PART 2 — Electoral Tactics

Before you can wield power, you need to be elected. After that, the dominant goal for most political officeholders is to be re‑elected to the same or a higher office, because power and its trappings are highly desirable. You already know this, particularly if you are running for re‑election, but the implications are worth examining because they affect your ability to hold the line against Democratic advances while pursuing your personal objectives. Being elected to office always depends on a blend of luck and ability, both of which will mitigate to some degree the difficulties involved in holding that office. Those who rely on luck the least will generally manage better, unless there are more powerful individuals or entities that need them to continue to hold a particular position.

This section covers the current state of the electoral environment, the optimal strategy for securing your voters, and a variety of tactical recommendations to improve your campaigning effectiveness. The goal is to amplify your natural ability and reduce the degree of luck required. And yes, the incompetence or goodheartedness of your Democratic opponent counts as a type of luck that is an unreliable path to victory.

[Violetta Tinari note: The discussion of luck vs. ability is a close echo of Machiavelli's The Prince, Chapter 6.]

The Composition of the Electorate

The recent shifts in the Republican recipe for success mean that it is worth examining how to handle each part of the voting audience.

Understand what drives electoral success, or you will fail to achieve your goals.

Your dedicated followers are the core of winning. They allow you to win elections against primary opponents, and they will be the most vocal advocates in a general election and beyond. Expand their numbers at every opportunity, and ensure you instruct them to cast ballots in addition to showing up at rallies and talking about how great you are.

Traditional conservatives are still necessary at the ballot box for now, although the goal is to build a coalition that will bypass them in the future. Most of them will find the antics of your followers offensive, and they may feel similar disgust for the way you pander to those followers. The trick to keeping them on board is to maintain enough of a veneer of respectability that they think there is still a possibility you will pursue at least some conservative priorities. Between that slender carrot and the heavy stick of fearmongering about being ruled by rabid progressives, you can convince enough conservatives to reluctantly vote for you instead of a Democrat.

Traditional liberals and progressives are unlikely to be swayed to your side, so the goal is to foster divisions among them and ensure that the Democratic candidate has as little support as possible because of having to choose sides among internal factions. Try to avoid being so repulsive to these groups that they set aside their differences and unite against you. This is challenging due to the techniques that attract and maintain your followers, so your objective is to learn how to walk the tightrope. Have your campaign encourage liberal complacency so they think their votes are unnecessary due to polling that indicates a Democratic win, institutional safeguards that will constrain your behavior if you win, and a belief that a future Democrat can set things right if needed. Apathy is also a useful tool, and you can make some of them believe that it doesn't matter whether there is a Democratic or Republican in office because neither is serving their interests.

Disaffected Democratic constituencies are a short step away from joining your followers. The more you can do to cultivate a sense of hopelessness among them, the more likely they are to abandon the party that would help them in favor of your promise to give them a sense of power. This is part of why state-level Republican control is so important for national elections—it enables the creation and expansion of misery even in Democratic strongholds such as cities, feeding this sense of hopelessness and making more potential followers for you to capture.

Independents are naturally a mixed group, so any of the previous techniques can apply. In short, peel away as many as possible who are susceptible to your message, convince others you are the lesser of two bad options, and discourage the rest from voting because Democrats failed to put forward their ideal candidate. In a world where Americans expect to have their desires catered to perfectly, it is easy to convince independent progressives and liberals to justify not voting because the Democratic candidate fails to align with them on a single hot-button issue, even if they generally share the same set of beliefs and principles. Idiots.

[VT: For website purposes, I'm using this blue italic text to imitate the callout boxes in the original book. These are supposed to be the "quick takeaways" for busy politicians.]

[VT: This is one of the techniques currently being used to sway pro‑Palestine voters. Since the Democrats haven't addressed their wishes sufficiently, they should sit out the election even though Republican policies will likely give Israel even greater freedom to do as it pleases.]

How to Attract Voters and Bind Them to You Permanently

The ideal follower is one who will never switch to the other side. The entire electoral system is a numbers game and time is on our side due to locked-in achievements at the Supreme Court and elsewhere, so for now it is worth losing more than one voter temporarily to gain one permanently. As long as we keep adding to the base, total domination is assured.

The process of adding voters to our cause is akin to religious conversion. Once a convert is past the initial stages of committing to their new faith, they are often more devoted to it than someone who grew up in the same faith. This is because they have made a conscious choice, and in many cases have suffered social consequences for that choice because their peers do not understand it, they have a low opinion of that religion, or because they believe the conversion has caused a change in the convert’s behavior that creates barriers to getting along the way they used to. As time goes on, it is increasingly difficult to renounce the new faith due to the universal human distaste for admitting mistakes, particularly one so fundamental to daily life (and the afterlife). Nobody likes to be on the receiving end of “I told you so,” from their peers, and certainly not after suffering for the original decision.

