A Whisper to the Conservative Movement

A wake-up call to conservative donors that we need to do things differently going forward.

by Bernie Marcus for American Greatness

America is in a state of decline, if not chaos, following disappointing results in three straight elections and too many years of organized turmoil in our streets, schools, government institutions, and elsewhere. Reversing this requires fundamental changes in conservatives’ political and philanthropic strategies.

Change at the margins is not enough—not with inflation at 50-year highs; rampant crime in our streets; military preparedness and our children’s education compromised at the altar of wokeness; social experimentation occurring in our schools without parental knowledge; protection of our southern border having collapsed; government and large corporations coordinating censorship of certain viewpoints; and weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI.

Against this backdrop, it is stunning that Republicans were unable to win a majority in the Senate and only able to win a slim majority in the House in last year’s midterms. This must serve as a wake-up call to conservative donors that we need to do things differently going forward. Fortunately, a growing number of conservative donors now realize this and are asking the appropriate questions: “Where did Republicans fall short in the midterms?” “Are there more effective strategies than those we now use?” and “Are there more effective consultants and organizations than those we currently fund?”

Republicans fell short in last year’s midterms because Democrats had four distinct advantages. First, the effectiveness of Democrats’ absentee-ballot, ballot-harvesting, and early-voting programs. Second, the tone-deaf messages of Republican candidates and information operations about the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Third, young voters continuing to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Fourth, suburban women not voting Republican in the same numbers as they did in 2016.

Democrats gained these advantages through 24-month integrated strategies between elections while conservatives pursued disparate, often ineffective, tactics and then backloaded our spending to the 90-day run-up to elections. Democrats fully fund and work continuously on the mechanics of elections—absentee-ballot, early-voting, vote-by-mail, and ballot-harvesting programs—to tilt elections in their favor. Conservatives must compete more effectively on election mechanics going forward.

Through their control of the levers of power in education, the media, and entertainment, Democrats also work continuously on the “long game” by developing the narratives they believe will transform America’s culture and shape election outcomes. George Soros and others like him have spent staggering sums over the past 20 years validating their belief about the impact of narratives and have funded a “liberal ecosystem” for this purpose. The results speak for themselves. Conservatives must compete more effectively in the long game. To this end, a small group of conservative donors funded the development of a “conservative ecosystem” to push back against the liberal ecosystem.

Conservatives must also compete more effectively for the hearts and minds of the “magic middle”—swing voters who decide elections. Reaching and persuading swing voters requires different messengers, messages, and message amplification than those conservatives currently employ. In the context of charter schools, for example, the most influential messengers are the parents and children who have lost out in school lotteries because of Democratic policies limiting the number of charter schools. This strategy borrows a page from progressives’ playbook about actual victims of bad government policy telling their stories. Most effective are the stories told by these children and their parents that tug at the heartstrings of the target audiences.

Broader message amplification requires reaching the magic middle where they live, and they do not live on conservative talk radio or television. The conservative ecosystem was developed for this purpose.

There is more work ahead of us than I have shared here. My hope is that this will start a broader conversation about the fundamental changes that must be made to preserve our freedoms and ensure prosperity for future generations. We owe this to our children and grandchildren.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- June 11

 

I doubt if this bit of advice will be taken seriously given the amount of fights that occur here every day, but I'll say it anyway given what I've witnessed in the past week with a few of my friends:

If you're feuding with someone over something stupid or petty, and you happen to both be conservatives, please find a way to peacefully and maturely work out your issues that doesn't end with words being said that can't be taken back, or friendships ending because either of you were too childish or stubborn to try to act like an adult to listen.

Believe me, neither of you want to be in a situation where you have to play peacemaker in a fight where all of the fighters are people you consider to be your friends, and you try your hardest to give out good advice to try to see if you can get the harassers to listen to reason, and the end result is you get harped on because well, they want to act like petty children instead of adults!! And then you end up losing good friendships because the harassers refuse to listen to reason and would be bitter and petty than try to be reasonable.

