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Colonel Jeremy Denton, US Army (Ret.) (Insurgency Expert)
Nothing succeeds like success, and one of the keys to a successful insurgency is successfully governing in the liberated areas outside the control of the powerful central government. You have to demonstrate that the alternative works or the people—who are what you need to be focused on—won’t be with you.
We had that in our insurgency. We had the red states with conservative governors showing that we weren’t incompetent, and at the same time letting us build strength for the fight. They were our liberated territory.
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Tamara Hayes Smith (Professor/Activist)
Thanks to the wisdom of the Founders and their recognition of the sovereignty of the states, we had an essential sanctuary where conservative ideas could flourish. And, critically, it demonstrated to a dubious national electorate that the constitutional conservatives were competent and capable of governing.
Our opponents faced a daunting problem because the states we controlled—a slight majority—continued to improve and prosper while their blue state neighbors continued to spin around the toilet bowl, awaiting the inevitable moment when their profligate spending pulled them down the drain. The Illinois bankruptcy was one example—Hillary bailed it out, which cost her greatly politically because it was so unpopular, but then California followed and that was much worse.
Look at California, hamstrung by its own liberal incoherence. The rich liberals on the coast who controlled it, with the assent of the mass of poor and generally hopeless, had managed to take a state packed with incredible riches and essentially write off any industry that focused on exploiting those resources. California guzzled power, but it outsourced the dirty work of generating that power out of state. So red states that did use their resources got paid by California, a state with even greater, but untouched, resources.
California was a huge engine for growth and opportunities, but liberalism didn’t just kill the goose that laid the golden egg. It killed the whole flock. By the 2010s, what manufacturers remained in California (they had been leaving in droves for a decade already) faced new and even more ridiculous rules designed to address the global warming scam. These rules crushed manufacturing and transportation sectors and drove them east. The Golden State, suffocating under unfunded pension liabilities for an army of do-nothing, layabout government drones and run by and for the benefit of their unions, was pretty much doomed.
Who wanted to come to California? The drive into the state over the crumbling freeways was tough enough but once you got there, there was nothing for you. There were no jobs, and the land use rules limited housing so there was hardly any to be had without paying a king’s ransom. But even if you managed to earn a king’s ransom, it was taken from you by some of the highest taxes in the country.
California became a state with a huge number of welfare recipients, a few megamillionaires, and a dwindling middle class. That was a recipe for disaster.
If you were young and wanted to succeed, you had to go someplace like Texas. Low taxes, a reasonable standard of living, fewer plaintiff lawyers. Sure, for a while California dominated a few industries, but emerging technology meant industries like high tech and entertainment could function seamlessly anywhere. Is it any wonder these businesses went where they treated business well—the conservative states?
Hollywood became less a center of production than the place movie stars came back to after shooting their projects elsewhere so the paparazzi could find them and give them free publicity.
Now, a lot of people in this country weren’t very bright—look at how they voted. However, few were insane. Some people voted for Democrats in the blue states because they actually thought that liberal governance worked. But many were also willing to change their minds when they compared disasters like Obamacare at the federal level and the blue state bankruptcies with good, solid governance in red states like Utah and Texas. The liberal partisans were actually a fairly small group, a hard core of maybe 20 percent of the population. The rest of the people who voted for liberals were the ones the liberals could only fool some of the time.
Sure, the blue states resisted change. They had to—for many liberals, government paid the bills. In California, they had to see the Four Horsemen of the Liberal Apocalypse galloping down Sunset Boulevard to reform.
Now, in the meantime, those banjo-strumming barbarians in the Lone Star State were raking in the cash. People weren’t blind. They picked up on things like success—especially when they saw their tax money siphoned away to provide babysitting services for the illegitimate children of struggling performance artists. Seriously, that happened. And conservatives in California made a huge deal about it when they were fighting to turn the Golden State red again.
Providing a virtuous example to contrast with the cautionary example of the blue states was just one key function of the conservative states. Another was to be the vaunted laboratories of democracy we heard so much about in high school government courses. Bobby Jindal and other governors were out there cooking up all sorts of ideas—like eliminating the income tax—that were blueprints for success elsewhere. And successes in the red states made reform at the federal level easier—there was a track record of success our candidates could point to.
There was another benefit—the farm team. The GOP was plagued with far too many candidates who couldn’t seem to generate the intellectual wattage of a pile of used car batteries. Those geniuses were a real problem. The states offered a great training ground for new talent—and a way to separate the quality wheat from the chaff.
