* * *
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
We have left the relatively bug-free confines of Gator’s porch and are walking through the woods, beers in hand. Gator ignores the buzzing insects—and, apparently, the effects of several brews, even as I slap and scratch at the swarm. Gator notices my predicament. “I could use DDT out here, but I’m too damn lazy to bother. You know, by lifting the stupid DDT ban, we saved probably a few hundred thousand lives in Africa using it on malaria mosquitos. Liberals love third worlders, but not enough to let them kill the bugs that are killing them.” I push him on one of the least successful aspects of the insurgency, the immigration issue. He frowns.
Bar none, repealing the citizenship process for those already underway was the dumbest decision we made during the Marlowe presidency. We stopped millions of illegals from turning into freshly minted Democrat voters. But we also managed to turn immigrants and their families from kind of disliking us into wanting to string us up by our balls.
We still haven’t fixed it. Yeah, it was a shitty law. Yeah, “immigration reform” was a scam and they passed it through fraud, but the damn illegals did what we told them to do and on the verge of citizenship we pulled out the rug. That’s going to kick us in the ass for decades.
We fought against the amnesty law—we fought hard. They called it the “HOPE Act,” but I’ll be damned if I can remember what the letters H-O-P-E stood for. I think the “H” was for “Helping” or some damn thing.
Of course the liberals were all for it—they expected that it meant a ton of new voters for the Dems, and they were right. Our polls were all crystal clear. Most of the illegals turned citizens would be voting Democrat pretty much forever. See, right there you would think that Republicans might oppose it, but you probably don’t remember the old establishment Republicans we were stuck with back in the 2010s when Obama and Hillary were around.
What pissed us off was the people in our own party who just wouldn’t look the facts in the face. Amnesty was a bill to create new Dem voters, straight up. But there were Republicans who supported it—a lot of them. I still don’t get it.
Some were big business types who just wanted more cheap workers and more customers. Wal-Mart was a huge behind-the-scenes backer. Others were these smug jerks who kept telling us how thought it was the “right thing to do.” When some politician tells me something is the “right thing to do,” it pegs my bullshit meter. You want to do the right thing? That all starts with beating the lib you’re running against. Period.
Amnesty was political suicide for the GOP, but that didn’t stop the establishment types. See, the old Republican establishment had this kind of suicide pact mentality where they felt honor bound to jump on a sword. Damn, the libs loved those mavericks—until, of course, the mavericks actually did something remotely conservative. Then they stopped being adorable mavericks and went back to being racist sexist homophobes who wanted to murder the homeless.
What really steamed us was how these squishes would try and act like we were some kind of racist haters whenever we brought up how having a few million people wander north into our country without permission and start taking government handouts bothered us. The American people like the rule of law, and illegals were, well, illegal. We were supposed to ignore that and act like we were in the wrong for caring?
Remember that one-term Cuban guy from Florida who everyone thought was going to be president? I actually helped out on his first campaign against this ex-Republican weirdo who became a Dem. Oh man, do I have stories about that guy. Anyway, that senator jumped on the amnesty bandwagon and just lied left and right to us. He told us it wasn’t amnesty and of course it was. He lost reelection mostly because we conservatives abandoned him, but when Hillary signed the amnesty bill he came back to DC. There are photos of him smiling behind her as she signed the bill. What a tool.
We hated that law, but the fact was that by the time we got into office a lot of people were using it to move towards citizenship. So, we had a choice about the facts on the ground. We could live with it and try and fix some of the problems, like how it didn’t build a fence, or we could repeal it. The problem with that was a lot of people were in the pipeline already. The law was terrible, but they were obeying it.
We decided to tank it. Without a filibuster—thanks Harry Reid!—repealing it was easy, and that’s what we did. But that left all these folks hanging—they’d started the process to become citizens and then we went and told them we’d changed our minds. Not surprising, they and their families were pretty pissed off at us.
Looking back, I think that after amnesty passed and they got invested in it, we should have switched strategies and fought for their votes. Instead, we now have this angry bunch of immigrant relatives who are citizens here that libs can use as a base to try and make a comeback down the road. They didn’t move as far right as the rest of the country over the years, partly because we had trouble reaching them through Spanish media. Of course, we’ve deported a fair number and with the border wall up there’s no more tidal wave coming north. Still, we kind of stepped in it with repealing amnesty. There were no good choices, and we chose the worst of them.
* * *
Rob Patel (President-Elect)
At the mention of immigration, the president-elect seems annoyed for the first time as he paces across the floor of his suite.
The whole “conservatives hate immigrants” thing always ticked me off. I mean, I’m part Indian, but not like Cherokee Indian! I’d have to hate my own family. And most of my family is Republican.