It's extremely disheartening, and makes you wonder what would cause good people to ever want to start such a ridiculous fight between other good conservatives. Do good people really just wake up one day and suddenly decide to start fights between other good people who are supposed to be on the right side of history?

Try to actually keep good friendships instead of letting them be tossed away so easily by a petty argument. There's enough shit happening right now as it is, and we're supposed to get through it together instead of breaking apart. (and also pray that neither of your friends just 1 day, snap)

Can Trump Clean The Augean Stables on the Potomac?

Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is as corrupt as Hunter Biden’s laptop. Few people of either party trust it, nor should they.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

There is a reason that, since before the time of the emperor Tiberius, treason trials have been a favorite tool of totalitarians. Such proceedings allow them to get rid of nearly anyone they dislike. Successfully brand someone a “traitor,” an “enemy of the state,” and, bang, into the oubliette they go. 

I think the treason trial is the appropriate heuristic for what is happening, and what has been happening to Donald Trump ever since 2015 when he descended the escalator. 

The charge that Trump was “Putin’s poodle,” a “Russian asset,” etc., during the Russia collusion hoax was a sort of treason trial. And remember how elaborate it all was, a veritable glass onion, thanks in large part to Hillary Clinton, whose campaign concocted, paid for, and disseminated the infamous fantasy “dossier” fabricated by former MI6 spook Christopher Steele. And it was Hillary, remember, who first broadcast the charge that servers in Trump Tower were secretly communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank. The Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services—all were in on that game. 

Trump’s two impeachments were episodes in the long-running treason trial, as was Liz Cheney’s January 6 show trial, as are the still unfolding series of indictments that have dogged his footsteps with increasing ferocity as the 2024 election looms and Trump’s poll numbers stubbornly refuse to recede. 

A lot of legal hermeneutical ingenuity has been lavished on the current criminal indictment, a 37-count blockbuster revolving around charges that Trump mishandled classified documents he had stuffed away at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach. I think those analyses are mostly beside the point, so much wasted foolscap. The indictment, which histrionically relies heavily on the 1917 Espionage Act, is, when looked at with a sufficiently jaundiced eye, an amusing performance. Macbeth would have said it was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

You, dear reader, know differently. You know it is the latest writ of attainder pronounced against Trump by the regime. 

For what, when you come down to it, is Trump’s crime? Please don’t tell me it has something to do with his possession of classified documents or “obstruction” of an official proceeding. Former presidents have very wide latitude with respect to managing documents, as was set forth explicitly by the Presidential Records Act in the late 1970s. 

It’s a different matter with the 1,800 boxes of documents that Joe Biden glommed onto in his days in the Senate and as vice president. I believe they are still moldering under his Corvette in the garage of his Delaware residence, having wound up there after a trip through D.C.’s Chinatown and the Penn Biden Center, a facility paid for, as was Biden’s $900,000 stipend at the University of Pennsylvania, by China. 

This is the moment we return to Hillary Clinton and her “home-brew” email server through which she ran all manner of classified correspondence. According to disgraced former FBI Director James “Higher Loyalty” Comey, “no reasonable prosecutor” would go after Hillary, even though she deleted thousands of emails and destroyed mobile phones and hard drives after being subpoenaed. 

If you are hearing the winds murmur “two-tier system of justice” you are not imagining things. Donald Trump, as president, could declassify anything he wished. Neither Joe Biden nor Hillary Clinton had that authority. Yet Trump has to show up in Court on Tuesday to face criminal charges, while Hillary and (so far) Joe Biden skate. 

I say “so far” with respect to Biden because things are heating up for the Senescent One. Margot Cleveland, writing at The Federalist, noted the curious timing of the Trump indictment: “The news of the indictment quickly suffocated coverage of a confidential human source’s claim that the Ukrainian founder of Burisma had paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden.” Hmm.

Nothing to see here, gents, move along please. 

