Guest Post by Kurt Schlichter
The good thing about screwing up is that you can learn from your mistakes and do better next time. That, of course, assumes you are not a Republican Party official, because the GOP Establishment seems largely incapable of learning from its mistakes.
We should try again anyway.
We won some races, but we lost a lot more. Losing has one advantage over winning – pain is a better teacher than joy. After all, winning generally teaches you the wrong lessons. It makes you complacent. Look at Texas. The governor did worse than expected; Ted Cruz had a close call, and down ballot the Texas GOP got thrashed. In Texas. With a great economy. Because the Texas GOP got soft from too much winning.
Look, there are sometimes reasons for poor performance that are beyond our control. Tex Kennedy poured $70 million into the race, and the Democrat transcriptionist media nearly flooded Houston all over again slobbering all over that skateboarding goof. It’s no surprise that these factors had an effect – I don’t blame Ted Cruz, but I do blame the guys who were supposed to be keeping the Lone Star State red. The Dems went out and mobilized people who had not been mobilized before. The GOP should have done the same with its own people long ago – it should have had its grassroots wired. But it didn’t, because for a couple decades it didn’t need to. Well, it needs to.
Lesson One: Never get into the mindset that you can’t lose. Always play like you’re 10 points back, which is what saved Ted Cruz.
Let’s look at Arizona. If resumes were competing, Martha McSally, A-10 pilot, would have crushed Pinko Barbie. But resumes don’t run for office; people do. My AZ pal Jon Gabriel has a deep dive post-mortem, but there are some key lessons we have to draw from this ~1 point debacle. McSally is an admirable person who decided to run on “I’m impressive and not one of those conservative kooks” instead of on “Here are the things I stand for that I will get done.” Now, Sinema also ran a campaign based on personality – “I’m nice and oh so moderate.” So why would the average person pick McSally over Sinema if the only difference was “Impressive” versus “Nice?” What was McSally for?
Not being either Sinema or a conservative?
Hardly inspiring. Here’s an alternative idea. How about you embody the conservative values the GOP base wants? How about you not channel Jeff “18% Approval” Flake by launching Operation Desert Sasse and imitating the gutless weenie vibe of the same dork who you were seeking to replace because the GOP base fired him for not being conservative enough?
Trump endorsed her, but like he had a choice. It kind of shows the mindset that led to this fiasco – Well, these conservative dummies will be dazzled by Trump’s thumbs-up of necessity, so we don’t need to pay attention to them. Wrong! McSally had a bloody primary against Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio – say what you want, but they stood for something, and it was something the GOP voters liked. But did McSally go on stage with the defeated primary candidates to show unity? Not that I know of. I do know she skipped out on conservative events and cancelled appearing on the Mark Levin Show. That is certifiably insane.
She ran away from being conservative, and – surprise! – when she looked back the conservatives were not behind her when she needed them. As my new book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy explains, we’re tired of being disrespected by GOP candidates who seem to find their own voters slightly icky. That 2% edge McSally needed to win was right there for the taking among the Ward and Arpaio fans, but she shunned them. She didn’t want to scare the neurotic suburban mommy demo that these squishes always seem to chase and never quite catch. Falling into that trap was the insight of the out-of-state consultants McSally hired and listened to – diss the people who would vote for you in order to suck up to people who would never vote for you. But those conservatives voted for Governor Ducey, and in droves.
Lesson Two: Be for something – specifically, conservatism. Nail down the base by not buying into the Fredocon notion that true conservatives should be ashamed of being conservative.
Florida is always close and crazy, being full of Floridians, but we need to understand that the “Why looky here, a whole bunch of new votes” thing is the wave of the future. Today, every blue enclave is Chicago, and if it’s close they will cheat. It’s going to happen. They are already planning on it. Remember, election theft is a part of the Democrat campaign plan just as much as ads about Republicans murdering grandmas; it’s neither an aberration nor a rarity, but a deliberate strategy that has worked in the past. The people who will steal our elections are not Russians; they are the nitwits who are babbling about Russians stealing our elections.
Lesson Three: We need to be ready. We need lawyers prepositioned and poised to fight wherever we expect the corruption to happen. And we need to win races outside the margin of fraud.