To build out your cohort of followers, the objective should be to accelerate the process of political conversion to the most extreme form of right-wing behavior that can be achieved. Wherever possible, bypass the “conscious choice” part and try to get potential followers to the stage where they begin to suffer consequences for their political faith (more on that in the next section). Even if the potential convert is already a long-time Republican voter, moving them to the extreme helps to lock them in permanently. If this does not happen, they may abandon our cause as the educated suburban middle class has begun to do, out of distaste for our rhetoric and narrow culture-war focus that neglects their actual needs. For any other current political affiliation, the trick is to appeal to them on one or two topics, get them to agree on those points, then encourage them to become advocates for your position. Once this happens, the people they interact with will assume they also share your uglier opinions, and will respond accordingly. This is the crisis point—will they turn away from you or commit to being your follower? Since you cannot micromanage each individual situation, the best approach is to create an aura of inevitability that our side will ultimately win, and that any pushback from the rest of society is a sign of hidden forces that are fighting against the truth!

Democrats have yet to fully understand and come up with a way to mitigate our approach on this front. There is ample hand-wringing about cultish behavior among Republicans, and multiple experiments on how to present real information in a way that will change the mind of a test subject who has succumbed to our alternative facts. They remain unsuccessful because the techniques rely on interventions at an individual level, ideally from someone who the subject already trusts and who is also trained in the correct intervention techniques. In business terms, propaganda is highly scalable and industrialized, but deprogramming its victims is a cottage industry.

Humans have three components—mind, body, and soul. Democrats appeal to the mind by assuming the populace will exercise good judgement. Playing for the soul is much more effective.

Despite what your admirers imply, you are not God, so use His adversary’s tactics to bend voter’s souls to your will. The more you convince voters to commit a variety of sins at your behest, the deeper the connection will be between you.

This is the same principle used by criminal gangs that require new members to commit a petty crime and increasingly raise the stakes as time goes on. This functions both as a way of recognizing status and as a way of ensuring group cohesion. After a certain point, the unspoken understanding is that nobody else will accept a gang member after the things they have done, and that the only safety (from police, other gangs, and society) lies in remaining a loyal member of the gang.

Calling on your followers to commit outright crimes on your behalf is risky, both for them and for you. Dancing around the topic can get you a certain distance, but if you are too explicit in the request or they are too enthusiastic, the resulting backlash and arrests may diminish your power and number of followers. Encouraging them to sin is much safer, particularly since American society no longer recognizes or punishes many of the sins you can incite.

Christian doctrine provides a convenient list of ways to entice voters into your camp. Commonly called the seven deadly sins, these human frailties are easy to exploit, and much of the preparatory work has already been done for you.

The Seven Deadly Sins and Their Applications

Pride is the gateway sin, as it leads so easily to all the others. Always tell your voters that they are better than everyone else. They want to believe it so badly they will accept it as truth despite any evidence to the contrary.

Every sin matters, no matter how small. It is better for one of your followers to act them out in a thousand small ways over the course of a week than it is for them to commit one big sin such as violent assault or murder. The cumulative effect will be much greater as they slowly turn away from the amiability and generosity of spirit that Americans like to believe is part of the national character. Remember, aside from the occasional martyr for your cause, you need your followers to remain free and able to vote, so encourage bad behavior that remains below the level where law enforcement will take an interest. The safest road to becoming one of our ideal voters is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Remember that the sin of pride is distinct from healthy pride—the laborer’s satisfaction in a job well done, or a parent’s joy in seeing their toddler accomplish a difficult task like tying shoelaces. The kind of pride you want to nurture is the one that induces someone to claim that their race, nation, religion, political opinion, etc. is superior to any other. Once they are convinced of that, it is easy to cultivate contempt for other people who are different.

The path to sinful pride is an easy one, and it can begin with an otherwise healthy idea. A true patriot can love their country while recognizing that other countries are perfectly fine and may in fact be better suited to the tastes of the people who live there. An American patriot visiting such a country may say that it’s not to their liking as a whole, but they are happy for the locals who seem to enjoy it and there might be one or two good things that America could learn from. You could drop an American nationalist into that same situation and hear nothing but complaints about how these dumb locals don’t understand the right way to do things and America is simply superior on all fronts. Their pride in being an American has been pushed beyond simple enjoyment of the good things they have into a loathing for anything foreign.

At the level of basic human interaction, you will know you have succeeded when your followers begin to view other humans as things rather than people. Abstractions have no faces, no names, and their pain is of no consideration. If the only way to be worthy of respect is to share the same ideals as you and your followers (because you are all superior beings who have the right ideas), the risk of leaving the group is too high to consider. The contempt for others is what makes pride so useful for branching out into other sins:

• Anger—“I hate that someone inferior like that is doing X!”

• Envy—“why should they have nice things I don’t?”

• Gluttony—“it’s only natural that I should consume more because I’m better than them”

• Greed—“all the resources should be controlled by the right sort of people”

• Lust—“other people exist for my gratification”

• Sloth—“I’ve done enough for the world simply by being me; I don’t owe anyone anything.”

Much of the groundwork has already been laid for you, ranging from the concept of “proud to be an American,” to the way self-esteem is taught in schools. Perhaps the greatest achievement in normalizing the sin of pride is the work the progressives did with gay pride and the other flavors of sexual deviancy that followed. Objectively speaking, there is nothing about homosexuality that justifies a feeling of pride (the same is true of heterosexuality), so the only thing to be proud of is the identity label itself. Once that precedent was set, it became socially acceptable to express pride for any number of other characteristics that also have no inherent merit. You may add to the list as desired, and it will be difficult for your opponents to challenge you without resorting to arguments about past injustices, which only works for a handful of topics such as white pride. Even then, your followers will come to your defense because they feel they are being told they should not be proud, or should even be ashamed, of who they are.

