The whole nihilism thing with Hollywood was a dead end. You look at the television and movies of the 1960s through the 2010s, 50 years, and a lot of it was intensely cynical. It was supposed to be edgy not to believe in anything except the kind of vague liberal crap they spoon-fed us in schools and universities.
You would see that the conservatives were always the villains—always. Any kind of positive value was always faked, never sincere. If a religious person showed up, you just knew—there’s the villain. He’d be a hypocrite or worse. I always hated that kind of cheap cynicism. They never had anything better to offer; it was always about cutting down regular people and their traditions and values.
Yeah, I was conservative, but I was an artist first. I still am. And what I saw with this liberal lockstep thinking was boring and stupid product. So I decided I would rise within the system, get my own show, and do what I wanted. And I found that showing up smug liberals and their nonsense got this huge response.
Pretty soon other people were doing it. Now, I wasn’t the first. The real break came a few years before, when Obamacare totally tanked and a few—not all—of the late night comics turned on him. Until then he had been untouchable—no one would dare make a joke about him. But eventually there was enough of a payoff for being brave enough to take him on that at least a few couldn’t resist.
The lapdog comics and hosts who stuck by him and sucked up to him, well, they all went away. It wasn’t just that they were liberal. It was because you lose credibility when you try to be a man of the people and you can’t talk about what the people are talking about.
There was some direct action too. Some conservatives began to actively boycott liberal entertainment. Some liberal would say something horrible about conservatives in general, or more often make some disgusting comment about a conservative woman, and Twitter and Facebook and other social media would ignite. The conservatives would simply stop watching. Now, a niche show on one of the old cable networks could survive that, but on the big networks it was a real problem. Liberals would retaliate and urge their folks to tune in to counterbalance it, but it’s a lot easier to organize a view-out than a view-in, if you see what I mean.
So, it started becoming acceptable to joke about liberals, and joking about conservatives got to be kind of tired and hacky. Now, liberals are often the butt of jokes. They usually get portrayed as bitter, out of touch, and borderline delusional. Now, I’d argue that’s all absolutely true. Liberals are all those things and worse. I happen to think liberals are inherently funnier because they’re so obnoxious and their failures are so undeniable.
Are we doing to them what they did to us? I hope so. Look, I don’t buy the idea of equivalency. Liberalism is a failure—we lived through decades of it. It is opposed to freedom—we all saw how the liberals ignored the Constitution to keep power, even if it meant sticking some critics in jail. Liberalism makes people stupid, lazy, and weak. I’m all for it being mocked because it’s terrible.
But we conservatives have to make sure not to allow our new cultural power to turn us reactionary or allow us to fall prey to powerful interests. Power always corrupts, and I expect it will with us in the entertainment world—hell, I expect it will in the entire culture. This next generation is going to find fault with us, and that’s okay. I just hope the people who take us out when we get fat, lazy, and corrupt are more conservative than we are!
* * *
Jack Archer (Democratic Strategist)
When the retired Democratic strategist talks about the past, you can read the disappointment on his face. It was clear that at one time he believed in liberalism. It is not so clear that his current support for it is based on anything more than habit.
You need to understand something about Obama. He always—always—succeeded because his opponents screwed up. He waited for it. But the GOP made him be aggressive, and he just wasn’t that good at it. I wish our party today would stop “me tooing” them and start fighting them like they fought us!
But I don’t see that happening for a while. The Obamacare thing was really the first domino. It was so incompetently executed, and the fact was that if the Democrats had been upfront about how it was going to really turn everyone’s healthcare insurance upside down, it never would have passed. And then they just wouldn’t stop digging once they got into the hole. People would be upset and they would essentially tell them that they were too stupid to understand all the liberals were doing for them. Liberals had gotten away with a lot in the past, but you couldn’t deny what people saw with their own eyes.
And then Hillary comes in and tries to salvage all these programs that, while well intentioned, were just falling apart and becoming unsustainable. Not just Obamacare—Medicaid, food stamps, everything. All the while the economy is still tanking for everyone except the politicians’ rich friends on Wall Street. These were Democrats and they were cavorting with rich guys! How the hell was I supposed to spin that!
I was a strategist trying to find a way to win our campaigns. You know how hard it is to sell a product that stinks and that everyone knows stinks? In the 1950s it was the Ford Edsel. In the 1980s, New Coke. In the 2020s, the iPhone 19.
I don’t think the damn conservatives killed liberalism. I think liberals did by not being honest, competent liberals.
* * *
Michael Ambarian (Supreme Court Justice)
The justice ponders the activist conservative Supreme Court of today as he orders another pint of Guinness.