We got slammed below the fold. We lost 300+ stage legislature seats on November 6th. Remember how smug we were about winning 1000+ seats during the Obama years? Change is inevitable, and in a split nation we have to lose some seats sometime, but 300+? Do we have a coherent plan for recovering them? The state government seats are our farm team of future talent and they will have a huge effect on redistricting after the next census. A seat in the Idaho House of People Who Live In Idaho is not as glamorous a US Senate race, but it’s important.
Lesson Four: We need to get back in the fight down ballot. Who is the GOP leader in charge of that nationwide? If the answer is “Shrug,” that’s the wrong answer.
Finally, we need good candidates. They are out there. The search for our stars in 2020 started November 7, or at least it better have. We need a solid candidate on every ballot. Again, who is the GOP official in charge of recruiting? What is his/her/xir name?
And we need to be picky in our primaries. You know the guy who lost to Flattop Jerk in Montana? Turns out he had some baggage those of us out here in the rest of America did not know about. Montanans voted for Trump by pretty big margins; they didn’t turn into SJWs in the last two years. But they felt that liberal creep Jon Tester represented them better than the GOP candidate – why? What were their concerns that our party ignored, that our GOP voters ignored in the primary? Let’s vet our candidates better – not just the party functionaries but those of us who vote in the primaries need to be much more careful.
Lesson Five: Candidate quality matters. No more losers.
Losing sucks. But you know what sucks worse? Losing twice in a row. So we Normals need to get militant and demand that our GOP Establishment try something new – like learning from its mistakes.
I’ve got some questions. 1) Who gives a shit about repo’s or conservatives. For instance trump is neither and this blow hard doesn’t seem to care. 2) Since when did your side winning actually enhanced your life? Seems to me that ‘winning’ just means the other lying bastard is worse than your lying bastard. 3) Why is this hack consistently earn a place in the line up? I never read him except to rank on his dumb ass like this. If the standard at TBP is anti-state and anti-war why the fuck listen to any repo? Like they’ll reduce the state or end wars? Pathetic.
Vote, my ass
The standard is not anti-state and anti-war. The standard is common sense. Anti-state and anti-war often fit into that, but not always, if you have common sense.
Oh. Defined by you I suppose. I’ll narrow it down for you. I want no state and no wars. Period.
Towards that end I’m on board with TBP. Relegating ‘common sense’ to the Orange Crusader doesn’t work for me because I think he’s a con man and a liar. And repos and conservatives are his marks.
An actual conservative should want to conserve jobs for tax paying citizens by punishing the employers of illegals, particularly in border states.
To all that I would add the not letting of RINO’s like that cocksucker Romney get on the ballot.
Lesson six: democrats always put their message in a moral frame; ‘medicare for all good; republicans bad’. Moral issues are ‘social’ issues. How many republicans have stated they didn’t want to deal with ‘social’ issues? One result is that republicans don’t have a coherent message. The sad irony is that they could hit the democrats with moral issues all day long.
Voter fraud
Look what the Republicans have given us for presidential candidates: Bob Dole / Mitt Romney / John McCain. How the fuck are you going to win an election with material like that?
Same for Minnesota. The Republican Attorney General candidate was easily defeated by Keith Ellison.
Ellison is a criminal, hard for the Republican to be worse than that…
Good grief!
Will someone please take a flamethrower to this Read Team/Blue Team system once and for all?
Take the flamethrower to immigration…o/w America is stone dead.
or/white America is stone dead.
Damn, 260 million white Americans never had a chance.
That’s what’s wrong with you, pyrrhic, you give up too easily. Good thing we didn’t put you in charge of the Alamo.
First make the voting system 100% honest (to hell with making it so easy that many people vote twice; dead, out of district, under age, imaginary, and illegal people vote; the Democrat Election Supervisors can rig and stuff the ballot box; and the DNC Programmers rig it). Conduct complete audits in any suspicious districts and prosecute guilty people; then every vote will count, we will really know what the voters really wanted and voted for. Right now, the whole thing is nothing but a rotten bowl of cold old moldy communist bullshit mush being crammed down Conservatives throats.
What he said.
