What Can We Do?

The heart of MAGA methodology is deception. Every step of the way they’ve made use of it, from launching their extremists beliefs under the label of republicanism, to spreading rumor, innuendo and suspicion under the guise of ‘news’, to hiding behind policy positions while attacking our fundamental American values. Rather than use reason to convince us that their path is the right one, they try to manipulate us with sophistry and rhetoric, using mass-manipulation tactics like normalization and coercion to build a movement to simply overwhelm us. They rationalize this approach by cynically declaring that everyone uses it.

Their values are themselves revealed in their methodology, and there is a reason they are foreign to our ears, something we must be conditioned to accept. While they assert that they stand for what is right, for instance, they justify themselves by arguing that everyone else is as bad as they are. When they argue that they are the only ones in Washington honest enough to admit their own corruption and deceit, they align themselves with our foreign enemies in declaring our nation’s high-minded Enlightenment values a mistake from the beginning, nothing more than a ruse to make us believe that America ever stood for something better than the old values of ‘might makes right,’ or that the ‘ends justify the means.’ They want us to view American politics as really nothing more than the raw power struggle that the American system of government was created to oppose in the first place. They want us to turn our backs on the principles of government that we used to build both our own nation and the most powerful alliance of nations in human history - what we all together used to call the ‘free world’ until only a few short years ago. 

This is the real fight over values. This is why our foreign enemies cheered at the elevation of the MAGA leader to the new imperial Presidency, and our former allies now openly fear for the future of the globe.

When we speak of our values, we are talking about the foundational Enlightenment values that our founders used to forge a better way than the simple use of raw power under the banner of righteousness, which fills our history books with violent death, misery, oppression and hopelessness. We are talking about the value of replacing rulers with leaders, of enforcing leadership qualities like honesty, integrity and service to the public through a system of accountability to the public itself, using the mechanism of representative democracy. We are talking about the value of good faith and the use of reason to light our path, not deceit and manipulation to grab power.

When we call them ‘our enemies’ - as we must - we are not talking about the Americans they’ve fooled and manipulated, the good people on all sides who they’ve put at each other’s throats by exploiting our policy divisions. We are locating the source of this ideology as foreign to American values and therefore an attack on our nation itself - not the values we argue about in our policy disagreements, but the ones we use to resolve those disagreements in the first place. They’ve attacked our nation by manipulating us into breaking our covenant to each other to use reason and the truth it reveals, not raw power, to forge our future together. By perverting the concept of democracy to make us believe that our entire history of using these values together is only as good as one vote - the last vote - they invite us to agree with our enemies that America is a failure, our use of democracy impotent against the evil that our founders intended it to oppose.

Their use of deception and misdirection indicates what can be done to oppose them. We must in the first place expose their deception to sunlight. We need to reveal the true nature of their attacks on our nation, and trace the source of these attacks back to their origins - the traditional enemies of the America forged from Enlightenment principles, the enemies who were defeated by the power of our example.

But we cannot expose their deceptions if we ourselves have been fooled by them. If, in our desperation to oppose this movement, we adopt their own tactics of deception and manipulation, we will find ourselves unwittingly supporting them, even as we try to oppose them - just as so many unwittingly attack our nation by standing with them, thinking they are only trying to right a policy wrong. This is in fact a key goal of our enemies: to offend and enrage us until we abandon American values to beat them back.  

This is not a guess: this goal was identified by our intelligence agencies as key to the Russian military campaign against us, beginning in 2015 - coinciding with the rapid growth of the MAGA movement. This is why Russian operatives pretended to be Americans in the new online world: they intended to turn us against each other, not against them. Having failed to oppose us by force, they decided to hit us where we were weakest: our own understanding of our foundational values and principles, weakened by years of disassociation and the failures of our education system. And it is no accident that when Russians pretended to be Americans engaged in policy issues, on either side, the solution they peddled was always precisely what our nation was founded to oppose: the use of violent revolution under the banner of righteousness.