In their haste to free us all from outdated concepts such as shame, guilt, humility, and traditional social constraints, progressives have unintentionally helped us create a large cohort of people who actually believe they are superior and who take offense when the world does not react accordingly. Never back down, never apologize, never accept correction—you are too good for that and you want your followers to believe that they are as well.

Once you have mastered how to instill and manipulate pride in your followers, you will find that anger is the most versatile tool in your kit. It is possible to drum up outrage about literally anything, no matter how innocuous it may seem.

It is easy to go from a feeling of wounded pride and transition seamlessly into an angry attack on the perceived perpetrator of the offense. “How dare they” is a useful phrase, whether used explicitly or implicitly. This can be applied in situations ranging from the trivial to the immutable:

• Minor inconvenience: “How dare this store expose my eyes to merchandise targeted at a demographic I despise, even though it in no way affects my range of shopping options?”

• Political: “It’s unfair that my side didn’t win the election even though the other side is clearly inferior. I’m furious because they must have cheated or allowed too many of the wrong sort of American to vote.”

• Laws of economics and physics: “It’s outrageous I should have to pay higher gas prices just because oil is a globalized commodity and a limited resource whose overconsumption is destroying the planet’s habitability."

As with pride, the goal is to push your followers past the point of righteous anger and into the realm of self-righteous or vengeful anger. It is natural and even holy to express anger in defense of those who are helpless, or against the breaking of divine law. Take that anger and refocus it on targets outside your group, transforming it into hatred, resentment, and vengeance.

The news media is a useful tool for stoking anger. Take the latest attention-grabbing story and figure out who to blame for it. The nationalization of media means viewers are exposed to stories far from their communities, and the sensationalization of journalism in service of ratings means that stories are dramatized to elicit an emotional reaction from the viewer. People are bad at understanding statistics and assessing the actual risk of something awful happening, so it is easy to take a story and threaten your followers with whatever terrible thing is being reported.

A story about a large drug bust along the Mexican border should be nothing more than another note in the annals of the War on Drugs, but you can turn it into so much more. Stoke your followers’ anger and resentment at the Democrats whose “open-border policies” enable so much illegal border crossing (even if the seizure happened at a guarded border crossing as so many of them do—it needn’t be a rational argument against Democrats). Show your fury at the Mexican scum who are bringing in the drugs that ruin wholesome American families, making sure not to distinguish between regular Mexicans and the criminal organizations that are actually responsible and that terrorize the Mexican people even more than Americans. Reassure your followers that they are justified in hating all Mexicans for the things that are being done by a small minority, and encourage them to feel that any act of vengeance against Mexicans is commendable. Even the pettiest insult to an innocent hard-working immigrant who “looks Mexican” is a further stain on your followers’ souls that will bind them closer to you.

Build from there to question why Democrats want so many Mexicans to cross the border in the first place, stoking fear of what America will be like when ethnic minorities dominate more of your followers’ communities, not just the Democratic-leaning ones. The type of anger that ensues is almost righteous because it involves protecting a community’s traditions, which means that an individual is thinking of others beyond themselves. Once again, you must push them to move past that point to focus on how their own lives would be inconvenienced or otherwise unfavorably altered by having to deal with the changes brought by outsiders, such as bilingual signage or the fading of community traditions in favor of new ones. Fear of loss and anger at its perceived perpetrators is incredibly powerful if you use it correctly. An abstract fear caused by an event thousands of miles away can lead someone to hate and demean their neighbor if guided properly to that conclusion.

Anger is the most powerful emotion—learn to harness it and direct your followers to unleash it on useful targets.

Anger is the most transmissible emotion, so take advantage of the wrath-centric business models of talk radio and television punditry.

Humans evolved to recognize anger quickly and easily as a basic social survival measure. We pick up on it in someone’s tone of voice, word choice, facial expression, and body language. Other emotions with greater complexity or subtlety are harder to express over long distances, and this is one of our strengths. Conservative dominance of talk radio means that we can reach the working class in places where they lack access to other forms of media. Since Americans have been trained to avoid silence whenever possible, radio pundits serve as a constant whisper—or scream—in their ears, stirring up anger and outrage throughout the day.

Television news and talk shows can reach fewer places but they have the benefit of visual stimuli. This lets them create even stronger emotional reactions, through a combination of the hosts’ visual signals and the choice of supplementary images. Far too many people still believe (or want to believe and thus lie to themselves) that conservative television is designed to provide a truthful account of the world without the liberal bias found elsewhere. The reality is that profit is king, and the networks are under orders to push whatever version of reality is most appealing to the audience. If this means feeding the viewers’ desire to be outraged, then so be it.

You may ask why voters would want to feel angry all the time, and why that would be an effective business model for anyone. The lure of anger is that it feels powerful, as the body releases chemicals for the “fight” part of “fight or flight.” This feeling is energizing and can become addictive, particularly when combined with the physical or mental exertion of toiling away in dead-end jobs. For many of your followers, this will be the hook that first draws them to you. There is no need to spend too much time as a guest on radio or television shows, as long as you regularly feed the hosts with quotes they can use as the seed for a diatribe that will bear fruit in the form of new converts to your cause.

