It was four years ago that I had my party. I wanted to show everyone the hat and the outfits that I had gotten for the convention. I also wanted help coming up with what it was going to say on the card that I was going to be passing around. The people that I had invited, I could trust them. As I remember, I was actually kind of scared. The news had been hyping up the fact that they were transferring prisoners to make room for all the protestors they anticipated arresting. That security was going to be extremely tight. Police where coming in from other states for backup. Protest groups were being infiltrated.
Meanwhile a whole slate of documents were being circulated. One called “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism,” in which groups opposed to issues like the Obama health care plan and illegal immigration were lumped with white supremacist groups like the National Socialist Movement and Skin Heads.
The crazy thing is that the group writing and publishing this had/has direct ties to the Department of Homeland Security and was helping to write official DHS policy.
DHS with the help of this group released “Domestic Extremism Lexicon” which labeled the following to be extremists, bordering on terrorism: Those concerned over the economy (like who wasn’t) ; loss of jobs (again, who wasn’t); foreclosures (duh! it was the middle of the housing collapse); antagonism toward the Obama Administration (our country has a long history of criticism of our presidents); Criticism of free trade programs (could this be related to the aforementioned jobs thing?); stock piling food (well considering the jobs thing…); oppose illegal immigration (well, it is ILLEGAL, right?); oppose a New World Order; oppose the UN; oppose global governance; fear of Communist regimes; oppose loss of US manufacturing to overseas nations (they still don’t see the jobs thing) ; anti-abortion; oppose gay marriage (interesting in light of the recent Orlando shooting that this be included); and they use the internet or alternative media to express any of these ideas (use the INTERNET?! Like, they expect people to use a quill and passenger pigeons?!). As you can see, there was a big net being cast. I wasn’t involved, or knew about half the stuff I was supposedly associated with.
Naturally, with the USAPATRIOTACT, which had been for convenience sake been shortened to The Patriot Act, in full effect, people, like myself, who were supporting a return to constitutional logical governance and specifically a call to sound money, a balanced budget, and a foreign policy of non-intervention could be monitored and tracked in the name of national security. I remember sadly taking the bumper sticker off my car because I didn’t want to be targeted as an “extremist” since by this time supporters of political candidates and whole political parties were included on “the list” in “The MIAC Report”. The list of potential terrorists ended with Americans who supported not just one, but three different legit presidential candidates. My candidate was on the top of “the list”. It also cited those who opposed the creation of a North American Union with Canada and Mexico.
Of course, it’s not like my online conversations and comments about my support of my candidate weren’t a dead giveaway about me. The vibe was pretty much low level paranoia considering the themes of the music, movies, and books being released by the huge publishing companies at the time. And if you were supporting my candidate for president you definitely stumbled across Alex Jones at some point and you definitely knew “They” might be watching you. I remember how people used to think that they had a constitutional right to criticize their government and assumed that they had privacy in their communications. NSA was not a widely recognized acronym then.
Anyhow, the people that I had invited to my party, I could trust them. We had all been together for eight years prior to that. We had all lived through a presidential election together and now this was the second time our candidate had made it to The Big Show. Last time had been a disaster, and this time it was expected to be much worse. And it was. At least last time we got to go on a wicked cool road trip, meet people face-to-face that we had met on-line, march around, which is basically what we were good at – that and raising tons of money for our candidate. We saw live bands as well as heard some amazing speeches. About 18,000 of us had converged in Minneapolis for an alternate convention paid for entirely by our donations. We had to do that because our candidate had been literally banned from entry to the televised convention across the river in St. Paul 2008. That was the one with the worlds largest flat screen TV. None of the real politicos showed up to that convention except the nominee for vice-president because of a hurricane that was expected to hit Texas which was, of course, a really lame excuse. But the world’s largest flat screen was there, so there was that…
This time around, in 2012, our candidate was going to get nominated from the floor. Supporters of our candidate had worked since the last election to basically infiltrate the Republican party and infuse the party with our philosophy and elected delegates. It was actually working because, after all, the Republican party, in their own words, is a “big tent”. And more importantly we had studied the rules. We had enough states supporting our candidate to nominate him from the floor of the convention. It was going to be bloodless revolution. We’d follow the rules they had created for us.
But of course, that didn’t happen.
My personal plan of action was, that since I had actually been elected to be there, I could easily walk around and get the word out – maybe sway some last minute concerned citizens. HAHA! Looking back now, how naive. Like anyone attending a major party’s convention really gives a hoot about anything other than defeating the the opposing big party’s nominee or advancing their own political career.
Anyway I kept to my plan. I was going to follow the rules and create change. I passed through all the metal detectors and like a good parasite latched on to the host. It was more repulsive inside the belly of the beast then I thought it was going to be. First off, it was a vulgar display of unnecessary spending with its pageantry and made for TV backdrops. The money being spent on the event was ridiculous. More concerning, they messed with us using a media hyped hurricane that never got to hurricane status in Tampa. (I guess the one in 2008 was so successful that they figured they’d do it again.) The night before my candidate was to give a speech they called off the entire convention until the devastation of the “hurricane” was over. The party’s head haunchos changed the convention rules in the middle of the night and the next day hijacked all the states that supported our candidate buses so that we could not oppose the sudden rules change. With the new rules it was impossible to nominate our candidate. The rules change also laid the ground work for what we see today. Despite the fact the Donald Trump keeps repeating how the system is rigged – he’s the one benefiting from those late night rules changes.
I’ll be honest, by that point I wanted to take down the entire Republican party. I had spent eight years of my life trying to generate positive change in the way I thought good citizens did. You know, through the political process. It was critical that I do something – this political party thing wasn’t working. But I didn’t want them to just boot me out the door like some CodePink thing. And screw protesting on the street in the fenced in “Free Speech Zone” only to be hauled off to no-one-knows-where-they-took-you land. So I dressed up as attractively as I could in a black form fitting dress, back seam hosiery, long black gloves and to top it all off, my fabulous hat. I passed out my cheap business cards with the statement that my friends had helped craft. I also wanted to document everything I was seeing because I knew I was watching history and that if people were at home watching TV they weren’t being allowed to see what was going on. So I made a Twitter account with a fake name. That fake name later turned out to be the main character in my Security Through Absurdity series. I invite you to check out @JocelynMcLaren on Twitter and maybe read my book, The Big Show, about this whole experience. The whole Security Through Absurdity series is pretty good – kind of funny and make you think. They were voted BEST NEW SERIES 2014 on Goodreads.com and despite being written for GenX the books are now included in public high school libraries in Rhode Island and Connecticut. If you do read my books and have any questions at all, please go to www.RachaelLMcIntosh.com. I’d be happy to hear from you!
