cause. If we could destroy progressivism for the price of letting Bob Marley–loving potheads fire up their bongs without getting arrested, we were getting a bargain.
Phase three was active conflict, where we used every one of our limited assets in the most effective manner possible across the entire spectrum of society to challenge the left. Over time, as we began to prevail and become stronger (and as progressivism became weaker), we could meet them on equal terms. Conservatism, not milquetoast GOP moderation, became the sole opposition.
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.