We have to understand some hard truths. First, America is the most conservative, which elsewhere would be liberal democratic, nation on Earth. We’ve gotten even more so over the last 20 years. Even the other English-speaking countries are to America’s left on almost every issue. So, just about anyone coming here is to the left of the American mainstream. The immigrants from developed countries are shocked by what they see as the lack of basic welfare state institutions, and the ones from the third world are used to various degrees of socialism. Sure, a few of the countries are trying out American-style reforms and hope to copy our success, but it’s a culture shock. So that immigrants usually start out on the left shouldn’t surprise anyone.
This is particularly true about Mexico, where another part of my family is from. Mexico should be a rich nation—it’s full of hard-working people and has great natural resources, but the fact is that the culture embraces a kind of socialist caudillo model where the government rules the people and not the other way around. A lot of Mexican and other Latin American immigrants get here and they bring the values of their homelands with them.
And when it comes to the role of government in people’s lives, those immigrants have a very different view than Americans. They think government should have a big role in people’s lives, and we constitutional conservatives don’t. It’s a tough challenge for us.
* * *
Javier Salazar (Immigrant Worker)
Salazar earned his citizenship after enlisting in the United States Air Force as a drone maintenance crewman, but many of his family members had their processes cancelled by the Marlowe administration.
I was furious. People were counting on citizenship. They’d just followed the law, even if they hadn’t in actually coming here.
But that wasn’t the only thing. I could never understand these conservatives. They seem to hate the government and want people left out on their own. That’s something I don’t believe in. I work hard, my family works hard, and we contribute. We aren’t lazy, but sometimes we need help and that help isn’t there from the government anymore. We used to have healthcare through the government and now I have to go find my own. I won’t ever vote for one of them.
* * *
Jack Archer (Democratic Strategist)
The retired Democratic strategist smiles.
We own the Latino immigrant vote forever. I mean, they never had a ch
ance at it in the first place. Even John McCain—remember him? His daughter has that awful talk show—anyway, he only got like 30 percent of the Hispanic vote and he was a liberal on the immigration issue. Boy, they sure took a bad situation and made it worse. Thanks, conservatives!
* * *
Ngo “Nate” Swazile (Immigrant Entrepreneur)
The legal Nigerian immigrant owns 20 cabs in New York City, something made possible by the deregulation of the industry over the last decade.
I will always be Republican. Always. Some say Republicans hate immigrants, but this is not so. They do not care. They leave us alone to make our own way. I do not need help and I do not need regulations that hurt my business. I just want to run my business.
I employ many people. They come from everywhere, and I tell them, “Today you drive a cab, but Allah willing someday you will have your own cabs if you work hard.” I tell them, “You must vote for the Republican at all times because the Republican will leave you alone to work and the Democrat will not. The Democrat will take your money and give you nothing back.”
* * *
Yitzhak Weitzman (Israeli Immigrant)
I met up with the noted novelist in a New York café, not far from his home in Manhattan. He was in downtown Tel Aviv on November 30, 2020, about two miles from ground zero. The left side of his face, the side facing the blast, still looks noticeably different. Blast burns are common in survivors—Weitzman calls them “the new camp tattoos.” They are a mark of resilience in the survivors and a mark of shame for those who allowed the atrocity to occur.
After aiding in the rebuilding, Weitzman left Israel for the United States at age 33. He won several awards for The Flash in the Sky, his novel about the attack. Like many American Jews, both new and old, he found himself surprised to be drawn to the constitutional conservatives.
I was a socialist, for all intents and purposes. And I felt that we Israelis were largely in the wrong. I was very active in the peace movement there, very active. When Obama essentially allowed the Iranians to get the bomb, I thought it would pressure Israel to make concessions for peace. In retrospect it is hard to understand, but the things the Iranians said about burning the Jews off the face of the Earth and such didn’t resonate. I chose not to believe them, as did Hillary Clinton obviously.
I was going to get breakfast when the bomb went off. The air raid siren went off and I looked up, more puzzled than frightened – when was the last time an enemy plane or even one of Hezbollah’s primitive rockets had broken through our air defenses? It did not occur to me – or, tragically, to the Mossad – that a pair of Russian officers would sell an advanced cruise missile to the mullahs.
There was a bright flash and then heat on my face. People ran and screamed. I looked off to the south. It exploded in the air on the outskirts of the city instead of over the government center where it was aimed—only the Iranians could miss a city with an A-bomb—and the fireball was rising.
I was stunned. I just stared and watched. I am lucky not to be blind. But what was even more shocking than the blast itself was what it did to me inside. In that blast, everything I had believed changed. I realized I had been a fool.
I was a peacenik one moment and then in the next I wanted bloody vengeance. I just assumed that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] would retaliate with its own A-bombs. But Clinton demanded we not do so and actually set the US Air Force against us. American stealth fighters shot down the planes carrying the retaliation strike to Teheran while they were over Saudi Arabia.
Clinton promised to make the Iranians pay, but even as our city burned and we were burying 30,000 of our people (ironically, many Arab-Israelis, since it detonated over the predominately Arab Jaffa section of town), we watched the news showing the Iranians laughing and singing, celebrating in their streets. Untouched, unpunished.