[VT: The last sentence in this paragraph is almost a direct quote from The Screwtape Letters, except that the original begins “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one…” See my note at the end of the section on how to degrade expertise for more about Kavelli's plagiarism.]

Anger and fear go hand in hand—a wrathful person who wishes harm upon another human being will live in fear of being the target of someone else’s violent wrath.

Living in a state of near-constant sinful anger creates mistrust of others, particularly those who may be expressing righteous anger. Those who live by the sword die by the sword, and those who depend on guns and police for their peace of mind fear those weapons being taken away or turned against them. When black protesters take to the streets after yet another unjustifiable white-on-black or police-on-black killing to express their sorrow and anger (which is righteous because it seeks change that protects life), you must stoke fears that the anger has already become hatred and is about to become violence against your followers. They will believe this because they will project their own kind of anger on the actions of others and assume that the behavior will be similar. The reality does not matter, but the fear will drive gun sales, and every gun purchased for that reason will become a constant back-of-mind reminder of the fear that prompted it. Since people do not like feeling fear, you can encourage them to be angry with the protesters who made them feel fearful in the first place, and thus the cycle continues.

Envy is easy to exploit, and it runs two directions. Encourage your followers to hate the coastal elites and others who have a better quality of life, and ensure that they fear the potential actions of less-fortunate people who surely envy them in turn

By engineering the economy and society to create winners and losers, both at the individual and the regional level, we ensure an everlasting supply of envy. The liberals in Hollywood and the media are useful tools in reinforcing this feeling, constantly showcasing the glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous. Even something as mundane as a home-renovation show that helps regular people have a better place to live can be a low-grade source of envy, as it teaches viewers to desire the possessions that others have.

Focus your followers’ minds on the contrast between their lives and those of the people they envy, rather than the system that produced the disparity. Imply that the targets of their envy acquired their lifestyles by cheating and exploiting everyone else. This is at least partly true, which helps sell the story, but make sure to omit the ways Republican policies contribute to the situation. Envy can thus be converted into anger at the injustice of immoral liberal elites living a good life while honest conservative families struggle every day. This anger is then converted into hatred, which can lead voters to act against their best interests purely to spite those coastal elites who they envy.

On the flip side, remember that every sin your followers commit can also be projected onto others. If they envy others, then surely the under-classes (particularly immigrants, illegal or otherwise) must envy them in turn. They want what we have, which is why they come here in the first place. In the zero-sum system we seek to preserve, this fear of loss is a powerful motivator and easily leads back to anger against those who might cause our followers to lose what little they have.

Envy need not be about material things or lifestyles—it can apply as easily to the respect or other forms of status attained by those who are envied. Use this to undermine the role of experts of all types by convincing your followers that they deserve as much deference as someone who has spent years building expertise and actually knows what they are talking about.

Gluttony abounds in American society, almost to the point where it goes unnoticed and unremarked. The trick is to derive a political benefit, mostly by stoking fears of enforced moderation.

We are a gluttonous society as a whole. By almost every measure, Americans consume more per capita than any other nationality. The majority of our economy is built around consumption of products and services, rather than production, and the advice often prescribed to other countries with economic struggles is that they need to boost domestic consumption to more closely resemble us. Spending money, and going into debt to do so, is practically a virtue as far as our economy is concerned. Unlike the other sins where you want to encourage your followers to commit more, this is one of the few where capitalist society has you outmatched and your exhortations are raindrops in the ocean of pressure to consume.

Given these circumstances, how can gluttony be put to good use? Once again, the fear of loss comes into play—convince voters that Democrats, liberals, and shadowy manipulators behind the scenes want to deprive them of the good things in life. Any policy or even common-sense advice that advocates moderation should be viewed as an attack on Americans’ God-given right (hah!) to be gluttons. If health is a concern, as with policy efforts to restrict the sale of outrageously large sugar-laced drinks, then call it a nanny-state attempt to restrict consumer freedom. When a Democrat makes an offhanded remark about keeping car tires fully inflated to improve gas mileage, mock that as “the Democratic economic plan” even though it… works. Take gluttony and overconsumption and turn it into a giant middle finger aimed at anyone with an ounce of common sense or self-preservation, like the “rolling coal” nutcases who modify vehicle engines to emit high amounts of sooty exhaust fumes.

If you want to explore the nuances of gluttony, keep in mind that quantity is not everything. Diet culture in its many forms is also a kind of gluttony once the dieter begins to use it as an excuse for attention-seeking behavior. “I couldn’t possibly eat that much, take it away,” or “I only consume gluten-free, locally raised, organic vegan meals,” are each their own forms of gluttony when they become an intentional burden on other people. Even the notion that “all I want is a plain cup of good coffee” becomes a source of grievance and gluttony, because it relies on finding someone who can make it properly. In this case, “properly” is imagined to mean the good old days when things were simpler, cheaper, and waitstaff did their jobs well; in reality, it means the days when the complainer’s sense of taste was more easily pleased and they had other pleasures in life so everything seemed good all around. Never underestimate the ability of humans to lie to themselves about the source of their feelings, especially when nostalgia is involved. The desire to sate an appetite that cannot be satisfied without going back in time or changing one’s perspective in the present is an endless source of aggravation that you can learn to harness.

