At some point our Rebellion may succeed in throwing the scalawags out of Congress, and hopefully we will get to snidely smirk as we watch a few of them marched off to be arraigned. We may even get a repeat in 2012, watching an army of administration insiders limp away with their tails between their legs.
     What then? Have you considered next steps?
      In 1992 we sent a bunch of fresh faces to Washington, then turned and walked away, and very shortly, many of them had become just like "them". So, have you ever considered things you not only have to continue doing until the day you die, but must now also pass on to the next generation?
     Have you all considered these things? There can be no respite, no rest, until the day you die. What you (we) have undertaken will be central to your lives from now on. It is that kind of war...and not just the memory, but the severity and peril must never fade.

     But also consider this. At some point our Rebellion may fail miserably and utterly. I can think of many ways this can happen, so where that fire that now burns white hot in your belly must be banked so as to continue to burn even if we lose, but also must be hidden from view...as millions of Iranians have had to do the past thirty years. Think about it.
     Everyone remembers the Boston Tea Party, but can anyone recall the Boston Massacre? Think Tian-an-men Square. Look it up. The other side has the manpower, the guns, and if they want to do it, can make the law into any sort of weapon they desire, turning what you think now to be a patriotic act into a crime. I have no doubt theat when pressed up against the wall, when they start to lose but still have power over government, they will try some awful stunts.
     So you have to be sure of yourself, for, as I cited Steve McQueen earlier, "You've never played the game until you have played for more than you can afford to lose."
     You can also self-destruct from internal bickering and disputes, as I lined out in Part II. The first tests of that will occur soon, as you will have to decide what political shape the Movement will take. Right now we are an unofficial adjunct of the Republican Party, inasmuch as we are pursuing principles they have espoused for many years...though rarely fought for, also for many years. The GOP has not yet decided whether to reach out and accept paternity for us, little b**stards that we are (and they utter under their breath). Nor have we fully decided we want to accept back into our family that man who drove off to Washington one day, leaving momma on the front porch, barefoot and pregnant, promising to come back, but instead falling in with the bright lights and brothels of the big city. Daddy, we hardly knew ye.
     And then there's all those Sugar Daddy Warbucks who have spent so much money making our little Rebellion possible, with all the stagecraft, sexy websites and fireworks. How beholding are we to them? Or them to us?
     How many of them actually have their sight on the same prize we do?
     That's the politics of it. It seems to never stop...at the same time it seems never to fix...correction, promises to never fix anything.
     In this, Part III and in Part IV I will line out things we have to do no matter what, win, lose or draw in the political arena.

     As I wrote earlier, there are three phases to the Rebellion: the political, the institutional the culture. Top to bottom politics is corrupt, in part because 1) men are corrupt when they get too close to power for too long, but also because of all those little fat, greedy mouths they have to feed in the institutions, who in exchange, keep them in power (and also keep the culture in decline).
     The culture, if you're looking for a definition, is the soul of the people. Just as in everything, there are good souls and there are bad ones. Ours is becoming, in fact, at one generational level, has become almost rotten to the core. We have to fix this. And we have to fix it without tossing out the Constitution with the bath water.
     You can analyze this yourself, or take my word for it, but a rotten culture eventually has to be tied to a leash and led around like a dog, which, while you make this out to be a bad thing, suits the people owning the leash business just fine. A moral culture on the other hand can roam freely. It's that simple. The rottenness found in our culture today was put there on purpose, therefore you can see this relationship between the political, the institutional and the culture.
     Retaking the culture is our end-game, for only then will we be worthy of the faith and privilege the Constitution placed in our hands almost 225 years ago. I'll discuss how that can be done also in Part IV, but you can also see how the Politics is the lynchpin, for without controlling the political landscape we double the time and manpower in reigning in the institutions that are making war on our households and and freedom. Just go to East Europe, and look at the cultural slide after the Communists took over in 1944. They held onto enough to eventually run off the Communists, but after 50 years, most of the original culture, the original strength of the soul of the people had been lost. Twenty years later, free, they are still struggling to regain even a semblance of that moral center that defined them.
    The top three, in my estimation are 1) the power of the bureaucracies, 2) the power of public schools and universities and 3) the power of advertisers.
    The good news is, these are fights you don't have to march on Washington in order to make your case. These are fights that are fought best from the bottom up anyway, and to some extent, these are fights that can start simply by saying "No". Solzhenitsyn wrote about the "wrecking" of the great plans for agriculture reforms in the USSR under Stalin. It was true, what was once the bread basket of Europe in the days of the tsars (not to be confused with czars), had annual crop failures from 1919 until 1992. Stalin blamed counter-revolutionaries, "wreckers". But all it was was the people saying "no". For you see, the one power even the most tyrannized people have is to be able to deny their masters what they want. The Communists wanted total control, but if total control included bumper crops, they couldn't have it.
    Remember this law.
    