When the party hacks, the globalists who pull the party strings, etc. have already pre-selected the candidates you get to choose from on the ballot, who gives a shit how honest the voting process is? And when 99% of the problem is the permanent bureaucracy that never changes, regardless of which globalist puppet is elected, who cares about the “integrity” of the vote? Believing that real change will actually come from an election is delusional. Countless individuals, including Mark Twain, have all correctly commented in one way or another, that if elections actually changed things, they would be illegal. Propping up the “integrity” of this unholy system of governance should be the LAST thing anyone wants. The more the system is looked up with disgust, disdain, and distrust, the sooner it will collapse from the withdrawl of the support that is keeping it alive.
The Republican Party establishment defines “winning” in different terms than the firebreathing Schlichter seems to understand or, perhaps, acknowledge. We are in a time of positioning for a post-nation-state future. Dem and Repub grandees (and a lot of the donors) are busy trying to be in a position to claim assets after the coming reset is effected. They all want to be OUT of the group that loses every dollar (or Euro, or Yen, or whatever) asset and IN the group that has the power to seize and dispose of hard assets. It is that simple.
It is no longer a matter of ideology or political philosophy, Dems or Repubs, Liberals, Progressives or Conservatives. That stuff is all gone for a while. Right now, it is all about desperately seeking to keep one’s rice bowl full. As soon as we Normals figure that out, and STOP participating in the charade of politics, we will be that much closer to finding a real path forward.
Looting has already reached epic proportions, along with population replacement, but Normals seem too dumb or perhaps zombified to notice that…
The lesson you should have learned is there won’t be enough time for any more lessons. The most important thing in life is where you live.
If you live in NJ , don’t expect people who voted for that crook Menedez to change. They won’t. Take a drive 90 miles north , in the area of Woodstock. Look at all the abandon houses. That is your future .
Don’t conflate Republican with conservative they are not the same. There are only about 40 conservatives in congress (the Freedom Caucus) Most of the rest are Paul Ryan wannabes.
That’s a worthwhile distinction. A lot of folks who vote Republican don’t qualify for the conservative label. They are folks who flocked to the party because, white. This Republican-light party gave the nation that white trash president Trump and candidates like him it will further erode the brand until old line Republicans will bolt to the Bull Moose Party.
GOP needs to made broader appeals ” i.e. compromise of principal ” to people of color. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
The Future of the American Conservative. One Last Hoorah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHZoW1Dqclc&t=1s
Fake conservatives everywhere…
You said it, pyrrhic. “Conservative” is now merely virtue signalling for white folks. Read that way, the title of this piece is better put: 5 dumb White mistakes we better fix before 2020.
Not sure if it was KaD who describe their methodology but I have seen it; forming closed FB communities to spy on and report on colored folks – black and brown – and refusing to do commerce with them.
Outstanding video. I still think there is one bug a boo in all this identity politics. And that is the military is comprised of all white men at the top.
There must be some plan to start a civil war among minorities to kill off millions to wipe out the debt. And then expell the rest.
Blacks are too stupid to realize they have no physical mobility the way Mexicans do even within the United States. I don’t see 4 families of negros moving in to a 1 room Appartment to do slave labor.
Where are the negros going to go once the shit hits the fan?
” the military is comprised of all white men at the top.”
Same as the GOP .
“taking thousands of American troops who are trained on the cutting edge all the time, and sending them down to a border where there is no need, no threat to an invasion of the hordes coming in from Latin America, which is a joke.” Chuck Hagel
Strangely enough , GOPpers had no problem defending the borders of a country 7,000 miles way , just never our own.
4 families of negros moving in to a 1 room Appartment to do slave labor. – da mouse
It ain’t families, it’s several laborers occupying sleeping quarters on a shift basis.
usually not on a shift basis in my experience–
i’ve has as many as 9-10 in a 2 br trailer–they just roll out their sleeping bags on the floor & roll ’em back up the next am–
as a group,”mexicans” are the best tenants i’ve ever had–
KaD is still traumatized by the tales of horror her mom would tell her about cleaning up after Mexicans staying at her hotel. You would think they were rock stars.
flashy, it was only a few years ago that Bush was said to be the last Republican president because he had put together an unlikely coalition.
Since he was beholden to nobody, he went on to entrench the US in a quagmire we can’t get out of today. We need another Nixon to buy us a ‘peace with honor’ extraction from Afghanistan.
