The MAGA Den

Founding and early history

The College Republicans were founded as the American Republican College League on May 17, 1892 at the University of Michigan.[6] The organization was spearheaded by law student James Francis Burke, who would later serve as a Congressman from Pennsylvania.[6] The inaugural meeting was attended by over 1,000 students from across the country, from Stanford University in the west to Harvard University in the east. Contemporary politicians also attended the meeting, including Judge John M. Thurston, Senator Russell A. Alger, Congressman J. Sloat Fassett, Congressman W. E. Mason, John M. Langston, and Abraham Lincoln's successor in the Illinois State Legislature, A. J. Lester. Then-Governor of Ohio William McKinley gave a rousing keynote speech.[6]

The College Republicans quickly pursued a strategy of sending college students to vote in their home districts and registering others to vote where they schooled to swing closely contested districts.[6] This strategy was successfully implemented for the 1900 presidential election between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, helping win Bryan's home state of Nebraska for McKinley.[6]

James Francis Burke, 1901.

The College Republicans were financed, at least in part, by the Republican National Committee throughout much of its history. James Francis Burke received significant funding from the RNC to support the American Republican College League's founding and to maintain the organization's early offices in New York City and Chicago.[6] By 1924, the organization was operating directly under the auspices of the RNC as the Associated University Republican Clubs.[6]

The relative dominance of the Democratic party through the 1930s through the 1960s coincided with a precipitous drop in the membership and effectiveness of the College Republicans.[6] In 1931, the College Republicans were absorbed as an arm of the Hoover campaign.[7] For the next several years the organization operated alternately under the auspices of the "Republican National League," "Young Republican National Committee," and the "Division of Young Republican Activities."[7] In 1935, the College Republicans were merged into the newly created Young Republican National Federation, encompassing both college students and young professionals.[7] College Republican operations continued under the Young Republicans until the 1965 founding of the "College Republican National Committee."[7]

College Republican National Committee Wiki Page

One common theme in the abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social, artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism. 

Pan-progressivism

To be a Silicon Valley executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political affinities.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.

Google calibrates the order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent. Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.

The $4-5 trillion market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of 19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.

Silicon Valley apparently does not believe in either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It exercises a monopoly over the public airwaves, and resists regulations and antitrust legislation of the sort that liberals once championed to break up trusts in the late 19th and early 20th century. As payback, it assumes that Democrats don’t see Big Tech in the same manner that they claim to see Big Pharma in their rants against it.

Wall Street donated markedly in favor of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in their respective presidential races. Whereas conservative administrations and congressional majorities are seen as natural supporters of free-market capitalism, their Democratic opponents, not long ago, were not—and thus drew special investor attention and support from Wall Street realists.

The insurrectionist GameStop stock debacle revealed how “liberals” on Wall Street reacted when a less connected group of investors sought to do what Wall Street grandees routinely do to others: ambush and swarm a vulnerable company’s stock in unison either to buy or sell it en masse and thus to profit from predictable, artificially huge fluctuations in the price.

When small investors at Reddit drove the pedestrian GameStop price up to well over a hundred times its worth, forcing big Wall Street investment companies to lose billions of dollars, progressives on Wall Street and the business media cried foul. They compared the Reddit buyers to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.

One subtext was: Why would nobodies dare question the mega-profit making monopolies of the Wall Street establishments? The point that neither the Reddit day-traders nor the hedge-fund connivers were necessarily healthy for investment was completely lost.

Surveys of “diverse” university faculty show overwhelming left-wing support, reified by asymmetrical contributions of 95-1 to Democratic candidates. The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. to make race incidental to our characters no longer exists on campuses. Appearance is now essential. More ironic, class considerations are mostly ignored in favor of identity politics. “Equity” applies to race not class. The general education curricula is one-sided and mostly focused on deductive -studies courses, and in particular race/class/gender zealotry that is anti-Enlightenment in the sense that predetermined conclusions are established and selected evidence is assembled to prove them.

We are also currently witnessing the greatest assault on free speech and expression, and due process, in the last 70 years. And the challenges to the First and Fifth Amendments are centered on college campuses, where non-progressive speakers are disinvited, shouted down, and occasionally roughed up for their supposedly reactionary views—and by those who have little fear of punishment.

Students charged with “sexual harassment” or “assault” are routinely denied the right to face their accusers, cross examine witnesses, or bring in counterevidence. They usually find redress for their suspensions or expulsions only in the courts. What was thematic in the Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the University of Virginia sorority rape hoax was the absence of any real individual punishment for those who promulgated the myths.