    Bureaucracy
    In January, Robert Hightower, one of our partners, wrote a piece on the "Front Office vs the Front Lines". He is our "Bureaucracy-buster".  He described bureaucracies, even in the best of run private companies, as cancers, requiring constant vigilance and treatment. Miss one dose and the cancer spreads.
    From the constitutional standpoint, controlling bureaucracy is an issue of size, and political will. The people can rarely affect bureaucracies directly, but rather must require their elected officials to do this for them...for the first mission, the Prime Directive of Bureaucracies, is to secure their seat at the dinner table. (I'll bet you thought it was getting medical care to to infirm, or medicine to the elderly, or building highways in Vermont. Hah!)
    There are several rules about bureaucracies you should know, and I recommend you visit our other essays and learn them. They figure in, and exacerbate, just about every political ailment known to man, since the third millenia BCE. To the extent "bureaucratism" could be cured, constitutional democracy in the public sector and free market competition in the private, is about as close as you could get. Bureaucracies feed on the Left in public sector just as they do on inefficiency and redundancy in the private, for the Left sees their bureaucracies as the primary jobs sector, "their" job sector.
    But both require extreme vigilance, which in the political sphere we stopped watching years ago, while in the private sector, in the specter of Big Business, has come back to bite us big time....for you see, either way, it is us, taxpayers and consumers who pay for their waste. And if you want to know why mom's can't stay at home instead of work even if they want to, like it used to be on black and white television shows, it's because of that waste, and the high taxes we must pay to support it....and the power advertisers have over our children.
    The main rule you have to understand is that they don't care about you, the taxpayer, the guy who pays their bills, fills their rice bowl. Remind me to write an essay about the evil that is indifference, but it is one of the guiding rules of bureaucracies:  They care about your rice bowl, their place at the trough. They care not one whit about the people who prepare that place for them. In fact, they look down your nose at taxpayers.
     Bureaucracies, in government at every level, and Big Business are filled with redundancies...in other words, two people in two different offices doing essentially the same work, only for a different boss or agency, or according to a different enabling act of the legislature...since the guys who wrote it forgot someone was already doing it. Usually they fill out forms and count stuff, and pass the forms onto the next guy, who double checks the work, then puts his signature on it as well...only, if it's something serious, every one of those signatories have to send the paper back down the ladder for further explanation, which is a sort of CYA, and which may eventually mean the paper will never get to its final destination or will find a circuitous route, so that if anything ever does go wrong, it will be that poor schlub back at the beginning who gets fired. After WWII, when they hung so many Nazis, many of those men who stood on the scaffold and stared Eternity in the face, did so cursing that one signature that sent that one carload of Jews one step closer to the rail yards.
    Bureaucrats are risk averse.
    Once upon a time the way you controlled this was by simply denying your own congressman or other elected representative the right to send these people your money. FDR stopped a lot of that, and indeed, after 1933, not only Washington DC, but every state capital who had to deal with the New Deal, found both depression and bureaucracy to be very profitable. Even today, as I write this, we have lost almost 2.4 million jobs, yet the government is claiming nearly a million jobs saved or gained from the "stimulus". No one to my knowledge is pointing out the simple fact that those 2.4 million lost jobs are all private sector while those saved/gained jobs are public sector.
    See how this game works? Virginia right now is boasting that its unemployment rate is going down, not up.
    Today, federally mandated and funded bureaucratism has crept down to the tiniest city council, where, just fifty years ago, the only federal employee ran the post office.
What to do.
    So today, you have to form a shadow government in your town, your district, your state so as to decide just what services, and at what cost, you believe your little part of this democracy can abide. (The first two people I want to get rid of are those two sheriff's deputies who take my pocket knife away from me every time I enter the courthouse. I've been through a dozen this year.) Most standing politicians will not go along with you, so you have to form your own ticket, and find your own candidate.
    (You will have to do pretty much the same thing with your schools, so get ready for some long hours of work.)
    From these slates of candidates, within eight years, will arise some very important state and national leaders. This is how Sara Palin rose.
    The major point is, no matter how you arrive at the formula, your elected official has to know his/her job depends on reducing the size of government, both in terms of structure and mission, and the size of its budget. Start at 25%, and as my friend Mr Hightower wrote, make sure it is the paperhangers in the front office and not the people in the front lines who feel the pinch.