Do I have doubts about using the courts to promote a constitutional conservative agenda? Hell no. Not a one. Constitutional conservatism is about conserving the Constitution, not about substituting in the latest leftist legal fad du jour. There’s your difference.
We learned from Justice Roberts that when you play constitutional footsie with progressives, their foot kicks your ass. No, I have zero problem with activism in support of the Constitution. We ought to be more active in support of it.”
* * *
Roberta Klein (Conservative Activist/Attorney)
The renowned lawyer sums up the fight that took three decades of her career.
We never gave an inch—we fought attacks on free speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to be free of unreasonable searches. The thing about progressives is that, unlike us, these freedoms were always merely tools to use to batter their opponents. They never really held them as principles and never had a moment’s hesitation in abridging them once they had power.
But for constitutional conservatives, these were bedrock, core beliefs. And the American people saw who fought for them. In the minds of most Americans, constitutional conservatism became the ideology associated with freedom. And when you thought of progressivism, you thought of the smug bureaucrat who denied your request for a doctor’s appointment.
* * *
Billy Coleman (Activist)
Billy has shopping to do—at a midsized grocery store whose owner he has known since high school. He picks up his hemp shopping bag and leaves me with a thought.
Might Walmart come back someday? Kind of up to it. If it wants to play by the same rules as everyone else, it’s welcome to try. But the days when a corporation can use the government to crush the little guy and erase the competition, well, those days are over.
I gotta get my shopping done and get back to the farm—my cows won’t milk themselves.
* * *
Ted Jindal (Technology Consultant)
The master technologist activates the HP holograph monitor and gestures toward it with evident pride, as well as evident concern.
This is our encrypted database. It has everyone we know or believe is a constitutional conservative, and we interact with them constantly. There’s a phenomenon we call “tech exhaustion” where a person gets tired of constant contact over social media, but we see surprisingly little of it. Most conservatives have learned you have to watch these bastards like hawks, and we do t
hat for them and pass them the info they need to stamp out liberalism wherever is raises its pointy little head. They learned the hard way—if you aren’t engaged, the bad guys still will be.
* * *
Brad Fields (Insurance Salesman)
Brad has to take a call from a client, but leaves me with some final thoughts.
I feel like today we have the country that the Founders promised us. Some people are angry because there’s no more free lunch. I say, “Great!” Government is supposed to protect people and allow them to live their lives freely, not to subsidize deadbeats.
You know what I want from the federal government? A military that can kill our enemies, guards on our borders to make sure you can’t come in without an invitation, and not a helluva lot else. If it isn’t in the Constitution, the federal government has no business doing it. Period.
But most of all, it needs to leave me and my family alone.
* * *
Sammy Honda (Hollywood Producer)
The valet glides the Ford Ventura up to us as we wait on the curb. Honda is so busy talking to me that he doesn’t notice, but then again it’s electric so the producer probably didn’t even hear it. A few decades ago, no one in Tinseltown would have been caught dead driving an American car, but Ford’s refusal to be bailed out and the massive technological advances that came about after Marlowe’s deregulation initiatives during the 2020s and 2030s put the venerable automaker back on top as the car the Tinseltown players drive—or, rather, ride in while the auto-drive sweeps them to their destinations.
The valet waits with the door open as Honda finishes telling me about his next project.
I’m making a movie about the Iranian War. Lots of action, but with a message, you know? That message is, don’t be a punk if you’re president!
It’s going to really drill the libs. It’s written by this Gallegos guy who fought in it. It’s harsh. It shows how Clinton and her gang talked big, got our boys to hang their asses out over the line, then left them hanging. It never could have been made before.
* * *
Flamenco (Performance Artist)
With a performance happening in a half hour, the artist talks to me while changing into an outfit consisting of a pink skullcap, a leather jacket, and what the artist describes as an “enqueered Lebanese kilt.”
Flamenco cares nothing for politics now. Flamenco does not need to. Flamenco pays some of Flamenco’s income in taxes, Flamenco is left alone. This is the way it should be.
Government should be off in the background, out of our lives—though Flamenco always votes, and for the most conservative candidate. Without interference by bossy liberals, Flamenco can concentrate on new projects. Currently, Flamenco is examining identity issues by rejecting the use of the first person in everyday speech.
* * *
Gail Partridge (Leftist Show Host)
Partridge fulminates, enraged that the progressive world of 2013 has morphed into her own version of hell in 2041.
This isn’t my country anymore. People like me get no say at all. People are doing whatever they want, with no guidance, no leadership, totally out of control. You call that freedom?
