225 Roger Stone’s Legacy vs the Left-Liberal Alliance and Mitch McConnell vs Adam Jentleson on Strategy
I’ve been very gratified to see some post November 5 developments-like the young group of Zoomers working to create a sort of liberal version of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Points as well as Kyle Kulinski’s recent interview on Project Liberal. These are some of the signs that liberals and leftists on YouTube are beginning to realize that while neither side entirely likes or trusts the other it’s the future assuming either side hopes to achieve any kind of a progressive future.
Partuclarly love that young folks realize that being a liberal is actually BASED-liberalism won two world wars, whipped the Great Depression, passed the New Deal, integrated the armed forces, passed the GI bill, did the Great Soceity, signed the Voting Rights Act. I don’t think it’s hyperolic at all to say that all progressive achievements of the last 111 years are thanks to the Democratic party.
FN: Find links
As I’ve argued in other chapters the cause of liberalism cum progressivism hit its nadir after LBJ’s 1964 landslide and it’s been only-or at least mostly-downhill since. Reagan’s General Electric speech of 1964 ‘liberals say you’ve never had it so good’ was correct-it was a highwater mark for both liberalism and US capitalism. If liberalism has mostly or at least much of the time gone South since Ronnie’s speech so has the country as a whole at least for the 60% supermajority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
You might have noticed in this book that I have quite a lot of criticism of the Left. The reason for this is that often the Left’s only real function has appeared to be to spllit the progressive vote thereby electing the GOP Right. Think about it. The Left takes much pride in their anti LBJ chants-‘how many kids did you kill today?!’ but all they did was elect Nixon who continued Vietnam 5 years longer than it needed to take-even Daniel Ellsberg himself acknowledges this in retrospect that Hubert Humphrey would have ended the war as I do believe would have Kamala Harris. Like Harris however, Humphrey’s was nervous about putting too much daylight with his own Administration.
FN: Link
Leftists always seem to come most alive when there’s an opportunity to take down a liberal Democratic President-they always seem to hate liberals more than they’d ever hate fascists. And we’ve seen this has been a recurring dynamic-Nader 2000, #BernieorBust Circa 2016, #GenocideJoe 2024, Jill Stein every four years. Indeed what’s very telling is Kirsten Sinema originated in: the Green party because of course she did. The Green party seems to have no function other than to play a spoiler to the Democratic party-as opposed to more substantive third parties like Minnesota’s Farm Labor party or the Working Families Party.
But years ago in the Nixon Administration-of course-the GOP’s playbook was laid out very well by none other than Pat Buchanan: the GOP strategy is to focus not on things that unite Repubicans but divide Democrats-a very effective wedge for the GOP for many years was between US labor and the African American community, for instance as Buchanan had pointed out.
Although we looked at this in chapter Roger Stone it’s worth looking at this passage again in this context as it’s very key:
I don’t think Stone ever says what policy he is for in this memoir, and he might well consider a focus on policy a distraction. There is only winning and losing an election, and five methods for achieving a victory recur again and again in races that Stone is involved with, four methods that create a mirror maze of confusion, misdirection, and elimination. The first is through association, by having a candidate receive an endorsement from a person or group who potential supporters of the candidate are predisposed to view as an opponent, or through association with something unquestionably malevolent made via protesters, pamphlets, or other means funded by Stone’s campaign but without any fingerprints. The second is by having a group, funded by allied interests, oppose a candidate or policy due to some larger moral principle that everyone can agree on – the issue is not candidate A versus B, but opposition to crime, gambling, or child abuse. The third is the smear, saying your opponent is corrupt, weak, racist, a rapist, a murderer, a pedophile, always helpfully done not through you, the opponent on which this tar might stick, but through a phantom proxy. This last is used very, very often by Stone. The fourth, and one of the most effective, is through fragmentation of the vote. There is, say, overwhelming support for candidate A, who will raise the minimum wage, versus candidate B, who won’t. You split this overwhelming vote by funding another candidate, who wants to raise the minimum wage even higher, and who chastises candidate A for compromising their principles and being beholden to business interests for not asking for a higher wage. Through a vote split, candidate B, the one who says he believes the condition of workers must be improved, but not through easy sounding solutions like a higher minimum wage, scores a victory. At the same time, you make great efforts to keep the votes for your own candidate or issue from being fragmented. The fifth is vote suppression, of black and latino voters, who tend to poll democrat. The first four have been employed in elections that Stone has been involved in, with Stone often taking credit. The fifth has been employed alongside Stone’s efforts, though perhaps without the collusion of Stone.”