Clinton promised to make them pay. She would land American forces and take their vital facilities on the Persian Gulf coast and then, somehow the Iranian people would throw off the mullahs and all would be well. It was magical thinking, and for me it was especially painful because it was the kind of magical thinking I had indulged in my whole life up to that time.
There was no revolution, of course. The mullahs were not about to let that happen. Clinton had hollowed out your military to such an extent that it would have been difficult to sustain the operation even if she had not placed politically connected incompetents in command instead of warriors who would tell her hard truths. What credibility America had not already lost when it acted to stop Israel’s retaliation was gone as the invasion force retreated or surrendered.
I came to America near the middle of Clinton’s second term, in 2022, and I was surprised to find it a sadder, weaker nation than Israel. In Israel, the attack had brought us together, and in some ways made us stronger as a nation. But I found that Clinton’s America—which was supposed to be vibrant and rich and powerful and free—was none of those things. The economy was stagnant. There was no hope, just droning liberal propaganda about how the hard times and the government’s mistakes were the fault of others—of anyone but the liberals in power.
I expected a free exchange of ideas, but people warned me not to speak publicly about the failings of the Clinton administration. “You’ll get the IRS on you,” they said. “They’ll deport you. Keep quiet. Don’t make trouble.” This, in America!
I was never quiet when I was on the left and now, on the right, I was just as loud. I submitted an article to the New York Post, which printed it, to its great credit, even though it ran afoul of the noxious “Fairness Law” the liberals used to stifle dissent. It was called “Liberalism’s Betrayal of the Jews,” and it got a lot of attention. Unfortunately, I got a lot of attention too—they started trying to deport me, and I was fighting that in the courts until President Marlowe ended all the retaliatory administrative actions once she was inaugurated.
I argued that, as Jews, the constitutional conservatives were the only force in American politics we could put our trust in. The liberals, we had learned to our great sorrow, had no principles except the pursuit of power. If we Jews became inconvenient, we would be discarded—and we had been discarded.
But the constitutional conservatives believed in freedom and justice and not merely power—in fact, what I liked most about them was that so few seemed to want power. They seemed vaguely annoyed that the liberals had forced them to take time away from other endeavors to retake their country. And many of them were either Orthodox Jews or evangelical Christians—despite the leftist lies I had learned about these Gentiles as a young man, these religious Christians were our people’s greatest friends on Earth.
I found that constitutional conservatives were not seeing the world through the same hyperpoliticized lens that the liberals were. They had no political need to overlook the barbarism of Israel’s enemies. They knew an enemy when they saw it, where liberals never could—or rather, because of their ideology, refused to do so.
And constitutional conservatives felt no need to interfere with the lives of the people. For liberals, the personal was the political, and they felt compelled to insert themselves in every aspect of human existence. It was liberal cities and states where you would see petty harassments and insults like attempts to ban circumcision. It would never occur to a constitutional conservative that this was any of his business. In fact, they saw these progressive attempts to interfere with our sacrament as repugnant.
I found many of the American Jews I met politically and culturally confused. The bombing finally drove some out from under the heel of liberalism, but others couldn’t escape. They were too far in. It was too big a part of their identities. Most were secular, like me, and liberalism seemed to fill a void in them that religion would have in another age. Despite everything liberalism did to them, every failure and every betrayal, some simply could not reject it. But enough did that there is no longer a solid Democratic “Jewish vote” in American politics.
Chapter Four: Regula
r People
“I Was Just a Normal American Who Was Scared to Death”
The conservative insurgency was not fought by Washington insiders, though some played a part. Even if the people are sometimes led by a cadre, insurgencies are essentially of the people and by the people. These regular people activated and acted without centralized leadership, yet the synergy of their shared focus exponentially increased their power. But it was not only “ordinary” people or clichéd conservatives—liberalism and its appetite for total control of every aspect of life pushed nonconformists who would otherwise be leftists into the insurgency.
* * *
Sandy Crawford (Conservative Activist)
Underneath a portrait of a smiling Andrew Breitbart, Sandy Crawford pauses for a moment to take a phone call. It’s one of her grandchildren; she gives him some advice, then ends the call and returns to our talk.
My kids are why I did it, why I got involved. You have to understand. I was frightened for them and for my country. A lot of us were. Everything I had seen my parents work for was falling apart. The country was being changed into something I didn’t recognize, and something that seemed to hate normal people like me. I was just a normal American who was scared to death.
Obama came in promoting this “hope and change” crap. And it was crap—it was simply a power grab for coastal liberal elitists. He was elected right after Wall Street almost collapsed, or at least said it was about to collapse in order to get its bailout. The national debt was staggering. Prices were increasing, and the Democrats targeted us, the regular middle class folks, the only folks who by no stretch of the imagination were responsible for the crises he was claiming to be solving.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 8