True freedom is freedom from having to do everything for yourself. I think people will miss when we had a government that took the load off their shoulders, a government that let people with some education make decisions instead of just anyone.
Supposedly everyone is making money today, but why are we only discussing material issues? What about morality? When Obama was president, yes, we had a few problems, but we were a moral country. Now, someone like me who wants to put progress in motion gets laughed at. It shameful.
I love what this country was 30 years ago, but I hate it today. America doesn’t deserve liberalism!
Epilogue
The following is newly sworn in President Robert Manuel Patel’s inauguration speech, given on January 20, 2041, in its entirety:
My fellow Americans, we gather here today to continue our work to fulfill the vision of the Founding Fathers. As such, upon today taking office as president of the United States, I shall be brief, for the responsibilities of the federal government as set forth in our Constitution are few.
We have come far as a nation, yet we have truly come full circle. After over a century of misguided expansion of the role of the federal government, thinking this would make us more prosperous and free, we instead found ourselves much less prosperous and much less free. Today, embracing the principles of the Founders, our nation once again stands above all other nations in terms of material wealth and military power, but most importantly, in terms of freedom.
For without freedom, wealth simply means life inside a gilded cage. That is not a fit life for any American.
The Constitution clearly sets forth my duties and the limits upon my authority. I shall endeavor to perform those duties to the best of my ability, and no others. Under our system of limited government, a president who does more than the enumerated duties our Constitution sets forth is as great a failure as one who fails to carry out his enumerated duties.
I shall lead the executive branch and see that it faithfully carries out its duties under the Constitution and the laws promulgated under its authority—all of the laws, not merely those I pick and choose according to my whims and my own short-term political interests.
I shall endeavor to make the executive branch ever smaller but ever more efficient, and to ensure that its employees understand that their ultimate accountability is to the citizens.
I shall lead the military as the commander in chief, a great and grave responsibility. Our military has once again assumed its rightful place as the most powerful in the world, but its true distinction remains that the United States military is the greatest agent of peace, freedom, and justice in all of human history.
The protection of our nation is properly the president’s most important duty, and the fighting men and women who stand between us and our enemies—for we must never again delude ourselves into believing that we have no enemies—will always be foremost in my mind.
But what I shall not do as president is presume to lead you. Nowhere in the Constitution is the president denominated the “leader” of the nation; he or she is only an executive with carefully defined responsibilities for certain specified and limited parts of federal government. I am not, and do not propose to be, your guide, your teacher, or your master. The president is not a ruler; he is a servant, an employee hired by you, our citizens, to perform certain tasks. He is nothing more.
As a nation, we once forgot that. We chose to look not to ourselves but to a remote potentate cloistered in his imperial chambers in the capital to provide the guidance we should have sought within ourselves or from our Creator.
And some presidents, human beings with human weaknesses, came to believe that they had not merely the ability but the right to rule their fellow citizens.
No president rules any American. An American citizen is free, with rights granted by his Creator. Through the Constitution, the citizens grant the government certain powers, but no more than are clearly enumerated.
You, the American citizen, by right, rules the president. Now, once again you do, and for as long as I am your president, you will.
May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.
Afterword
“I have not yet begun to fight!”
—Captain John Paul Jones, United States Navy
We built this country. We fought for it. It’s ours, and we’re taking it back.
The fight to take back America from the progressives will not be just a battle, or even a campaign. It will be a figurative war, and a long one. We need to understand that returning America to what it should be will take a generation, maybe two, and especially in the early years we will face defeat after defeat.
And there will be thuggery—threats, intimidation, even minor violence—committed by our enemies against us, designed to silence us. We are s
eeing that already. They ignore laws, rules, and traditions when it suits them—even when they can be seen on video vehemently arguing the now inconvenient contrary position.
They lie to our faces and tell us we’re stupid for having believed them. They convert the word “period” from meaning “no exceptions” into an all-purpose asterisk that converts whatever they say into whatever they happen to need it to mean at any given moment.
We need to be tough enough to accept all this, to face the challenge as it is and not as we wish it to be. If we are, we will grow strong enough to prevail in this struggle.
Today, we constitutional conservatives are the minority faction of a minority party—many of our opponents are those supposedly on our side, who call themselves “conservatives” back home at election time, then come to Washington and gleefully vote to sustain and expand the hideous, soul-killing welfare state and its attendant pathologies.
These pseudocons—call them “moderates,” “squishes,” “RINOs,” or “Lindseys”—hate us even more than they hate the liberals. We seek their removal; the liberals are content to let them enjoy a few perks as the loyal opposition, so long as they manifest that loyalty by not actually opposing anything. So we, not the real enemy, are their target.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 24