All three were used in the first major race that Stone was involved in, the 1972 presidential election. When he was ten years old, Stone remembered he had a tarot card reading where he was told he would meet a leader who would change his life, and Stone would later say this leader could be only one man, a man he would become enraptured by, make into his idol, and whose face he would ink into the skin on his back14. In 1972, he would help to get this life changing leader, Richard Nixon, re-elected. Every method, except voter suppression, were put to use by Nixon and the Nixon group Stone worked for, CREEP, the Committee to Re-elect the President
Roger Stone: Pretty Reckless Is Going Straight To Hell Part One | italkyoubored
I covered the details of Stone in 1972 in Chapter Roger Stone but Stone had the winning shot-or at least a major assist-for Nixon’s winning shot when he hand delivered the Canucks Letter to the Manchester Union Leader leading to the sudden withdrawal of Ed Muskie from the race
Roger Stone: Pretty Reckless Is Going Straight To Hell Part Two | italkyoubored
FN: It’s amazing how the GOP strategy never changes-it’s timeless. Yet the media, the Democrats, the anti Democratic Left, and most of the voters NEVER EVER NEVER catch on. Like this is literally what they did to HRC in 2016.
After the apocalypse of Watergate, Stone had two noteworthy jobs. He would work as a driver for Bob Dole, who, he tells us, was “angry and horny”. More importantly, he would join the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), a group made up of veterans of Barry Goldwater’s failed presidential campaign, which would score electoral wins by flooding a race with negative advertising that could not be tied to the candidate that it was intended to help out. “Groups like ours,” said Terry Dolan, a founding member of NCPAC and its most important player, “are potentially very dangerous to the political process. We could be a menace, yes. Ten independent expenditure groups, for example, could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.”21 They would help Ron Paul win his first election in Texas; they would take down John Culver of Iowa, George McGovern of South Dakota, Frank Church of Idaho, and Birch Bayh of Indiana. It was not about ideology, it was about you winning and the other guy losing. “We want people to hate Birch Bayh without even knowing why,” explained Dolan2
Or Al Gore in 2000, or for that matter Biden in 2024 or Jimmy Carter in 1980. What the GOP has mastered is the art of destroying the popularity of Democratic Presidents or nominees.
Roger Stone: Pretty Reckless Is Going Straight To Hell Part One | italkyoubored
The Dirty Trickster | The New Yorker
“Remember,” Stone said. “Politics is not about uniting people. It’s about dividing people. And getting your fifty-one per cent.”
At least for the Right wing this is what it’s about-by dividing the majority of Americans who support Center Left policies-the Washgingto Post poll in October showed they did as much then as they did in 1946 during Nixon’s first successufl campaign to the House-as the true father of McCarthyism.
This account that Nicole Shananhan-RFK Jrs billionaire running mate is yet another example of Roger Stone cum GOP con-conspirator brand of voter fragmentation. The intuition of Buchananan back in 1972 holds today-most voters prefer progressive/liberal policies so for the reactionaries to win they have to divide the vote in as many ways as possible
UPDATE:
Didn’t age well
Adam Jentleson: “If RFK gets confirmed (chances well better than even) we’re going to have to figure out how to get the H5N1 vaccine approved and taken by lots of people. If and when that happens, the wisdom in this piece and podcast will be very helpful. Throwing tantrums online doesn’t help with vaccine uptake!” — Bluesky
Adam Jentleson: “Happy new year! One of my resolutions is to post here more.” — Bluesky