Moving beyond the realm of food, seeking social media validation or influence is also a form of gluttony, and this is a rapidly growing field that is worth exploring. Use your social media activity judiciously to cultivate a desire among your followers for your high-profile reposting or “like” that will validate their opinions and temporarily sate their craving for recognition. Before long, they will be competing to post increasingly outrageous things in hope of your approval or that of their peers. Anywhere that an appetite is out of balance, there is an opportunity to exploit its overindulgence or the associated fear of enforced moderation.

Greed is rampant among Americans, to the point of being hailed as a virtue. Feed it by drawing contrasts between the lifestyles of your followers and those of the elites, but avoid doing anything that might narrow the gap between the two camps.

Americans toil for longer hours, with less vacation time, and under generally worse conditions than almost any other developed society. Some of this is driven by pure survival as we have ensured that certain occupations and classes of work are so poorly compensated that many people have to overwork merely to keep sufficient shelter and food. Once basic needs are met, work is often seen as the means to acquiring an ever-increasing quantity of material goods. A big house in a nice neighborhood, cars for everyone in the family, the latest fashions and electronics, experiences that convey high status when posted on social media—these are the things Americans are taught to desire from an early age. As with a glutton’s relationship with food, there is nothing wrong with these desires in moderation to the extent that they lead to a fulfilling life, but we want to see them taken to excess. Greed should become a driving force that consumes every waking moment of its victim’s life and leads them to treat others with cruelty either as a means to achieving riches or in order to remove them as an obstacle.

While philosophers and religious teachers commend the value of hard work and its associated rewards, most also advocate taking time to rest, contemplate, and develop the mind and soul. This is what you must keep your followers from doing. Focus their energy on two things to keep them greedy and angry. The first is working to the point of exhaustion in pursuit of material goods because that is the American way and it makes them virtuous compared to lazy liberals, elites, immigrants, etc. The second is to constantly point out how, despite working their fingers to the bone, they are not reaping the material rewards they clearly deserve. The system is rigged against them (just the way we like it) and the only way they can feed their greed is to tear down the people and institutions who stand in their way.

Castigate Democrats as creating systems that destroy opportunities for hard-working Americans to get ahead, especially if they are policies that lead to better work-life balance that would giver workers a chance to improve their mental/spiritual health. Focus on the plight of small business owners who are just trying to stay afloat in an ocean of red tape, and divert attention away from the others who are able to feed their greed by grinding workers into dust. Attack foreign governments and industries for stealing American jobs, denying our workers the ability to feed their greed and possess even more of the world’s wealth.

Most importantly, appear to taunt the elites by proposing cultural policies that will supposedly bring them distress, thereby soothing the feelings of your followers. It may seem odd that your followers despise elites for the greed that led to them controlling most of the wealth in the country, even while being driven by their own greed, but it is far easier to convince someone to see another person’s sin than their own. When dealing with the elites directly, as you will when soliciting their donations, support their fantasy that their wealth and power is earned or otherwise deserved, which makes them feel better about themselves. After all, it can’t possibly be greedy to simply enjoy the just rewards of [insert justification for obscene levels of wealth], even if it means millions of their fellow Americans struggle every day to make ends meet. Whether addressing a billionaire or a minimum-wage worker, the key is to never let them see the negative consequences of their own greed while highlighting the negative impact on their own lives due to the greed of others.

Lust is tricky to deploy overtly, but you can make subtle use of it to advance conservative causes and denigrate liberals.

Most of your effort with lust will be directed toward men, partly because they are more susceptible to our approaches and partly because they are currently proving to be more reliable voters for us. It is no mistake that conservative media and politics tend to have traditionally good-looking women involved. Democrats and progressives have a tendency to respect knowledge, expertise, and competence over good looks, so they have a more diverse set of women. Use this disparity to insult and demean your opponents, implying that they are angry, spiteful, or generally unlikeable as a result of being unattractive and unable to catch a good (conservative) man. You will likely have ample opportunities to use this tactic since Democrats tend to have more women involved in politics in an attempt to get closer to gender parity. Republicans have relatively few women involved, except as attractive, doting spouses. Draw on this contrast to highlight the fact that Republican women understand their traditional role in the family and are doing things the right way.

Your proxies in the conservative media will help on this front, whether by picking at Democratic women over insignificant matters of their clothing or appearance, or by playing up the “ugly, angry woman” rhetoric. An additional benefit of conservative media is that male audiences are more likely to believe whatever a pretty woman on the television tells them, even if it’s blatant nonsense. Even female viewers are slightly more susceptible because they see a woman who seems well put-together and want to identify with her. This also extends to social media, where influencers extolling traditional women’s roles show off their highly curated lifestyles and encourage their audience to become the kind of woman that a conservative man would lust after.

A less obvious use of lust depends on the attractiveness of conservative men, at least in their own eyes. While they may not be as physically attractive as fully styled conservative women, men seek to display a cartoonish version of manly behavior that is supposed to be attractive. To many conservative women, it is—they want to be with a stereotypical provider and protector, the kind of macho figure that brings in the cash and wouldn’t hesitate to pick up a gun and fight for his family. Male Republican politicians need to display this type of gruff bravado, both to attract conservative women and to show that they are the epitome of masculinity that other men want to associate themselves with.