This goal is also revealed by how they use their own symbols. What important principle does a flag with the name of their leader emblazoned across it stand for, again? Americans in clear view of our values do not march under the banner of a person, however much we may like them. To what bright future did their use of the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” on t-shirts and bumper stickers lead? No, their goal is clearly not to build a stronger nation through unity, but to weaken us with division. And again, we are not talking about the division of policy disagreements, our arguments over the best way to move forward together, which are necessary and in accord with our values, but the more fundamental division over the values that separate America from our enemies in the first place. The only reason they could have for wanting to weaken us through division, is to destroy our power as a nation, and as a leader of the free world. Only our enemies have such a goal.

This is why the intent of True North is to help us reestablish and strengthen our link to the values that founded our nation and guided its history. We need to make sure we know what we stand for, so that we can stand for it. We need to see the error not only of our enemies and those who - wittingly or not - stand with them, but the pitfalls that lie before our own steps in opposing them. This is why a significant part of our approach is educational. Building solidarity around our uniquely American values requires that we have them in clear view, our path forward free of the ideological land mines laid by our enemies.

But we can do much more than that. One reason for our sense of powerlessness in this struggle is that we have been fooled into thinking this is a fight over policy, when in fact this is a more fundamental attack on the values we use to resolve policy disputes in the first place. But there is another, related reason for this sense of powerlessness: our enemies have a clear side to take, but we don’t. While MAGA has simply taken the side of our enemies, which has been in existence for centuries, we have no clear vehicle to stand for America. This is because there exists in America today no organization that stands specifically for our foundational values, and those values alone. 

In some ways this is not surprising. We’ve never needed such a group. These foundational values have always been taken as a given, our political parties and policy groups assuming and appealing to them to promote their policies, the task of teaching them relegated to our education system. But we can now clearly see that this system, which has been under sustained attack for decades and now exists as a patchwork of largely unregulated private religious schools, often poorly funded public schools and homeschooling, has failed far too many Americans.

Now that our enemies have exploited this gap in our knowledge, there is nothing specifically designed to fill it in. What MAGA is doing is like a football team marshaling their millions of fans to declare that the founders of the game intended only those wearing red jerseys be allowed to score, and only the winners of one game - the last game, the one they won - gets to decide who wears red jerseys in the future. Of course we couldn’t defeat them by fielding a better football team against them, because their path to victory is not to defeat a team on the field, but to defeat the intentions of those who created the game in the first place. Of course there would exist no group to oppose them on those terms, because we would never think that we needed one. Their sleight of hand would be to deny not only our ordinary interpretation of the rules of football, but the more fundamental value of fair competition that led to the creation of the rules in the first place, and guided the refinement of them over the years.

True North intends to step into that breach. We are attempting to create an organization for all Americans - regardless of partisan or religious views - who continue to believe in the nation that our founders gave us, and that we built together over generations. 

By standing specifically for the Enlightenment values that motivated our founders to create the nation itself, in the way that they did, we can directly oppose the attacks against it in those terms. True North can thus be a way to stand for America, in unity against our foes. We can be a vehicle for all of us who know that America marked a different path than raw power and oppression, a place for democrats and traditional republicans, for moderates who find themselves abandoned, for people who don’t pay attention to politics but are troubled by what they are seeing, for members of any religion or none at all, to assemble under one banner. We want to provide a space for unity among even the most passionate advocates, who may disagree with each other about everything else, but not about that. 

With this approach, we can deny our enemies the cover of policy fights by refusing to be divided by them. We can reveal our true numbers by bringing together the people who are not misled into division by the disagreements we have in good faith, because we know the attack is on the value of good faith itself.

We can do that not just by growing the membership of this group, but by using our symbols to reveal the solidarity of all individuals and groups who see the danger of this fanaticism, who have not abandoned our covenant with each other to use truth and reason as our guide, to argue our positions in good faith and conscience, and to demand the same of the leaders who represent us. This use of symbols is in fact a key initial goal of True North, and one of the first actions we can immediately take. 

Using the power demonstrated by solidarity between those who otherwise disagree with each other, we can redefine and reorient the public debate to reflect the real struggle. We can remind Americans that losing elections should evoke disappointment that our positions will not get priority treatment, not fear that our nation is itself in danger of capitulating to our enemies, of radically changing our future from one built by us with the ‘consent to the governed’ to one imposed on us with the 'will to power.’