Indeed in these cases many argued that false allegations in effect were not so important in comparison to bringing attention to supposedly systemic racism and sexism. In Jussie Smollett fashion, what did not happen at least drew attention to what could have happened and thus was valuable. It was as if those who did not commit any actual crime had still committed a thought crime.

Almost all media surveys of the last four years reflect a clear journalistic bias against conservatives in general. Harvard’s liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy famously reported slanted coverage against Trump and his supporters among major television and news outlets at near astronomical rates, in some cases exhibiting over 90 percent negative bias during Trump’s first few months in office. Liberal editors can now be routinely fired or forced to retire from major progressives newspapers if they are not seen as sufficiently woke.

No major journalist or reporter has been reprimanded for promoting the fictional “Russian collusion” hoax—and certainly not in the manner the media has called for punishment, backlisting, and deplatforming for any who championed “stop the steal” protests over the November 2020 elections. The CNN Newsroom put their hands up and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”—a myth surrounding the Michael Brown Ferguson shooting that was thoroughly refuted. Infamous now is the CNN reporter’s characterization of arsonist flames shooting up in the background of a BLM/Antifa riot as a “largely peaceful” demonstration. BLM, of course, has been nominated for a Nobel “Peace” Prize. After the summer rioting, one could better cite Tacitus’s Calgacus, “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”.

A George W. Bush or Donald Trump press conference was often a free-for-all, blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden version devolves into banalities about pets, fashion, and food. The fusion media credo is why embarrass a progressive government and thus put millions and the planet itself at risk?

Andrew Cuomo’s policies of sending COVID-19 patients into rest homes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Still, the media gave him an Emmy award for his self-inflated and bombastic press conferences, many of which were little more than unhinged rants against the Trump Administration. Anthony Fauci’s initial pronouncements about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, its risks and severity, travel bans, masks, herd immunity, vaccination rollout dates—and almost everything about the pandemic—were wildly off. Yet he was canonized by the media due to his wink-and-nod assurances that he was the medical adult in the Trump Administration room.

It would be difficult for a prominently conservative actor or actress to win an Oscar these days, or to produce a major conservative-themed film. Bankable actors/directors/producers like Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson operate as mavericks, whose films’ huge profits win them some exemption. But they came into prominence and power 30 years ago during a different age. And they will likely have no immediate successors.

Ars gratis doctrinae is the new Hollywood and it will continue until it bottoms out in financial nihilism. When such ideological spasms contort a society, the second-rate emerge most prominently as the loudest accusers of the Salem Witches—as if correct zeal can reboot careers stalled in mediocrity. Hollywood’s mediocre celebrities from Alec Baldwin to Noah Cyrus have sought attention for their careers by voicing sensational racist, homophobic, and misogynist slurs—on the correct assumption their attention-grabbing left-wing fides prevents career cancellation.

Hollywood, we learn, has been selecting some actors on the basis of lighter skin color to accommodate racist Beijing’s demands to distribute widely their films in the enormous Chinese market. Yet note well that Hollywood has recently created racial quotas for particular Oscar categories, even as it reverses its racial obsessions to punish rather than empower people of color on the prompt of Chinese paymasters.

Ditto the political warping in professional sports. Endorsements, media face time, and cultural resonance often hinge on athletes either being woke—or entirely politically somnolent. A few stars may exist as known conservatives, but again they are the rare exceptions. For most athletes, it is wisest to keep mum and either support, condone, or ignore the Black Lives Matter rituals of taking a knee, not standing for the flag, or ritually denouncing conservative politicians. Those who are offended and turn the channel can be replaced by far more new viewers in China, who appreciate such criticism directed at the proper target.

Again, what is common to all the tentacles of this progressive octopus is illiberalism. Of course, progressivism, dating back to late 19th-century advocacy for “updating” the Constitution, always smiled upon authoritarianism. It promoted the “science” of eugenics and forced race-based sterilization, and the messianic idea that enlightened elites can use the increased powers of government to manage better the personal lives of its subjects (enslaved to religious dogma or mired in ignorance), according to supposed pure reason and humanistic intent.

Many progressives professed early admiration for the supposed efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s public works programs spurred on by his Depression-era fascism, and his enlistment of a self-described expert class to implement by fiat what was necessary for “progress.”