The funny side of lust is that emerging demographic trends among the youth are leading women to lean liberal while men lean conservative. This is perfect for driving the wedge deeper and fostering discontent. As we continue to promote a simplistic and outdated view of physical and dominant masculinity that appeals to young men, it makes them less likely to find a suitable match among women who are repelled by their lack of useful traits like empathy, intellect, and respect for women as equal partners. This opens the door for us to tell men that progressives are poisoning the dating pool and trying to deny men the pleasures of the flesh, and that the only way to fix things is to enforce traditional gender roles. In other words, the world and its women must bend to men’s desires instead of men adapting to women’s preference to be treated as independent human beings.

Sloth may seem like a misfit among the sins because we tend to think of it as a lack of activity, while the others are mostly about useful activity taken to the point of excess. For political purposes, encourage mental and spiritual sloth to ensure that your followers are easily led to their destruction.

Physical sloth is easy to cultivate, and it pairs nicely with pride. While most of the time we want Americans to be working to the point of exhaustion with no discernible improvement in their quality of life, any leisure time they scrape together should be spent in total collapse, binge-watching a show or doomscrolling social media or something equally unlikely to improve their state of being. Their slothfulness after all that work will have been “earned,” and this can be extended to any work-leisure ratio. Slothfulness is always deserved, because these are good people who have a right to relax and vegetate for a while. This is useful, but mostly to the extent that it prevents self-improvement, whether through exercise, nurturing friendships, community-building activities, or some other healthy way to pass the time.

The more important aspect of sloth is that you want your followers to avoid thinking for themselves. Encourage them to accept certain types of authority—not experts with actual knowledge, but confident voices that reinforce whatever they already think. Feed them easy answers to complex problems and discourage them from thinking things through. Build a wall on the southern border (and ignore the fact that walls don’t work)! Repeal business-stifling regulations (that protect your voters’ health and even life itself)! Talk tough at foreign leaders and they’ll cave to American demands (or, more likely, run rings around us diplomatically)! The mental image your followers have of the way the world works is still rooted in small-town life, where solutions were generally straightforward and only occasionally led to blood feuds with mass casualties. Encourage them to ignore the vast web of interconnection that has produced all of life’s modern conveniences but that also complicates the options for dealing with problems that appear simple.

By encouraging this willful ignorance that comes from a slothful mind, you can spin any nuanced solution proposed by progressives or Democrats as either an elitist talking down to good, honest folk, or even better as a double-dealing trick to get Americans to fall for some hidden agenda. “If I don’t understand it, I don’t trust it” is the motto they should live by. This can apply to anything from vaccines to climate change to economic policy. Paired with pride, this ignorance enables your followers to argue with a straight face that their opinions are as good as anyone else’s facts. Try not to laugh at them when they do that.

The last feature of sloth deals with the spiritual side of your followers. For all of the aforementioned sins to have long-term effects that benefit you, the sinners need to avoid any influences that may turn them back toward a righteous path. As with mental sloth, keep them looking for easy answers. Abortion is bad. Treating LGBT people as equals just encourages others to follow them into sin. Drag queens tempt children into immorality. Note how these examples all involve some aspect of sex—by focusing our followers’ minds on a tiny subset of sins that they’re unlikely to succumb to, we enable them to overlook the panoply of sins they commit every day at our behest or simply as a part of American culture.

Leading Your Followers Into Temptation

The most powerful way to promote sin among your followers is to lead them into temptation. Become the living embodiment of as many sins as you can tolerate.

This is harder than it sounds because even the most dedicated long-term politicians often have a sense of self-preservation with regard to their own souls. But consider the most effective political figure at this time. Every speech is loaded with prideful boasts about accomplishments both real and imaginary, combined with vengeful anger toward enemies. Envy is clear with every comparison, driving further boasts that ring empty in the ears of anyone who examines them closely. Gluttony and greed are embraced as marks of social status and superiority to others, and lust is directed at any compliant member of the opposite sex deemed worthy, while the unworthy ones are demeaned and insulted. Sloth is almost a hallmark, with boasts about avoiding books or other forms of real intellectual stimulus because they are unnecessary due to natural genius.

Compare that living embodiment of sin against the handful of other Republican leaders who flirt with calling their followers to sin, most of whom rely on anger as the easiest tool available. It gets them a certain distance but their audience actually does have enough insight to pick up on the fact that they’re not authentic and committed. It’s too much of an intellectual exercise on the politicians' part, and it comes across as manipulative rather than leadership by example. Granted, you may not want to cheat on your spouse(s), commit fraud multiple times, and air all your dirty laundry on a daily basis in the expectation that you will steamroll anyone who dares question your behavior—few people have the stomach for that. But whichever sins you choose to specialize in, make sure you are committed to seeing them through and never back down or apologize for them. Use the guide above to market them as virtues and encourage your followers to come along for the ride.

Humor, or a pretense of humor, is useful for deflecting criticism of your personal sins, or even extolling them as virtues to your followers.

Assuming you are still inclined to feel shame for your sins, humor can lessen the sting. It also provides a way to further bond with your followers. If you can pass your behavior off as a joke, particularly as one that your opponents would call out as distasteful, it gives your followers a reason to come to your defense. For example, a man who is unfaithful to his wife is a low-life, but a man who cracks jokes about how his Democratic opponent can only wish to be as lucky with the ladies portrays his lust as a mark of superiority. An angry speech that calls for executing political enemies would normally be viewed with alarm, but pass it off as a joke and it becomes just another sign of how passionate you are in advocating for your followers’ interests. The applications are limitless, and the best part is that anyone who criticizes the “not-really-a-joke” can be cast as lacking a sense of humor, while those who approved of the horrific reality behind the joke are the discerning ones who “get it.” This creates even greater cohesion among your followers.

