Today, I was going to cap off my Harry Byrd series with an article on what I think we should learn from him about building a political machine to retake the country. That remains relevant, as is hopefully obvious, and will be something to work on for the next few years…but also, I suspect that many of y’all, like me, are not really in the mood or headspace for a dense history read right now. So, I figured this article, which was originally going to be an addendum to that one, might be somewhat more timely, relevant, and appropriate to right after a crushing midterm defeat.
If we want to avert the Brazilification/South Africanization of America that seems to be our present trajectory, we need to win in 2028. If we are to win in 2028, we need a better message, along with commitment to follow through on it. That means Republicans will have to move past 1) a love for foreign wars, 2) the hokey “up by your bootstraps”-type message that annoys everyone in a bad economy, and 3) the refusal to address the problem of black crime and the related discontent of everything remotely connected to it being unbearably expensive.
Just think, what two issues consistently make life worse for ordinary Americans?
Crime, particularly black crime and illegal immigration
Affordability (closely related to black crime for everything other than gas and food)
To put it simply, one must live a life of vast expense because urban anarchy is tolerated and has long been tolerated.
Listen to the audio version of this article here:
![[AUDIO] The Willie Horton Path to the Presidency](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!igWT!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F223663985%2Fa15fed38-1c9e-47b0-ac19-26ff37a94abe%2Ftranscoded-1793902829.png)
Housing is unbearably expensive because a third of every city is essentially a no-go zone dominated by slum housing, “gang violence”, and all the other symptoms of disorder. Daycare is expensive because everyone who has kids needs it, and they need it because both spouses must work to pay for the expensive house that is not in a dangerous (diverse) area of the city. Then there is the burden of private school and its costs, which was made necessary by schools being turned into zoos and holding pens for future felons by 1) integration forced at bayonet point, and 2) Obama making it illegal for schools to punish black “troublemakers” (yes, this really happened, as Jeremy Carl covers well in The Unprotected Class). And, of course, you’ll have to drive everywhere, as the alternative is to be stabbed in the neck by a 15-time released felon like Iryna Zarutska was.
That means you’ll have to get a car and car insurance, which is more expensive because there are a gazillion uninsured drivers on the roads, almost all of whom are black or immigrants. And then you’ll get a red light camera ticket from driving to work to make enough to pay the property taxes for the local public school you can’t use, all while the police do nothing about the swathe of your city that is essentially Somalia but without pirate hats. Maybe one can stop at the grocery store afterwards and see an EBT American using EBT to purchase crab legs you can’t afford with an EBT card for which your taxes paid. Then you can be stabbed by a schizophrenic as you walk out of the store, because you were rushing to get home and forgot to stop at the “good” grocery store (the food is the same, but 20% more expensive and there are fewer EBT Americans buying crab legs). Your estate will be taxed at 40%, and he will be released the next day by a DA who ran on a “restorative justice” platform.
On and on it goes.
The alternative to bearing all these costs is to risk seeing your child’s head slammed into the concrete by a socio-economic factor, or have your own head face a similar fate. Most who can would rather just pay the cost of living away from that, expensive as it may be.
Thus, ever since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the “new American Dream” has been making enough money to avoid it by bearing all of those expenses and keeping one’s noggin off the concrete.
Of course, even if you do everything right and manage to afford all of that by undergoing all the impositions it takes to become a highly paid doctor or something of the sort, you still might just be stabbed in the neck by a socio-economic factor that the justice system decided to release for reasons of equity.
To be too explicit about this tends to alienate voters. Many of them lack the realism of Harry Byrd, and are still overly attached to the American Nightmare that was MLK’s Dream.
But it is a powerful tool if wielded correctly, as George HW Bush, of all people, took advantage of quite well.
His famous Willie Horton ad is one of the few good political campaign ads, as it gets to the central message that every Republican voter knows to be true: Democrats want to let black criminals murder you, and will do everything possible to let that happen if they are elected.