Then there was the matter of the power to make law at the state level. This was huge. Remember, we were in a cultural struggle, and much of it took place at the local level. We conservatives started with some of the obvious stuff. The basis of a conservative society is marriage and family. The feds wanted to tear those institutions apart—they’re a huge enemy to those who want to remake mankind. So we doubled down on supporting them at the state level.
The liberals wanted single-parent families. Back from the Marxist/Frankfurt School days, the left had an ideological predisposition to hate traditional families—they saw them as vehicles of resistance to state power. They also rightly saw them as institutions that reinforced conservative values. Poll after poll showed that Democrats had huge support from single mothers, for example, while marriage and family correlated with the GOP. Liberals wanted to take the place of fathers and husbands. We had to reverse that.
We reformed taxes and other benefits to favor married couples starting in the states. Later, we would bring these reforms to the federal level. We wanted the default condition for adults to be half of a married couple. The default was on the way to being hungover man-children who spent their days playing Call of Duty video games and watching Internet porn. Conservatives increased the tax deductions for married couples, eliminated marriage penalties, and actually set a marriage advantage. Then they added tax credits for kids.
This sounds kind of harsh to those singles, but why should immaturity be subsidized? We wanted young people to move on from adolescence, not have the people who did grow up bankroll those who wouldn’t. It was and is the families who make the country run, not the players and bimbos who enjoyed the benefits of a stable society they undercut. Plus, since singles tended to vote for Democrats, conservatives felt that when it comes to choosing who gets screwed, choose the other side.
It was called hardball. The conservatives learned that lesson well after having the Obama administration jam liberalism down its throat on straight party line votes. They learned to reward their friends and punish their enemies. A lot of liberals very sadly reaped what they had sown once Carrie Marlowe was elected.
And the states were a great place to pursue our struggle against various institutions that had joined up with liberals to shaft our society. Universities were a very inviting target. Many depended on state governments, and it never occurred to them that tho
se conservative state governments might not feel like continuing to subsidize the liberal tumors in their midst. They had to adapt, meaning turn rightward or starve. They chose not to starve.
Trial lawyers were another funding source for the left. The red states found that tort reform was not only good policy but a great way to starve the plaintiffs’ bar. When that big trial lawyer had a cash crunch and had to choose between another diamond for Mrs. Third Wife and sending a check to the Democratic National Committee, guess who got paid?
And the red state governments targeted the unions, those evergreen funders of liberal pathologies. Michigan and Indiana became right-to-work states early on. Others followed. This dried up Democratic funding in the red states but also had the effect of making unionization less competitive in the blue states. After all, when their businesses couldn’t compete, the unions would go under. And every time a union shop closed its doors, the Democrats got weaker and the conservatives got stronger.
Oh, and the red state bans on public employee unions were a huge victory. Banning them cut costs, improved the schools, and crippled the Democrats. It was political advantage overlapping good policy. The federal government followed suit—President Marlowe signed the law ending the right of federal employees to unionize.
They also wisely locked in their success with improvements to election security. The liberals used to scream bloody murder about voter ID, as if millions of voters couldn’t come up with identification. It was a scam—they needed, desperately, the ability to cheat. Voter ID helped stop that. So did tougher penalties for voter fraud, with an increased focus on the inner city elections where most election fraud happened.
The conservatives were pretty ruthless once they took control, but they had learned their lesson. If you don’t fight to win, you fight to lose, and this was political warfare. Successful insurgents can’t waste time playing patty-cake.
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Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
Marlowe, advised by McCoy, first came to prominence in her fights with the Clinton administration over federal gun laws. The Anti-Violence Control Act sought to limit private ownership of weapons following the newly majority liberal Supreme Court’s ruling that there was no individual right to keep and bear arms. This decision, Bloomberg v. NRA, was overturned by the Thirtieth Amendment in 2028, reaffirming the fundamental right of mentally competent, law-abiding citizens to carry weapons for the defense of themselves, their family, their community, and the Constitution.
As Florida’s governor, Carrie Marlowe stunned the political world by snagging the GOP nomination in 2024. She made no bones about her constitutional conservatism. None, and that was something new. No more establishment losers getting the GOP nomination. We constitutional conservatives had finally reached the big game.
As governor, she slashed the Florida state budget while other states teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, and she slashed taxes as well. Just chopped it. We called Florida “an island of commonsense prosperity in a sea of liberal despair” in our ads. Drove the libs nuts. She also built a coalition of citizens concerned about personal liberty by suing the feds over the Obamacare health info leaks against Clinton opponents in Florida.
And she royally pissed off Hillary by refusing to allow any Florida agency to cooperate with the feds in enforcing the Anti-Violence Control Act. It didn’t get as bad as it did in Texas, thank God, but it was a defining moment. Yeah, Hillary hated her, so Carrie knew she was doing all right!
