Plus, the administration suddenly realized that it might not have the means to fight, if it came to that. Some of its own law-enforcement personnel had refused to participate in the Texas operation, and who knows what a conservative, largely Southern military would do if she gave it an unlawful order.
One more thing. Antigun legislation in liberal states had driven gun and gun accessory makers to the free states, away from the Northeast and West Coast. That’s the opposite of the Civil War, where the Yankees had all the gun factories. The conservative states supplied most of the warriors and most of the weapons. In the end, what were the liberals going to do, make us submit with harsh language?
Darren Dolby (Lawyer/Activist)
This flamboyant attorney talks about the Clinton administration’s gun laws and the grassroots reaction to them, with widespread resistance by police who refused to cooperate (sometimes because of state laws instructing them not to) and by jury nullification.
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 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.