Watch it, in all its glory, below:
Naturally, Bush was damned for that ad, though his campaign didn’t make it (it was paid for and run by the National Security PAC, which worked with Lee Atwater to produce and push it). Indeed, it was Atwater, not Bush, who was the one who sensed the potential of the Horton incident: “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate,” he was quoted as saying.1 That worked. Bush turned what had been a somewhat close election into a blowout by making it a referendum on black crime and those devils who allow it.
The usual suspects claimed it was offensive because it “perpetuated harmful stereotypes by depicting Horton as a threatening figure”. How a rapist and murderer could be depicted non-threateningly is beyond me, but that and the “racial overtones” were about what they were most worried.2
Nevertheless, America responded quite well to the ad and its message of a “radicalized threat” portrayed by Horton, even if the political class was upset about it. It helped encourage good turnout for Bush, and made voters think of Dukakis as the one who wanted to let black criminals murder them (which was, after all, true). “After the Willie Horton ad dropped, Bush established a lead in the polls and never looked back,” admitted Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University.3
As a result, Democrats still bemoan the ad when admitting that the crime issue is “kryptonite” for Democrats4 for this reason. If Republicans would just take advantage of that, they would do far better.
It is important to note this: voters responded well because it reminded them of the threat posed by Democratic rule, and the vow of action—Bush supports the death penalty. The problem is not taxes, pronouns in one’s email signature, or whatever the rest of the Democratic agenda is. That culture war stuff matters less and less in elections, particularly given how degraded and deracinated the general electorate now is. It is that Willie Horton will be allowed to murder you. People react to that, and generally want to stop it from happening to them.
Further, the ad brings out the worst in the left. Ever since it aired in 1988, the left has insisted that the real problem is not that Willie Horton was released from prison so that he could go on a weekend rape and murder spree, but that he has been demonized. They rush to portray him as someone who made a small mistake, who regrets what he did, who ought be forgiven, and who is needlessly attacked and demonized.5 Never does it occur to them to admit that perhaps murderers ought not be patted on the back, or that Americans tend to support the death penalty for such sorts.
Thus, such ads are a double whammy. For one, they remind voters of the existential stakes of the election: if you vote Democrat, one of the endless variations of Willie Horton churned out by the ghettos your tax dollars subsidize will probably try to murder you. Second, the most execrable sorts of leftists, such as Al Sharpton, can’t help but come out of the woodwork to defend the criminal and attack whites as “racist” for noticing,6 which does much to alienate normal people from the left.
“Bush supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime,” was the perfect message to achieve that.
Now it needs to be replicated and acted upon.
There are countless opportunities. In every county in every state, there is likely a case of a scary-looking criminal like Willie Horton being let out of prison and allowed to commit more crimes. In most places with more than a handful of people, there’s likely one such case a week, and all the Democrats in the area are fully on record as fully supporting the policies that led to that happening. The same is true of illegal aliens committing crimes, of welfare fraudsters stealing vast sums, of schools turned into deadly zoos as a result of Democratic policies, and all the rest. There is no shortage of mugshots that could be displayed on a screen as a message regarding how Democrats let them get away with it plays.
That must be taken advantage of.
Elon spent nearly half a billion dollars on this past midterm election cycle. It went terribly, and most of that money was wasted on nonsense. Imagine if, instead, it had been spent on producing Willie Horton-style ads about such criminals as Decarlos Brown Jr. and running them on every platform in the nation, constantly. YouTube, Rumble, X, Facebook, Instagram, cable news, and banner advertisements on websites all bombarded all day, every day with location-based, hyper-specific ads revealing which terrifying-looking criminals the Democrats have released from prison who went on to commit more crimes, and how pro-death penalty the Republican candidate is. Preferably, the ads would also note what welfare programs—EBT, Section 8, “income security”, etc.—the felon was on before getting arrested again.
We have two years. For the next 730 days, every PAC should be producing those ads and running them relentlessly. It worked for Bush, and would work now.