We can remind Americans, for example, that our right to vote is not limited to the act of checking a box next to a name and hoping it will be fairly counted, but instead includes the entire system of information gathering and accountability we’ve established to make sure our vote actually means something. We can insist on speaking the truth: that the real power of our vote lies in the processes we’ve demanded to make sure that we have the information necessary to decide who to vote for in the first place - from the Free Press to the inspectors general that the people demanded and the MAGA leader just fired.  

We can take the fight to them with moral clarity, because we know that right and wrong are not what you can get away with or not, that our government was not established as a winner-take-all power struggle, that power is not an end in itself, that the ends do not justify the means, that two wrongs don’t make a right, that the true example of American leadership is not the criminal Mob.  

As we grow in strength and clarity, we can create our own center of gravity. As the good Americans who have been manipulated into joining our enemies begin to pay attention to us, we can take the opportunity to remind them of these values they once held, and their origins among those who founded the nation itself. We can create the space for them to regain their bearings, while at the same time forcing their promoters and enablers to explain how corruption and deceit are the appropriate tools to restore America to righteousness, as they claim they want. 

We can reclaim America and our history, especially as they more and more openly stand against it. We can do this by stubbornly refusing to lose our bearings, by keeping our eye on the ball. We can continue to compare their cynicism to the faith of our founders, and ask our fellow citizens to make their choices in those terms. We can expose their beliefs, and prove that they they are in opposition to America and its history, not to call them names and further fan the flames, but to use the language that Reason demands. We can say and prove, for example, that this ideology stands against our Constitutional values, our history, our people and the role we play in our own government through the democratic process. We can say and prove that to support a man who attempted to nullify our votes against him, votes given to us by our founders themselves and defended with the very lives of millions of Americans throughout our history, is to break faith with the American people. We can say and prove that they have been led to accept open corruption, lawlessness and mendacity as acceptable political activity. We can say and prove that MAGA ideology is rooted in autocracy and fascism.  

We can use True North to bolster those who are willing to put aside our policy disagreements in this crucial fight to stand for and defend America. We can help to restore our faith in Reason, to clarify and reinforce American values, support each other, teach each other, remind each other what is important in this struggle, and what is not. We can offer each other the respect of civility in our own disagreements, remembering that arguing in good faith means that even if we are wrong, we are not trying to be. We can meet with and get to know each other in person. We can focus our support for those of us in rural areas, some who have been ostracized by their neighbors, excommunicated from their churches, or feel alone and abandoned for the beliefs they hold in good conscience. We can use True North to find each other, so we can let our kids play together, go bowling together, arrange BBQs or potlucks together, have fun together, and congregate around our shared beliefs.  

These are some of the ways we can use True North to help stand for America. Some of them we can begin immediately, some only with growth and development, but since the next step is to ask you to join us, we need to make something very clear:

All of our plans, now and in the future, are intended to both expose the radical anti-American beliefs that MAGA and their leader represent, and to reveal our true strength through solidarity with each other and our nation itself. None of them, now or ever, will include violations of criminal law or the use of violence, including the threat of violence. The very history that we here support clearly delegates the use of force to defend our nation against our enemies to the military and law enforcement, not to private citizens. When we define ‘our enemies’ to include all of those who support these attacks on our nation, we do NOT mean that they are all bad people. In fact, most of them are good people, with homes and families and loved ones, who have been manipulated in the various ways described in this site and elsewhere, to join or support this attack on our nation. These people deserve our help to regain their bearings, not personal attacks and scorn, the kind our enemies want to incite. While we cannot respect, and must forcefully call out and oppose, their anti-American beliefs and actions, we will not deviate from the fundamental American belief that they do in fact have inherent value as human beings, and deserve the special respect due to our fellow American citizens. 

These writings together represent the ideological foundation of True North as an organization. We’ve described the reason why we exist, outlined in broad strokes the deceptive methods our enemies used to attack our nation, and described the approach we want to take to forcefully and directly oppose them.  

There is more to come, but if you have heard enough by now to know that you want to stand with us, then we ask you to take the first step: sign up. Hit the subscribe button to establish contact, get updates, and identify yourself as a citizen who believes in the country we were until only a few short years ago. 

Stand with us, as we together stand with America. Have faith in our nation and your fellow Americans. Together we will move forward, step by step, into the ideological battle to come.