But Cleveland is right. “The entire case [against Trump] was a set-up from the start.” Yet one wonders, set up by whom? And what was the supposed predicate? I ask again, what was Trump’s crime? 

I think it was a dual manifestation of one crime. His original sin, his unforgivable or eternal sin, was being elected president in 2016. The regime endeavored to expiate that sin by hampering Trump, then by impeaching him. But here he is, persisting in his folly, seeking to commit the same tort again. Conclusion: he must be destroyed. Hence the treason trial masquerading as a legitimate judicial proceeding.

Reflecting on the latest chapter in the tale we might call “The Persecution of Donald Trump,” the Wall Street Journal noted that this is “a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President.”

Donald Trump is currently, and by a large margin, the front runner of the opposition party in the 2024 presidential campaign. The party in power is attempting to silence him, to take him out of the running, by mobilizing the police power of the state against him. This is the sort of thing one expects from banana-republic regimes in Africa and Central America. It could never happen, one would have said only a few years ago, in America. 

But here we are. The indictment against Trump was formally brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. But the Journal is right. Smith is just an errand boy. “Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment,” they noted, “and they are right to think so.”

Indeed. Elon Musk, no fan of Trump’s, put his finger on an essential element in this saga: “There does seem,” he wrote on June 8, responding to the indictment, “to be far higher interest in pursuing Trump compared to other people in politics.” 

How’s that for understatement? Almost as good, I’d say, as his deployment of the future tense in his follow-up sentence: “Very important that the justice system rebut what appears to be differential enforcement or they will lose public trust.”

That ship has sailed, I regret to say. Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is as corrupt as Hunter Biden’s laptop. Few people of either party trust it, nor should they. What we need now is a bold new Hercules who can cleanse the Augean stables on the Potomac. It seems unlikely, I know, and perhaps supremely ironical, but the name of that cleansing hero may just be Donald J. Trump. 

Patriots Do Not Flinch

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

We are patriots engaged in a battle of consequence!

We are the workforce.

We are also digital warriors, meme creators, artists, researchers, autists and ordinarily invisible people now considered dissidents in our own country.

We are the backbone of industry, the people who keep it all functioning, the builders, diggers and blue-collar workforce that keeps everything functioning.

We are the people they will never fully control.  We speak in languages they do not understand, and we absorb targeted ridicule as fuel.

We are the movers of goods, the truckers, the farmers, the nameless people behind the skilled trades that keep what they call American society moving.

We are the people who grow the food, pick the food, transport the food, stock the food, cook the food and facilitate the life they live.

We are a visible, yet disregarded, insurgent force within their sphere of life that is never considered, yet we control the outcomes of every moment they value.

We pick up the trash, answer the phones, run cables to their devices, mow their lawns, solve their problems, control the flow of essential services and keep our heads below the radar.

We are the majority.

We are a self-reliant, freedom loving, normally peaceful and God-fearing assembly.

We drive them to their destination; we are comfortably out of mind until needed, and yet we are irreplaceable for the things they require.

We are armed with tools, hammers, pens, rulers, mice, pickup trucks, laptops, post-it notes, stickers and alternate forms of messaging that circumvent the control mechanisms deployed to create our silence.

We are inside every facility, every institution, every meeting, every moment of their existence – and we notice everything.

We have eyes of mice and ears of elephants.  We are there when they do not expect, and we melt away before they notice our appearance.

We are smart, strategic, highly intelligent and carry a brutally obvious and pragmatic common sense that finds optimal solutions to everything.

We identify our tribe immediately and without conversation.

We see what they hide, we hear what they whisper, we decipher their codes, and we understand the complexity they create in their effort to conceal.

We control the physical world that operates around every element of society, and we value real and tangible assets.

We do not sit around pontificating eloquently about philosophic nuances; we get shit done.

We are the people who facilitate their ability to take us for granted, and we do so without issue, resentment or desire for recognition.

We are optimistic, affable, kind, generous, friendly, loyal, warm and quietly spiritual in purpose.