    The Public Schools
    In theory we defend home schooling, but it has always been a great sadness that we are willing to walk away from what once was the finest public school system in the world. And the reason it was the finest was because of local control. The Left long ago understood the power of state textbook commissions, for instance...while we slept. That garbage your children is taught didn't get there by accident.
    You have to reacquire that power, which even in the best of circumstances, would have been a fight lasting many years. And you have to look beyond the time your own kid is in school. Public schools ain't Little League baseball. It's your country's future.
    I will not tell you here my opinions about dress code, corporal punishment, busing, private automobiles, school uniforms. I will simply say there is much that is being taught in public school that should not be taught at all. There is also much that is being taught the wrong way, with the wrong emphasis. Among these, especially, are American Government and American History. Both need to taught with enthusiasm (which would require the firing of many teachers straightaway) and with a view toward American exceptionalism, and American heroes.
    Kids relate to heroes at about fourth grade. So start then, and build up. If George Washington slept around, let them find that out in college. What they need to know early on is how to discern the difference between a lie, a smear and a fact. They need to see the perosnal virtues of the founders reflected in the virtue of the country as a whole.
    In all cases, what is taught in schools should augment what has already been taught at home..and by "at home" I mean most homes. The entire school system should not be required to stand on it's head because one parent is abusive, an atheist, or offended. The school system should reflect the standards of the community at large, and hopefully our finer elements. So black lipstick just may be out this year in East Kentucky.
    In the 1930s our school systems "forced" certain American values down the throats of kids, from backward Appalachia to immigrant- ridden St Louis to segregated Columbia, Tennessee. Black students in 1955 received demonstrably better public educations than they do now, in any public school, and the question needs to asked "Why?". Segregation was not the answer, so look for the others. Reverse engineer that whole process. In my view, segregation notwithstanding, public schools went from demanding "you can" from its students, to "you can't". That's "leftism", not racism. Instead of teaching those children to hate the white George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, teach them to hate what has been done to them by their government the past forty years...for it indeed has been hateful...and criminal.
    I'm getting into proprietary areas here, for we are involved in counseling, curricula and cultural issues, both from the position of being (back) in political power and from the opposite position should the new national police come crashing through your front door with a battering ram, and we have to take this theme covert.
    Our main point here is, you can't just win in 2010 or 2012 then walk away. You have to know "they" won't quit until one of you is completed defeated, so you can't quit either. Sorry, that's the hand you've been dealt, so you have to play it.
    Or fold.