Now we have Trumpy who insinuated that he would get the US out of the ME but instead has decided Bush didn’t go in deep enough or hard enough. Trumpy will teach these stormy muzzies what fer.
They had almost two years to tighten up the election process to prevent massive vote fraud and to close off the border to illegals, they did neither. There really isn’t anything left for them to do except pack their shit because they are going to be moving out after the next election.
It’s just a ride. – Bill Hicks
430,000 sealed indictments. – Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZHa7WdWbaU&t=1s
flash, could you provide a summary or intro to your vid? I don’t like to click on a vid only to find it’s an anti-Jew bullshit vid. I don’t like to have smoke blown up my ass.
if trump runs against the do nothing house,he will probably win & retake the house–
in the senate,the reps have a huge # of seats to defend in 2020,and it will probably be lost to the dems–
When you add up all the fails in either party, you can almost cynically conclude they are only in it to win it but not to change a damn thing. Change is something revolutionaries do. Politicians only promise to change things.
i had a bit of an epiphany in early summer–
though i’ve been redistricted into one of the biggest lefties in congress,i’m still on the weekly email newsletter for my former “conservative”republican representative–
sometime from late may to late june,don’t remember exactly,his letter was bragging about how the congress was going to spend about 12billion that had been found in the budget but not spent–he was careful to say that it was not new spending since it had been appropriated but not spent–
hell,that was half the cost of the wall,or at 2% interest a savings of 240 million if they had just not spent it–
many of the republicans are only marginally better then the dems–
if anybody wants to check it out,it’s congressman bilirakis of florida–
You voting for Hillary again ?
Vote fraud, Kurt..That’s why McSally lost…Ducie wins Maricopa County by 330,000 votes, but McSally lost by 40,000, after extremely delayed vote counting and the “discovery” of lots of provisional ballots? Not possible…You know that’s just the Chicago style election theft….Same going on in FL, because Rick Scott never lived up to his promises to supervise Broward and Palm Beach counties, and remove the crooks like Brenda Snipes, who had already been convicted of vote fraud…etc…
#NeverTrummper McSally is another GOPper that was a leftist in all but name only. The battle to save the Republic will not be won with electing even one backstabbing cuck.
Personally, I would never bother voting for a woman. They’re too easily flipped into the enemy camp by their big bag-o- feelz. . It’s more common than not.
” Are you disgusted like I am that Martha McSally capitulated — smiling on her couch with her dog, conceding the election to a lying, cheating code-pink pinko who deceived the voters into thinking she was a moderate when, in fact, she is about as far to the left as Medea Benjamin? ”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/unhappy_and_unappeased_about_mcsally_.html
That looks like Kang Kong’s dick. Castrating bitches are never happy until they have your dick on their mantelpiece. Imagine if a dude held up Maxine Waters’ hairy poon in triumph, the bitches would lynch him on the spot.
good post & good link flash–
somebody posted here a couple of weeks ago that mcsally & the dem were lesbians & i thought they were joking,now i’m not so sure–
1. Running on a platform and promises to support and promote freedom and then doing the EXACT OPPOSITE once elected.
This has been a problem since 1860.
Conservatives are the #1 enemy of the Right. They can’t even conserve the unity of their own party.
Republican Sen. Jeff Flake said Wednesday that he won’t vote to confirm judicial nominees unless GOP leaders hold a vote on legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired.
https://apnews.com/28c5f8d772fd4b3097e152c025336fd3
Fuck, Doug. He got shit-canned for insubordination, got too big for his britches.
Flake is a RINO…..and a flake.
“we’re tired of being disrespected by GOP candidates who seem to find their own voters slightly icky.”
Tucker Carlson did a spot on The Rubin Report a few weeks ago and said the exact same thing. Mainstream GOP leaders HATE their following.
I’m getting sick of being hated. The left hates me for being a white guy who thinks personal responsibility is king, and the right hates me for daring to think I am their equal, me with my little house, scuffed boots, and state-school degree.
We’ve become a nation of hate. The GOP won’t win because it doesn’t want to win. It wants to rule. And the “militant normals” are sick of it.
You left your Democrat party home because of the gays and blacks but the Republicans don’t want you either, shit, sounds like the story of my life.