We are polite, considerate and slow to anger.

We prefer to be left alone.  However, pushed entirely far enough, decisions are reached.  Right now, we are tenuously staring with deepened gaze.

We are increasingly pissed off…. Big Time!

In every town, village and hamlet we are encountering the same conversation.  On every porch, in every shop, at every event, the topic is the same.

Right now, we are taking this fury to the platforms of visibility where we hope to influence outcomes.  But if that effort fails, and/or if the command-and-control authorities make the mistake of thinking they can shut down our visibility, destroy our leadership and therefore control the dissent, there will be no quarter provided in the aftermath.

The two biggest mistakes they can make right now is not understanding why we have begun to bow our heads.

First, our heads are not bowed because we are subservient, cowering or accepting the current effort to control us….

….We are praying!

Their second mistake would be to ignore that we are not praying for us…

….We are praying for those who trespass against us!

They may not like what follows, “Amen!”

We are resolute and of common purpose.

We are what they fear!

 

New Gallup Poll Debunks Myth Of Inevitable Left-Wing Cultural Change

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist 

A new Gallup poll out Thursday reveals a shift toward social conservatism not seen in more than a decade.

According to Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey conducted May 1-24, social conservatism is entering a renaissance in the United States. With an 8-point jump in the last two years, 38 percent of respondents identified as “very conservative/conservative” on social issues, the highest level since 2012. Just 29 percent claimed to be “very liberal/liberal.”

“The increase in conservative identification on social issues over the past two years is seen among nearly all political and demographic subgroups,” Gallup reported. “The survey comes at a time when many states are considering policies regarding transgender matters, abortion, crime, drug use and the teaching of gender and sexuality in schools.”

It also comes at a time when leftists have, respectfully, lost their minds. The glorification of transgender interventions for children and the guarantee of abortion-on-demand have become hallmarks of the left-wing cultural agenda that alienates Americans.

A new poll out from Summit.org with McLaughlin and Associates in October found that 75 percent, or 3 in 4 Americans, agreed the transgender movement has “gone too far.” This year’s pride month included a clothing line designed by a literal satanist and pro-trans apparel for children. If the polls are in doubt, take a look at Target’s stock in free fall.

Meanwhile, laws passed by Republican legislatures to protect children from the permanent procedures promoted by radical trans activists have provoked left-wing insurrections and other demonstrations at state Capitols across the country, including Tennessee, Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

A more recent poll from The Washington Post published just last month forced the paper to concede that a vast majority of Americans are with Republicans on transgender issues.

“Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows,” read the headline.

“Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth,” the Post reported. “A 57 percent majority of adults said a person’s gender is determined from the start, with 43 percent saying it can differ.”

Americans definitely don’t endorse the complete erasure of sex through the admission of men in women’s sports. More than 6 in 10 adults told The Washington Post they do not want biological men in women’s leagues.

On abortion, an overwhelming majority of Americans are turned off by the left’s demand to remove any and all restrictions, which is quite a departure from the Clinton-era “safe, legal, and rare” mantra. As Beth Whitehead wrote in these pages, 72 percent of registered voters surveyed in a Harvard-Harris poll last summer “supported abortion restrictions at least as strict as a ban on abortions after 15 weeks, like the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs.”

A Knights of Columbus and Marist Poll out last year also found 71 percent of Americans want abortion heavily restricted.

Gallup’s results published Thursday illustrate how culture, just like politics, is a pendulum. Remember that abortion bans were illegal in all 50 states until last summer, when the conservative Supreme Court majority finally overturned the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade. Tides turn. Public opinion changes.

An op-ed published in USA Today this week called on corporations to endorse radical transgenderism and proclaimed “businesses that practice real Pride Month allyship will be on the right side of history.” But will they? The growing population of sterile detransitioners suggests otherwise.