Even contemporary progressives have voiced admiration for the communist Chinese ability to override “obstructionists” to create mass transit, high-density urban living, and solar power. Early on in the pandemic Bill Gates defended China’s conduct surrounding the COVID-19 disaster. Suggesting the virus did not originate in a “wet” market was “conspiratorial”; travel bans were “racist” and “xenophobic.” In contrast, had SARS-CoV-2 possibly escaped by accident from a Russian lab, in our hysterias we might have been on the brink of war.

So it is understandable that progressivism can end up as an enemy of the First Amendment and intellectual diversity to bulldoze impediments to needed progress. To save us, sometimes leftists must become advocates of monopolies and cartels, of censorship, or of the militarization of our capital.

The new Left sorts, rewards, and punishes people by their race. And some progressives are the most likely appeasers of a racist and authoritarian Chinese government and advocates of Trotskyizing our past through iconoclasm, erasing, renaming, and cancelling out. San Francisco’s school board recently voted to rename over 40 schools, largely due to the pressure of a few poorly educated teachers who claimed on the basis of half-baked Wikipedia research that icons such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington were unfit for such recognition.

Absolute Power for Absolute Good

There are various explanations for unprogressive progressivism. None are necessarily mutually exclusive. Much of the latest totalitarianism is simple hula-hoop groupthink, a fad, or even a wise career move. Loud progressivism has become for some professionals, an insurance policy—or perhaps a deterrent high wall to ensure the mob bypasses one for easier prey elsewhere. Were Hunter Biden and his family grifting cartel not loud liberals and connected to Joe Biden, they all might have ended up like Jack Abramoff.

More commonly, progressivism offers the elite, the rich, and the well-connected Medieval penance, a vicarious way to alleviate their transitory guilt over privilege such as a $20,000 ice cream freezer or a carbon-spewing Gulfstream by abstract self-indictment of the very system that they have mastered so well.

Progressives also believe in natural hierarchies. They see themselves as an elite certified by their degrees, their resumes, and their correct ideologies, our version of Platonic Guardians, practitioners of the “noble lie” to do us good. In its condescending modern form, the creed is devoted to expanding the administrative state, and the expert class that runs it, and revolves in and out from its government hierarchies to privileged counterparts in the corporate and academic world.

Progressivism patronizes the poor and champions them at a distance, but despises the middle class, the traditionally hated bourgeoise without the romance of the distant impoverished or the taste and culture of the rich. The venom explains the wide array of epithets that Obama, Clinton, and Biden have so casually employed—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, ugly folk, chumps, and so on. “Occupy Wall Street” was prepped by the media as a romance. The Tea Party was derided as Klan-like. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were rightly dubbed lawbreakers; those who besieged and torched a Minneapolis federal courthouse were romanticized or contextualized.

Abstract humanitarian progressives assume that their superior intelligence and training properly should exempt them from the bothersome ramifications of their own ideologies. They promote high taxes and mock material indulgences. But some have made a science out of tax evasion and embrace the tasteful good life and its material attractions. They prefer private schooling and Ivy League education for their offspring, while opposing charter schools for others.

There is no dichotomy in insisting on more race-based admissions and yet calling a dean or provost to help leverage a now tougher admission for one’s gifted daughter. Sometimes the liberal Hollywood celebrity effort to get offspring stamped with the proper university credentials becomes felonious. Walls are retrograde but can be tastefully integrated into a gated estate. They like static class differences and likely resent the middle class for its supposedly grasping effort to become rich—like themselves.

The working classes can always make solar panels, the billionaire John Kerry tells those thousands whom his boss had just thrown out of work by the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It is as if the Yale man was back to the old days when the multimillionaire and promoter of higher taxes moved his yacht to avoid sales and excise taxes and lectured JC students, “You study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

There is no such thing as “dark” money or the pernicious role of cash in warping politics when Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, both through direct donations and through various PACs and foundations—channeled nearly $1 billion to left-wing candidates, activists, and political groups throughout the 2020 campaign year.

In sum, the new tribal progressivism is the career ideology foremost of the wealthy and elite—a truth that many skeptical poor and middle-class minorities are now so often pilloried for pointing out. Progressives have adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations, largely because solidarity with elite minorities of similar tastes and politics excuses them from any concrete concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races. The Left finally proved right in its boilerplate warning that the “plutocracy” and the “special interests” run America: “If you can’t beat them, outdo them.”

