Paternalist is one of the innumerable friends I’ve made through quarantine, and certainly one of the rather curious ones. If you only knew him from his online persona, he would seem to be a Star Wars and Roman History nerd who occasionally creates Dovahhatty-inspired memes. But get to know him, and Paternalist is a rebel elite, and a member of the Deep State apparatus, so to speak. You should know Paternalist is a Fed, to put it bluntly. He glows. Coincidentally, he is also a Lobbyist. And while he has the connections to be a corporate lobbyist, he has the rare virtue to lobby for his own elite interests. How lucky to have him as a friend.
One of Paternalist’s recent pet projects was introducing HB20 to the Texas Legislature, which effectively forced social media’s hands on censorship. I encourage you all to read it. Or, if you’d prefer a quick laugh, read here to see how progressives sperg over Paternalist’s work and have a gand-er at this piece of propagand-er…
Paternalist’s bill reveals a certain uncomfortable fact: Most bills are not actually written by representatives. They are handed to them, ready-to-go, by special interests. His success also points to a comforting reality: You can game this system for yourself, dear reader. We know the progressive NGOs have been subverting for decades doing this, so I sat down and asked Paternalist if he could write up a brief article on how a Man of History, should you desire to be one, can do it too. So that - hopefully - you dear traditionalist can follow his guidance and - perchance - help your local community arm themselves legally against this March Through the Institutions.
On that, onward is his own writing. I hope you enjoy it, and do try to learn something from it, dear reader. I hope you learn how to exercise what I call, Maskepolitik…
Freelance Lobbying
How to use your leverage to influence political action covertly
When it comes to people in political movements, there are two filters I use to find people who I can do genuinely productive things with, assuming we're politically at least somewhat compatible. The first filter is if they ever got involved in politics of at least their home state. The second filter is if there are any political accomplishments that can be attributed to him. Those two filters might not seem that impactful but when applied, what usually starts out as tens of thousands of people I can work with, is narrowed down to maybe a 100 or so. And most of the 100 or so people are probably unaware of me and I’m probably unaware of them too. Whenever I tell people that the mantle of political action must be assumed by our very own rather than the impotent Republican leadership of Congress and different US states, they automatically assume that I’m saying they should run for office. Some of these people aren’t from the US and can’t, some people are paranoid that they’ll get their life ruined and some people assume I have bad motives. What I do on a daily basis has resulted in at least a few political victories that I helped bring to fruition and it has occurred almost completely covertly, without me ever running for office and others that I know of who have done the same have lived with those same conditions.
Running for office itself isn’t a bad idea though. Some state legislatures have good enough pay that the barrier for entry to get elected is probably less than your salary. And if you’re running for state legislature, you don’t need to run on nationalized issues. You can even afford to be rather based as an open secret and even if attention is drawn to you, nobody is going to run a nationwide campaign to kick you out of office. Federal Agents aren’t going to monitor you either, at least not because you’re a state rep or state senator and if you live in a GOP controlled state, you can be one of a much larger majority passing experimental legislation that Congress never could without an extreme amount of effort. But that is not the purpose of this short guide.
As it turns out, the most effective, low cost and safe way to accomplish real political victories is lobbying. You don’t have as much direct control over state politics when you’re lobbying compared to being in the legislature directly but the barrier for entry is so low, that even high school students can do it, with very little risk, as most legislation that could feasibly pass in a red state, won’t result in you losing your job if by some infinitely small chance hackers manage to view phone and email logs and identify you, which won’t happen anyway. There are a few issues that might dissuade you from lobbying as opposed to the much higher risk approach of legislating from the bench directly.
The first one is that unless you know how to write bills yourself, you’re going to be stuck with a pool of bills that even get introduced. Texas recently passed and signed into law a very good social media censorship bill and there are no examples of bills with the same framework that have even been introduced, let alone passed. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any social media censorship bills in state legislatures, in fact FL has one and several other state legislatures passed their own bills in at least one house. The issue is that these bills often radically differ from each other and you have to make do with whatever bill you can get, unless you go through the process of translating a bill to another state, by finding equivalent state code sections to cite and changing all the state names and references that pertain to said state. If you know how to write bills from scratch instead of converting them, you can just send them along to state legislators anonymously but learning how to do that is hard. There is room to make mistakes though. By giving a based state legislator a good foundation, he or she is probably willing to make corrections to the bill so it can actually function.
