Wanted: New Conservative Fighters

Let me be blunt. It’s obvious to me that the political right needs a fighting force—an organized ground level force built for the political conflicts of the 21st century. Politics has become a contact sport. This force must be unlike many GOP political figures who want to avoid contact and seem obsessed with being admired by the left and the editorial boards of the New York Times and CNN, rather than pushing back against the people seeking to destroy them. Who was it that said, you can’t fix stupid?

The left aided by the liberal media has declared war on conservatives. They have declared war on cops, the Constitution, the rule of law, due process, religion, and free speech. To counter this, we need political street fighters, brawlers to help President Trump push back against the swamp, the deep state, never-Trumpers on the right, and the Washington establishment. Currently, Trump has to rely on a group of your grandfather’s Republicans who mistakenly believe that you can compromise with the left or that you can win at political warfare from inside the safe space of a think tank, a TV studio, or from a DC cocktail party.

Traditional GOP politicians and elites do not realize that going forward into the 2020 elections the tactics they are currently using that had previously worked to win elections have become obsolete and ineffective at countering the guerrilla-type warfare tactics of the Democrat Party and the American left.

Somebody needs to tell these Republican intellectual elites that the other side is shooting at us figuratively and literally as in the case of Congressman Steve Scalise. In this new age of political warfare, they have allowed the left to dictate the rules of engagement. In turn, the left has turned politics into the art of lying. They control the language that can be used and thus control the narrative. Anyone who thinks the left will play fair or use traditional methods to win debates or elections is dangerously naïve. These political ambushes are the metaphorical equivalent of a roadside IED. Often you won’t know the left’s blast is coming until it’s too late in the election cycle when their eleventh-hour surprise smears or outright lies appear. Recall when former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t pay his taxes for ten years. After the election when Reid was confronted about the outright lie he smugly responded, “It worked didn’t it?”

Everyone should be awake to the predictable left. Their opposition research digs deep into a GOP candidates’ past, finding some innocuous clumsy statement, photo or connection even if it was decades ago and smears them with it as if it happened yesterday. They recently did it to Cindy Hyde-Smith in her U.S. Senate race as the Democrats engaged in their insidious game of identity politics.

Who is behind this? A few culprits are Media Matters, American Bridge, CREW and Shareblue. These are subversive leftist groups running a well-funded and organized Trump resistance movement. They are purveyors of misinformation and propaganda. They have made it clear that elections no longer matter unless they win. When they lose, they demand recounts, claim voter suppression and suspicious uncounted ballots will magically appear. Media Matters operative David Brock said in a confidential memo that, “We will fight every day. We’re going to resist the normalization of Donald Trump. We’re going to contest every effort.” In a training manual, Shareblue proclaimed that Trump allies would be forced to step down or change course due to news pushed by Shareblue. They organize boycotts and threaten corporations into not doing business with conservative groups. They conduct training courses on how to write letters and flood newspaper publishers to stop counterview op-eds from being published in liberal publications. They attack conservatives on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and flood their administrators with complaints to get them shut down or suspended.

These are the leftist bullies that can at a moment's notice summon a mob of people to show up and raise hell. They were behind the smearing of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. They were the ones who were pounding on the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court trying to storm the gates. They engage in political violence, throw out false allegations of sexual assault or harassment, and race baiting along with other types of physical threats, physical violence, and property damage. They are undoubtedly behind the assaults against Republican elected officials and White House staff in public places like restaurants or at their homes.

These leftist groups are a formidable foe that the conservative side currently has no response. We need infrastructure, and we need to mobilize it quickly. I want to be clear. I do not advocate for violence, but I do advocate for more effective counter-tactics than the weak-kneed ones currently deployed.

This new conservative fighter has to rid themselves of their self-righteousness about the kind of tactics they will have to use to take on the left’s machine. For instance, taking the high road is an ineffective tactic against this foe as merely is expressing outrage. Proving that we are better than they are is useless. Besides, I already know I am better and don’t have to prove that to anybody. This new political fighter has to be able to fight through whatever the left throws at them and not flinch, apologize, grovel or abandon a conservative or GOP candidate after an opposition research sneak attack. Think Trump supporter. They have to snicker at being called racist, homophobe, misogynist, lslamaphobe, and fight on. In other words, when the left metaphorically throws rocks, the new conservative fighter has to be willing to pick up those rocks and throw them back. If you need an example just watch how President Trump fearlessly takes on the left.

Many on the conservative side do not have the stomach for this. My response is then get used to losing elections. Get used to gun confiscation. Get used to government control over every aspect of your life. Get ready for totalitarian fascism. You can stop it. If you dare to change tactics and move to the front.

