I attended CPAC 2013. What's remarkable is I don't think my mother's flower-child views and mine are all that different. I think I would have been right beside her in those hippy-dippy late-60's, protesting our government's effort to export freedom at the cost of our nation's men, despite public opinion. I have to credit my sister with opening my eyes to this paradoxical similarity between my Tea Party consevativism and my mother's anti-war liberalism. I'm not stuffing flowers into the barrel of a National Guardsman's gun, but I am on Twitter telling the establishment to stuff it. I'm not delusional; I know my tweets never make the slightest twitter in the ears of a single politician, but my mother's marching didn't end the Vietnam War, either. She was driven with the same patriotic fervor that now energizes me: the unbridled American spirit that compels and even demands that I care deeply about what is happening in Washington. Because what those men (and few women) are discussing, signing, and bargaining away is my freedom and safety and future.
Righteous Indignation and Demonic were two gigantic doses of schema-altering literature. I felt like my brain exploded, reading those two books back-to-back. A veil lifted. I could see the machinations of sordid politics that had been working behind the scenes to undermine true liberty and religious freedom in America since the nation's birth. I also felt a tremendous sense of my own responsibilty to at least pay attention to what is happening locally and at the state and national level, and not to rely solely on the main-stream media, not even on Fox News, but to search wide and deep for broader coverage of everything that's going on behind closed doors, under the rugs, in the nooks and crannies where politicians and other crooks hide their dirty, nefarious deeds.
Everything my history teachers taught me was altered and distorted to fit the liberal narrative. The truth about who supported the Civil Rights Movement, as one example, was never brought to light. Either my teachers blatantly lied or purposely insinuated that those big, bad white Republicans had been oppressing blacks since Lincoln's assassination--a crime probably committed by a right-wing John Wilkes Booth--failing to mention that oh-so-insignificant detail that the Southern Democrats had always been the enemies of desegregation. Breitbart and Coulter tore down all those faulty, misconceived edifices and left me desperate to completely reconstruct my understanding of our history and our current condition.
Now I'm consuming as much literature and blog media as my brain can handle--more than I can process, really. I read Levin's Liberty and Tyranny, Beck's The Overton Window and Arguing with Idiots, Malkin's Culture of Corruption; I watched Occupy Unmasked and Runaway Slave.
Then, on a whim, and at a good friend's urging, I booked a flight to DC for the last day of CPAC, where I would meet Phyllis Schlafly, Dr. Ben Carson, and Ann Coulter, among others.
The convention wasn't all sunshine and tea parties. I left knowing Republicans are going to lose the next election, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum. They are going to compromise and prostitute themselves in a desperate attempt to win over liberal voters, "independents" or "libertarians," Hispanics, gays, and everyone else who holds up a middle finger to the GOP. I struggle to even find the right word to label my political beliefs. For simplicity, I call myself a Republican or a Conservative, because those are terms people identify with the Right, and at least that's the general direction where I'm standing. But those words are muddled because like the liberals, Republicans are twisting and bending words until they have an entirely new meaning, leaving us wondering why the "conservative Republicans" are sidling up next to our enemies on the Left (see Gingrich's say-nothing speech at CPAC 2013). The Tea Party deserves credit for the motivation and hope I now hold with the likes of Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, two tremendous speakers at CPAC, I might add.
There's a growing voice of dissent coming from people just like me, and it's not rumblings from the aged and uneducated, as the Left would like to believe. The voice of dissent is rising in young people, educated people, and we've never lifted our voices before. We're on Twitter, we're on the blogs, we're watching and listening more intently than ever. We're still drawing encouragement from the defeated candidates and from the badgered bloggers, and even from Breitbart, because once you've heard the truth, you know you're willing to go the distance, even to Washington, to stand, and to keep standing, no matter what they throw at us.
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