   Public Universities
   Dittos to what I just said about K-thru-12 public schools, only to add that the high cost, the criminally high cost of public education is a reflection of our health care problem. The reason $29 textbooks cost $125, and have to be revised every three years, killing off the used book market, is the same as that $29 aspirin at the hospital...just substitute "subsidy student loans" for "insurance company".
   Moreover, fully a third of most university academic programs is designed to regenerate itself and grow. Any decent analyst can come up with a 1-, 5- and 10-year forecast for the nation's needs in historians at the university, high school and middle school levels. For super specialized studies, such as the History of Pre-Columbian Sheep Shelter Furnishings in the Ozarks, let Professor Gardiner at SE Missouri State choose his own successor.
    When college programs graduate students at a 2:1-3:1 ratio to available jobs in a particular field we have a problem. And not just because of the disgruntled two thirds who end up at Best Buy, Hooters or answering the phone at Dewey, Scoogem and Howe. Besides, all the Women's Studies grads who chose not to go after their masters degree already have those receptionist jobs in tow.
    The tendency is to expand the university itself to accommodate the overage, and the way they do this is by tapping out the best of the lot and move into graduate programs. Those grads in turn will then go on to newly created position and departments in yet another university, bumping up that state's education budget. see how it works?
    We believe the people should cause the curricula to be revisited, with a view of creating a core curricula, based on what was taught 1900-1960. Yes, that means Western Civilization is back, Samoan Civilization is out. University budget priorities should be directed toward this core, from whence come jobs and the old ideal of the "better man and woman". Colleges and universities can be cut by 25% easily, and the degrees they pass out at the bachelor's level have become so meaningless that truly, a degree is worth little more than a diploma...except that a lot of educational bureaucrats got richer along the way.
    Finally, in every area of academe K-PhD, there is the problem of the "outlaw" teacher, professor, and sometimes even entire department. There are things citizens can do to cast a chilling effect on this conduct. All legal, mind you, but things that will certainly make them think twice about repeat performances. And yes, there is a little reverse engineering of Alinksy's Rules for Radicals, in that's how they spot us and make our lives miserable. But it's also the way the Commies took care of business when they were in charge in  the Eastern Bloc...identify, isolate, prosecute and persecute. They could be clever to the point of being artistic. We know how.
    I've asked Bernie to work up a single article on this subject, the outlaw teacher, to appear soon, but much of what we have to say as to specific tactics, well, we can't say. That's how we make money, since, for a few hundred bucks, instead of hiring Vinnie and Augie with baseball bats, you hire us to bust their shins legally.

    You'll note I've said very little about the unions, at either the high school or university level. But they are your chief adversary. At the local level they will fight back, and fight hard. They will know you by name...so learn theirs. It will get personal. It will get mean.
    The way to beat them is by beating the drums about things that are really above their pay grade. If the people of Iowa decide Women's Studies don't fit into the plans of higher education, it is none of their concern (only we all know that it is). That is a political issue decided by legislators and the people.
    You way you defeat the unions is to beat down "their soldiers in your emply", i.e., the legislators. (This is the one fight Ronald Reagan didn't want to take on in the '80s, and it was because the people were not yet on his side of the issue. Now we are.) If you squeeze or replace the legislators who conive with the unions, you will beat them.
    In twenty five years, if you are successful, there will be many books written as to how you did it...and a grateful nation will read them and learn.

Advertising
    I consider most forms of advertising protected speech, so there's the problem. Advertising works best with children, and they've been doing that since the radio shows in the 30s first began selling cereal to kids.
    What we all know is that advertising that doesn't work stops. Suddenly. Just like bad music. Since few kids actually work...cut grass, deliver papers...everthing kids buy, someone else pays for.
    Don't do that anymore. If you say "No", the advertising stops. Kids will be content to wear 4.99 T-shirts instead of 14.99 ones with a silhouette of a man and a basketball on it. I once asked a kid how much Nike was paying him to advertise their products. He looked at me dumbfounded.
    In any case, that logo cost about $10 on a crummy t-shirt, and the point is they marketed and advertyised that t-shirt to him, but you shelled out the money. If Nike were to remove the logo and simply put their label at the back of the collar, then sell the shirt at say 7.99, and then sell the logo as an iron-on at another $8, see how many kids would pay for the logo. You are the problem....for you are not teaching kids about the basics of economics and marketing, and the humiliation of being made a sucker.
    Advertising and marketing isn't so much about lies as it is in making you want somethign you don't need and often can't afford. It is about being suckered. In the end they know you will be willing to go into debt to get it. At that point advertising is a home invasion with a full seat at the dinner table, right next to car loan and home mortgage.
    You need counseling and therapy. Join a group. Form a group. Teach you kids and practice what you preach. Just as you demand of the schools, create a core budget of necessities, and ask you kids to do the same thing. Make it a routine thing...watch "I Remember Mama" (Irene Dunn). Teach your kids that saving, and building a nest egg, or delaying gratification are good things. Teach them these are things with which we build our House, and by "House" I mean the House of David Schmidlap, not a building.
    Teach them early enough and they will beam with pride, rather cower with embrassment, when they put that dollar back in their pocket,  turning down the offer the biggie-size the fries, instead putting that money in a mason jar at home.
    This is just one thing you can do, but just think of the collateral damage advertisers are doing to your House, because of the lack of a simple "no".

Vassar Bushmills