For those of us old enough to remember when America was a free country—way back before September 11, 2001 changed everything—things have never looked crazier, more dangerous, and incoherent than they do right now.
To quickly recap, we were run out of Afghanistan by an enemy we inadvertently armed with tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry and equipment. Our former allies in Afghanistan’s intelligence and special operations units, who we trained and then abandoned, have gone over to ISIS. The FBI has decided the angry parents of traumatized schoolchildren—along with pretty much the entirety of the administration’s political opposition—are domestic extremists. The National Institutes of Health paid millions of dollars to a Chinese military bioweapons facility to do experiments, which created a virus that “escaped” the lab killing millions and crippling the economies of much of the Western world. If all that isn’t scary enough, the president of the United States is obviously not running the country, and it is not at all clear who actually is.
There’s more, obviously, but this is probably enough to get the point across. What exactly happened to America? Recovering from the shock of wave after wave of self-inflicted turmoil, many Americans are coming to the realization that they’re going to have to do something about this situation before it becomes unrecoverable. Because it’s that bad.
While the old Right is asleep with delusions of classical liberalism and bipartisanship dancing in their heads, the new Right, or what I call trad America, has awakened to the sounds of fire alarms and klaxons blaring. The USS America is taking on water and listing perilously to one side. What to do now?
The Left has a long history of political activism, the Right very little. Even the Right’s successful 2010 Tea Party takedown was quickly neutered by the GOP establishment grift machine. The Right simply doesn’t have experience organizing or conducting political actions like strikes, protests, civil disobedience, and bare-knuckle brawling that comes from growing up in the political school of hard knocks. This is going to have to change if trad America is going to save itself. We have to learn the art of political warfare.
Regime change in America used to happen every four to eight years. They were called elections. Lately our elections aren’t changing much other than the cult-like personalities at the top of the uniparty. If we want to avoid our coming dispossession and fate at the hands of a globalist leviathan, we are going to have to rescue ourselves.
First Steps
Just like you can’t play football without a team, you can’t run political movements without an organization . . . and that’s what we need to do here, organize. We need to build a grassroots movement. We must gather together like-minded trad Americans and build our political movement’s structure. We need leaders to direct and coordinate the efforts of the movement.
When it comes to structure, think in terms of cells, each with leaders, each organized around a functional area required to fulfill the movement’s goals. The military and most businesses use departments to handle administration, finance, logistics, operations, internal communications, public relations, intelligence, and business development. Set up your cell-like structures to mimic what you already know from working in and around these departmental functional areas.
Identify like-minded trad Americans in your immediate local area, recruit them, and assign them to leadership positions in each functional area. Once you have your initial cadre, sit down and flesh out a draft agenda. Your agenda should be super simple at this point: identify the essential values that your organization supports and identify key policies that need to change. Stay away from unrealistic or fringe ideas and don’t be influenced by the social media outrages of the day. Strive to fit it on a 5-inch by 7-inch index card. Your new movement is going to use this draft agenda for the next step.
One note before we move on. America is no longer the land of the free and home of the brave. Modern America is essentially a police state, a non-permissive environment that we created when we voted for ubiquitous surveillance and limitless terrorism exceptions to the Bill of Rights. It got even more dangerous when we mindlessly “backed the blue” that wasn’t backing us and fawned over Sean Hannity’s “good guys and gals” at the Justice Department and FBI. Know this: every single electronic communication is now recorded and available for monitoring, analysis, and distribution to government law enforcement and non-government political organizations.
Trad Americans need to understand that there are no “good guys and gals” outside of your own organizational circle until you have vetted them. This means when you organize, you have to take care not to let in the trashy informant class that has traditionally haunted conservative ranks. It is naïve to think that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. Today’s establishment enforcers, like the FBI, don’t care about innocence or right and wrong. They’ll frame you, lie in court, get you fired from your job, and even shoot you—whether you’re guilty of a crime or not. In a non-permissive environment like modern America, you need to carefully vet and screen your associates and constantly be on the lookout for government provocateurs.
With this in mind, find and recruit new members and advocates from your local area. Your movement needs depth. It has to be more than a few trads with a social media sock account or a home-based “think tank.” It needs members to conduct political and civic actions like protests, marches, and strikes. It needs real people to carry out the everyday missions of spreading the word—your agenda—and doing things like organizing meetings, conducting training events, press releases, media events, and connecting with other local and regional trad American movements.
Your movement needs advocates, too. Advocates are individual members and organizations with special skills, capabilities, and resources. Advocates can be journalists, business owners, trade workers, and philanthropists. Advocates provide funding and special services pro bono or at reduced rates to facilitate the movement’s activities.
It’s important to do as much of your organizing as possible in person. Don’t attempt to organize on social media. Social media is surveillance. Do not post anything on social media that you wouldn’t put on the front page of your local newspaper. Social media is useful for influence operations or to publicize your agenda, but that’s it. Don’t use it or its messenger apps to organize, recruit or discuss your movement’s plans and intentions.
Private messenger apps, like Signal, Telegram, or Threema, are a better communications medium than social media, but not necessarily private or completely secure. They are, however, appropriate to post notices and events or arrange for in-person meetings to discuss sensitive plans and intentions of your movement. Remember, for grassroots organizing you are looking for trad Americans in your local area. You are not recruiting members from other states or distant cities. Keep it local in order to keep it real. Also, do not participate in organizational gossip on social media or in private messenger apps. This kind of loose talk feeds opposition research.
Once you have a shell organization, an agenda, and key leaders in various functional areas, it’s time to start fundraising and leveraging advocates. One of the most important advocacy issues for a political movement in a non-permissive environment is legal defense. As we witnessed during the Trump Administration and in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol protest, legal defense means the difference between political victory and having your movement dismantled one arrest at a time. It doesn’t matter if you are innocent or not. The government, at the behest of your political opposition, will use the criminal and civil justice system to disrupt and undermine your activities. If your members face bankruptcy from legal bills after every protest or political action, your movement will not last long. The government knows this, and they will gleefully leverage the powers of prosecution to protect their political benefactors.
At this point, you have what should be a functioning grassroots political movement. It’s now time to start public meetings and events to publicize and promote your agenda.
Every community is different, but they all have common venues such as parks, courthouse steps, community centers, etc. that are ideal starting places for public media events and gatherings. This is the first step in getting your voice heard. There is a lot of work to get to this point, so it’s best to get started right away. In part two of this series, we’ll discuss how to make your grassroots political movement strong and how to effectively make your agenda heard while connecting with other like-minded regional groups.
What’s happening in America right now is bad. It’s time for trad America to take a stand for this country and the way of life we believe in. Politicians like Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy will not fight for your rights, your way of life, or your children’s future unless you stand up and make your voices heard in the streets. You’re going to have to convince the political class, that like it or not, it controls a big part of your destiny, that you’re serious, and you’re not going to take this anymore. Good luck, Godspeed, and let’s get started organizing!