Rebuffed by GOP Voters, GA Secretary of State Raffensperger Says His Goal is a “Broad Based Coalition”, ie Win Democrats

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse 

When the Republican Party of Georgia tells the current Republican state politicians, they are not representing the interests of the constituents, a normal person of servant-minded disposition would look internally at what they might be doing wrong.  Alas, in the state of Georgia, the state Republican office holders blame-cast against their constituents and say their goal is to work with Democrats.  This is the inherent nature of the UniParty at work.

Appearing with Neal Cavuto, a man of notoriously intemperate disposition, when asked why he would not be invited to the GOP convention, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger deploys that infamous GOPe catch-phrase, a “broad-based coalition“, code speak for “reach across the aisle” or the non-pretending description, acquiescence to Democrats. {Direct Rumble Link} WATCH:

The good news is that the purging of GOP establishment types is continuing at a state level.

Breaking: The Conservative Treehouse Admits to Holding Identical Classified Documents Which Led to FBI Raid on Mar-a-Lago

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Yes, it’s true, according to the information contained in the Jack Smith indictment of President Donald John Trump, The Conservative Treehouse likely holds similar “classified documents” as outlined in the case by the special prosecutor.

Once you understand how, you then understand one of the most overlooked nonsensical aspects to the insufferable DOJ and FBI case that has been pushed in the media for the past year.

The indictment accuses President Trump of withholding documents containing “classified markings,” a very specifically deployed obtuse wording intended to create the implication of something nefarious where nothing nefarious exists.  It is entirely possible for a person, any person, especially a person who follows the news, to possess documents containing “classified markings.”

[SOURCE page 41]

There is a big difference between a classified document and a document containing classified markings.  As an example, anyone who has looked at the Carter Page FISA application, made public in July 2018, has reviewed a document containing “classified markings.”  When a document is declassified, they do not remove the markings.

You might think this is a one-off use of the “documents with classification markings” lingo, but it’s not.  This language is the underpinning of the entire DOJ/FBI framework that predicated the raid on Mar-a-Lago.   Specifically, neither NARA nor the DOJ-NSD requested President Trump or his team to return Classified Documents.  The DOJ demanded the return of any documents that contained “classified markings.” [SEE BELOW]

[Indictment Source, page 4]

Because the verbiage is so intentionally obtuse (ie. Lawfare), a fulsome production in compliance with this DOJ demand would include any newspaper or magazine articles that had a picture of the Carter Page FISA application, or any printed online article that might contain the same or similar elements.  There is a big difference between asking for a classified document return, and asking for a return of documents that contain “classified markings.” [Example from CTH, below left]

As a result, it is entirely possible, I would say almost certain, that President Trump -and his legal team- returned every document that contained classified information but may have omitted documents that retained “classified markings”.  There’s the spirit of compliance, and the letter of absolute compliance when contrast against a very granular interpretation of the request.

It is obvious from the demand, the DOJ/FBI were casting a wide net on the compliance side, knowing that amid hundreds-of-thousands of presidential documents and records, there would be obscure documents with classified markings that had nothing to do with national security.  Thus, the “classified markings” establishes a Lawfare compliance tactic.

It will be interesting to see how this nonsense progresses.  It becomes easier to call it nonsense, when you simply accept the approach being used.  If the DOJ-NSD, FBI, Special Counsel or NARA were genuinely interested in ‘national security issues’, they would not be playing obtuse word games in order to structure court filings simply for media narrative engineering and propaganda purposes.

Again, all of these insufferable pretending elements simply create more avenues for smart legal minds to highlight to the court.  The judges can see through this nonsense, and their action or lack thereof becomes part of showcasing their own agenda.  Fortunately Judge Cannon has a very solid background on the Mar-a-Lago documents case.  She wouldn’t need to have this stuff pointed out to her; she has already experienced it.

In the interim, for your own conversational points with friends and family, simply draw their attention to the difference between Classified Documents and documents containing “classified markings,” eventually everyone except the rabid orange-man-bad moonbats will figure out the games being played.

ps. My advice would be to hire this guy and let him have fun with it.