Non-whites, other than some Hispanic men, don’t vote Republican. They might be annoyed by the ads, but no more than they already are. The only way for any Republican to win is to rally white men, married white women, and Hispanic men to the cause. The best way to do that is to remind them that Willie Horton will likely be given an opportunity to murder them and their children if they don’t.
Such should be the message in everyone’s head for the next two years: “Governor Democrat wants to let Willie Horton murder you, here’s the proof, and here’s what Willie looks like. Vote for us, and he’ll never get another opportunity.”
That will work. Anti-crime ballot measures dramatically outperformed Republican candidates.7 Americans detest crime, and it, along with the related issue of immigration, are the two that Republicans have an obvious advantage in rhetoric and policies on.
John Normalson
Paired with this is that HW Bush was the perfect candidate to push that message. Not the perfect candidate—his abominable record on immigration8 and Civil Rights9 speaks for itself—but the perfect sort of person to push the crime message. He wore a well-fitted suit with a tie, was a classic WASP, wasn’t given to unnecessarily radical rhetoric, and could manage the balancing act of running with Willie Horton’s picture as his campaign slogan without turning people off in the way Bull Connor vowing to let a German Shepherd eat Willie Horton would have.
Hence the other thing Republicans need to work on: revamping the party machine so that it only selects “John Normalson” types to run.
The perfect candidate, and only sort of candidate we should ever nominate, is he who looks like the sort of pilot you pray to have when you get on an airplane: a competent-looking, clean-cut white guy who says “hello” with a smile as you walk aboard. Not a “based” black guy. Not harridans who want to pretend young white men are the primary causes of the welfare burden (Sarah Sanders did this because she was afraid to call out black welfare queens10, for example, as did others). Not some Star Wars name character who insists that he will be able to win over whatever ridiculous voting bloc always votes 80% Democrat. John Normalson. The guy you’d be ok letting into the country club.
Further, that candidate shouldn’t have weird pet issues (I would be a terrible candidate for this reason). Rambling about this or that conspiracy, being obsessed with political change on a very unpopular issue, obsessing over this or that culture war concern the average voter doesn’t really care about (abortion and Israel), unease-inducing “incidents” in the past like corruption scandals…all of that is a huge detriment to Republicans and must be treated as such.
“Elect John Normalson to end crime, and cleaning up the city will make your life easier and less expensive.” No more no-go zones. No more “underinsured drivers” on the roads or “temporarily unhoused individuals” in the park. No more EBT for murderers or Section 8 for rapists. Just locking up Willie Horton and making your local school a school again. And then following through on it by using every lever that level of government has to ensure criminals face the harshest consequences imaginable.
Brandon Gill is a great example. He’s much further to the political right than most of the party. He’s great on issues related to immigration and crime, and doesn’t talk about much else. He won handily despite the bloodbath in Texas for that reason. The same is true of Jace Yarbrough, who also won handily in Texas. Both are well-spoken and clean-cut young white guys who dress well and are farther to the right than anyone else elected to Congress on the only two issues that matter—immigration and crime. They should be the model moving forward.
The midterms were a disaster. That is bad.
2028 cannot be a disaster. That will be catastrophic.
The way to avoid a disaster in 2028 is to have John Normalson candidates be the men behind Willie Horton-style ads playing across every zip code in America every day for the next 730 days. Not doing so might well mean a nation of Willie Hortons trying to murder us all.
This is why I have dedicated The American Tribune X account to posting about such crime incidents near-exclusively, and will continue doing so. If you can do anything approaching the same, you should. If you can share such messages, such stories, such mugshot pictures, you should. That is the path to victory. To avoid it out of fear of being called “racist” is to admit defeat, and we might as well all just put our heads on the butcher’s blocks to make it easier for the race communists. Don’t do that. Take the Willie Horton path to the presidency instead.
Just read this article about the ad, for example: https://www.history.com/articles/george-bush-willie-horton-racist-ad
I would add that the examples of recidivism used in the ads have affluent white liberal victims so that they don't think they're exempt.
The election was rigged. We're undergoing a color revolution orchestrated by the deep state. https://substack.com/@beckya961708/note/p-223664336?r=2arg2x