Self-righteous progressives believe they put up with and suffer on behalf of us—and thus their irrational fury and hate for the irredeemables and conservative minorities springs from being utterly unappreciated by clueless serfs who should properly worship their betters.

The First Amendment, by its terms, doesn’t apply to private employers. It says “Congress shall …,” which has been read as applying to the federal government generally; the Fourteenth Amendment, which starts with “no state,” has applied this to state and local governments. But just as private firings based on religion or race don’t violate the Free Exercise Clause or the Equal Protection Clause, private firings based on speech don’t violate the Free Speech Clause.

But they might violate statutes. Federal law, for instance, generally bans private employers with 15 or more employees from firing people based on race and religion; many state laws do the same even as to smaller employers. And a considerable number of states bans firings based on certain kinds of speech or political activity, though the rules vary from state to state (and sometimes even by city and county), and are often quite vague.

I canvassed these laws in a 2012 article (and Utah has enacted a new law since then), but for now let’s turn to the New York law. Let’s assume for this that the article is correct in describing Oefelein as an employee; the law may not apply to certain kinds of independent contractors. (Whether New York law applies to an employee who apparently works from Alaska is an interesting question, which I’ll set aside for now; it would likely to turn on various details of the employment relationship, including whether the employment contract calls for applying New York law. Alaska has no such employee protection law.)

New York bars employer retaliation for off-duty “recreational activities,” including, among other things, “reading and the viewing of television, movies, and similar material.”

(2) Unless otherwise provided by law, it shall be unlawful for any employer or employment agency to refuse to hire, employ or license, or to discharge from employment or otherwise discriminate against an individual in compensation, promotion or terms, conditions or privileges of employment because of …

© an individual’s legal recreational activities outside work hours, off of the employer’s premises and without use of the employer’s equipment or other property …

{“Recreational activities” shall mean any lawful, leisure-time activity, for which the employee receives no compensation and which is generally engaged in for recreational purposes, including but not limited to sports, games, hobbies, exercise, reading and the viewing of television, movies and similar material ….}

(3)(a) [This section shall not be deemed to protect activity that] creates a material conflict of interest related to the employer’s trade secrets, proprietary information or other proprietary or business interest ….

(4) [A]n employer shall not be in violation of this section where the employer takes action based on the belief … that: … (iii) the individual’s actions were deemed by an employer or previous employer to be illegal or to constitute habitually poor performance, incompetency or misconduct.[1]

A separate part of the statute expressly protects a limited range of partisan political activities (“(i) running for public office, (ii) campaigning for a candidate for public office, or (iii) participating in fund-raising activities for the benefit of a candidate, political party or political advocacy group”); the question is whether the “recreational activities” protection covers political commentary on social media that’s outside those narrow categories.

The answer is unfortunately unsettled. Court decisions have indeed treated “recreational activities” as including arguing about politics at a social function[2] and participating in a vigil for a man killed because of his homosexuality.[3] Plus if “reading and the viewing of television, movies and similar material” is recreational, why wouldn’t writing and posting material on a social media platform be recreational too?

But one court has held that picketing is not sufficiently “recreational” to qualify.[4] Other New York courts have likewise held that certain non-speech activities—dating[5] and organizing and participating in “after-work celebrations with fellow employees”[6]—that might normally be seen as recreational nonetheless are not covered by the statute. This suggests that “recreational activities” might likewise be read narrowly in some speech cases.

It’s also not clear how the “without use of the employer’s equipment or other property” exception would play out here. There would be a factual question: Did the employee, for instance, use a company-issued phone or computer? And there may be a legal question: How should company-issued devices that are expected to be used at home for personal purposes alongside business purposes be treated for purposes of the law? I know of no cases exploring that.

What about the exception for activity that “creates a material conflict of interest related to the employer’s trade secrets, proprietary information or other proprietary or business interest"—could an employer argue that it allows firing for any activity that might harm the employer’s business by offending some customers or business partners?

One case read the exception as allowing the German National Tourist Office to fire an employee for becoming known as the translator of some Holocaust revisionist articles.[7] Presumably the court’s view was that the activity could lead to public hostility to the office, and that this hostility created a "conflict of interest” between the employee and the employer’s “business interest.” If that’s so, it could apply to any speech or other recreational conduct that’s sufficiently unpopular. But other cases interpreting similar statutes in other states, however, consider some speech to be protected even when it does undermine the employer’s business, for instance by offending customers.