Thus there are three approaches to lobbying. Being reactive, semi reactive and proactive. Being reactive is calling state legislators and committees whenever there is news of a good bill and its the easiest by far but has the least potential. You’re relying on boomer republicans to write a bill for you and then you’re getting their colleagues to agree to signing onto it. Being semi-reactive is when you find the best example of a bill that pertains to an issue you want to be solved and then you edit the bill to make versions for whatever states you want it passed in. This is more intellectually challenging and time consuming than simply waiting for an opportunity to arise and then shilling for it. The most time and mentally intensive process is one that right now I’m still in the process of learning, that being writing up bills from scratch and sending it to contacts and networks to get passed. The risk of this approach is higher than the other two but it still probably won’t get you fired from your job if you’re found out to be partaking in this, unless the issue is particularly divisive and even then, the chances of you being outed are close to to zero.
Now how exactly do I find legislation to shill for and how do I shill for it? There is a website that I browse daily, called legiscan.com. It contains updates for every bill being written and introduced in all 50 states plus congress, including updates on whether it passed committee, passed with amendments, passed one or both houses and was signed by the president or governor of a particular state. It contains text files which have all versions of the bill verbatim, it shows how the state legislature or congress votes on it and all around, its the best tool you have at your disposal when it comes to lobbying.
Go onto legiscan.com right now and set the states category to “All States.” Then, search up a term that pertains to an issue you care about. Oftentimes it may not pop up with a single search, so make your terms broad and change them until you find what you’re looking for. If you can’t find anything about an issue at all, try to find a bill about a similar topic then study how its structured. Then maybe ask someone with expertise if they can draft a bill on your topic or do it yourself. One thing you’ll have to watch out for is what's called a State Statute Code. Every state bill has to cite its own state law code to be enforced or to stand in court. Make sure that your bill has a new subsection for that code.Let us say you want to pass a law that makes social media platforms public utilities. Then search up the state code and look for a public utilities section. Say its Article 23, Chapter 7 and the sections that exist are 0-9. If it's a brand new topic that's quite unrelated to what's already on the books, go up by at least 10. So if laws cite Statute Code 23.7.0-9 so 23.7.10 for instance. If its by hundreds, go up by 100 and so on. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of this, just hire someone. You can do it for free but it will be more time intensive.
When it comes to actually lobbying, I’d recommend doing it by social media dms or by phone. If you’re in college, you can get your College Republicans organization in it, which can speed up things significantly. On legiscan, look at the committee the bill is waiting through. Then call up the committee chair of that state committee and any legislator who has an uncertain physiognomy. Go by your gut. If you think the legislator is an unpredictable Soccer Mom Republican, call her too. If a bill has passed committee, then call up the house and senate leadership of that state too. When it comes to social media, I’d recommend using Facebook. Most of the GOP state leaders are boomers who don’t respond to twitter dms but I have gotten a lot of success with Facebook messaging.
Now what legislative accomplishments have I gotten done through these methods. The biggest one I’m responsible for took 4-5 months, involving 3-4 different bills before it finally passed. That is HB20, a bill passed in the 2nd special legislative session of Texas. This law makes social media platforms with over 50M+ monthly users common carriers, which are effectively the same thing as public utilities. The one distinction these have from just regular companies is that they cannot deny you service based on how you use a service, if it's in a lawful manner. Using pre-established legal precedent, it effectively makes any speech on social media that is legal speech that cannot be removed, deplatformed, cause a ban, algorithmically demote, shadow ban or age restrict. If you’re wondering about whether it applies to hate speech, yes it does. The TX House Democrats tried 3x to introduce amendments that would let social media companies censor hate speech, speech about a certain Austrian painter in the 40s or vaccine quote on quote disinformation and EVERY TIME it was voted down. The bill also allows you to sue a company for censorship and regardless of whether you win or not, they must pay for your legal fees, a big expense to them financially on a large scale. This spurred a reaction where Anthony Sabatini, a based state rep from FL, said he plans to do something similar and any state legislator in a R controlled circuit court will likely do the same.
I also am responsible for a law that made it illegal for Ohio universities to punish you for right wing political beliefs, and banned safe spaces on campus. I also know people with contacts in state legislatures directly, who have done many impactful things on a FEDERAL LEVEL, that I cannot disclose currently. One of the disadvantages of covert action is also its greatest strength. You have to take hearsay as gospel, if somebody attributes a successful victory to themselves, they can’t back it up with any article or news journal crediting them. This also means they won’t be disparaged by the media either, which is why it's low risk. Thank you for listening to my guide.
-PATERNALIST
For the record, officially, the Bill was authored by Briscoe Cain and endorsed by the offices of Senator Bryan Hughes.
But you’re not reading this for the official record, are you?