What we are faced with is a propaganda war, and we are all too close to defenseless in it.
I speak, of course, of “the media.” IMHO there is a remedy, which can be implemented but should have been done “yesterday.” The Republican Party has been libeled systematically and viciously by American journalism, and it must sue for damages in the billions of dollars.
Theoretically anyone can sue for damages, but not just anyone has a specific claim of a specific tort which would really matter. It has to be the Republican Party. Of course, the pre-Trump Republican Party would never have tried such a thing. But as a centaur is a man with the body of a horse, and a mermaid is a maiden with the body of a fish, Donald Trump is a seemingly mythological creature. He is a Republican with the chutzpah of a Democrat. He needs to get this ball rolling.
Anyone can file a lawsuit, but the objection is that the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision makes it difficult for any politician, or even a judge, to sue for libel. This is true - and not only so, but that 1964 decision was unanimous, with concurring opinions wanting to make it even stronger. Not only is that the case but - I warrant - a panel of judges picked by Donald Trump today would decide the same case the same way tomorrow.
Why then do I suggest a lawsuit which would be “doomed to fail?” Because the case to be brought would neither allege the same facts nor plead for the same relief as the Sullivan case did. And it would attack “the media” under a different law - antitrust law.
You and I know that “the media” is a cabal which conspires against the public by ganging up on Republican politicians, and letting Democrats off ~~easy~~ ^completely.. But it can be shown that that is precisely what should be expected of journalism as it exists today. Not only can voluminous evidence of this fact - already compiled by existing organizations such as Brent Bozell Media Research Center - be adduced, but it is easy to show that journalists have ample motive and ample opportunity to conspire against the public in precisely that way.
As to motive, journalism operates under the rule for commercial success which states, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Journalism is systematically negative, such that society might easily build an entire city with little notice from journalism except for the occasions when buildings burn down. All journalists know, therefore, that journalism is negative. And yet journalists claim that journalism is objective. The claim that “negativity is objectivity,” however, can only be made by a cynic. Why then would journalists claim objectivity? Because they want to be influential (and commercially successful).
The trouble with being objective is that it is difficult to the point of impossibility, on the one hand, and against human nature, on the other. It is against human nature, because anyone who has an opinion thinks that opinion is right - or it wouldn’t be his/her opinion. The only way to try to be objective is to analyze that opinion from the point of view that where you stand is probably affected by where you sit. This is uncomfortable, and that makes it hard work. And that is not what journalists do. Given the opportunity, journalists collude to claim objectivity, and collude to destroy the reputation of anyone who questions their objectivity.
And journalists have the opportunity, in spades. It is the air they breathe. In the founding era, and into the late Nineteenth Century, newspapers were primarily about the opinions of their printers (much as the Rush Limbaugh show is about the opinions of Rush Limbaugh), and nobody would have seriously suggested that they were objective. And that is the sort of journalism the authors of the Constitution and First Amendment were familiar with.
The telegraph was demo’d by Samuel Morse in 1844, and the first wire service began in 1848. This quickly morphed into the Associated Press, and by the 1870s concern began to be expressed over its concentration of propaganda power. The AP’s response to the charge was to assert that it essentially consisted of its - and its member newspapers notoriously did not agree about much of anything. At the time, there was truth to that argument - and the value of the wire service in disseminating information quickly throughout the country while conserving expensive telegraphy bandwidth was unquestioned.
But the AP “wire” constituted a virtual meeting of a critical mass of American journalists. And as Adam Smith warned in Wealth of Nations (1776), “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Although the Associated Press Stylebook institutionalized some useful standardization (such as the “pyramid” organization of news stories which demands that the most important information appear early in any story), it can also have direct political implications (such as the insistence that illegal aliens not be called “illegal aliens”).
The “meeting” created by “the wire" gradually became the air that journalists breathe. And the motive to cooperate - the motive of going along and getting along ideologically, and being seen as “objective,” transformed American journalism from an assortment of ideologically idiosyncratic purveyors of opinion (and secondarily information) into the ideological monolith with which we are all to painfully acquainted. All major journalism institutions all insinuate cynicism towards society, which conservatism considers to be fundamentally OK and in need of little guidance from government. And concomitantly, they project naiveté towards government (of which conservatism is suspicious).
The Republican Party must therefore sue wire service journalism (especially the AP, emphatically including its member newspapers). All wire services have the same sort of homogenizing effect, and all journalists share the motivation of being considered objective - and share the fear of the wrath of the cartel if they challenge any other journalist’s objectivity. So the fact that there are multiple wire services does not change the dynamic which, arguably, the AP was best positioned to start but need not be the only support of the system in being. Journalism which is in a de facto cartel does not compete, and functions to promote its interests, and those of the Democrat Party.
The upshot is that the journalism cartel pushes for “campaign finance reform” to decrease the ability of outsiders to oppose its agenda, and in other ways promotes the conceit that, far from being ordinary citizens, journalists in good standing with the cartel are “the Fourth Estate,” with rights that you and I do not enjoy.
The New York Times v. Sullivan case presented entirely different facts. The losing plaintiff, a Southern Democrat, was an unsympathetic figure, and the Times didn’t even write the ad of which the plaintiff complained. And the ad did not even attack the plaintiff by name. There was no implication of conspiracy among journalists as a class.
Collusion among journalists to obviate ideological competition among them is provable factually, and it is explicable theoretically. Not just an individual newspaper here or there but the whole of journalism must be sued for libeling the whole of the Republican Party. Because that is what has been going on for half a century and more. The wire services are engines of “conspiracy against the public,” and - in the wake of the development of fiber optics, lasers, and microwaves and satellites - wire service journalism doesn’t save important money in the dissemination of the news. Wire services should be forced to transform, or disband.
New York Times v. Sullivan to the contrary notwithstanding, SCOTUS can do it. But the Republican Party has to bring the case.

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