An additional benefit of this approach to humor is that it allows you move the discourse toward flippancy, in which serious matters are treated as if they are a joke. The defense of freedom in partnership with our NATO allies, the stability of the domestic economy, the ability of any inhabitant of the United States to go about their business without being harassed—any of these can become a punchline. Liberals have forged a path for us with late-night shows and comedy in general, which they generally do much better than conservatives. In their rush to poke fun at the powerful and strike a blow for the little guy, they have inadvertently helped diminish the public’s ability to view serious matters with appropriate gravity. Use this to your advantage wherever possible; just as humor can deflect criticism of vice, it can prevent sincere praise of virtue.

A future-oriented mindset is an essential tool for creating the conditions for temptation. Ensure your followers strive for unattainable or inadvisable outcomes.

Keep your followers focused on the future, which can be presented in whichever way brings the greatest advantage. A revisionist view of the past is useful for generating pseudo-nostalgia, and the present is a rich source of grievances, but the future is where a person’s hope and fear really come into focus. The sheer uncertainty of the future allows you to amplify those hopes and fears beyond any reasonable expectation without having to provide a detailed list of steps as to how a particular future will come into existence. If the Democrats win, the nation will be overrun with immigrants, honest white Americans will be reduced to poverty, and all kinds of sexual deviancy will be approved or even enforced against the will of families. By contrast, if Republicans win, a new era of prosperity will be ushered in, all borders and American interests overseas will be secured, and traditional values will be respected and enforced on the deviants. The more outrageous and hyperbolic the claims in either direction, the better. It doesn’t matter if there is no discernible path from the present to any of these outcomes—the more vague you are, the easier it is for your followers to fill in the gaps however they please.

Beyond the utility of a future focus for campaign messaging, it is also a key angle for encouraging sin. Never let your followers look to the past with gratitude, or focus on the love that exists in their lives the present. Instead, urge them to look to the future with a fear that leads to anger, greed for the resources they could acquire, lust for the pleasures they could derive from the right social outcomes, and so on. The worst possible outcome would be for an American to do a good day’s work in some manner that benefits the community or the nation, and go to bed with a sense of gratitude for the many blessings that come from living here. Your followers should live perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always ready to sacrifice the real gifts they have in the present in the hope of some imaginary future that fulfills the dreams we have planted in their minds.

Why Sin Works

A sin-based connection with your followers is particularly powerful because Democrats have no easy way to counter it.

Since progressives have tried to move society beyond the concept of sin, guilt, and shame in the religious sense, this makes it both difficult for them to recognize and articulate, and awkward for them to call out. Imagine a Democrat onstage chastising their Republican opponent for proposing lust-based social policies… they would be laughed out of the auditorium. Or picture a television journalist asking a sitting senator why their economic bill is designed to encourage greed and gluttony. That journalist would be embarrassed to ask such an unsophisticated question, even if it accurately cut to the heart of the matter.

Democrats are also unlikely to emulate our tactics because they are trying to make America better, which generally means less sinful behavior even if they cannot bring themselves to use that term. The closest they come is anger, but even then it is mostly righteous anger in defense of those who are harmed by our vision of the way the country should be run. That pales in comparison with the visceral fury we can summon among our followers as needed, so there is no reason to worry that your opponents will be able to use the techniques listed above with anywhere near the effectiveness available to you.

Despite the religiosity of many of your followers, the Church is unlikely to prove a barrier to temptation.

The collapse of the Church’s moral authority is explored in greater detail later, but too many religious leaders have already shown themselves willing to overlook a multitude of mortal sins in exchange for policies that target a tiny handful of sins. If church leaders, with all the self-important pomp of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, can describe a walking case study of vice as a “champion of God, sent to save this country,” then you need have nothing to fear from them.

Exploiting Ignorance and Stupidity

Understand the differences between natural ignorance and willful stupidity. Both are useful, and you should convert the former to the latter whenever possible. Ignorance is a void to be filled as you see fit, while stupidity is a spiked shield that repels any attempts to introduce a dose of reality.

The typical American does not understand much about the way anything works outside their own narrow personal experience. This is also true for their elected representatives, especially in the House of Representatives and in state legislatures, whose inhabitants find themselves suddenly in the position to make decisions about things for which they are totally untrained and unprepared.

Realistically, there is no reason to expect most people to grasp the finer points of national budgets, foreign policy, regulatory processes, or commercial markets. They simply lack the education and experience to do so. This natural ignorance is an opportunity—whoever is first to fill the gap in an individual’s worldview gains an advantage because the next person has to dislodge the previous idea to make their point, which is increasingly difficult as people become resistant to rational debate. Never hesitate to offer an opinion that serves your purposes, particularly for topics that have been recently opened up for discussion. Even if 95% of the population already has an opinion (whether or not it is an informed one), the remaining 5% may adopt whatever viewpoint you are pushing, especially if they are predisposed to already agree with you for other reasons.