Again, keep in mind that this is the New York statute; if a similar matter comes up in another state, you’d need to consult the statute in that state (or, in some instances, city or county). And note that none of this speaks to whether these laws are good ideas. Perhaps employers should be free to fire employees based on their speech or political activity or recreational activity (or their religion or sexual preference or race or what have you); or perhaps speech should be treated more like, for instance, religion, as a basis on which the employer may not fire an employee (even if the religion is quite unpopular); here, I just talk about what the law is.

[1] N.Y. Lab. Law § 201-d (McKinney 2011) (enacted 1992).

[2] Cavanaugh v. Doherty, 243 A.D.2d 92, 100 (N.Y. App. Div. 1998) (treating an allegation that plaintiff was fired “as a result of a discussion during recreational activities outside of the workplace in which her political affiliations became an issue” as covered by the statute).

[3] El-Amine v. Avon Prods., Inc., 293 A.D.2d 283 (N.Y. App. Div. 2002) (affirming denial of summary judgment in a § 201-d(2) case apparently brought based on plaintiff’s “involvement in a vigil for Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was brutally murdered in Laramie, Wyoming,” Jennifer Gonnerman, Avon Firing, Village Voice, Mar. 2, 1999).

[4] Kolb v. Camilleri, No. 02-CV-0117A(Sr), 2008 WL 3049855, at *13 (W.D.N.Y. Aug. 1, 2008) (“Plaintiff did not engage in picketing for his leisure, but as a form of protest. While the Court has found such protest worthy of constitutional protection, it should not engender simultaneous protection as a recreational activity akin to ‘sports, games, hobbies, exercise, reading and the viewing of television, movies and similar material.’”).

[5] E.g., Hudson v. Goldman Sachs & Co., 283 A.D.2d 246 (N.Y. App. Div. 2001) (“romantic relationships are not protected 'recreational activities’”); State v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 207 A.D.2d 150 (N.Y. App. Div. 1995) (“dating is entirely distinct from … recreational activity”) (internal quotation marks omitted). But see id. at 153 (Yesawich, J., dissenting) (arguing that dating should be seen as covered).

[6] Delran v. Prada USA Corp., No. 101691/04, 2004 WL 5488006 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Aug. 2, 2004).

[7] Berg v. German Nat'l Tourist Office, 248 A.D.2d 297 (N.Y. App. Div. 1998); Paul Schwartzman, It Just Isn’t Write[;] German Axed Over Hate Mag Article, Daily News (N.Y.), May 11, 1995, at 6.

After Parler was promptly deplatformed by Amazon Web Services after the US Capitol riot, the services’ administrators sued the company, pointing to the termination of Parler’s web services as a violation of the company’s contract with Amazon. Litigation against the monopoly has proved unsuccessful so far, with a judge declining to issue a preliminary injunction requiring Amazon to reinstate hosting services and provide 30-day advance notice before shutting off access.

Parler’s URL is online, but only with a few messages from CEO John Matze and investors associated with the free speech platform. Parler’s team has repeatedly emphasized that they plan to return to functionality after initially questioning whether they could.

Trending: LET FREEDOM RING: Secession Fever Sweeps Across America as Biden Regime Loses Legitimacy

Free speech platform Gab remains online and functional, with the Parler competitor’s administrators scaling their server and hosting capabilities in recent weeks to accommodate an influx of users seeking to speak freely, having been rebuffed by Twitter’s censorious practices and Parler’s deplatforming.

All of Gab’s server infrastructure is internally owned and operated. This immunizes the free speech company to Big Tech’s cancellation tactics, providing them no means to shut off their platform.

Merely signing up for another web hosting service isn’t going to be a long term solution. Even if Parler contracts hosting services overseas- in Eastern Europe or Russia, for example- they still face vulnerability to deplatforming tactics. Joe Biden’s State Department can potentially browbeat the governments of nations where Parler would seek hosting to shut it down, threatening sanctions that even nations chilly towards American influence don’t want to deal with.

Matze had previously suggested Parler would seek to return to the internet through contracting hosting with another third party. Internet free speech advocates may be left questioning the wisdom of such a tenuous arrangement after Parler’s initial deplatforming, and Parler would be wise to consider an internal server model similar to that of Gab. If not, conservatives, nationalists, and pro-free speech dissidents may have no choice but to conclude the service is permanently on the thin ice of Big Tech’s rigged arena.

Follow me on Gab @WildmanAZ, Twitter @Wildman_AZ, and on Parler @Moorhead.