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Sandy Crawford (Conservative Activist)
Say you lived in California, and you’re being taxed to support a dependent class while prices are going up because of regulations and your dreams for you and your family are denied. Then, you look across the border at Arizona and it is everything California is not—prosperous, free, a place of opportunity—and, moreover, conservatives are constantly pointing that out.
Eventually, the contradictions get heightened, and combined with a real effort at grassroots organization to take back the GOP, suddenly conservatism became viable again even in the bluest states.
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Roberta Klein (Conservative Activist/Attorney)
We tied Obamacare up in knots, and with help from conservative state governments that refused to cooperate, we set the stage for repeal.
State governments were key, creating state laws that allowed us to litigate for conservative change at the state level. New university diversity and free speech laws allowed faculty and students to go to court more effectively to challenge progressive campus speech codes, unfair disciplinary codes, and discrimination against conservatives. These spurred huge changes.
Before, that kind of petty progressive tyranny was cost-free. Now, a winning student or aspiring faculty member could go to state court and win not only an injunction but substantial money damages and attorney’s fees. With the states giving us these tools, we could start the larger cultural fight.
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Darcy Mizuhara McCullough (Former Missouri Governor)
That I was the first Asian-American governor of Missouri, and a woman, just made the liberals crazy. They were offended that I wasn’t buying into what they were selling. Why would I? I could see the results. California used to be the Golden State, but companies were leaving there as fast as they could pack. The only folks left were people on welfare and super rich liberals.
Oh, they were furious when I’d run ads in Los Angeles and Chicago and in the Bay Area telling companies to come to Missouri. Our slogan was, “Missouri: We Appreciate You.” They hated it. I loved it! And we never let up on them.
When I was running, I told Missourians to look around, that they had a choice. They could make this a booming red state like Texas or Louisiana, or go down the drain like blue California and Illinois. They looked, and they chose red and me!
We used the Republican Governors Association as a way to exchange ideas about new policies and reforms, and we worked with think tanks and grassroots groups to develop them and share them. You saw liberal Washington trying to increase taxes, and blue states too, while we cut them. We pushed right-to-work laws and reformed government employment practices in our states, and things improved.
The voters in the blue states started wondering why they were falling behind, and then they started to see that in blue states the governments were by, for, and about public employee unions and entitlement recipients. And they started to get tired of it. Who wants to slave away at a job to make sure some DMV clerk who retired at 42 gets another $200 a month in his pension?
We also gerrymandered—hell, we redistricted mercilessly in 2020. We learned from liberals that this game was for keeps, and that’s how we played. See, at first we could only play defense in DC, but in the states we could grow and learn and prove ourselves and conservatism to the American people, who had frankly started to doubt us. Having safe havens in the states was critical to our comeback.
What was most important about having the states was the comparison it provided, our success through conservatism versus their blue failure. Sure, the media tried to poke holes in what we were doing—60 Minutes must have done a dozen sob stories on how mean we were to poor people. Except it backfired on them.
They thought they had me when I was interviewed about ‘hungry people without jobs” in St. Louis and I said, “If you won’t work, you should be hungry. You need to go out and support yourself.” My ratings went up eight points the week after that aired!
Chapter Eight: Big Money
“A Few Rich Guys Made a Huge Difference”
Much of the heavy lifting of the conservative insurgency was done by regular people acting in their own communities, but the contributions of a number of wealthy businessmen—not only in terms of cash but in business savvy and contacts—helped the movement tremendously. Liberals fixated on these “suspicious donors,” and many found themselves targeted by activists, the media, and even government bureaucrats for daring to conf
ront the establishment.
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Dan Stringer (Billionaire CEO/Activist)
The vilified tycoon is outspoken about his views and how he went for the throat against the liberal establishment that hated him.
The leftists used to say that our dad, and then me and my brother, bought and paid for the entire conservative revival. But I think our contribution was less in quantity than quality. We used a rigorous cost-benefit approach—where could we send money to maximize our return? We sought the most bang for the buck, as it were.
Some of the big conservative institutions—think tanks, magazines, and other groups—had gotten fat and lazy on easy money from big donors. We demanded measurable results. I remember one bunch of consultants wanted a zillion bucks for some technological get-out-the-vote program. The guy had a wonderful presentation using the latest software—holograms and everything. My brother Dave vectored in a couple of software guys to analyze the plan. It was shit. We passed. Some other rich guy funded it. A great presentation and then a million bucks, down the toilet.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 15