At the political level, ignorance is one of the primary avenues used by our allies in think tanks and lobbying organizations to achieve results. It all comes down to incentives, as sponsoring and passing legislation enables elected representatives to build their reputations as they seek re-election or higher office. A conservative “win” gives them bragging rights as someone who gets things done rather than a useless windbag. This leaves representatives with three options: craft legislation on a subject they actually understand, rely on an outside party to provide a comprehensive policy on a subject they do not understand, or pick a culture-war topic that requires no actual knowledge. The first option is unappealing because the representative’s narrow experience means their personal interests are unlikely to have wide appeal to the voters. The second option is most common, which is why Republican-dominated states often pass similar legislation that is essentially copy-pasted or ghostwritten by external advocates who are paid well for their service to the rich and powerful. The trick is to dress it up to look good to voters while working against their real interests. The culture-war option requires the least amount of effort but still benefits from outside advice regarding how far the boundaries of legality and constitutionality can currently be stretched, which depends on how much of the applicable judiciary system is favorably disposed to us.

Willful stupidity is the gold standard for your supporters. When they embrace an ideological position despite the evidence and actively resist all attempts to change their minds, that is when you know they are truly yours. Ignorance is the default state for humans, as we are born with zero knowledge. The only choice is whether or not to remain ignorant. By contrast, stupidity is a choice from the outset. When mothers feed their babies honey because the government advises against it to avoid infant botulism, or when people consume bleach to kill viruses or “cleanse” their bodies because they see social media as a more reliable source than government and manufacturer advisories not to do so, that is willful stupidity.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a huge opportunity for the ignorance-to-stupidity conversion, which has yielded gains across the board. In the early days of the pandemic, nobody knew what to do, other than a few experts who were prepared for such an event. This created an information void along with a pressing demand to fill it with… something. As medical experts began to insert their knowledge and educated guesses, we built a counter-narrative that the disease was inconsequential and that there was no need for business restrictions of any kind. Our followers believed it because nobody wants to have their lives disrupted the way they saw happening in the Democrat-governed states with major population centers that first saw the body count climbing. We leveraged our long-standing mantra that Republican-led states are “different and better” to convince them that the rules of epidemiology did not apply. Once this initial position was established, it was easy to raise doubts about the effectiveness of any countermeasures imposed by government, businesses, or individuals. We were assisted by the ever-changing guidelines on masking, lockdowns, etc. even though those changes were a reflection of society’s ability to mitigate the disease.

The stellar work on mask-wearing is the easiest example from those days. People were told not to buy up masks so they would be available for those who needed them the most, then to wear cloth masks, then that cloth masks were ineffective against later mutations of the virus, then that they should wear disposable N-95 masks once supply chains had caught up. At every step of the way, we suggested the experts were just making things up, obliterating nuance in favor of a simple “now they say to wear a mask, now they don’t, and does it really matter?” Once the validity of mask-wearing was in doubt, we raised the question of why anyone would create rules to enforce mask-wearing because there must be a motive behind the action. The inevitable answer based on our decades-long messaging is that masks are a form of government control and thus should be resisted to ensure freedom from tyranny. Even if a private business sought to enforce mask-wearing, it must be because they were collaborating with the government. Having established the basis for a conspiracy, it was easy to get our followers to question everything about COVID-19, including its seriousness (“not as bad as the flu”) and even its existence. When your followers are dying by the thousands, many of them denying the existence of their killer with their last words, you know you have mastered the art of cultivating willful stupidity.

Now that COVID-19 has largely receded from the national stage (even as it continues to be a leading cause of death), a quick survey of the political environment shows that its effects will be permanent. Now that our followers have embraced willful stupidity in a life-or-death situation, it will be easier to encourage it in other circumstances. The immediate defensiveness and preemptive aggression they developed to counteract good advice are behavioral patterns that require nothing more than the correct stimulus to reactivate. You might even call it a latent virus, just waiting for a vulnerability in its host. It is your job to create that vulnerability in a way that motivates your followers to serve your interests.

Identity Politics

Once you attract followers, it is your responsibility to give them the identity and characteristics that will best serve your needs.

Democrats are a useful foil for discussions about how identity politics are ruining America, but the reality is that we mastered the technique long ago and remain far ahead of them in milking it for political gains. You can borrow from any creative story-telling process you like—books, movies, tabletop roleplaying games, or podcasts. Any character can be defined by identifying who or what they love, hate, and fear. The rest of the character description should flow naturally from there. When you engage with your followers, your role is that of the creator, building an identity that they will adopt as their own. Tell them what to love (America, motherhood, apple pie, and drilling for oil in national parks), what they should hate (unions, anything woke, and drag queens), and what they should fear (Democrats being elected, losing access to guns, and transgender groomers corrupting their children). Nurture their grievances and lay the blame squarely on external forces, keeping them from looking within to see if their life choices or voting choices bear any responsibility. Teach them to crush the inner doubts that tell them they have failed to adapt as the world moves onward, and give them a narrative in which the elites are intentionally making their lives difficult while secretly sneering at their inability to thrive under current conditions. Paint them as heroic characters, fighting against the odds and even against the false gods of technology, economics, and wokeism. If you succeed in giving them an identity they enjoy as one of your followers, you will be able to direct them anywhere—even off a cliff if there is something to be gained in doing so.